Bones, Fat & Bitter

All by Jennifer McLagan

Three very good, very themed cook books.

These books are a great source of inspiration.  The Brussels Sprouts and Chickpea recipe is worth stealing. It may be one of those recipes that  I make once or twice a week for the years. Everyone enjoyed it, and it's so easy.

I will also make more of an effort to save my chicken fat.

The Norm Chronicals

Stories about numbers and danger. By  Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter

Perhaps this book can be thought of as actuarial tables with stories.

I read an excerpt of this book and was fascinated. Unfortunately, the excerpt was the most interesting thing to me.  Not that the book is bad.

The excerpted chapter was bout how lifestyle affects your life. What happens if you exercise? Smoke? Drink? Are Sedentary? Eat vegetables? Eat Beef?

The numbers are all there. Unfortunately, even though I forget them now, I've already learnt the lessons-- Don't smoke. Exercise regularly, every day even, but after about 30 minutes of exercise there are diminishing returns. One drink a day is good for you. Two or more are not. Eat your vegetables.

Stay a away from radiation.

A 12 mile motorcycle ride is as about four times as risky as your average daily death risk.

There were many other stories there. Many. After you get out of the big risks, their contributes to your life expectancy are almost noise.

Take beef for example. Regularly eating beef slightly decreases your life expectancy. The change is measurable, but just barely. On average beef eaters will die a year or so sooner than non-beef eaters, however the distribution and overlap is huge.

Maybe that's the big lesson of the book. Outside of the big five (Eat your vegetables, exercise, sleep properly, don't smoke, maintain a healthy body weight) most activities have a tiny impact on your life expectancy. Sure radiation and extreme sports don't help. Just use common sense.

There is also a chapter on cancer. It's possible that about 20% of cancer is cured by the body. This is troubling since diagnostics are getting better and treatments can be tough on you. The rule of thumb may be, don't go looking for cancer unless you have health problems. Cancer diagnostics and treatments are not yet at the point where we should be very proactive.

Falling to Earth

by Al Warden

Memories Fade.

I didn't know about the postal covers scandal. I picked this book up because it was written by an astronaut, and I've always had astronaut dreams.

Al Warden flew on Apollo 15. At the time, he and his fellow crewmates brought postal covers along with them with the intent of selling them at a later date as special  memorabilia; a souvenir of something that had flown to the moon and back.  

But that nots all what the book is about. It's also about the life of an astronaut. How they got there, what it takes. Al admits that he got lucky. He was an astronaut because at the time the government believe that test pilots with an engineering background would be great astronauts and he fit the bill

He did have a lot of passion for his career. This did cause him much personal pain as his wife never had an appreciation for a husband who had to take great risks with his safety.

 

Money, The Unauthorized Biography. By Felix Martin.

Documents the history of money, especially the tension between the two concepts of money. One as an absolute standard of value. The other as a transferable system of credits.

Money as an absolute standard of value (Such as the gold standard) has always been favored by less-government types because it can be maintained without a powerful government. It's only when money is treated as a system of transferable credit, managed by a government, that the economy can stabilize.

The book also has a strong opinion on how banks should be reformed to deal with the great recession. It calls for a separation between payment-transfer banking and investment banking. There were other recommendations, all good I'm sure, but they have fallen out of my mind.

Mastering the Craft of Smoking Food

by Warren R. Anderson.

This is a good over view of smoking food, different types of smokers, and how to build your own.

Good, Good Enough, and My Over Refined Pallet

Two Vines wine. It's about $6.00 a bottle and I enjoy it very much. Yes, sometimes I like a good $30.00 bottle of wine. But you know, for me, a $30.00 bottle of wine isn't $24.00 better than Two Vines. I'd rather have five bottles of Two Vines. When it comes to wine I'm very careful to rein in my pallet. I like being able to enjoy a $6.00 bottle of wine.

 

Dicks Hamburgers and Red Robin. Red Robin makes a good burger. No doubt about it. Dicks makes small, inexpensive sliders. They are not gourmet by any standard. But, if you are out late drinking with friends, then nothing is better than pulling up to a Dicks Drive In and ordering a meal—a Deluxe burger, fries and a vanilla shake. If I remember, I'll splurge and spend an extra 10 cents on ketchup.  The whole thing costs less than $8.00.  It's all lower quality than Red Robin, but it's right for that moment.

 

These are situations where absolute standards and relative standards live in stark contrast to each other. Is my life worse off because I settled for a Dicks Deluxe instead of a Red Robin Whiskey River burger? Or because I settled for $6.00 of Two Vines instead of $30.00 for Five Star? No, of course not.

 

Of course this view creates a problem. How do I tell what good quality is if external factors, the place the time, my feelings, turn something that's cheap into something that's wonderful. I think Persig dealt with this "Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" when he asked "What is quality?" and went off into the weeds trying to answer that question rather than accepting that we can't easily define quality.

 

If I can't define quality, then how do I hold high standards? Perhaps the answer is that I have to hold myself to high standards, but accept that the world around me is going to be filled with experiences of various levels of quality.

 

I've spent the past few days working near Christiansburg VA. It's a very nice place. Very pastoral. One thing that frustrates me is how difficult it is to find a nice restaurant. BBQ and Greasy hole-in-the-wall's are all that's around. BBQ is good for one day but then…

 

Is this a regional cuisine that I don't have an appreciation for, or does this region just accept bad cooking? Could I develop my pallet to appreciate the finer points of places that consistently over boil there vegetables and serve iceberg lettuce with some brown bits still attached? By all accounts the people of Christiansburg are very happy with their city. If I were to tell them that I wanted to spend lots of money on well roasted vegetables drizzled with the right amount of a tasty sauce, a prime cut of rare steak and a nice glass of wine, they would look at me a little puzzled and point out that I could have five chicken friends steaks with all you can eat vegetables for the price of one of my meals. That the chicken fried steak isn't that bad, especially when it has good gravy on it. In short, they would point out I had overly refined tastes that weren't doing me a lot of good.

 

Where is the balance in all of this? When are tastes over refined? When are they too low? This all can't be a regional popularity contest, can it? Perhaps this is why Persig went mad when he thought about the nature of quality.

 

 

 

How Not To Be Wrong

By Jordan Ellenberg

Kind of in the same vein as "The Signal and the Noise" Not that it's a clone. More like an intellectual cousin. How Not To Be Wrong discusses how math has been used as a tool to guide us through life, the limitations of what we can know, and how we can get a feel for the size and shape of the unknown, and how to take action when we are unsure.

"For this is action, this not being sure!"

"Error will bring us to the truth more quickly than vagueness."

There is a great chapter on smoking-- does smoking cause lung cancer, or does lunch cancer cause people to smoke. The answer is obvious now. Not so in the 1950's. While the statistics said that smoking was correlated to cancer, the mechanism was not known. Since correlation is not causation… since 90% of all statistics are made up… how do you prove that smoking causes cancer? How much data do you need? And what type? How do you show that you are not biased in your experiments? How do you make progress?

Several times the author touches on this theme. A mathematic process can give you a result if you give it any set of numbers. But, does that process make sense? Are you asking a question the data can answer?

Sometimes the answer is "I don't know" Randomness and noise can have very subtle effects that our brain erroneously thinks are patterns.

In this situation, can you measure the size and shape of the unknown? Control it's distribution and variability? This is preferred to deluding yourself into believing that you can create an answer if you torture your data enough.