Later On

From Cook’s Country:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• In order to achieve a respectable crust, the steaks’ exterior must be dry. After trying numerous drying-out methods, including salting and aging, we considered the freezer. The freezer’s intensely dry environment sufficiently dehydrated the steaks’ exteriors, and since we were only freezing them for a short time, the interiors remained tender and juicy.

• Rub the steaks with a mixture of salt and cornstarch before freezing. [First, dry the steaks completely with a paper towel, then rub with 1 tsp salt mixed with 1 tsp cornstarch for 4 strip steaks – LG] The salt assures they are well-seasoned, and cornstarch—a champ at absorbing moisture—allowed us to cut the freezing time in half [to a total of 30 min up to 1 hour – LG].

Interesting post (with video) by Dan Colman in Open Culture.

Fascinating talk by Michael Lewis on the topic of his forthcoming book.

And take a look at this excellent post, from which comes this chart:

Gets public lesson from HHS Sec Kathleen Sebelius:

From the Center for American Progress:

In what the Guardian called "arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration," President Obama announced yesterday that the United States would abandon President Bush’s plan to construct a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic and instead focus defensive measures on more immediate threats, such as short-range Iranian missiles capable of targeting the Middle East and parts of Europe. Obama said yesterday that the new system "will provide stronger, smarter, and swifter defenses of American forces and America’s allies," noting that the new system is "more comprehensive than the previous program" and that its capabilities are "proven" and "cost-effective." The new program, at the recommendation of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will unfold in three stages. First, by 2011, the Navy will deploy Aegis ships carrying SM-3 missiles to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to better protect U.S. allies in the Middle East and East Europe. The second phase, beginning around 2015, "will field an upgraded, land-based SM-3 in allied countries," perhaps even Poland and the Czech Republic, while the third phase envisions larger, longer-range defense missiles based in Europe to protect against intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Particularly the provision on student loans. From the Center for American Progress:

The House voted 253-171 to pass a sweeping education bill yesterday that would "effectively end private-lender involvement in the student loan market." "This bill will end the billions upon billions of dollars in unwarranted subsidies that we hand out to banks and financial institutions, and will use that money to guarantee access to low-cost loans," Obama said in a statement.

Ben Nelson must be having a fit.

From the Center for American Progress:

A new study released by researchers at Harvard Medical School has calculated that 45,000 Americans a year die because they lack health insurance — nearly one every twelve minutes. "We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction…drunk driving and homicide combined," said Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study.

That’s an annual death toll equal to 15 9/11s every year. That should get the public’s attention.

An editorial in the Wichita Eagle:

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., isn’t the only lawmaker to claim that illegal immigrants would benefit from health care reform. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, said at town hall meetings last month that the health reform plan in Congress would pay for insuring illegals.

But as nonpartisan fact-checking organizations have repeatedly stated, such claims are false or vastly overstated. House and Senate bills explicitly prohibit "individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States" from receiving federal assistance to buy health insurance.

Though he has apologized for yelling "You lie!" at President Obama, Wilson still contends that he isn’t wrong about illegal immigrants. He argues that it might be possible for an illegal immigrant to benefit from health care reform, because there isn’t a strict verification method in the House bill for determining whether a person is an illegal immigrant.

But haven’t we gone down this dead end before?

Because of unsubstantiated concerns that illegal immigrants were receiving Medicaid benefits, states were forced in 2007 to verify the citizenship of Medicaid beneficiaries. That resulted in long delays for U.S. citizens and high enforcement costs for states — but very few cases of illegal immigrants seeking benefits.

A study of six states by a House oversight committee found the states spent $8.3 million on enforcement and caught only eight illegal immigrants. Kansas spent $1 million and turned up one illegal immigrant among the applicants.

Requiring strict citizenship verification as part of this reform likely also would be costly and punish U.S. citizens who happen not to have the correct paperwork. Nonetheless, the White House and Senate negotiators have stated that verification of immigration status would be required for anyone seeking to purchase coverage…

Continue reading. The GOP needs to have its collective head examined.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Late Thursday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., granted yet another detainee at Guantanamo Bay the right to go free. That makes 30 out of 37 habeas corpus cases decided so far in which Guantanamo prisoners have won orders for their release. In each case, a federal judge has concluded, after reviewing all of the government’s evidence, that there is no justification for continuing to keep the detainee behind bars.

Yesterday’s ruling appears to be another case where, like in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the government’s primary evidence was based on coerced confessions following abusive interrogations, according to the detainee’s lawyers. (An unclassified version of the judge’s opinion laying out her reasoning is not yet available.) It’s also the second case in which a Guantanamo detainee who faced a war crimes charge by a U.S. military commission has been ordered freed.

In the habeas corpus petition granted yesterday, Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah, a 50-year-old Kuwaiti aeronautics engineer and businessman, claims he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to do charitable work in accordance with the requirements of Islam. But he was kidnapped and held hostage by the Northern Alliance, he says, which turned him over to U.S. authorities, which then sent him to Guantanamo Bay where he was imprisoned and interrogated for the next seven years.

The United States claimed …

Continue reading.

I’m now reading The Go Consultants, by John Fairbairn and T. Mark Hall. Quite interesting. From the link:

Have you ever wondered what pros think about during a game? This book gives you a unique opportunity to find out and you will frequently be surprised. The book follows a game between two teams: Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru (the young hot-shots) versus Segoe Kensaku and Suzuki Tamejiro (the established top players). The members of the teams were allowed to consult with each other in another room between moves, and a reporter made notes on what they said and what they did on the practice board. As a result we have an incredible record of what the players were planning and hoping for, what they thought their opponents were doing, and what they decided not to do as well as why they made the choices they did. There could not be a more thoroughly commented professional game.

You can see sample pages here (PDF). It is indeed interesting and informative to read their discussions  of their moves.

Interesting article:

The sun doesn’t rise over the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; it ignites. One minute the blaze-orange glow of dawn is cascading down the sulfur-rich Jackson and Kamma mountain ranges, tinting the prehistoric lakebed a million shades of pink. The next, it’s full celestial throttle. By 6:30, the sun is blinding and the heat is ratcheting up.

So if you’re going to spend a day in the open, pushing a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter attack jet that you’ve converted into a drag racer close to the speed of sound, it’s advisable to get the prep work done before the heat sets in. Yet at 7:00 on a Wednesday morning in July, hardly a single member of Team North American Eagle was stirring. By 8:00, only a few bleary-eyed troops in this volunteer army of American and Canadian aircraft mechanics, engineers, scientists, machinists and hot-rodders had emerged from a cluster of RVs parked alongside a makeshift hangar. Apparently a party at the hot springs, about 12 miles north, ended well past midnight, culminating in a car-to-car flare-gun battle on the ride back to camp.

The wind had kicked up on the playa by the time Team Eagle rolled its car out to the 3.5-mile improvised runway around 10:00. Crew members, finally looking alert and focused, ran down their checklists. Data-acquisition engineer and resident hacker Steve Wallace was up on a ladder, making some last-minute tweaks, leaning down into the web of wires, nodes and connectors set inside Eagle’s fuselage. In the supersonic zone, the slightest aerodynamic instability can cause a ripple effect, mustering forces that can annihilate a car and scatter its pieces across the desert like cracker crumbs, which is why the team had to pull off some successful data-collection runs this week. They had already pushed their erstwhile jet fighter faster than 400 mph, but before they can make their scheduled run for 800 mph—a new world land-speed record—on July 4, 2010, they need to gather enough data to finalize the vehicle’s design.

A team member towed the car to its mark with a pickup truck. Team leader and driver Ed Shadle lowered himself into the cockpit. Pulling on his helmet and lowering his oxygen mask, Shadle gave the thumb’s-up. The crew wheeled over the “huffer cart,” a mobile power unit used to start aircraft engines. With a shriek of its own small turbine, the cart cranked over the Eagle’s General Electric J79. Dust swirled as the jet engine gulped for air.

Suddenly someone ordered a shutdown. One of the parachute bays had popped open. Shadle aborted the start-up, which, as it often does, left some unspent fuel in the combustion chamber. One of the crew spotted a small orange flame burning inside the tailpipe. Shadle got the signal to restart and blow out the flame, but when he did, a fireball leaped from the exhaust, sending crew members diving for cover…

Continue reading.

On the whole, handwriting today is in bad shape—partly because good handwriting is no longer taught as an admirable skill, and in part because people more than ever rely on keyboards to produce written communications. I have a post on italic handwriting and how to learn it, and Jack of Amsterdam points out this article by Emily Yoffe in Slate:

If you have school-age children, you may have noticed their handwriting is terrible. They may communicate incessantly via written word—they can text with their heads in a paper bag—but put a pen in their hands and they can barely write a sentence in decent cursive. It’s not going to be easy to decipher one either, if they think cursive might as well be cuneiform.

My daughter is in the eighth grade, and I realized several years ago that her rudimentary block-letter printing was actually never going to improve because handwriting had been chopped from the school curriculum. Children today learn basic printing in first and second grade, then get cursory instruction in cursive in the third grade—my daughter was given a cursive workbook and told to figure it out herself. She dutifully filled in every page, but she never understood how these looping letters were supposed to become her handwriting, so they never did.

I was appalled that she seemed stuck with this crude penmanship. After all, I had spent hours in Miss Mackenzie’s fifth-grade class perfecting my Palmer-derived hand. Surely part of being literate was having decent handwriting! But I was hardly one to talk. As with the human body, over the decades people’s cursive tends toward collapse. The loops become lumps and eventually degenerate into illegibility. My script piled up on the page, letters smashed against one another at different angles like a series of derailments.

Miss Mackenzie is long gone, but I decided to see if both my daughter and I could improve our handwriting. I was hopeful for her but dubious about myself. At her age, she’s in the neuron-growing business: Certainly she could master this basic skill. But at my age, I assumed handwriting was one of those things that was so fixed it couldn’t be fixed.

We went to the Maryland farmhouse home of Nan Jay Barchowsky, 79, who for almost 30 years has been a handwriting consultant with a line of instructional materials she developed. A calligrapher and artist, she started teaching handwriting at a local school, basing her letters on italic script—the elegant, quick form developed in early-16^th-century Italy.

Barchowsky sat my daughter and me at a slanted writing desk and dictated a paragraph for us to write. She then looked at our work and tried to be diplomatic. She noted that my loops were too big and tended to get tangled in the lines of writing above and below, the sizes of my letters were inconsistent, they slanted in every direction, and certain ones—like R—were illegible while others got omitted altogether. She asked, "Do you ever go back and find you are unable to read your notes?" Yes, all the time!

Barchowsky said my daughter’s handwriting would look more sophisticated, and be both faster and more legible, if her letter size was more regular and she learned to create joins within her words. My daughter acknowledged her frustration. "My handwriting makes me look so young," she complained. "Also it’s so big that on tests and reports I can’t fit in what I want to say."

This Washington Post article describes the national abandonment of penmanship in recent decades. Until the 1970s it was taught as a separate subject through sixth grade. Children in mid-20^thcentury America spent two hours a week on it. Today the teaching of it generally ceases after third grade, and a 2003 survey found that during the years it’s taught, it’s for 10 minutes or less a day…

Continue reading.

TOBS Avocado shaving cream is one of my favorites, though I definitely prefer soap to cream. Still, creams make a good lather, and the Rooney Style 3 Small Super Silvertip held lather for passes from now till noon. The Apollo Mikron with, I believe, an Astra Keramik Platinum blade, did a stellar job, and Alt Innsbruck was a nice finish.