The Emperor’s Aluminum Clothing

/ Politics

The New York Times’ in-depth look at how the White House (and others) screwed up with the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war is a great read in its entirety, but one paragraph especially stood out for me given my feelings about the first debate:

Also that January, White House officials who were helping to draft what would become Secretary Powell’s speech to the Security Council sent word to the intelligence community that they believed “the nuclear case was weak,” the Senate report said. In an interview, a senior administration official said it was widely understood all along at the White House that the evidence of a nuclear threat was piecemeal and weaker than that for other unconventional arms.

But rather than withdraw the nuclear card – a step that could have undermined United States credibility just as tens of thousands of troops were being airlifted to the region — the White House cast about for new arguments and evidence to support it.

In other words, the White House had already staked its reputation (and, at least in their minds, the reputation of the US as a whole) on a claim that wasn’t nearly as strong as they had implied and was starting to unravel, but they couldn’t admit it. Why do we keep electing presidents who have a pathological inability to admit when they’ve made a mistake?

So now we’re in the embarrassing situation where not only is the Emperor walking around nekid, not only are the children pointing and laughing at him for being nekid, but he continues to strut down the square talking about his cool new threads while muttering about how unpatriotic children are for not backing him up in his story.

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Brief thoughts on the 1st debate

/ Politics

Some brief thoughts on the first presidential debate, before the talking heads try to destroy my memory of what I heard and replace it with meaningless fluff about who had better nose hair and who made more points with the key Floridian over-65-black-helicopter-mom vote.

First off, I was very impressed with Kerry. He was decisive, plain-spoken, and specific in his plans and priorities. I was especially impressed by his pragmatic position on Iraq — I figure anyone who still claims Kerry has a shifting or incoherent position on Iraq must either be completely shilling for the other side or be especially dense. Our foreign policy is something of a mess right now, and before this debate I was still thinking of Kerry as a “he can’t mess it up more than the current guy” candidate. I’ve changed my tune now, and at least on foreign-policy issues I’m confident he knows what he’s doing and can put things to right.

I also left the debate with a better opinion about who Bush as a person. The thing that has always confused me about Bush is his tenacious loyalty to an idea, policy or statement even after it’s clear to everyone else in the world that it’s wrong. The venomous theory that it all comes out of Rove-induced “Big Lie” manipulation tactics has never seemed right. Certainly there are party-faithful on both sides capable of such evil, but Bush isn’t an evil man. He’s also not blind or stupid, so the idea that he can’t see any of his administration’s mistakes due to a thick “What, me worry?” fog seems far-fetched as well.

Now I think I get it. As he said in many ways in this debate, Bush believes the most important thing a president or country must do is present to the world a strong, confident stance and an unwavering message. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the experience or skill to avoid backing himself (and us) into a corner. A noble man sticks to his principles, but a skillful noble man knows not to draw a line in the sand until he’s good and ready for whatever may step across.

This may be my own bias, and I listened to the event rather than watch it, but several times during the debate Bush sounded… trapped. Not by Kerry, but by the events of these past three-and-a-half years. I heard in his voice tonight something I heard in the secret audio recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson — the sound of a man who knows he’s out of his depth, but also firmly believes that he needs to keep up a strong face for the good of his country. I sympathize with the man. He’s absolutely right, being President is a hard job, and I know for a fact that I would not be up to the task. But as much as I’m coming to like George W. Bush as a man, I’m all the more convinced we need someone else as President.

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The 80 lb stench from Ohio

/ Politics

My old fraternity brother and Ohio-resident Rob Calhoun over at Splefty.com has chimed in with his own frustration at Ohio’s (Republican) Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell‘s decision to require Ohio Boards of Election to reject voter registration forms that aren’t printed on 80 lb card stock:

The 80 lb card stock requirement is from the days when the cards themselves were the archival record. Given how registration is processed today, it is hard to view Mr. Blackwell’s sudden enforcement of this rule in a charitable light. I’m also perturbed by the fact that our Board of Election’s voter registration web page no longer seems to have a .pdf file of the voter registration form available; I’m really pretty sure that’s where I downloaded the pdf I have.

It’s difficult not to view this as a back-handed effort to roll back some of the gains that Democrats have made in registering new voters in Ohio this year as described in this New York Times story.

Looking at the Wayback machine, it looks like they provided a PDF of their voter registration form from the page’s first capture in 2001 until sometime after August of last year — it had been unlinked by December, but apparently the PDF was still available when the Wayback last indexed the page in February of this year (it has since been removed from the main site).

Butler County, OH, on the other hand, still has their Online Voter Registration Form on the Web with the instructions:

In order to use this form as a registration for the purpose of voting you MUST:

  1. click “next” and print the form
  2. sign the form in the appropriate area
  3. mail it to the Butler County Board of Elections

Their Web form creates a nice little registration page for you to print out and mail in, with the instructions Please adjust the margins to .25 inches under Page Setup to avoid misprinting the form below. No mention of card stock. I find it hard to imagine a non-underhanded reason for newly enforcing this rule, except perhaps a suddden onset of dimentia on the part of Blackwell — Rob’s right, this stinks to high heaven.

UPDATE: Blackwell has since “clarified” his position, and says he’ll accept all voter registrations submitted by the deadline. Good for him — I wish I could believe this was just a simple misunderstanding though.

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PODcasting, academia and XM Radio

/ Media Technology

There’s a recent buzz around what’s being called PODcasting, wrapping web audio with whatever wrappers are necessary to make them convinient to link in a blog and download to your MP3 player of choice for later listening. (See Doc Searls’ explanation for a nice intro.)

It’s a nice meme, and having gotten a lot out of my own browsing through audio links I hope it catches on. I find it interesting and not that surprising that the PODcasting meme seems seems to mostly involve pointing to educational and intellectual audio rather than the music that drove the P2P music-sharing revolution. Music briefly had its day on the Web, but was rapidly driven off by commercial interests worried overtly about piracy and covertly about both piracy and competition. Education has both a different culture and economic structure, and while educators and lecturers like to make money somehow there’s a much deeper understanding that giving away our best ideas is often in our own best interests.

Unfortunately, even in the academic and public-radio world it looks like we’re in a meta-stable state, with many sites offering only streaming audio due to either legacy licensing issues or presumably to maintain some control on distribution. Once the technology to record off a stream becomes ubiquitous (as it surely will), will the remaining barriers to recording and rebroadcasting the audio be enough to placate people who want to distribute their content for free but not let it run wild?

Regardless, this whole thing just reconfirms my original skepticism at the long-term viability of XM Radio as a basic technology. Here we are in the age of personalized, on-demand, time-shifted and place-shifted content… and XM Radio is offering a capital-intensive satellite-based broadcast solution. Maybe I’m underestimating the value of live, up-to-the-minute news and information, and maybe I’m underestimating the long-term value of a big company that can afford to make deals with the RIAA, but I just don’t get it…

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Aebleskiver

/ Uncategorized

Years ago I was introduced to aebleskiver, a Danish holiday breakfast food that’s best described as a spherical pancake. (Aebleskiver is Danish for Apple…uh… Skiver.) The little balls are made using a special cast-iron pan with half-spherical hollows, called an Aebleskiver pan or sometimes called a monk’s pan. Dough is put into a hot hollow, and soon forms a crusty half-ball with still uncooked dough in the middle. Then the ball is flipped over using a knitting needle (traditional) or wooden skewer (my style) and the remaining dough flows into the hollow and forms the other half of the ball.

Last year I picked up an aebleskiver pan and tried making some aebleskiver for Thanksgiving breakfast, following the recipe that came with the pan. They were awful — the outsides were charred and the insides were rubbery. I take it as a sign that my family truly loves me that they ate any at all. So I went to the Net and downloaded some different recipes, and tried again at Christmas. (One advantage of having to split your holidays among parts of the family is you can repeat experiments like this on an unsuspecting audience.) This one was better, but the rubbery after-texture remained.

So then I got serious. Being a scientist at heart, I solicited aebleskiver recipes from anyone who knew someone with a Danish grandmother, downloaded more off the Net, and picked a set of five that fairly well spanned the space. Like most folk recipes, they varied widely — some called for low heat and some for high, some for lightly mixing the ingredients and some for thoroughly mixed, some for baking powder, some for buttermilk, some for yeast, and one called for beer. Then I invited a friend over and we set out to make micro-batches of aebleskiver, taking careful notes along the way.

They were all bad. Every last one. Only two of them weren’t rubbery in the middle, and those had a bitter after taste. Experimentation had failed; it was time to resort to theory.

We pulled out The Cook’s Bible, a great cookbook done by the editor of Cook’s Illustrated, and started browsing the index. This led to a discussion on the science of waffles, full of tidbits like the fact that a waffle is fried on the outside and steamed on the inside, that browned waffles are more flavorful than just tanned ones because of the Maillard reaction, that buttermilk and baking soda is the key to a good thick batter and baking powder leaves the batter thin and bitter, and that you want to mix liquid and dry ingredients with a very light touch so you don’t burst the CO2 bubbles formed by the buttermilk’s lactic acid reacting with the baking soda. Best of all, it had a master recipe for waffles that took all these principles into account. We tried it, and the aebleskiver came out perfect!

Here’s a synopsis of the master waffle recipe described in The Cook’s Bible, modified only slightly for aebleskiver. I find I still have to sacrifice a batch or two to the skiver gods when I’m using a new oven to get the right pan temperature, but this recipe has yet to let me down. (Note to Danish grandmothers out there: if this recipe goes against all that is holy about a proper aebleskiver batter, just chalk this up as yet another example of American ignorant hubris and ignore it.)

Ingredients

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tablespoons cornmeal (optional)
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 eggs, separated
  • Between 1.75 and 1.875 cups buttermilk
  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
  • diced apple, applesauce, applebutter or jam (optional)
  • cardamom or cinnamon to taste (optional)

Directions

  1. Put the aebleskiver pan on a medium-to-high heat. The goal here is to have the pan good and hot (around 390°) by the time the batter is ready.
  2. Whisk the dry ingredients together. Whisk the egg yolks with the buttermilk and melted butter in a separate bowl.
  3. Beat the egg whites until they just hold a 2-inch peak. (The Bible specifically admonishes that you not overbeat the whites.)
  4. Add the liquid buttermilk-butter-yolk mixture to the dry ingredients in a slow, steady stream while gently mixing with a rubber spatula. This is where the gentle hand comes in — you want as many of those invisible bubbles intact as possible. I find it easiest to do this step with one person slowly pouring while another mixes. You should still have large patches of dry ingredients by the time you finish, this is more wetting of the batter than mixing.
  5. Fold in the egg whites, again with a light touch. Again, the Bible emphasizes that it’s better to undermix than to overmix.
  6. Place a little butter in one of the pan’s hollows. It’s not really necessary to grease the sides of the hollow as well, but I do anyway. Then take a small ladle or big spoon and fill the hollow not-quite-to-the-top with batter. Depending on how hot your pan is, you may need to add batter quickly so the butter doesn’t hit its smoke point. Fill the other hollows the same way.
  7. Add a little diced apple or jam to top of each dough-ball, and cap it off with a little more dough (optional).
  8. By the time you’ve finished filling the last hollow, the first one should be just about ready for turning. Take your specially-designed Danish knitting needle (or wooden skewer, or whatever) and poke the batter right at the edge of your first hollow. A semi-spherical shell should pop up out of the hollow. Push it so it caps off the hollow, allowing the uncooked dough from the center of the shell to fall into the hollow. Repeat for the other hollows.
  9. Now it’s just about turning the balls every now and then to give them an even heat, though honestly they don’t really need turning (I just can’t help fidgeting with them). Remove from pan when a toothpick comes out clean, usually about 5 or 6 minutes. The aebleskiver should be brown (not just tan).
  10. Serve immediately. If you added jam or applesauce to the centers, be sure to warn your guests that while the bread may merely be hot the fruit may be molten.

Enjoy!

Update 6/20/06: I was recently at The Little Mermaid, a Dutch restaurant in the tourist-town Solvang, California, and asked how they made their (very tasty) Aebleskiver. The woman serving us leaned in conspiratorally and whispered “Bisquick Pancake Mix — it works every time.” She also mentioned you should turn the balls just a quarter turn at a time (which takes up to 15 minutes to fully cook), and this clever trick: instead of buttermilk, use 7-Up! This still provides the acid to react with the baking soda, but also provides Carbon Dioxide for extra froth. Oh yes, and don’t spare the cardamom (they used quite a bit). I haven’t tried any of these tips yet, but I plan to give it a whirl the next batch I make.

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An Anthropologist on the Farm

/ Culture

Aaron Swartz has been blogging his experiences going through Stanford’s freshman orientation. His observations so far are both painful and comfortingly familiar to me — I have to wonder if I would have had the same right-brained analytical discomfort had I gotten into Stanford as a freshman instead of going all of 10 minutes from home to Georgia Tech for two years. (The only mention of school spirit in Stanford’s grad-student orientation, by the way, is along the lines of “those are called undergrads — they’ll occasionally talk about this place called Cal, so don’t look bewildered if it comes up when you’re TAing them…”)

All this trip down memory lane makes me glad I was able to re-do orientation as an almost-20-year-old transfer student. Two years perspective can make a hell of a difference.

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More free-will paradox

/ Philosophy

Yesterday’s post on counting votes is related to a paradox I’ve been thinking about for a couple weeks. This is a from-memory paraphrase of the description in Martin Gardner’s Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight:

Dr. Omega, brain specialist extraordinaire, is conducting a study. First, he scans your brain, has you fill out lots of personality tests, measures the bumps on your head, and looks deeply into your soul. Then he brings out two boxes, one opaque (A) and the other transparent (B). In the transparent box is a $100 bill. He then gives you two choices:

  • Choice 1: Take the contents of only the opaque box (box A).
  • Choice 2: Take the contents of BOTH box A and box B.

Dr. Omega explains that you that if, based on his tests, he expects that you will take Choice 1, he has placed $1000 in box A. If he expects you will take Choice 2, he has placed nothing in box A.

With that, he leaves for a vacation in Vegas.

Which choice do you take?

Assuming you believe Dr. Omega is good at what he does, I’m pretty sure this is equivalent to the Prisoner’s Dilemma with you playing against your future self.

Here’s the payoff matrix:

Your Choice
A A & B
Omega’s Prediction A $1000 $1100
A & B $0 $100

Regardless of what prediction Dr. Omega has made, your payoff is always one hundred dollars higher if you take choice #2 (A & B). The only way that can’t be true is if your choice now in some way affects the prediction that Dr. Omega has already made. And yet, if Dr. Omega’s prediction is correct then by choosing A & B you only make $100 rather than $1000 or $1100.

The paradox is even more clear if instead of a brain specialist, Dr. Omega is a time traveler. He jumps a few moments into the future, watches which choice you make, then pops back to the present and sets the boxes as before. If you believe in a single-timeline worldview (it’s already happened, so that’s how it’ll happen, ala The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) then you’re better off choosing A (insomuch as you can “choose” at all in this worldview). If you believe in splitting timelines (you can change the future, ala Terminator) then you’re better off choosing A & B.

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Upcoming Bay Area events

/ Events

A few events around the SF Bay Area that I found interesting:

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