the golden mean

11:59pm: sticky: about this journal

• If you are reading this on Livejournal: this version of my blog is no longer being updated. The canoncal source is (and has been since early 2012) at totient.dreamwidth.org.
  
  
• I don't make private posts. What you see here is what you get. Feel free to subscribe and/or grant access. I'll eventually notice and grant access back but it won't change anything.
  
  
• All recipes posted here are original. Many of them are still works in progress, even if they say they're not. I may modify them at any time, and I do not generally give notice that I have done so.
  
  
• The "what's this" game is *not* original to me. Older game entries may become more or less difficult as Google Maps is updated. My intent with any puzzle is that about half of the people who attempt it should be able to get the right answer, and that it shouldn't be the same half every time.

9:52am: live each day
My first Wiscon was Wiscon 30. Chaired by Jeanne Gomoll, it was clearly a transformative year for the con -- but not the first one. Gomoll also chaired Wiscon 20, at which the con made a quantum leap from average Midwestern science fiction convention with a feminist focus to worldwide feminist event with a science fiction focus. Some of what she did is clear: by getting dozens of former GoHs together in one space Wiscon 20 achieved a critical mass for its program that would not have been possible any other way. But Wiscon 20 also abandoned a host of SF convention features, like a film room and a Masquerade, in order to make what, from the ephemera I've seen, was quite a large number of other changes. I've always wondered how she did that.

Last night, I found the explanation. Perhaps I've even read this explanation before and not really been in a place to understand it. Wiscon 20 was planned, at least at first, as possibly the last Wiscon, a capstone. It's a lot easier to kill off parts of the con if the whole con is dead anyway.

The coming year is going to be a chance for conventions everywhere to decide what they want to keep as their core essence, and what has been holding them back. It's an exciting time, and also there is going to be a lot of despair, just as there was a fair amount of despair in Madison in the mid 1990s. I wonder what will come out of it.

11:17pm: ambition
In a file 770 thread, Steve Davidson accuses Arisia of wanting to be Dragon-Con.

Arisia has never wanted to be Dragon-Con.  There was a time when we wanted to be SXSW.  I'd like to think I have gotten us past that desire.

1:18am: trading posts
Scattered across the American southwest are trading posts. Not the Hudson's Bay company fur trading posts that mostly closed in the 1840s; these are trading posts founded to trade with the Navajo and other tribes in the 70 years after the Long Walk. At their peak, just before World War II, there were nearly 150 of them, of which dozens remain in operation -- I don't know exactly how many as there is no comprehensive list, nor a category in Wikipedia. I've been to several: Hubbell, Cameron, Gouldings, Ismay, Twin Rocks, McGee. They're all different, sometimes drastically so: Cameron's Trading Post is absolutely enormous with tour buses pulling in to it every few minutes, whereas there wasn't much sign that anyone other than myself went into Ismay's Trading Post at all on the day I was there, towards the very end of its 90+ year existence. Hubbell is now a museum; McGee is mostly an art gallery. Each has taken its own path.

But for all their differences, they have some things in common, so much so that when researching this post, I read yelp reviews stating "that's not a trading post" and nodded, because the establishment in question didn't fit the pattern. I'm not sure I can exactly put my finger on what the rule really is. In my experience generally they're right on a political boundary, right next to at least one stunning landmark, and buy things as well as selling them. But I don't think this is what those yelp reviewers were talking about and there are exceptions to these and any other rule you might come up with.

So it is, I think, with the sorts of science fiction conventions I like to work on. DragonCon and WesterCon are as different as Cameron and Ismay. But there is a kernel of sameness within them anyway. And there's no need to define that essence, nor any one rule that exactly describes what that kernel is.

1:40pm: Where I slept 2021
Marion MA
Somerville MA
Granville MA
Orleans MA
Gaithersburg MD
Melrose MA
Lewiston ME
New York NY
Mt Laurel NJ
Newburgh NY
San Francisco CA
Monterey CA
Santa Barbara CA
Altadena CA

This is back to normal on count, though very differently motivated and by and large closer to home than it used to be.

10:33pm: shrimp ceviche
Third in the series. This is a gazpacho-inspired modern ceviche and my first time writing a recipe that could really use the word "inspired" in that way.

1# shrimp, fully peeled and deveined. If this is raw, cook it for 2 minutes in a big pot of water at a rolling boil, then quench in an ice bath. Cut into pieces to better fit on a fork.

Marinate this for an hour in enough lemon juice to cover, plus maybe an ounce or two of tomato juice.

5 or 6 oz of Korean or Persian cucumber, diced. These are both crisp but sweet cucumbers with a tender skin so that they don't have to be peeled. This can go in towards the end of the marination.

Pour off the excess lemon and add:

1 tomato, diced, and its juice. I didn't bother seeding the tomato, but I did strain the juice as i poured it off the cutting board.
The leaves from half a bunch of cilantro. This will seem like too much but it's not.
2t Worcestershire sauce
2t balsamic
1/8t ground cumin
Maybe 1/4t ground black pepper
Maybe 1/4t salt -- do this last and be careful, because you'll also get salt from the Worcestershire sauce.

I served this tonight alongside my traditional Peruvian-style haddock and Mexican-style salmon nectarine ceviches and it was very well received.

3:38pm: haddock ceviche
second of a planned trio of ceviches.

1# trimmed haddock or similar white fish (if the skin has to be trimmed this will require about 1.25# to start), cut into 1/2" pieces
4oz lemon juice
2oz orange juice
1t salt
3/4t honey or agave
3-4 oz red onion, chopped very fine
3/4 oz jalapeno, about 1 small or 1/2 large pepper, chopped fine
6 oz tomatoes, cut into 3/8" pieces
1 avocado, cut in 3/8" pieces, about 4.5 oz

add items in order without pre-prepping, so that onions cook a little less than the fish and avocados cook a lot less.

30 minutes after adding the lemon juice to the fish, pour off excess liquid (probably about 3 oz) and serve with corn chips.

I had cilantro to add to this but I forgot, and I don't think that was a problem.

12:24am: ready
miss_chance and I bought 1075 pieces of candy today. We have no idea how many kids to expect but that should cover any plausible eventuality even if we eat some of it ourselves while giving it out.

12:35pm: new watch
A long time ago I had a Pebble smartwatch. Remember those? They were just the thing for undiagnosed ADHD wearers. Long battery life so you didn't have to remember to charge them all the time, a warning on your wrist when it lost contact to let you know when you'd absently left your phone somewhere or let its battery run down, good control over notifications so you could amplify the ones you wanted with a buzz on your wrist as well as in your pocket, and a very simple quick text reply so that you could acknowledge a message without falling into your phone and forgetting what you were there to do.

They got bought by Fitbit, supposedly for the people and the underlying tech, and shut down so as not to be competition. Eventually mine stopped holding a charge, so I got the next new thing: a Vector Luna. Even better battery life, 45 days out of the box and still 30 days after years of use. No quick replies, but a good timer app that was good at reminding me to check back in to a task I'd put on the (sometimes literal) back burner. Plus it was pretty handsome -- and durable -- as a watch. They too got bought by Fitbit and shut down, shortly after I bought the watch.

The shutdown immediately meant that the weather streams that the Vector supported didn't work any more. That was a little bit of a shame, but the timer and notification functions were still so great that I had no regrets. But they also stopped developing the companion phone app, and eventually Android's notification system moved on to where their app would no longer work. This left me with no notifications, no find my phone function, and a somewhat unreliable timekeeping function. But the timer and stopwatch (and looks) were still good enough to keep me wearing the watch instead of an analog one.

Ever since the latest Android update, though, I've been looking for a replacement. There are lots of choices, and some of them even have good battery life and things like an always-on display that I probably don't need but have gotten used to with the Vector. Two or three of them are surprisingly affordable, and come with nifty features like being able to flip the display so that the buttons wind up on the other side for lefties. But those are also chock full of malware, much of it intended to feed all of your online data to the Chinese Communist Party.

After much dithering I decided that who was making the watch was as important as the feature set. Fossil makes one with a 30 day battery life, real hands through a hole in an always on display, and many of the other features I had on the Pebble and Vector (including quick replies and a working weather feed). It is rebranded by Skagen, another watch manufacturer, who have their own app for it. Both companies also make lots of other things besides smartwatches, which will make it harder to Fitbit to buy them. The Skagen one is a little more handsome so that's the one I got.

Here's hoping it's a nice long time before I have to make this decision again.

11:19pm: stories
I found myself tonight once again answering the question "so where did the name 'phi' come from" with an explanation I've used for a while now, that stories get less and less true as time goes on, and at this point the origin of my name is many stories, none of them with any bearing in reality at all.

And I came to two realizations as I was making this explanation.

First, that this isn't because what happened changed, but that who it happened to changed. We are all George Washington's axe (or the ship of Theseus, if you prefer). The "I" in a story from 32 years ago isn't just an imperfect memory of myself; it's also a new understanding of who I was in light of who I became, and even a new understanding of the concept of identity as fleeting and illusory.

And second, that I'd been telling this story about truth for long enough that it was also starting to get less true itself, and that maybe it's not actually about truth at all.

6:00pm: offset bottle brush
I use a speed pour to make drinks sometimes, and keep bottles of lime juice and mint simple in my fridge. In order to fit a speed pour to a bottle it has to have a 3/4" neck, which is smaller than most bottle brushes. I have some bitty brushes that fit inside, but they only clean a few square millimeters at a time. My dishwasher isn't much help -- not a lot of water gets in there. It's a big pain.

Fortunately there's just the right tool out there: an offset small neck bottle brush that not only neatly fits into my bottles but also easily cleans the inside shoulders. The only downside was figuring out what else I was going to order to go into the box with it.

12:44am: Went on a lovely 30 mile bike ride with Andy P-C this morning. I showed him my favorite roads for tricking myself into doing high quality intervals, and we did a bunch of those. It was a ton of fun and I think we'll do it again soon.

It was Ingress mission day, which used to mean getting game credit for traveling a few hundred miles to go for a few specially chosen pleasant walks. In pandemic times the traveling part is gone and you have more choice of walks to do, so I got another hour or two of outside time.

Last night I put up some Chicken Tikka to marinate, and this evening I cooked it up into some absolutely perfect Chicken Tikka Masala. I adjust all of my recipes on an ongoing basis but I think this one is done.

9:51pm: Rode 81 miles today without exactly intending to. By which I mean I only brought enough food for a 50 mile ride. I did stop a few times for things like apple dumplings but my ride did not take me past ice cream I could eat so I was pretty hungry by the time i got home.

Next time i do this I'll have to make sure the route passes by Meletharb, so that I don't have this problem.

12:49am: gazpacho
There are a whole lot of basically identical gazpacho recipes out there. I've been slowly drifting away from them, so:

prepare a big pot of boiling water and an ice bath. Take

- 3.5 pounds of heirloom tomatoes, ideally from the seconds bin at the farmers market. I like pineapple tomatoes best for this but anything with a woody top is probably going to be good.

Score the bottoms, cook for 15 seconds to loosen the skins, chill, and pat dry. Peel the tomatoes, cut into sections to give access to the pulp, and strain all the pulp and any juice from the cutting board through a wire mesh strainer to remove the seeds. Once the seeds are removed from the tomato sections, cut those into half inch pieces.

Measure the juice and take note of how much there was. Add it to the tomatoes, along with:

- 2 cups cucumber, seeded and diced
- 1 cup red onion, diced fine
- 1 cup red pepper, seeded and diced
- 2 jalapenos, seeded and diced fine
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 1/4 cup lime juice
- 4 tsp worcestershire sauce
- 4 tsp balsamic vinegar
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1/2 tsp black pepper

subtract the amount of tomato juice you measured from 5 cups, puree that much of the mixture in a blender, and add it back in.

Best served the next day, after the flavors have had a chance to incorporate.

12:07am: Tito Santana Taqueria
Visiting the Beacon/Newburgh area, miss_chance and I stopped in at Tito Santana hoping for delicious tacos. Those they had, but they also had six different kinds of empanadas, none of which had cheese in them (as some of my readers know, I can't eat dairy with antibiotic residue in it).

Over two visits I had three different kinds, and the brisket was a particular star. The pulled pork was also excellent and the beef empanada was OK but not as amazing as the brisket. miss_chance reports that the grilled fish taco was excellent, and much better than the catfish taco. They had Culture Pop sodas which were new to me but very tasty, and a nice cold brew coffee.

Tito Santana Taqueria
142 Main St
Beacon, NY 12508
(845) 765-2350
open daily 1100-2100

9:58pm: upgrades
Three upgrades today!

We got a new cable modem a couple of days ago that can keep up with the supposedly faster speeds that the latest service gives us. I finally got around to installing it. Annoyingly, it refuses to go until you install a smartphone app on a phone (anywhere in the world, as far as I can tell) and use that to tell the cable provider the MAC address of the cable modem you're enabling. Why you can't do this on their website I don't know -- it is already possible to configure every other thing about a cable modem there. I gave the app a 1 star rating and I had a lot of company for that. We haven't tested the range yet but it does seem to address some airflow issues that made the old one overheat a lot.

A script at work has been nagging me to upgrade the OS on my work laptop to a newer version, using a provided installer. Said installer has bricked the machines of several of my coworkers and I was hoping to wait until I could bring the brick to a person and exchange it for a new computer instead of having to do that by mail. But that's not going to be for a long time now. After gathering some evidence it appeared that the problem is that the amount of free disk space required is more than the installer thinks, and so people who're clearing out only that much space wind up clearing out their whole machine. Clearing out twice that much space seems to work, and I have plenty of external drive space so I moved a few large files around and everything went fine. First, though, I made sure that I could get work done from my personal laptop if I had to, and that effort will probably turn out to be useful.

Some construction here required shutting the power off for a couple of hours and one of our ethernet-over-powerline boxes didn't come back from that. F materialized a new one in what seemed like no time at all and we plugged it in. We had to rearrange the plugs in the outlet to fit it in with the new cable box's power plug but that did work after a bit of trial and error. F is testing it out with some Overwatch and it seems to work OK. Supposedly the new ones are a little less fragile.

6:16pm: idiom
Programming languages, like human languages, have idioms; if you use constructions that other people are familiar with you are more likely to be understood, separately from the grammar of the language. This doesn't sound so useful -- wouldn't it be better to just make everything straightforward -- but in coding just as in conversation sometimes you want to express a complex or subtle concept. More importantly, though, idiom helps keep multiple programmers aligned with how the code is expected to work -- so long as they're all using the language in the same way.

Recently I was brought on to a project at work to audit it for places where the code wasn't doing what we thought it was doing. This is not so simple as just reading through 25,000 lines of code written by six authors because that's too much to keep in your head at once. But a first read through did turn up a small handful of places where a data structure did things that were far away from usual coding idiom. One bit in particular did some things that I found surprising and thought would be especially likely to give rise to misunderstandings. Today I went through and looked at the code that used that data structure and sure enough, it expected the data structure to work according to the usual idiom and not the strange one. Clearing up the misconception won't be too hard and maybe the program will work better once I do. Hopefully I can do that in a way that makes it less likely that someone else will have the same misunderstanding in the future.

4:22pm: mint simple
I've been asked for this recipe, so:

In a small or medium saucepan, muddle

1 oz fresh mint, stems on, in
1/2 cup sugar

for quite a while, so that the sugar starts to turn green, the stems are flattened, and the mint leaves have started to form into a mat. Add

1/2 cup hot water

and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for three minutes, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat. Spoon most of the mint into a strainer and force the syrup out into the pan. Discard strained mint and strain remaining syrup into a small bottle.

Makes about 3/4 of a cup (but don't count on a double batch of it necessarily fitting into a 12oz bottle, especially if you want to leave room for a speed pour).

3:53pm: salmon nectarine ceviche
I've been making salmon ceviche with variations and have finally zeroed in on one I adore. This recipe rejects both the "15 minute" and the "overnight" schools of thought on marination time and results in salmon that is cooked most but not all of the way through.

Cut the skin and any nearby brown bits off of enough salmon to result in 1# or maybe a bit more once you're done. Cut into 1/2" cubes and marinate in just enough lime juice to cover for four to six hours. Fresh squeezed or prepackaged lime juice are both fine so long as there aren't adulterants in it as there are in ReaLime and other "100% juice" products that are only 100% because they round up.

The brown bits are very tasty cooked up in a pan and eaten separately, perhaps as temaki if you have the ingredients and patience for that.

After marinating, pour off most of the lime juice and add:

• 1 ear roasted corn kernels. I grill mine on the cob and with the husk on, for about 20 minutes.
  
• About half of a medium red onion, diced into 1/4" pieces. If your onion has the stem on go ahead and include that.
  
• 1 avocado, cut into 3/8" pieces. This can be slightly overripe but cut off any really dark bits.
  
• Maybe a dozen grape tomatoes, quartered.
  
• 1 ripe (or even overripe) nectarine, cut into 1/2" pieces. You could probably use mango or mandarin orange to similar effect here.
  

Serve with good quality corn chips.

Makes enough for a main course for three. Delicious either right away or later.

12:17am: Somerville Open Studios this weekend
Somerville Open Studios is doing a hybrid online / outdoor in person event this coming weekend.  Some artists will be online using BoothCentral at https://my.boothcentral.com/v/events/somerville-open-studios-2021.  Some will be displaying art outside and socially distanced.  I will be doing both, with a thematic selection of 22 photographs set up on the fence along my driveway at #75 Lexington.  There are also a couple of artists nearby on Josephine St including Jeff Fullerton whose work and presentation have both influenced mine, and other outdoor artists across the city including Rachel Mello in a small group in the parking lot of Mad Oyster Studios in Gilman Square.

Much more information at www.somervilleopenstudios.org/

Come check it out!

4:36pm: Dal Makhani
This recipe now reflects non-zero actual understanding of the dish (unlike the first time I made it) and has been edited accordingly. Like the other Indian recipes here it is not in final form and I will continue to tweak it, especially for spicing.

Rinse and soak 1 cup of lentils in 2-3 cups of water until they have expanded to about 2.5x volume, which will take 6 hours or so (it's OK to leave them longer). When you're ready to start the rest of the recipe, strain and rinse well.

Put up a kettle for the 1 cup of hot water below.

In a saucepan or maybe on saute mode in an instant pot, cook

1t cumin seeds in
a little bit of avocado oil, until they sizzle. Add

1c diced onion

and saute for 3 minutes. Add

3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 jalapeno, seeded and chopped fine
1T grated fresh ginger

and cook for another 2 minutes. Add

1/2t salt
1/2t turmeric
2t garam masala
2t ground coriander
1t paprika

The recipe can be held here, and the resulting base is similar enough to other recipes up to this point that you can make a big batch for multiple dishes.

Put the mixture into the instant pot, if it's not already, along with the lentils and

1 cup diced tomatoes, plus their juice (2/3 of a can, if using canned tomatoes)
1 cup hot water

and cook on high pressure for 35-40 minutes. Add

1/2 cup canned kidney beans (1/3 of a can)
1/2t garam masala
1t butter
2T heavy whipping cream
2T chopped fresh fenugreek (every recipe I've seen says you can't sub for this, but actually you could totally sub cilantro here and it'd be different but tasty)

Simmer for at least 15 minutes (more is better) and serve.

Makes a little more than 2 pints.

10:18am: happy birthday...
Remember when we all used to wish each other happy birthday here instead of that other place?

Seems like a thing to bring back. So, happy birthday dpolicar!

9:57am: Nabeyaki Udon
I have a good source of udon now, and I had a bunch of veggies to use up, and I've started stocking more Asian pantry goods than before. So I made this:

Put up a kettle with 4+ cups of water. While it is boiling, boil

2 large (not jumbo) eggs

for 6 minutes and 15 seconds, starting the eggs after the water is hot and quenching in an ice bath when they are done. Once they've cooled, peel them but don't cut yet.

In a 3 quart saute pan, combine:

3 cups hot water, plus extra if you are using ingredients like dried mushrooms that will absorb the broth
1T hondashi powder (I have kombu, but making fresh dashi is a production)
1T red miso
1T sweet vermouth (or mirin if you've got that, but sweet vermouth is quite acceptable)
1T rice vinegar (I had white but black might have been more interesting)
3T tamari
1T grated fresh ginger

and heat until it reaches a simmer. Add, allowing to come back to temp after each one:

1 small carrot, grated
5 large or 10 small frozen fish balls (or some other protein; chicken is traditional and 7-8 oz of tofu also works)
4 oz fresh shiitake (I had sliced, but whole is good too). Dried mushrooms will do in a pinch; use 1 oz, put them in before the protein, and simmer for a while to reconstitute.
250g of good udon, still frozen
handful of bean sprouts (this won't need to come back up to temp)
1# baby bok choy -- this will seem like way too much. Cut or tear into 1" pieces. Or you could use spinach; again you want quite a lot.

cover so that the bok choy will steam. As soon as it has, pour into two bowls, add and slice egg, garnish with

a bit of chopped scallion

and serve immediately.

11:34am: a prediction comes to pass
Way back in 2011 I made a post about how SpaceX's engine out capability worked with their plans to reuse rockets. Since that time they have had 110 launches, 75 booster landings and, as far as anyone knows, three engine out events. The first of these was shortly after I made my post and before they were even trying to land boosters. The second was near the end of the boost phase and supposedly wasn't the cause of the subsequent landing failure, though now I have to wonder. The third was a couple of weeks ago and only in the last few days have we learned that it happened and was the cause of the first SpaceX landing failure since the previous engine out event.

Before these last two engine outs, landing failures were much more common. I suspect that going forward, engine outs are going to be the primary cause of booster loss for SpaceX.

One fascinating tidbit is that SpaceX isn't slowing down their launch cadence any after engine outs. They're no big deal! It's one thing to say they'll be no big deal before they've happened but quite another to keep your customers from thinking otherwise once they do.

12:51pm: scallion pancakes, perfected
I've been making scallion pancakes regularly for a while now and feel like I have got the recipe dialed in. It's actually pretty close to the one I started with, but I've explored the space of flour ratios, rollouts, fats mixed into the dough or for rolling or for frying, frying temperature, and the precise maximum amount of scallions that a pancake can hold before they escape.

2.5 cups / 330g pastry flour, or a mix of pastry and AP (but definitely use pastry flour for dusting your work surfaces, not AP, since the dusting flour doesn't get denatured by the hot water)
1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt, if I remember which a lot of the time I don't
1 cup not quite boiling water -- I boil this in my kettle and then the thermal mass of my glass measuring cup lowers the temp to where I want it

You will need small amounts of flour for each following step, but not nearly as much as if you start with a 2:1 ratio of flour to water as some recipes do.

Mix together in a medium sized bowl with a wooden spoon until it forms a shaggy dough. Knead for five minutes at which point it will be nice and smooth. Rest in the fridge, covered, for at least an hour and usually overnight.

Chop small:
2 cups of scallions (erring on the side of too many).

You will also need at this point:
2 tablespoons duck fat (if you don't have duck fat or want to be vegan, sesame oil also works well)

Divide into six pieces by weight (usually each piece is about 3.25 oz). Roll out each piece (size of the rollout is not critical at this step but I usually aim for 7-8 inches) and brush with 1/2 teaspoon duck fat, leaving the fat off the inch of dough furthest away from you. Roll up and coil each piece, form into a patty, and go on to the next piece before doing the next step (for me, this results in each piece getting a 10-15 minute rest at room temperature).

Re-roll, brush with another 1/2 teaspoon duck fat, and add 1/3 cup scallions, also leaving scallions off the inch of dough furthest from you. Roll up, coil, form into a patty, and refrigerate in a small bag or plastic wrap to rest for another hour or more (but try to use them all up within a day or two, they don't last forever.)

Roll out a final time to a diameter of about 8 inches and fry in canola oil. The hotter the oil, the chewier the pancakes will be.

I don't like my sauce sweet, so I've dialed-in a dipping sauce at 1 part sesame oil, 4 parts white rice vinegar, 10 parts tamari, dash of mustard powder, and a bit of grated fresh ginger. This is easiest if you do the oil first, so that you can pour some back in the bottle if you overdo it.