Ribs

Last Sunday, Jess and I caught a show called Bittman Takes on America's Chefs. We'd seen it before, and the gist is that this Bittman guy visits top chefs and cooks with them. While the chefs tend to use expensive ingredients and complicated techniques, Bittman tries to make a comparable meal that is completely attainable by the average non-chef. In last Sunday's episode, Chris Schlesinger (the chef) made his famous slow-grilled ribs, which can take up to 6 hours to cook, while Bittman countered with a much quicker version, which he finished in less than an hour. Jess found the recipe online and bought some back ribs to make this week. We finally got to making them today. Here's how:

Chris Schlesinger's Rib Rub
makes ¼ cup and takes 5 minutes
1. • 2 tablespoons paprika
   • 2 tablespoons sugar
   • 1 tablespoon salt
   • 1 tablespoon ground cumin
   • 1 tablespoon black pepper
   • 1 tablespoon chili powder
2. 1. Stir all the ingredients together in a bowl, then transfer the mixture to a covered container. Keeps for at least one summer.

This made enough for 4-5 racks of back ribs (ours was about 1.5 lbs). I lit the charcoal, and went back inside to massage the ribs with the rub Jess mixed up. Then I went back outside to watch the fire die down and push all the coals to the back of the grill. The ribs went over the un-charcoaled front half of the grill and the lid went down and both vents got opened for 30 minutes of indirect cooking (following Bittman's recipe). After that, I moved the ribs over the coals and left the grill open for 15 minutes of direct heat. I made sure to watch them, since the fat kept falling onto the coals and flaring up and I didn't want the ribs to burn. After that, they came in side and rested for a few minutes before we ate. We were a little too hungry to think of taking a picture, so here's one that looks like how our ribs turned out.

Perpetual motion

"In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"

- Homer Simpson

When I was eight or nine, I was very concerned about the environment. "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle." was my slogan and I promised myself that my first car purchase would be an electric (now I'm leaning toward a totally clean hydrogen car). When I was a little older, I got an M.C. Escher calendar for Christmas and was pretty fascinated by the idea of creating a perpetually flowing stream. I tried to "invent" one that used a mill to capture the energy, but never got it to work. When I started seeing articles about an Irish company that seems to have created a perpetual motion machine using magnetic fields, my interest was piqued. There's a good chance it's a scam, but we'll know the truth once scientists test it. I mean, the first law of thermodynamics is empirical, so there's no reason why it couldn't be proven wrong. Decide for yourself.
Here's a video from Steorn explaining their find:

the way interfaces should be

When I was eleven or so, my dad flew overseas for a week over the summer to visit his family. Since my mom had a full time job, our grandmother (her mom) stayed with my sister and I during the day. Though we spent most of our time riding bikes with our friends down the street, we would come inside for lunch and to spend time with Grandma. We had bought our first computer with Windows, so my sister and I spent hours playing solitaire and minesweeper on it. Grandma had always played card games with us, so we thought it would be fun to show her how to play on the computer. We didn't realize that simply understanding how to use a mouse would be so difficult, since we had been using them for years. A simple game of solitaire became impossible for grandma, since the interface was so difficult to learn. Since then, I've been pretty interested in movement away from interface-based computing. Touchscreens seemed to be a step in the right direction, but I couldn't fathom what the user experience would be like with even less interface. Until last year. Rich and I were sitting on opposite sides of his apartment, each teetering on top of a precariously stacked pile of furniture, trying to get the best wireless signal possible. Rich happened upon a reference to Jef Raskin and began reading. We eventually started learning about Archie, a much more human-friendly interface that the creator of the Apple Macintosh had been working on just prior to his death. The core principles made so much sense, and I couldn't help but think about how important and appealing accessibility can be, in everything from architecture to web design. Just last week, I ran into a video that shows how interface has nearly been eliminated:

How cool is that?! And it just dawned on me that this should be the direction we move towards - away from the agony of constantly having to learn and re-learn how to interact with your computer. I mean, if computers are to be such a help, shouldn't they be intuitive enough that Grandma can play solitaire without having to learn how to interact with a computer first?

The future of search engines

So I have all these technology news things on my Google page and even though most of the headlines don't interest me, almost every day there's something really cool and new to read about. I think I'll start sharing those things. Today's article was about the future of search engines (click the title of this post to read the article) - they're moving toward a more intelligent kind of searching that will be able to do much more than the keyword searches we have now. The websites the article talks about are still being tweaked, but you can play with them to get an idea of how they work: Medstory focuses on medical information, and what makes the search intelligent is that it finds webpages and groups them according to what information they provide about your search. For example, searching "arthritis" brings up groups of results that address Drugs, Conditions, Nutrition, Procedures, and People that have something to do with arthritis. Riya is even cooler. With a Google image search, you search for a word and your results are all photos with your search term wither in the name of the image file or somewhere near it on the webpage. This means that when you search "dog", you're not getting all those pictures that are still named "DSC74394" from someone's digital camera, especially if the word "dog" isn't on the page anywhere. Riya, on the other hand, uses an algorithm to scan the image itself and compare key features with those of other images. This is much like the facial recognition software you see on your favorite primetime crime drama, but it does "places" and "things", as well. It also lets you specify a location for the photo (using Google Maps). When you upload photos (you have to download a program that will upload photos for you, but it can only upload from a folder, not one image at a time), they're stored an made available as results for other peoples' searches. This scared me a little, considering that there are so many photos of kids, tagged with the kids' names, and some even specify a location. How much easier could they make it for a pedophile? In light of that, I tried uploading some photos of cats, but it didn't recognize anything in them so the search was pretty useless. Oh well.

in the kitchen

the week after we got back from our honeymoon, Rich decided to solve our problem of not having enough room for all the wine and champagne glasses we received as gifts. he quickly designed and cut pieces to go under our kitchen cabinets. here's a picture of his latest pride and joy. I've been doing a lot of cooking recently. I've been pretty hesitant to attempt Indian cooking after failing every attempt I've made so far. my lamb korma always ends up as a pasty, sawdust-colored mush that didn't taste remotely like the real thing. However, my cousin (and godmother), Maureen, gave us an Indian cookbook at a wedding shower. the recipes looked fairly easy, so I had Rich pick a recipe and I added a couple others for vegetables. while Rich was crushing spices by hand, I broke up several dried chili peppers and forgot to wash my hands before touching my face. so i spent the rest of the afternoon feeling like my cheek and nose were in flames. by the end of it, though, we had a really delicious meal. thanks Maureen!

We're married.

Life is getting back to normal. I keep having moments where I think, "I should post about that," but then I start thinking I should post about the wedding before getting into whatever else is going on. But it's really too big a thing to summarize in a post. So I won't try. Suffice it to say that Rich and I are now married. Now to get on with the posting.