omenti

flavorful food

Find something with complex flavors so you can do a little experiment.  I have a small Snicker’s bar with its chocolate, salted peanuts and caramel.  You can probably find something better - even a flavored hard candy will work well.  I’ll wait ...

 

Got it?

 

Good!

 

Take a bit of it and, while holding your breath, pinch your nose and place the morsel on your tongue.  There is the sensation that something is on your tongue and you notice a taste or two.  Chew it a bit.  If you are careful to not breathe you’ll get one or more of the five tastes your tongue can sense - salt, sour, bitter, sweet and umami (often called savory). 

 

I’m sensing a bit of salt and sweet with the bit of the Snickers bar.  At some point you’ll need to breathe.  Try only breathing through your mouth and, if you can, lift the your palate so air doesn’t travel from the back of your mouth to your nose.  If you have good control you’ll continue to register the limited set of tastes.

 

Now start breathing normally allowing air from the back of your mouth to make it through your nose.  It is as if the world suddenly changes from out of focus 2d black and white to vivid 3d color.  The flavors come bursting through.

 

It turns out flavor is similar to color - we tend to think of them as aspects of the world that surrounds us, but in fact they are synthesized by our brains.  Much of flavor comes from smell, but perhaps not the type of smell that first comes to mind.

 

Dogs are often cited as being wonderfully optimized for smell.  They can put their noses close to the ground and the structure of their noses is beautifully constructed.  Some beautiful work has been done examining the low speed aerodynamics of canine smelling.

 

Humans are usually seen as poor smellers - indeed smell is often seen as a relatively unimportant sense.  But it turns out there are really two types of smelling.  Orthonasal smell is what you think of when you think of smelling in dogs or people.  Air laden with molecules that can stimulate smell receptors comes in through the nose and a signal is sent to the brain --  perfume, skunk, body odor burnt dinner and so on.  Retronasal smell is from odor producing molecules that arise in the mouth and pass up into the nasal cavity with the air leaving through the nose.

 

It turns out retronasal smell is so different some researchers treat it as a different type of sense entirely.  It also turns out, compared to other animals, we seem to be highly optimized for it.

 

When people learn that I have synesthesia they usually wish they could experience it.  I’m not entirely certain that is a good idea and I often wonder what it would be like to have orthogonal vision and hearing.  But I've come to the realization that all of us are synesthestic...

 

Your brain takes signals from retronasal smell and weaves them with those from taste to produce flavors in your brain.  These can be enormously complex and can vary from person to person.  They elevate cooking, wine making and the other wonderful things we do with food to art forms.  

 

The retronasal smell-taste synesthesia¹ is even more impressive as it combines with touch signals from the tongue to localize flavors on the tongue.  Retronasal smell is a referred sensation.

 

Our bodies are impossibly cooler and more awesome that we can imagine.

 

Now I’m thinking about food.  Over Thanksgiving I made about a half dozen dishes, some improvised, others modified variations of old standbys, that were excellent - the sort f thing to serve to guests.  My cooking skills are modest, but these were good enough that I offer a few of them:

 

 

Roasted Green Beans with Nuts and Cranberries

 

 

really simple and really good.  I'm guessing on the amounts.  Also a note -  a microplane completely rules for zesting citrus 

 

2 pounds fresh green beans, stem ends trimmed

4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced lengthwise into quarters

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil - good quality (I like Frantoia)

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/4 teaspoon white sugar

1 teaspoon lemon zest (about one lemon's worth)

2 teaspoons lemon juice  (about one lemon's worth). reserve another lemon for serving

1/2 cup dried cranberries  (a 50-50 mixture of dried cranberries and dried cherries worked well too)

1/2 cup pecans (walnuts work well too ..  you can toast them or leave them raw.  I went with raw both times)

 

 

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with heavy duty aluminum foil.

 

2. Toss green beans with garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper and sugar directly on the prepared baking sheet. Roast the beans for 15 minutes, then stir with a spatula. Continue roasting until beans slightly browned and just starting to shrivel - about 10 minutes more. Add lemon zest, lemon juice, cranberries and walnuts and toss well. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and more lemon juice.

 

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Sweet Potato, Roasted Red Pepper and Quinoa Salad

 

This is another in a series of modifications to a basic Mark Bittman recipe.  The trick is to combine crunchy apple tastes with a roasted grilled flavor.  It is probably the best variation I’ve made.

 

cook 1 c quinoa and 2 c water with a bit of salt.  I prefer quinoa from Bob's Red Mill

oven roast 1 cubed (1/2 to 3/4 inch) sweet potato 30 minutes at 350F  broil for 3 minutes.  crank the heat to broil for about two minutes at the end to push the Mallard reaction

 

roast 1 red pepper and dice  (I did this on the grill with the pepper cut in eight sections and coated with olive oil.  I went for a blistered skin with burning just starting and left the skin on)

 

toss into a large bowl and mix:

 

quinoa

sweet potato

red pepper

1 cubed peeled apple (a Cortland is a good choice)

2 ounces chopped pecans

2 - 3 chopped scallions

about 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

 

add

1/3 c high quality olive oil (I like Frantoia)

short 1/4 c white balsamic vinegar (Terre Bormane Aulente is great)

short 1/4 c balsamic vinegar (like Fini)

 

salt and pepper to taste

 

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Mango Lassi

 

I have a serious weakness for mango lassis and, over the years, have tried to make them with mixed results. Recently I learned many Indian restaurants use a commercial canned mango pulp.  Specifically Rellure was mentioned.  I found some on Amazon and went to work with a recipe. An Indian grocery will probably also stock some. If you can score wonderful very ripe mangos, go for it, but this short cut is very easy and delicious.

 

This made the richest mango lassi I've had.  The taste and mouth feel is that of something made with cream.  You might try regular yogurt and perhaps low fat milk.  I think you could simulate most restaurant drinks with 1% milk.  It helps to chill the mango pulp and milk to below refrigerator temperatures - if they are already refrigerated, put them in the freezer for about ten minutes. Alternatively serve over ice.

 

combine:

9 ounces 2% plain Fage greek yogurt.  (whole Fage would be wonderful overkill)

4.5 ounces whole milk

4.5 ounces mango pulp

about 4 tsp white sugar (or to taste)

some ground cardamom to taste - I probably used a tsp

 

blend for a minute or so

serve in a chilled glass and sprinkle with pistachios or sliced almonds. 

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¹ Perhaps this is a bit different from normal definitions of synesthesia, but I think as a crossing of two distinct sensory inputs to produce a sensation normally associated with one of them.  In any event this concept of flavor that we often interpret as taste is so common that we don't think of it as unusual.  It is something to celebrate and we are probably much better at sorting out flavors that most (perhaps all) of the other animals.

 

 

inspiring the right people and creating the right condition for leaps

Prizes are curious things.  Most are recognitions of some event, but a few have been crafted to inspire people to do something very difficult - something that makes a fundamental difference.  

 

Perhaps the most famous prize was the Longitude Prize - a reward by the British government in 1714 for a simple and accurate method to establish a ship’s longitude.  Navigation had become extremely important.  Latitude is easy to determine, but longitude was usually found by dead reckoning - an inherently inaccurate technique.

 

The prizes offered were significant ranging from £10,000 for a method that could determine longitude within 60 nautical miles, £15,000  for 40 nautical miles and £20,000 for 30 nautical miles.  Additionally smaller amounts were offered for significant progress towards a goal and advances were offered for promising methods.  The total prize money was £100,000 - roughly $25 million in today’s money.  

 

This set off a major industry of inquiry and invention involving many of the great minds of the day.  The history is fascinating - I recommend Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time for a great read.

 

The trick to a great prize is to find something that is possible, but is still so difficult that little progress has been made.  It is very easy to offer a target that is too easy or difficult.  There should be enough of a reward - usually a mixture of tangible and intangible - to motivate enough people as the real progress often comes from people who are not directly involved in the field.  John Harrison, the winner of the Longitude Prize, was a complete dark horse.

 

Some prizes have managed to capture long standing human dreams.  

 

In 1959 the British Industrialist Henry Kremmer offered a series of prizes for human powered flight.  The first was £50,000 for the first human-powered aircraft to fly a figure eight pattern around two points separated by a half mile.  The starting and finishing points had to be at least ten feet above the ground.  The second prize was £100,000 was to fly over the English Channel.  A few other prizes were concerned with speed and maneuverability and I think some are still unclaimed.

 

I'm lucky enough to have known the principal character behind winning the first and second prizes.

 

Our bicycle club had a few people who were fascinated by slow flight - low speed aerodynamics.  Hang gliding was becoming popular - at least for a few risk takers - and designs were advancing from simple (and sometimes dangerous) rogallo wings to much more sophisticated designs.  Paul MacCready was a gifted aeronautical engineer who was making serious contributions to the applied science of low speed fluid dynamics.  Paul had been a champion sailplane pilot and had some ideas on what it might take to win the prize.  He determined the first two were possible and enlisted local help.  

 

Paul and Peter Lissaman built the Gossamer Condor - actually there were three versions.  I put a bit of labor into the first aircraft - the Pasadena version.  The Shafter version was piloted by a very lightweight and strong hang glider pilot named Bryan Allen.¹ 

 

In August of 1977 the Gossamer Condor - 70 pounds empty and a 96 foot wingspan - flying at about 10 mph with Bryan as its engine won the first prize.  About two years later an improved aircraft - the Gossamer Albatross/Bryan Allen combination made it across the English Channel in a bit under three hours.  Bryan, at about 140 pounds, weighed twice as much as the aircraft and had to supply about 250 watts - a third of a horsepower - to keep it flying.

 

A dream had been realized.

 

Paul was a fantastically interesting guy to chat with - one of those guys who was obviously interested in many things and topics that are important.  One of those guys who connects dots. Spend the twenty minutes or so to watch his TED talk from 1998 where he talks about change.

 

 

In the talk, starting around minute 13,  you’ll notice some small remotely piloted vehicles.  It is important to recognize this talk was giving in 1998.  These came from Paul’s company AeroVironment.  The company is something of a Skunkworks that specialized in low speed aerodynamics and efficiency.  Human powered flight was cracked there and that opened the way to solar powered flight and electric airplanes.  They’ve explored very small aircraft for the military and have an interest in electric power automobiles.  A neat place.

 

The unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming very important for the military and there are literally dozens of types.  The small camera carrying aircraft are sometimes called first person view (FPV) aircraft and stunning advances have been made by advanced hobbyists.  Check out what you can do for a few thousand dollars.  

AeroVironment has a fantastic project called the hummingbird for DARPA that uses bird flight as a model.  It weighs less than 20 grams (about 3/4 ounce) and currently has a mission endurance of nearly 10 minutes.  We may soon have the ability to collect video and other intelligence at very close range with vehicles that are potentiall very inexpensive and difficult to detect.

 

At a larger scale there is a market for agriculture, utility, rescue and police FPV UAVs. The FAA will announce new rules for UAVs in January as current rules are very restrictive and were created with different technologies in mind.  There may be a market - helicopters start at around $2 million and are expensive to maintain and operate while stable camera platforms with very low operating costs can be had in the $5k to $50k range.  Aerovironment’s offering is the Qube and reportedly goes for about $40k.

 

Fully autonomous UAVs have been built and, along with FPV UAVs there are serious society and technology concerns. Some of us were wondering about the use of these devices in the Occupy movement - demonstrators, news and government.  Advanced hobbyists could easily supply the demonstrators now, although it isn’t clear if flying them would be considered illegal or if permits are required.  

 

Larger versions can have an endurance measured in the hours, can be autonomous and operated thousands of miles from a pilot when necessary and can carry payloads that go beyond surveillance - so called “active” platforms.   Even the toy class vehicles are impressive.²

 

Once again we’re on the edge of what may be a major change in what is considered private. 

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¹ Bryan was an excellent rider and could easily drop anyone else in the club.  You may wonder "why use a bike rider?"  It turns out this is all about power to weight.  Power generally increases as the square of an organism's size and weight with the cube.  A really big guy can generate a lot of power, but there is a penalty as you have to build a larger airplane.  You are looking for the sweet spot -  the smallest possible (lightest and lowest air resistance) aircraft. Bike racers tend to have huge leg muscles and a lot of endurance - ideal engines.  The sweet spot is for riders between about 120 and 140 pounds of weight.  A shorter pilot with large legs would be ideal.  There are some female riders who have flown this type of aircraft.

The other question is "why legs"?  It turns out it is easy to make a very light and efficient transmission that can transmit the power from the motion legs generate on pedals to a propeller - something over 98% efficiency.  It doesn't make sense to use the arms and the legs as power output is metabolically limited.  As long as a person's legs are adequately trained the total output combining power from other muscles doesn't add anything - if you add the arms, power output from the legs decreases.

² I've flown an AR Parrot Drone with an iPhone.  It clearly takes more practice than I had given it and I crashed a few times, but this is a very impressive device for large indoor spaces or calm outdoor settings.  A serious amount of technology for under $300.

 

 

when gifts are simultaneously unsafe and special

I enjoy cooking and baking, so even though many of you are dealing with food induced comas here is an offering of two recipes.  The first is quick, healthy and excellent.  The second is decadent and has a story.  So let’s get the healthy one out of the way:

 

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Pomegranate and sweet potato salad

 

This is one where you can play with the ingredients and proportions to suit yourself.  Use this as a guide and branch out.  There is one simple trick - you’ll need a lot of pomegranate seeds.  To extract them without ruining your shirt and making a general mess of the kitchen, fill a large bowl with cool water and break them apart under water.  No mess and it is very easy to retrieve the seeds.  

 

Two sweet potatoes cut into half to three quarter inch cubes.  Roast at 350°F for 30 minutes.

 

base salad - the baked sweet potatoes plus:

1 cup pomegranate seeds

1/2 green apple thinly sliced

3 cups kale chopped and coated with a good olive oil

3 cups of cooked quinoa - I’m a big fan of quinoa and have a preference for Bob’s Red Mill 

 

pesto

 

chop away in a food processor (it will be fairly liquify):

2 cups fresh mint leaves

2 tbl shallot

1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice (this is particularly good with blood oranges when they are in season)

1 tbl freshly squeezed lemon juice

a bit of cayenne (maybe 1/4 tsp)

a bit of salt (maybe 1/4 tsp)

 

Toss the sweet potatoes, quinoa, apples and pomegranate seeds.  Plate and pour on the pesto.  

 

mmmm - it is too healthy to be this good!

 

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There are times when a gift takes time to reveal its worth.

 

My parents had a very modest beginning.  Their wedding was done on a shoe string without a church or a normal reception - the big present was a $10 wedding cake a few friends provided.  One couple they knew only gave one thing - a recipe.

 

That couple was a German war bride and her GI husband.  She was from a line of bakers and the couple had a dream of starting a their own bakery.  Their gift was a brownie recipe.  She said it was her favorite and “trust me - it will be useful to you some day..”

 

Its proportions are a bit different from the standard brownie recipes and it comes out of the oven a bit gooey and has to finish cooking in the pan.  My mother has given the recipe to several people, but many don’t get the hang of it.  WIth a bit of practice, though, it is remarkable.

 

We always had them for holidays and she would give them to my father when he had important business meetings.  They always seemed to be appreciated. 

 

I started making them as a teenager and , while working on my Ph.D. thesis experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, would bake a batch nearly every night selling them in the physics department before I was closed down as a bakery operating without a license.  Afterwards I still got regular requests and my department developed a serious addiction - along with the particle physics theory group at BNL.  

 

The real story can later when my father had bypass surgery.  It may be that excessive brownie consumption played a part in this, but that would be the expected story wouldn't it?

 

His cardiologist prescribed several medications including one that was seriously expensive and something their insurance covered poorly.  The first month of medication was given as a free sample by the heart surgeon as a courtesy and my mother responded how she always did - she baked a batch of brownies for the surgeon.

 

Now there is something of a disconnect here.  Brownies aren’t exactly heart healthy food, but she was following her own well established protocol.  After all, everyone loves brownies, right?

 

The brownies were a huge hit in the surgeon’s office.  

 

A month after the surgery saw the first of a series of followup visits and my grateful parents brought another batch of brownies.  The surgeon was thrilled and reciprocated with another month’s supply of medicine. 

 

A machine had been set in motion ...  it ran for years

 

They tried to track down their old friends only to find both had both died.  But there had been a successful bakery and some children so the cycle was finished by telling them of their mother's prediction.

 

Make some if you are into brownies.   Again - not heart healthy, but great stuff.

 

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Wedding gift brownies

 

preheat over to 325°F and grease a 9x13 inch baking pan

 

melt together the following over simmering (not boiling) water in a double boiler

 

3 squares of baking chocolate

3/4 cup butter

 

meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl beat 4 large eggs together lightly

 

Beat the melted mixture into the eggs using a rubber spatula to get all of the chocolate and to scrape down the sides.

 

add 1 tsp vanilla extract

 

In a separate bowl mix the following:

2 cups white sugar

1 cup sifted flour

3/4 chopped walnuts or pecans - more nuts don't hurt ..  

1/2 cup shredded coconut

1/2 tsp salt

 

add the dry mixture in portions to the liquid mixture and spread out evenly into the baking pan.

 

bake ...  this usually takes 30 minutes or so.  It is “done” when a toothpick inserted in the center comes out almost clean - more than that and you’ve gone too far.  It needs to be a bit gooey. 

 

place on a rack and allow to cool

 

Frosting

 

Melt one square of baking chocolate and 1/3 stick of butter in a double boiler.  Add 1/4 cup evaporated milk and  “enough” powdered sugar ..  usually about a pound .. to get a smooth consistency.  Add 1/2 tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of salt.

 

notes:

I use only very fresh ingredients.  Find a good vanilla extract.  I make my own with vanilla beans that sit in a small bottle of rum for several months.  The traditional chocolate is Hersey’s baking chocolate - the squares are an ounce.  I use Lindt or Scharffen Berger 99% cocoa.  I would love to try some Mast Brothers chocolate one day - their bar chocolate is the best I've had. 

 

Playing around with the chocolate frosting is a good place to start experimenting.  You might also try changing the fat. It gives a different, but also very good result, substituting vegetable shortening for the butter or using a 50-50 mixture of vegetable shortening and butter. All of these are unhealthy in large quantities, but experiment and find the version you like best.  As an aside I strongly preferthe  Toll House chocolate chip recipe substituting vegetable shortening for the butter.

 

An interesting variation is to not ice them, chill them in the fridge (but not the freezer) and cut them in half to make them thinner.  Make a batch of home made ice cream and build up some amazingly rich ice cream sandwiches.

 

*really* good!

 

 

Some of you have wandered through this and are either left hungry or waiting for something interesting.  For you here is an offering from a Jim Henson - we were lucky to have had his genius.

happy holidays!  

bicycles are not made of cheese and frosting

The real purpose for Thanksgiving is the gathering of friends and family in gratitude for the food and company.  It may be the purest and most perfect holiday we have.

 

Last Monday evening we were lucky enough to attend a fine Thanksgiving dinner with friends in the city.  The food was excellent  and the careful orchestration in the kitchen and service caused my mind to wander...

 

What if food could be used to describe 3d printing?

 

Presentations could be mind-bogglingly complicated and would be perfect down to the millimeter.  Chefs could describe any presentation they could imagine, exchange their presentations with other chefs around the world possibly making a bit of money on the side.  Home cooks could have machines in their kitchens and reproduce anything they could afford.  The amount of preparation time would be well-known making it easier to bring all of the dishes in a dinner together at the same time.  Experimenters could create designs on their computers and know how they would turn out in advance.  Neat, but there is a nagging problem ...

 

Materials

 

 
Three dimension printers can only deal with a limited palate of materials.  To make the analogy with the current world of 3d printers imagine machines where one model could only deal with a four varieties of cheese.  It might be very good with cheddar and less good with three other hard varieties, but no other cheese would work with it.  Another printer might be very good working with ice while still another model does a fine job with frosting.  The cheese model allows you to print with colored cheeses and that feature will be added to the frosting model sometime next quarter.  There is a home model planned based on a hobbyist kit that can print spam (the stuff from cans rather than the email variety).  

 

Materials and how they are treated during manufacture are really important!¹

 

Most of us don’t think about it much, but consider the thousands of fabrics used in clothing, the complexity of materials that go into food, the hundreds of different woods used in building, the thousands of materials at an architect’s command when a building is designed, the exotic materials of a turbine blade in a jet engine or that make up one of the billions of transistors in your phone.  

 

A good designer needs a fundamental understanding of the materials used in their domain.  

 

3d printing is still very primitive.  It has enormous value fabricating prototypes, but there isn’t much flexibility in material choice.  It is like living in a culinary world limited to spam, icing, hard cheese and ice. 

 

Some disciplines push material use and design more than others.  Bicycles and airplanes are among the most interesting as the final vehicles should be strong and lightweight.  The bicycle is particularly fascinating as it is both elegant and simple.  It is still possible for a single designer to make most of the choices alone rather than relying on a large design and engineering team.  Airplanes were once that simple - when two bicycle mechanics from Ohio created the revolution, but the sport now requires large teams.

 

At about three to four times as efficient as walking, bicycles are the most efficient way to move a person using only muscle power.   There isn’t a lot of material, but a frame can be very strong often support fifty or more times its weight.  The shock of uneven roads is absorbed without losing much efficiency while the bike is rigid at the same time.  The drive train can transmit as much as 98% of the power you supply to the wheel and simple brakes that weigh a few ounces can dissipate the energy of a racer flying downhill at 50 miles per hour in a few seconds.  All of this is done by a machine that can be beautiful.  A bike is one of those places where art and technology come together.  

 

Twenty years ago most bicycles had steel frames. The type of steel and construction technique used were a function of the cost and purpose of the bike and high end bikes like my old Raleigh Professional were made of hand brazed exotic steels like Reynolds 531.  This made them light for the day and imparted a certain signature quality to the ride of the bike.

 

About then bikes with aluminum frames started becoming practical.  Aluminum has very different characteristics than steel and was difficult to manufacture, but Trek and others started using hydroforming techniques and prices dropped.  The bikes could be lighter than equivalent steel frames, but the ride quality was different.  Some of us preferred high quality steel, but there was a choice.

 

China builds an enormous number of bikes and began to export them.  A decision was made that bike technology is strategic for China.  Learning how to make aluminum bikes was seen as a way for China to dominate the international bike market as well as learn how to world with leading edge aluminum fabrication techniques.  What works for bikes also works for airplanes and thousands of other products.  

 

The first Chinese models were awful. but they stuck with it through partnerships and got to the point where they pioneered some techniques of their own.  in large quantities a low end bike frame from China now sells for about $4 - probably less than the cost of the electricity used to make the aluminum in many parts of the world.  China may be losing on the frames, but they own the market and make enough other high value parts to end up winning.

 

Now they are working on reducing the price of carbon fiber.  

 

Carbon fiber is found in most racing bikes.  I’m not fond of its ride quality, but it is stiff and very light.  It is possible to make a frame that weighs under a pound with a final, albeit exotic, bike tipping the scale at under ten pounds.  The Union Cycliste Internationale responded to this by requiring bikes to weigh at least 6.8 kilograms - about 15 pounds.   The bikes are lighter, but carry some electronics now.  Racing is an arms race in many dimensions.

 

Good carbon fiber frames are difficult to make with a large amount of labor and high material prices.  A few years ago a reasonable frame might start at three thousand dollars and unless your name was Lance Armstrong, fabricating one to exact dimensions was usually not practical. Now the price has fallen by about an order of magnitude as, once again, China has determined that carbon fiber fabrication techniques are a strategic need and a good are to gain focus and experience is the bicycle industry.  Such techniques have great application in aviation, wind turbines and will become common in the automobile industry during this decade.  it is possible the scale of the carbon fiber industry dwarfs the automotive battery industry.

 

But back to the basic bicycle.  It is possible to make bikes from other materials.  Titanium has desirable characteristics, but is expensive and difficult to work with.  Bamboo can be used by itself or as a composite material and can create beautiful bikes with a ride quality some people find wonderful.  And cranky purists like Dave and I have a variety of steels and techniques to chose from.

 

About two years ago a special bike was created for Colleen - a good friend who happens to be approximately tall.  Her body happens to be beyond the limits of the CAD tools common to bike design and a careful bespoke design was called for.  It was decided to base the design on an upright commuting bike rather than a racer and ride quality was important.  The issue was the frame was so tall that to get the right shock absorption, rigidity and “feel” the steel tubes used had to be carefully tailored.  The project required carefully measuring her with the precision normally reserved for racers.  This made sense as it was an entirely new design.  The steel was Reynolds 953, an exotic stainless steel requiring unique manufacturing techniques.  There is only one company on the planet that can make this stuff.  The wall thickness on the tubing is very thin - less than a half mm and as little as about a third of a mm - with tubes being carefully matched to produce the right ride quality.  It isn't cheap at something like $100 a linear foot, but it allows some interesting designs.

 

Jony Ive at Apple showed the world that consumer products can become art when mixed with great design and an informed materials choice.  My MacBook Pro has a body machined (!) from a single piece of aluminum stock.  An expensive process, but the quality shows and laptops from other manufacturers feel like toys to me even before the machine comes to life.

 

We live in a material world that is not made of hard cheese, frosting, ice and spam.

 

As it is Thanksgiving eve it makes sense to finish with a recipe that celebrates the enormous amount of material and fabrication choice available to the cook along with a bit of simplicity.  

 

On Monday we had some excellent roasted asparagus as part of an early Thanksgiving dinner in the city with friends.   There were asparagus dreams that night andI  had to make some on Tuesday.

 

I usually make asparagus when it is in season, but roasting gives you a bit of latitude and if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of the produce, you can still get great results.  I bought about a pound of ok looking stalks yesterday and fired up the oven.  The warning is the measurements are guesses as I cook mostly by throwing things together.  (baking is where I’m careful)

 

• Pre-heat oven to 400° F

• Snap off the bottoms of the stems at the natural breaking place (I used these for asparagus soup later, so they aren't wasted).  These weren't great asparagus, so I peeled the bottom inch or so 

• Put on a baking sheet, drizzle on some olive oil.  Add a bit of a good sea salt (Maldon for example), grind some pepper and toss.  Now arrange on the pan so the stalks aren't touching.

• Bake for 20 minutes  and plate

• Melt a half ounce of butter and add 3 or 4 chopped cloves of garlic.  Heat until about the time the butter starts to brown.  Drizzle/spoon or whatever over the asparagus  (note - the heart healthy way would be to use olive oil here.  I strongly prefer butter and rationalize it with the idea that each of us is only getting a quarter ounce.

• Sprinkle with chopped pecans or walnuts  

• Squeeze a bit of lemon juice on top or a drizzle good aged balsamic vinegar.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

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¹ I note that 2d printing is just cutting flat objects and technologies abound that allow a great choice of materials.  We will see, and are seeing, dramatic change here well before 3d printing becomes important outside of a few niche markets like prototyping.

 

a non recommendation

The right tool for the job - perhaps I can save you a bit of money...

 

Earlier in the week I attended a two day event in Manhattan that brings investors and tech industry types together.   I somewhat belong to the later group and the mixing is interesting - particularly the one-on-one conversations you find yourself in that would probably not occur outside this venue. Mixing people up is often brilliant.

 

As four people asked what I thought about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs it seems reason to write a bit about it.  Usually I stay away from making negative comments about books as I’m not a good writer and it seems wrong to judge someone who is a successful author.  But the book has serious flaws, so here goes...

 

I bought the book with a some misgivings as his book on Einstein biography left me cold.  It was an interesting read, full of details about his life, but Isaacson struck me as an incurious author.  There were technical mistakes (I’m a physicist) and, worse, directions that should have been explored.  It may be just his style and the fact I know the field and had read several biographies (if you have a scientific bent go for Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais)¹, but it left me with enough of a distaste that I wish I would have waited a bit before making the a decision about buying it.

 

I won’t give a review, but there are numerous technical and historical mistakes.  Some quotes are incorrect (for example he has Bill Gates noting a certain type of optical media didn’t make sense because it had too short a latency) - something I don’t like to see from a “name” biographer.  Some of these indicate it was a rush job, and I’m sure it was so it could be on the market at the optimal time, but deeper problems lurk.

 

Jobs told Isaacson he wanted him as the biographer as he could get people to talk.  Fair enough.  A remarkable range of people were interviewed and Isaacson appeared to have great freedom.  The problem is that Isaacson wasn’t curious.  He was getting bits and pieces of a larger story and failed to pursue several interesting paths.  The whole book felt like a series of Time magazine articles stapled together.  If he had been curious and followed these leads the book may have given real insight into how Jobs thought and how Apple, under Jobs, functioned.  As it is there is little new information on those subjects.

 

The personal side of Jobs is something that is of interest and perhaps he got more of this right.  Jobs does come over as the nasty self-important jerk many have reported, but I didn’t get any insight on how this was important to Apple and Pixar.  It didn’t seem to go deep enough.  There are aspects of his personality that I have been exposed to in a few meetings as well as one-on-one conversations that were simply missing.  I saw a bit of the nasty side, but not much.  What struck me was how intellectually curious he could be and how he took delight in playing with concepts.  I was struck by his sense of humor and think that may have been part of how he interacted with people. 

 

I wish someone who understood the industry and happened to be very curious had been anointed as the chief biographer.  To do a reasonable job would probably require quite a bit of time after Jobs’ death.  It seems like a lost opportunity.  Hopefully people close to him will write.  I’d love to hear what Jony Ive would say.  In the meantime we'll probably see more tone-deaf pieces like Gladwell's New Yorker essay on the "tweaker" ...

 

The book did serve the purpose of making it as a best-seller and perhaps that was the primary intention.   

 

I can’t recommend it if you are trying to understand Jobs more deeply and particularly if you want to understand the history of Apple, NeXT and Pixar.

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The flaws of the book  did make me think about what Amazon’s Kindle Fire is. 

 

Apple is very good at discovering the core of something and moving towards simplicity.

 

I have a tendency to disregard consumer electronic reviews from industry pundits.  The lens they view the world from is often that of the engineer, which is one of the reasons Apple has been so successful.  Most of Apple’s competitors are primarily engineering companies making it easy for Apple.  Apple moves towards simplicity and the competition doesn't.  Apple has done a lot of things right, but probably not as much as it seems.  Some of their luster comes from the fact their competition is ill-equipped to make great products.  It is good to have incompetent competition.

 

If someone who understands the space comments, I listen.  Marco Arment does understand tech and user experience. His review, combined with notes from a few user experience people, tell me the Fire is an incompetent tablet measured by the bar set by the iPad.  You would do much better spending your $200 on a used first generation iPad.  You probably don't want to gift one.

 

Perhaps the real question is: "what is the Fire?"  It may look like a tablet, but perhaps it isn’t. 

 

The iPad wasn’t really a tablet as envisioned by Microsoft and many who believed Microsoft’s vision dismissed it initially.  It was a collection of functionality that would be useful to someone who is moving around a house and holding something as they would hold a magazine.  It was also initially seen as a consumption device, but it has much more flexibility and is finding new uses.  The iPad is evolving and creating new niches even now.

 

My gut tells me the Kindle is a pure consumption device that strongly ties you to Amazon.  It is a key piece of their evolving platform and, as such, can be somewhat orthogonal to the iPad class of tablet.  Think of it as an Amazon vending machine that you can carry around.  A machine that Amazon gets you to buy.  Pretty neat for them if they can make it work.  At this point it appears there are issues that may render it frustrating as a vending machine.  Amazon will have to address them if they want to grow their platform.  It probably makes sense for them to support iPads and Android devices too - after all, those are just customers coming in through different doors.

 

It will be interesting to revisit this in six months. 

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¹ If you want to get a sense of how revolutionary Einstein's ideas are I would recommend learning a bit of special relativity if you haven't tackled it.  It only requires high school level math and is is exceptionally clear and logical.  You get a much deeper insight by playing with it rather than just reading about it.

Similarly trying to design a simple interface to something can be an incredible learning experience.  I've done a few and have found it humbling, but I've learned a lot with each try.  

Passive interaction does not lead to depth in a subject. You need to go out and engage in a bit of play.

 

 

finding "good enough" paths

We know a lot about the basic physics of energy conservation, chemistry and biochemistry to construct a framework of metabolism and how people use energy and create work, but the specifics that describe exactly what your diet should be if you want to lose weight and keep it off are not known.  Likewise we know Newtonian physics well, but kinesiology is not well enough known to describe exactly how walking or running works.  

 

People have an expectation that science, which often knows the fundamental bits of science in some areas, is able to explain all of the derivative bits associated with it - but the world doesn't work that way.  Often unraveling the bits and pieces takes significant work and often little progress has been made.

 

This piece on running hints at that - people are looking for "the best way" even though the basics aren't known.  As a result they seem to latch onto anything.  Some of the advice is good and some isn't.  The same is true for dieting.  The basic principals are known, but getting it right at the individual level can be extremely difficult (for example: even in calorie counting the approximations used can often be off by 5% and the regulation of the efficiency of the absorption of food is not extremely well-understood).  People are looking for easy explanations and results and, as a result, will try tactics that may have undesirable side effects in order to achieve the core goal.  

 

There are many areas where the knowledge is imperfect, but good enough. Driving the average car at 60 mph may or may not deliver better fuel mileage than at 55 mph - but driving at 70 mph always is worse than 55  mph.  Our current rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere will certainly increase global warming although the exact impact on the weather next year is unknown.    It is important to understand confidence levels associated with the science and then good enough advice can be given.  That message seems to be lost.

 

Science, particularly fundamental science, tends to built on itself and established results rather than throwing out the old.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both extend Newtonian physics into new areas - the very fast and the very small - but for all practical purposes Newtonian physics is just dandy for most of the world at our human scale.  Moving to complexity gets a bit more muddled as the understanding may not be as deep and calculation may be extremely difficult, but that is what understanding confidence levels is all about.

 

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The graph is from the Millimeter Anisotropy Experiment Imaging Array collaboration. 

 

change comes to cookbooks

This past week I found myself struggling with a technology that people have predicted is “just around the corner” for the past fifteen years.¹  While it has some limited usefulness, it will probably remain out of reach despite the wishes of its enthusiasts.  

 

At the same time it struck me that the cookbook is something that is undergoing enormous change.  A few widely available technologies - iPads and apps - have created a platform for a very inexpensive and useful sort of amateur education.

 

We probably have several hundred cookbooks. In the past year I’ve been buying some cooking applications for my iPhone and Sukie’s iPad.  The genre is still developing.  Mark Bittman has three applications that are not much more than conversions of his excellent existing books into searchable format that fits well on the iPhone’s screen.  They are extremely useful when I’m walking through the market and see some outstanding produce that is in need of inspiration.  I can quickly find recipes and pick up other ingredients while I’m at the store.  They are also cheap at about a quarter the price of his physical books.  More useful and less expensive is a good combination. Others have discovered this and his apps are in the million sales range.  Not bad for repurposing existing content.  It is a shame he doesn’t own the rights to his excellent The Minimalist series.  He created dozens of excellent videos that would be fantastic in the kitchen on an iPad.  The New York Times is missing an opportunity by not creating an app that would put this series where it is useful.  I'm hoping Mark is creating new video content on his own as he is a great teacher.

 

Mario Batali's app goes a bit further ...  He has a few recipes and the scope is much more limited than Mark Bittman's apps, but he has some polished videos showing technique.  It is aimed at the beginning cook, but is better than any television cooking show I’ve seen as it is usable in the kitchen and searchable - plus, like Bittman’s, you can use it for inspiration.

 

Other celebrity chefs have jumped on the bandwagon.  Jamie Oliver has an app for quick meals and Dorie Greenspan has a great baking techniques app.

 

The genre is still developing and cooking schools are filling a need - The Culinary Institute of America has a fine $50 app called the Professional Chef  that teaches some series technique with well produced videos.  It and an iPad may teach you much more than cooking lessons for the same price. You can also buy it in smaller bits - something useful to me as I don't eat meat.  

 

I’m aware of several very interesting app projects underway - connections to other cooks and authors are being investigated and applications along with applications that learn your interests and abilities.  Some have built in timers and recipe conversion calculators.  You can dream up a lot of other possibilities and many experiments are underway.  I expect dramatic change in the next year.

 

This is a type of book that just works better on a tablet or phone.  Some are going to be better for carrying around in the store and others - particularly those with video instruction - are going to be better in the kitchen.

 

A seriously good personal chef told me she has converted a few hundred of her recipes to pdf and has them, along with photos of many, on her iPad.  She also can easily calculate nutrition labels for what she makes using an inkjet printer in her truck for the final label.  She said it has fundamentally changed how she interacts with clients and has improved her business.  She's telling home cooks the two most important tools they should buy are a good chef's knife and an iPad.

 

Several do-it-yourself activities are more practical on an iPad than in printed form.  Some applications are appearing for home repair, dress making, crafts, photography, and probably much more.  For a modest amount of money any expert in some DIY field can contract with an app writer and a videographer and have a product.  There will probably be explosive growth.

 

At this point in time apps on tablets make more sense than direct Internet connections due to connectivity issues - plus there is a well established market.  This is a great example of a major change in education.  

 

Inexpensive and effective ongoing education for the motivated amateur.  How great is that?

_________

¹ 3d printing...  grrrr

 

 

a treat for the holidays

Harvard has a science for non-scientists course that uses cooking as a vehicle to talk about nature.  It started last year and was enormously successful with numerous audits and continues this year.  The lectures are often wonderful and can be found on iTunes.

 

Lots of fun.  An excellent starting point is the first lecture of this year by Dave Arnold (an incredible fellow if you don't know of him - he is heavily into the tech of cooking), Harold McGee (a serious science of cooking person), and physicist David Weitz.  I was following last year's lectures as they came out and am seriously behind in this year's set, but you learn something even if you know the science.

 

Some of this is associated with "molecular gastronomy" - yikes what an awful term!  Of course everything you cook is made of molecules.  A better label that seems to be finding acceptance is "modernist cuisine".  There are some fascinating methods sometimes associated with it like sous vide ("under vacuum") - a somewhat misnamed technique that cooks food sealed in bags in low temperature water baths (140° - 170° F are common) to allow for precise results.

 

Colleen and I have spent quite a bit of time working on how to explain the physics of energy to non-physicists.  One of the common areas we kept coming back to was food, cooking and what the human body can do with the energy it gets from metabolism. All of us share the common experience of life that depends on these energy conversions.  We have some interesting things to say about how cooking work and will put it out one of these days when some other work is finished.  

 

In the meantime enjoy all of your holiday meals.  There is a lot of great science embedded in them.

 

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In the meantime here is a great brussels sprouts recipe I've been making for a few years - I've been lucky enough to have made it for three of you.  

 

I never liked brussels spouts until I was about thirty.  Up until then I had only had the evil whole green leafy spheroids that were steamed to complete limp and awful imperfection.   I saw someone slice them thin and sauté  them in butter.  They were excellent.  Since then I've had some that were picked after a hard frost ... really good.  I think that makes them sugar, but any of them are probably really good this time of the year.

these are very approximate measures as none were used

1 pound of brussels sprouts
1/2 c olive oil
1/4 c water
a good sea salt 
freshly ground pepper
1/2c chopped nuts (I used walnuts and pecans)
1/4 c of a good balsamic vinegar  and 1/4 c of a good white balsamic vinegar like Colavita

Here is what I did.  I'm not good with measurements so these are guesses

chop and discard the hard ends off the brussels sprouts.  chop them lengthwise (I did top to bottom so they would be mostly uniform) they were maybe 1/4  to 3/8  inch thick. 

Throw the brussels sprouts into a pan over medium high heat with maybe 1/4 cup of olive oil and 1/4c water.  Add salt and ground pepper.  I *really* like Maldon salt when I'm working with a lot of vegetables and as a finishing salt.  When it heats up, turn the heat back to about medium, cover and cook about  5 minutes.

In a separate pan brown the chopped nuts in 1/4 c olive oil ... just to the point where they start to brown and smell *wonderful* ... lots of stirring.  Set aside

Uncover the pan with the brussels sprouts after 5 minutes, turn up the heat to medium high and heat until the water is gone and the brussels sprouts are tender (a few minutes) -- don't overcook brussels sprouts.  There is some rule of the nature that is violated if you do and you wouldn't want the Earth to suffer the consequences!

Now stir the balsamic vinegar and nuts into the brussels sprouts,  turn off the heat and serve. 

You may want to use more of the vinegars and alter their ratios.  I won't tell.

 

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The cutting board is a raised board to cut down on bending and back pain.  You may need one if you spend a lot of time in the kitchen and are over about 5'10".  If you are over 6' and have a standard 36" counter you absolutely need something like this.   There are details on sizing your own for a homemade version here as well as a link to a company that does a great job on custom boards.  You back is delicate and requires care - please take care of it with good ergonomics

 

 

 

on the death of the high fidelity industry

One of the more curious learnings I’ve repeatedly had over the decades is that audio and video quality isn’t terribly important to people.  Some jumps have been important, but at some point quality seems to be “good enough” and people become interested in other metrics like price, mobility, convenience and selection.

 

We did a lot of work on audio compression and there was a drive to make our codec (AAC) the best of its class.  This involved a large amount of human testing and the reference music was mostly compact disc class.  Higher qualities existed, but it was felt compressed music to CD like quality was necessary.  

 

We did it.  By 2000 AAC was recognized as the best of its breed and it was statistically undetectable to most listeners at 128 kilobits per second.¹  A CD is 1440 kbps, so this shrinks the data file for a music track to about 9% of its original size - really useful if your network connection isn’t terribly fast. 

 

Audiophiles had been hoping one of several standards would take off by about that time taking us beyond CD quality, but it never really happened.  Internet delivered music and the iPod fundamentally changed how we listened to music.  A few years ago I came across an article that pointed out the aftermarket for iPod accessories was larger than the entire market for stereo equipment.  Good enough sound quality in our pockets and a large and easy to use library was all we needed - onventional HiFi was dying and some would say it is dead.² 

 

The little white earbuds you see everywhere are not exactly high quality.  For $40 or $50 you can dramatically improve your listening experience and for $150 or so the quality can be fantastic.  But almost no one does it.  The quality issue just doesn’t impact most of us.

 

There are other directions music quality could do - trying to create the sound field - the audio experience - of a concert.  But there is this little problem - outside of multichannel sound for television, no one is spending money on audio equipment and very few people spend serious money on good audio equipment for their televisions.  

 

It just doesn’t matter.

 

mostly³

 

A few years ago some of us revisited the issue of speech quality on telephones.  The frequency range of a normal telephone is small compared with normal human hearing and voices, particularly female voices, are altered.  Mobile phones introduce even more issues with low quality audio compression.  The notion was that expanding the frequency range from about 3 kHz to 7 kHz would make a big difference that people might pay buy.  We did some careful studies on 3 vs 7 vs 20 and came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big deal for most people.   In fact people under 30 had a slight bias to the lower quality sound.

 

I speculate that for music or video there is a point at which the underlying performance is more important.  If we don’t reach that point the performance is merely wallpaper and we don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  As we cross some threshold what is being the performance becomes so engrossing that inferior reproduction isn’t a huge issue to most of us.  I’ve seen this repeated over and over ...  In an earlier post  I noted on an epiphanal moment I had:

 

A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

 

I think live performances are still very important - there is a communication between the performers and the audience and the overall sound field seems to make a difference.  The one way music and video we listen to at home or on the go is a different animal and needs to be considered separately. 

 

This notion of good enough quality is important.  You have to consider the entire user experience and not just some component like audio quality as defined by some engineering metrics that are measured with the listener out of the loop.  

 

It is something to watch for in many other industries.  Most people could care less, and don’t even know what gigahertz, gigabytes and other terms used to sell Wintel based PCs mean.  The same for horsepower and torque.  They are used as sales tools and people might think larger is better, but there is only a vague coupling to the final experience in most cases.  Even non-technical  enthusiasts have trouble with the definitions.

 

Perhaps industries where differentiations are made based on technical terms that are not understood by the customer based are  a good first order cut as those where disruption is possible.

 

Video and theater experiences are another rich and interesting area.  A lot of money is being bet that 3D will cause people to upgrade home TVs as well as go to movies, but there are some good arguments that won't happen.  There are other things that are probably more important in the theater and I tend to doubt the 3D revolution - at least as something that is a sustainable differentiator that will cause people will pay higher ticket prices.  

 

In the meantime I love going to live performances!  In the meantime don't bet on quality metrics unless you understand the complete user experience.

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¹  In fact if you increase the rate to 160 kbps statistically no one can tell the difference on normal music.  The guy who was really obsessed with tuning the codec went to Apple and their version of AAC has made great improvements over the years.

We found that some training is necessary to listen closely enough to music to detect artifacts.  It turns out that hearing ability decreases and anyone over about 35 is useless no matter how good their training.   Audiophiles tend to be males over 40 (and more often over 50) who spend tens of thousands on equipment.   

² Apple recently released their Apple Lossless Codec (ALAC) to open source.  Lossless codecs like Apple's and FLAC tend to offer compressions around three to one.  The file that is compressed can be turned into a file idential to the original so they are "perfect".  A few audiophiles use them and some companies even offer music, but this is a very small business.  

ALAC has some advantages over the other lossless codecs as it works with iTunes and iPods.  It can also work with music recorded at much higher than CD quality.  Now that it is an open standard perhaps it will gain some popularity among the enthusiast set.  The fact that Apple is releasing it shows they don't see any commercial value.  

³ At home I still use my 15 year old amplifier and once fine speakers to connect with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad wirelessly.  My 20,000 or so tracks worth of music is completely portable and distributed where I fancy on listening at the moment.

But I see no need to upgrade the system and the CDs just sit - I converted them (at 256 kbps AAC) a long time ago...

 

tools that lubricate human communication

The telephone was an imperfect approximation of communicating with others at a distance using voice.  It was, and still is, enormously useful and a number of innovations have kept it advancing.  Perhaps the last major innovation that was realized was mobile telephony.  For good or bad we could reach out - and be reached - almost everywhere and a tool had impacted how we communicate.  

 

Great lubrication!

 

Synchronous and asynchronous data communications became important and one company successfully recognized that adding lightweight text to a mobile phone along with a form of email that was relevant to how one segment of the population would be important.  RIM made billions on the Blackberry, but it is important to realize it is only a rough tool that resonated a bit with our deeper needs. 

 

A few years later the iPhone came along with a new type of interface and a good enough window into the Internet - for most people a much better model than the Blackberry.  Of course there are some for whom the Blackberry tool is better than the iPhone (or Android) tool, but for the most part the iPhone model is richer.  

 

And now we are seeing the beginnings of a voice driven data interfaces from Apple and Google ..  There is something that seems fundamentally "right" about Siri even though it is very early in its development.  In a few years we'll begin to learn some answers.  I'm pretty sure the Google approach to finding information and human/machine communication is far from optimal.

 

All of these tools are windows into something much deeper -  us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change.  The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we're only about fifty years into the current revolution.

 

From my vantage point I don't see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world.  They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change.  The term digital native is popular, but I don't see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide -- a rich continuum of tools has been emerging.  Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently.  And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.

 

It is probably best to keep up with tools and see what serves your own needs better.  Moving to them because they are "new and improved" is the wrong approach.   This is going to be an increasingly interesting and wild ride.  Just like the Industrial Revolution some companies will have brief moments in the Sun, most will vanish and a  few will endure.

 

My intuition tells me we really haven't made dramatic changes in how we deal with time - the Industrial Revolution made an enormous impact on us that lingers even though it is antiquated and perhaps counterproductive.  Perhaps in ten or twenty years communication tools will emerge that finally rip apart our Victorian perception of time.