A weird but coincidental connection

Posted on 2014-06-22 by

So @roboticwrestler tweeted this NPR story:


I responded that I was only surprised by Arizona, Delaware, and Minnesota. (Arizona and Delaware because I thought that there would be more Jewish people than Hindus living there, and Minnesota because I had thought that MN would have had enough Buddhists — thanks in particular to the Vietnamese diaspora — to make that religion come in second.) She then responded:

So here’s my story about WLGI. It is, by the way, totally coincidental; there’s no special meaning to be had here. The year, as I said, was 1988, and Scott Fybush (@neradiowatch) and I were doing the first of our extended (week-long) driving trips to take pictures of radio stations, watch local TV news, collect newspapers and phone books, visit state/provincial capitols, and do other road-trip-ish stuff — a few years later, we would do a 16-day trip halfway across the country that Scott dubbed “The Big Trip”, and we have continued to do these trips sporadically ever since. (We cover less distance these days, because Scott has contacts that often get us inside tours of the facilities we could only see from the outside back in 1998.)

The 1998 trip arose from the confluence of a number of rare events: the Confederation Bridge had just recently opened the previous year, linking Prince Edward Island with the Canadian mainland; CFNB (550 Fredericton) had recently moved to FM; CHSJ (700 Saint John) was about to do likewise; and my mother’s father’s extended family (who are Acadian) were having a reunion in Madawaska, Maine. So Scott and I figured out an itinerary that would take us up US 1 along the Maine coast through Bar Harbor, stopping by the easternmost radio station in the United States, WSHD (91.7D) at Shead High School in Eastport, passing through Calais and crossing the border into New Brunswick, then spending nights in St. John, Charlottetown, Fredericton, Madawaska, Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa.

We arrived fairly late to Charlottetown, after exploring the western part of PEI (seeing the little AM station in Summerside, dodging Japanese tourists in Cavendish, visiting the other two AM stations in the province), so the following morning we headed out to the eastern end of the island. As is our wont, we did a radio bandscan while driving around, trying to identify all of the signals that we could hear (and back then, there were a lot more AM signals in the Maritimes — nearly all are now gone), and it became clear that something unusual was happening.

There was some sort of E-skip opening going on to the southwest. One FM signal, on 90.9, particularly puzzled us: it sounded religious (which at the time was forbidden in Canada except for one Adventist-owned station in Newfoundland). Scott reached into the back seat and pulled out his trusty M Street Radio Directory (remember, this is more than a decade before smartphones!) and looked in the index for 90.9. It was the wrong day for religious programming on WBUR, which was too close for E-skip anyway, and it obviously wasn’t any of the other NPR possibilities (WMEH Bangor, WHYY-FM Philadelphia, and WETA-FM Washington) for similar reasons. The stations we were hearing on other frequencies seemed to be coming from North Carolina and Georgia — I think we had WFAE Charlotte on 90.7 — so Scott narrowed in on those states. There was a college station in Greensboro, an NPR station in Rocky Mount, another NPR in Fort Gaines, and a big 100-kW religious station at a college in Toccoa Falls. That seemed to be the best candidate, except that the programming didn’t sound particularly Christian. (After doing this for long enough, you learn to identify radio formats on fairly scanty evidence.)

Then Scott said, “You know, in South Carolina there is what I think must be the only all-Baha’i radio station in the US.” I asked what a Baha’i was, and Scott (having had a proper liberal-arts education) told me about them; he probably mentioned in particular the persecution they faced in Iran.

We kept the station on in the background as we were driving around. Eventually, the program sounded like it was ending, so we started paying a bit more attention. As we were crossing the Hillsborough Bridge on our way back into Charlottetown, we heard a woman’s voice say, “My name is [can’t remember] and I’m a Baha’i.” Scott grabbed his camcorder and started rolling video so as to capture the moment for posterity. Another similar announcement came on. A few public-service announcements later and it was time for the legal ID: “From Lewis Gregory Baha’i Institute, you are listening to ninety point nine, WLGI, Hemingway, South Carolina.”

Totally blew my mind.

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, Law & Society, Transportation | Tagged , , , , ,

Joanne Chang’s brownies

Posted on 2014-06-16 by

Thinking back to the summer of 1987, when I was working as a service clerk in the local Martin’s supermarket (part of the Hannaford Brothers chain), I remember one day in the break room I asked the bakery manager why all of the brownies had frosting on top. She said it was because they wouldn’t taste like much of anything without it. I was more a devotee of the boxed brownie mixes sold in supermarkets everywhere (Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, and others), all of which had the same basic recipe: dump contents of box into a mixing bowl, add two large eggs and a large quantity of vegetable oil, then mix well (but not too well) and bake until done. With the benefit of modern food technology, these were vastly better than what the supermarket bakery had on offer — particularly since I could take them out a little bit early, while the center was underbaked and still gooey — but still not all that good. The vegetable oil gives an unctuousness to the mix brownies that feels somewhat artificial, and all too often imparts an off flavor as well; of course, the quality of the chocolate used leaves a lot to be desired as well. So I pretty much stopped either buying or making brownies, unless I happened to be at a gourmet bakery where I could be sure that they would be worth the price.

Continuing my exploration of Joanne Chang’s Flour cookbook, on Sunday evening I turned towards her brownie recipe — officially, “Intense chocolate brownies”, on page 148. Chang writes that she was searching for a middle ground between the fudgy, gooey territory seen in many gourmet bakeries, and the cakey extreme of supermarket brownies. Or as she puts it:

The thing is, if I want a piece of chocolate cake, I pull out the mixer and the cake flour and make a chocolate cake. And if fudge is what I have a hankering for, I grab the candy thermometer and make fudge!

(Oh, for the life of a pastry chef!) So her recipe is rather unusual by comparison with most other recipes. For starters, she uses five whole eggs. There’s also quite a lot of sugar, and relatively little flour (just over a cup) or leavening. There is butter, of course, and quite a lot of it, and both unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate. But that’s it: the ingredients list is quite short, and the recipe is simple; most of the time required is in melting the chocolate.

Unlike the box brownies, which are prepared using a variation on the muffin method, these are built on an egg base:

Photo of beaten egg and sugar mixture in a mixing bowl

Chang’s recipe calls for an unusually large quantity of egg — five whole eggs are beaten with the sugar in a stand mixer. Most brownie recipes I’ve made in the past call for no more than two.

(Can you tell I have terrible lighting in my kitchen?) Then (well, actually first) comes the flavoring:

The chocolate flavor in these brownies comes from a mixture of unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate, melted together over simmering water, into which nearly half a pound of melted butter is mixed. I used TCHO chocolate for both (the bittersweet was 66%) as that’s what I believe Flour uses; I bought the chocolate at the Sur La Table store in the Natick Mall, but it’s also available by mail order from the usual sources.

The batter comes together:

After folding together the egg mixture, the chocolate-butter mixture, and the dry ingredients, the batter is quite thick, and must be leveled with a spatula in the prepared 9”×13” pan. I used baking spray rather than butter to lubricate the pan, and coated it with additional flour for good measure.

The brownies are baked in a 325°F oven, and when they come out, they look like this:

Chang advises checking for doneness every five minutes starting at 20 minutes of baking time; you can see the marks where I inserted a knife three times before I decided the brownies were done. At this point they need to cool for two hours before it is safe to depan.

After waiting a few hours, I had to deal with the issue of cutting them up:

Following my normal practice, I saved some brownies for home consumption and brought the rest into work for sharing. In the book, Chang gives a yield of 16, but that would have made rather oddly oblong bars from a 9×13 baking pan; I chose to cut them into nearly square 2½”×3” bars, giving 15 servings.

I used a tape measure and a pizza wheel to ensure straight and even edges. (Of course, I forgot to take a photo of the whole sheet of brownies on the cutting board just after I cut them up, which is why I’m only showing three of them in a Tupperware container.) The obligatory single-brownie-on-a-plate view:

This shows a single brownie (an edge piece, as it happens) in cross-section. The white stuff on the left is excess flour from the pan that I didn’t quite manage to shake out as thoroughly as I should have. You can see the texture of the brownie is not quite fudgy, but much denser than the typical cakey commercial brownie.

And of course from above:

Doesn’t that look delicious?

Nutrition

Sadly, I do ultimately have to consider how bad for me these brownies are. I’ve computed the data below on the basis of 15 brownies per batch, rather than the 16 stated in the recipe. I asked Joanne Chang on Twitter how big the brownies at Flour Bakery were, and she responded that they were 130–140 grams a piece, which unfortunately means that the ones I had been buying in her café and calling “360 calories” were actually a whopping 570 calories each. (It’s possible that some of the difference in mass is water weight, given all the eggs in this recipe, if the bakery takes them out of the oven even earlier than I did, but I can’t assume that.) I think if I ever buy them again I’m going to have to find enough self-control to only eat half a brownie at a time! Of course, I can always just make them at home instead, where I have control over the portion size, and at the size shown here, they are actually pretty reasonable (very close, in fact, to the walnut brownies at Whole Foods that they don’t sell any more). Multiply the values below by 1.67 for the bakery serving.

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: 1 brownie (about 80 g)
Servings per container: 15
Amount per serving
Calories 342 Calories from fat 148
% Daily Value
Total Fat 16g 25%
 Saturated Fat 2g 10%
 Monounsaturated Fat 0g ​
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 83mg 28%
Sodium 51mg 2%
Potassium 16mg 0%
Total Carbohydrate 44g 15%
 Dietary fiber 0g ​
 Sugars 28g ​
Proteins 4.5g 9%
Vitamin A 10%
Vitamin C 0%
Calcium 0%
Iron 3%
Posted in Food | Tagged , , , ,

Other people’s recipes: Mung ki dal

Posted on 2014-06-15 by

Some years ago, we did a pot-luck lunch at work, and my then-coworker Arthur (@hungryplanner) brought in a vegetarian lentil dish he called “mung ki dal”. I have no idea if it’s a real authentic Indian recipe, but it was the first time I had a savory vegetarian dish that was oh-my-god-I-could-eat-the-whole-thing delicious that wasn’t pizza or pasta. I asked Arthur for the recipe, and make it somewhat regularly now. It’s one of only two vegetarian mains that I make from scratch on a regular basis (ravioli in marinara sauce doesn’t count) — although I more often have it as a starch complement to a chicken curry (instead of rice or naan) rather than as a main dish. I asked him if I could publish it on the Web, so here goes (sorry, no pictures!). Arthur prefers yellow lentils in this dish, but I’ve never seen such a thing in the supermarkets where I live (green and black, yes, but never yellow) so I use red lentils.

Ingredients

1 cup yellow or red lentils
2 cups cold water (slightly less for red lentils)
1 tsp ground turmeric
¼ tsp ground red pepper (I use cayenne)
1 tsp salt
4 tbl (2 oz) butter (or ghee if you have it)
1 large onion
1 tsp cumin seed
1 tbl chopped parsley (optional)

Procedure

  1. Pick over lentils to remove non-lentil matter, then rinse in a mesh strainer until water runs clear.
  2. Place lentils, water, turmeric, salt, and red pepper in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cover partially; simmer until lentils are tender (about 25 minutes for red lentils, longer for yellow).
  3. Slice onion thinly from pole to pole. (I cut the onion in half, remove the core, then use my V-slicer, and it works well enough. Slicing radially would probably give better results but I’m lazy.)
  4. Melt 3 tbl (1½ oz) butter in a skillet until water has boiled off. Bloom the cumin in the hot fat for 15–30 seconds, then add sliced onions and sauté until slightly browned, about 8 minutes.
  5. Add cooked onion to cooked lentil mixture and simmer for another 2 minutes. If you overmix, the lentils will break down completely.
  6. Top with remaining 1 tbl butter and parsley and serve.

Nutrition

Arthur’s recipe doesn’t specify a yield. I get three servings as a side, which is how I’ve computed the data below; as a main dish it’s probably two servings (certainly would be for me, anyway, assuming I managed to stop before finishing the whole pot).

Nutrition Facts
Serving size: about a cup
Servings per recipe: 3
Amount per serving
Calories 399 Calories from fat 134
% Daily Value
Total Fat 15g 23%
 Saturated Fat 9g 45%
 Monounsaturated Fat 0g ​
 Trans Fat 0g ​
Cholesterol 40mg 13%
Sodium 791mg 33%
Potassium 114mg 3%
Total Carbohydrate 47g 16%
 Dietary fiber 13g 52%
 Sugars 3.5g ​
Proteins 18g 36%
Vitamin A 14%
Vitamin C 10%
Calcium 5%
Iron 25%
Posted in Food | Tagged , ,

Early-summer cleaning

I guess I kind of missed the usual deadline for spring cleaning. I spent a bit of time this evening going through some bags of 20- to 25-year-old clothing down in the basement. I’m not sure why I kept all of this old clothing, other than perhaps the vain hope that it might one day fit me again (although I have no idea under what circumstances the younger me thought a pair of jeans with a huge hole in the crotch might be worn again). So I started dividing the old clothes into three piles: brand-new, never-worn stuff (gifts from grandmother!), stuff that’s still wearable but I will never wear again, and stuff that’s past reuse. (There’s a pile of old underwear in here. Really? Why, oh why, did I think that was worth saving?!) The first two piles will get bagged for donation — the second after being thoroughly washed — and the third will go in the trash. Hopefully somebody will get some use out of this stuff.

Oh, and that Youth for Understanding T-shirt from 1989? You bet I’m keeping that.

I’m only about a third of the way through the old-clothing pile, and I’ve already filled the washing machine once. I have no idea what other things I’ll find.

Aside | Posted on 2014-06-09 by | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A tour of the Hale Telescope

Posted on 2014-06-05 by

This gallery contains 24 photos.

My parents recently moved to San Diego, and I flew out for Mothers’ Day weekend. On Saturday, I suggested that we all go up Mt. Palomar, in the very northern part of San Diego County, to take the public tour … Continue reading →

Gallery | Tagged , , , , , ,

Human-What? Interaction

Posted on 2014-05-06 by

Somewhere near the intersection of cognitive science, psychology, and computer science lies the subfield of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) — sometimes called Computer-Human Interaction. It’s not a subject I’ve studied at all (and if you saw the user interfaces I’ve developed myself, all doubts would evaporate from your mind); indeed, my own personal preferences in this regard would be considered by some to be positively Luddite. But at work there is a regular HCI seminar series (running weekly during the term since 2003), and I take the opportunity to attend when my responsibilities allow.

Today I attended a talk by Alice Oh, a lab alum who now works at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which was entitled “Machine learning approaches for understanding social interactions on Twitter”, and it struck me that a significant fraction of HCI research today isn’t really about Human-Computer Interaction: it’s about Human-Human Interaction; the computer (or the network) serves only as a mechanism, a facilitator and an amplifier, allowing humans to interact in ways they otherwise would not be able to. Having the computer in the loop allows researchers to collect information about the humans and their interactions that would not otherwise be easily available outside of an NSA or Google data center, putting the research much more in the realm of sociology or psychology than what we think of as traditional computer science, even if the result of the research is a computer program. This was particularly the case for the final research topic Oh discussed in her talk, which was an (as yet unpublished) analysis of Twitter language use in multilingual communities, with regard to both the structure of the social graph and the choice of topics in various languages.

I can’t say whether this is an actual shift in direction or just recency illusion on my part, but it seems a particularly salutary one if so. (Not that there’s anything wrong with making better user interfaces! Like many people in my profession, I don’t particularly like computers, and I do like humans — but I find computers, even the 1980s user interfaces that I tend to prefer, to be much easier to interact with than actual humans, so I put a lot of value on research that helps us understand how computer-mediated human interaction actually works.)

Posted in Computing, Language, Law & Society | Tagged , ,

Consent, real and imagined, in the technology industry

Posted on 2014-04-29 by

Everyone must read this article from ModelViewCulture: Betsy Haibel (2014-04-28), “The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User”

A few representative quotations:

Another mechanism behind rape culture is the belief that sexual consent and non-consent exist on a different plane than violation of non-sexual boundaries. But in a consent culture, all individuals have the inalienable right to determine their own boundaries in all situations – and to change those boundaries for any reason at any time. In a consent culture, making assumptions about an individual’s boundaries is anathema. Building a consent culture is about more than sexual activity – it needs to pervade every aspect of our lives… including the parts of it that happen online.

Rollouts like [Twitter’s introduction of photo tagging] that opt users into features tend to damage users unevenly; the less technical are the most affected, and users from marginalized communities are the most likely to be endangered by violations of their privacy – think of queer people who are outed to homophobic employers by accidentally-publicized Facebook photos, or stalking targets who need to lock down information about their physical location.

People’s natural desire to be in contact with their loved ones becomes a form of social coercion that keeps them on platforms they’d rather depart.

Go read the whole thing now.

Quote | Posted on 2014-04-29 by

Hey, it’s random segue time!

I was struck by the following music-player serendipity:

  • Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”
  • Cry Cry Cry, “Northern Cross”
  • Poi Dog Pondering, “Catacombs”
  • Aztec Camera, “Sun”
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Under the Bridge”
  • Dream Academy, “Life in a Northern Town”

A real late-80s, early-90s vibe going on here. I continue to wonder how many Americans actually comprehend the BrE connotations of “Northern”, particularly with respect to socioeconomic factors like unemployment.

Aside | Posted on 2014-04-29 by | Tagged

The latest way in which Firefox is broken

Posted on 2014-04-28 by

At work, Firefox is our recommended and officially-supported browser. We have historically liked it because (a) it works the same on all platforms, and (b) it implements SSL client authentication correctly. Unfortunately, it seems that very few Firefox developers actually have ever used or tested SSL client authentication, so they regularly find new ways to break it. (This is as opposed to the ways Google and Apple break it, which haven’t changed much. Microsoft actually gets this mostly right, as you might expect for a company that sells an enterprise certificate authority embedded in its operating system, but IE doesn’t implement the standard mechanism for client enrollment, only a Microsoft-proprietary one that isn’t even stable from one release to the next.)

So the current way Firefox screws us is as follows: most users will have the “When a server requests my personal certificate” preference set to “Ask me every time” (which is the default). But that doesn’t really mean “Ask me every time”, it means “Ask me once per browser startup, and then remember whatever I select until I quit.” When that certificate dialog comes up — and oh, by the way, it may pop up over an unrelated browser tab — if you select the wrong thing, too bad, there is no way to recover except by exiting the browser. Firefox will never ask the user to reevaluate the choice it has remembered, not even on shift-reload or clicking the useless “Try again” button on the inevitable error page.

It’s bad enough that Firefox will do this with expired certificates, but what makes it worse is that it will now remember that the user pressed “Cancel” on the certificate-selection dialog. So when that dialog pops up in an unexpected place (for our users, that’s usually the stupid “thumbnail” display that shows by default on new tabs — Firefox re-renders all of the pages shown there) and the user reflexively hits “Cancel”, other internal Web sites on the same server inexplicably fail for no (user-)discernible reason. This is a horrible, horrible UI fail.

What makes it inexcusable is that Firefox knows full well that the server wants a different certificate! The server returns a distinct TLS notification that says, “Hey, your cert’s not valid”, and the sensible thing to do would be to flush the invalid cert from the cache in that case. Even more sensible would be to not send the invalid cert at all: when the server asks for a client certificate, Firefox should make sure that it sends one, that it’s actually valid, and that it is signed by one of the issuers the server indicates it’s willing to accept. If the user for some reason doesn’t want to send a certificate, have them select a distinguished entry in the dialog that reads “Don’t send a certificate to this server”. At the very least, Firefox should at least re-present the certificate selection dialog when the user clicks on the f’ing “Try Again” button on the error page.

(In case you were waiting for me to explain what’s wrong with the other browsers: Opera doesn’t remember the user’s certificate selection at all, ever, which interacts oh-so-well with Apache’s default 5-minute SSL session timeout. Chrome only implements 3/4 of the certificate enrollment protocol: it can do <keygen> just fine, but chokes when the CA returns the signed client certificate in a PKCS#7 bundle (which our CA sends, and the original Netscape enrollment protocol officially supports, so that the user doesn’t have to separately download the CA certificate). Safari — really, the Mac OS Keychain framework — has consistently had problems selecting the correct certificate to send, although the bugs differ in each Mac OS release; since the server actually says which client CAs it’s willing to accept, there’s no excuse for getting this wrong. Oh, and all of these are things were implemented in Netscape 4, so it’s not like I’m asking for anything cutting-edge here.)

Posted in Computing | Tagged , , , , ,

On the uniqueness of (personal) libraries

Posted on 2014-04-14 by

Photo showing part of a narrow bookcase with three shelves, containing a variety of reference works

Some of my books


What’s the minimum number of books required to positively identify someone by their personal collection? For me, at least, I’m willing to bet that it’s two: if anyone else has both the late Dick Golembiewski’s Milwaukee Television History and Eugene Holman’s 1984 Handbook of Finnish Verbs, seen at opposite ends of the center shelf in the photo at left, I would be very surprised. Of course, some people own no books at all, and a great many people own only books a great many other people also own. But it occurred to me the other day that this bookcase (you’re looking at the top 3/5 of my reference library) is about as close as anything to summarizing the sort of things I’m interested in — although computer networks, my nominal day job, are notably missing (as indeed that subject is from the rest of my non-fiction collection as well). I generally don’t care to buy technical non-fiction as it tends to be obsolete before it even makes it into the distributor’s warehouse.

Prof. Holman (then and I believe still today at the University of Helsinki) shared with me his program FINNMORF, a BASIC program which implemented all of the morphology of Standard Finnish, nouns and adjectives as well as verbs, which was an outgrowth of his work on the verb book. I made a desultory effort at rewriting it in C, but never got as far as a working example; today you’d probably use a more sensible language. I was in Finland as an exchange student in 1988–89, which made the matter of Finnish morphology rather more than an academic question for me.

Writing this caused me to spend a rather unproductive hour playing with Google Street View trying to see if I could recognize any of the places I had been 25 years ago. Helsinki railroad station I thought I recognized, but the YFU offices are long gone from Vironkatu 6, not that I would necessarily have recognized the building anyway. (YFU, the Youth For Understanding exchange agency, was located on the second floor, stairway “A”, room 11.) I couldn’t recognize either of the schools I had been in, and I’m pretty sure that there were no Subway sandwich shops overlooking the market square in Turku back in the summer of 1988. I was able to find the place I lived for most of my time in Finland, but as it’s at the end of a long wooded driveway I wasn’t able to see the building itself. Finland has more freeway now than it did back then, and the European “E routes” have all been renumbered. (The highway from Helsinki to Turku was the E3 back in the 1980s, but is now the E18; similarly, national highway 5 was the E80 and is now E63.)

Posted in Books, Language, Transportation | Tagged , , , ,