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If necessity is the mother of invention, bad recipes are its ugly second cousin.
In preparation for a dinner party, I dug a fancy cookie recipe out of my collection of newspaper-food-section clippings: spiralled “black and white” cookies, made by rolling flattened chocolate and vanilla doughs together into a log, slicing into rounds, and baking. The procedure was horribly frustrating and messy, as one or the other of the two doughs was (no matter what I tried) either too stiff or too mushy to be rolled effectively. Then, even when cut with my newest, sharpest, imported German bread knife, the dough stuck to everything like snot to a mustache. In a momentary fit of physical violence that I reserve to express my opinion of machines or processes that are beneath me (e.g. all of them), I flung a dough scraper into the sink, propelled by a theraputic yell and as much force as I could muster without winding up. This provided a welcome moment of comic relief later that day when we discovered a blob of vanilla dough on the ceiling.
After all the pain I was excited to finally try a finished cookie. They looked great. But… they tasted like nothing at all: not chocolate, not vanilla. Pointless.
I never give up without a fight, so I was not yet ready embrace my backup plan (buy ice cream for dessert, and send the cookies to the recipe author along with a note suggesting where she could put them). In the end, elaborating on my wife’s idea to dip the cookies in melted chocolate, I spread melted chocolate on the bottom of each one, so as not to hide the cookies’ visual appeal, which at the moment was their only redeeming quality.
It worked well — the cookies were a big hit.
The only remaining problem was that one of the guests at dinner has a strong allergy to peanuts, “trace amounts” of which can apparently be found in the chocolate I used in the cookies. So she couldn’t eat them anyway, for as good as they looked they weren’t worth going into anaphylactic shock over. I should have gone with ice cream after all.
Bruce Schneier’s latest CryptoGram contains this great soundbite:
Honestly, security experts don’t pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft’s poor products are one of the reasons we’re in business. We pick on them because they’ve done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products’ security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft.
A number of people whose sites I frequent lamented the year 2001, as if some ‘2001' entity had caused them to have a bad time for most of the past 12 months. I’ll admit to having burned a calendar in effigy at one recent New Year’s celebration, but in truth I believe that anyone who is struggling to find highlights for the past year is bound to repeat the exercise 52 weeks from now.
In 2001 I achieved a number of exciting things — one of which I’d been talking about for years but begun to question whether I’d ever actually accomplish. In a word, I got fit. I changed my diet, began exercising, and lost more than 15 lbs. I must have changed my metabolism too, because during my recent trip to Europe I ate just about everything in sight for 10 days, yet came home weighing less than I had when I left. (Either that, or someone reset the scale at the gym.)
In 2001 I wrote 232 items for this journal, the traffic to which increased tenfold over the course of the year, thanks to terrific readers such as you, and lots more at googlebot.com.
In 2001 I released my weblog software — my first piece of open-source software.
In 2001 I took excellent vacations to Germany, Amsterdam,St. Louis, Sun River, Canada, Sonoma, San Diego, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. I saw two fantastic music shows, Stomp and the Blue Man Group. And I ‘ran into’ two local musicians of note, Mickey Hart and Tom Waits. Heh.
In 2001 I changed most of my house’s lighting to fluorescent, and reduced my consumption of electricity dramatically. My wife and I also managed to complete two remodeling projects that had been in the works for far too long, and which I continue to appreciate daily.
In 2001 I baked about 200 loaves of bread, and I was told by at least 3 people (who had mouths full of my pizza at the time) that I should dump my engineering gig and open a pizzeria.
To round out the year I replaced a flaky and noisy old webserver with a new machine that is about 3x faster and one-tenth as loud.
Looking forward, I’ve made a number of challenging resolutions for 2002, one of which is to not let this journal go unattended for weeks at a time. How am I doing so far?
The sequel to an outstanding book, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon tells the story of Earth during the time between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. As with the first Shadow, this novel tells the story of Bean, a genetically-enhanced genius and ex-soldier from Battle School.
If you’ve read the other books in this series, you’ll have to read this one too. It is a compelling story, although it contains too much politics and not enough science fiction for my tastes.
Patronize these links, man:
If you are interested in cryonics (freezing of heads or bodies in hopes that future science will discover ways to revive the “corpsicle”) or nanotechnology, you will find this book challenging, rewarding, and significant.
I can’t say this was a fabulous story, in terms of its appeal strictly as a work of fiction, but I believe it will stay with me longer than most of the stuff I read. This book has a lot more to offer than a romp through the future; it is the sort of book that will be used in college Philosophy and Literature classes.
Of special interest to fans of speculative fiction is Halperin’s afterword, which includes a bibliography for further reading about the science within the story.
Patronize these links, man:
