Darth Hammer

Saw this first from Elwyn on his LiveJournal...


EMBED-MC Hammer Vader Busts a Move - Watch more free videos

My brain hurts, now.

Food Porn: Jamaican Escovitch

Sometimes I think I watch the Food Network too much. Earlier this week, I watched an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and the dish in question was Jamaican Escovitch. It just sounded so good that I had to make it, and I must say, it turned out really well. In fact, it may be the best fish dish I've ever eaten, let alone prepared myself.

So I looked it up on the internet to see how it's made. I have a few tweaks (using tips from the chef in the Throwdown episode), so here's what's in mine:

• 3 tilapia fillets (about 3/4 of a pound)
• 1 large onion
• 1 medium carrot
• half of a Scotch Bonnet pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips
• 1 teaspoon of minced garlic
• 1 tablespoons canola oil
• half of a bay leaf
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tsp Allspice berries (optional)
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 cup white wine vinegar
• 1/8 cup water
• 1-1/2 limes, sliced into wedges
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup flour
• 1/4 cup peanut or corn oil
• 1/2 tsp whole black peppercorns (optional)
• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1/8 cup brown sugar

With the exception of adding the brown sugar when adding the water, vinegar, and lemon juice, the process is pretty much what you can read at GroupRecipes.com, so I'll let you follow the link for that part so they can get their hits.

And incidentally, Bobby lost.

UPDATE: As suggested at GroupRecipes.com, Escovitch does make a nice cold lunch.

Food Porn: Aloo Matar

Yes, yes... I've been a terrible blog slacker. I haven't been out doing much of interest frankly, so I haven't had much to post about. But, the Saga can't be left to decay indefinitely, so when I made a tasty Indian dish, it was time to produce a new Food Porn entry. It amuses me how many perverts find their way to the Saga this way, only to be disappointed by the lack of nekkid wimmin.


So, let's discuss the ingredients. This is from a recipe on AllRecipes.com, but with minor tweaks. I've highlighted the changes below.

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 medium onions, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon ginger garlic paste
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 large potatoes, peeled and chopped
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1/2 cup of canned tomatoes with green chilis, pureed
• 1-1/2 teaspoons curry powder
• 1-1/2 teaspoons paprika
• 1 teaspoon white sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

I discovered after getting home with the groceries that I didn't actually have the canned tomatoes I thought I had, so I used the tomatoes with green chilis; a little extra heat wasn't going to bother me. I actually have garam masala around somewhere, but I didn't feel like hunting for it right then, and the curry powder was handy. I wasn't particularly careful with measurements, and I naturally used a good bit more cilantro than the recipe called for.

The process is pretty simple and already described on AllRecipes, so I won't steal their hits by repeating it here. This recipe makes enough for four people, so I should have lunches for a couple of days.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

So, William and Juliana and I went to see Transformers 2 on opening night. I have to call this one another big win. As with the first film, the humor gets more sitcommy than I like at times, and this time it really pushed the limits of my tolerance, but the pace of the movie is still fast enough for me to get over that pretty quickly. There are also times when Michael Bay and the writing staff are clearly channeling George Lucas and James Cameron.

Please don’t be fooled into thinking this is a kids’ movie. You probably wouldn’t want your kids using some of this language in school, Megan Fox is definitely “Miss Fanservice” (with a little additional help, too), and the violence is intense. Incidentally, this movie is over two hours long, and probably the last half is a protracted battle, so expect to be very wired when you leave the theatre.

On the other hand, this movie is extremely pro-military. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines must see Michael Bay as their number one advertising assistant, and the Coast Guard is probably wondering why they get left out.

Joining the Evil Alien Conspiracy

Because Hulu now has episodes of Babylon 5!

Something to Keep in Mind

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
--Thomas Jefferson

And Now for Something Completely Different

Good old-fashioned Star Trek destroys Star Trek: Enterprise. Yay!

Poor Water Stanley

There's nothing quite so amusing as a good scam letter. I've let this one linger in my email box for a while, but finally gotten around to it.

Dear friend, As you read this, I do not want you to feel sorry for me, because I believe everyone will die someday.

So this time, instead of an appeal to my greed, I'm getting an appeal to my sympathy. At least it's not a disaster exploit.

My name is water stanley a merchant in London, United Kingdom.

For a British national, he has appallingly poor English grammar. That's also a rather odd name for a Brit (I would have expected Walter rather than "water"), and if memory serves, the British typically capitalize their names. These little details don't necessarily mean the writer isn't British, but they do raise my doubts.

I have been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and have been in the hospital for a very long time. It has defied all forms of medical treatment,and right now I have about few months to live, according to the medical experts. I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone (not even myself) but my business and wealth. Though I Am very rich, I was never generous, I was always hostile to people and only focused on my business as that was the only thing I cared for. But now I regret all this as I now know that there is more to life than just wanting to have or make all the money in the world.

The appeal to my sympathy continues. Most of us want to feel like we've been generous and helped our fellow human beings, but we feel like we haven't had the opportunity to be as generous as we would like. "Water" is plucking at those harp strings.

I believe when God gives me a second chance to come to this world I would live my life a different way from how I have lived it till date. Now that God is calling me, I have willed and shared most of my properties and assets to my immediate and extended family members, including few close friends. I want God to be merciful to me and accept my soul, so I have decided to give alms to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth before Gods call.

"Water" puts out an appeal to my religious sentiments, as well. I'm not exactly the most susceptible person in the world to such appeals, and there are plenty of evangelicals who might tell him that good works don't carry any weight with God, but there's no shortage of people who might feel the pull.

So far, I have distributed money to some charity organizations in the U.K, Algeria and Malaysia and some other countries. Now that my health has been deteriorated so badly, I cannot do this myself anymore. I once asked members of my family to close one of my accounts and distribute the money which I have there to charity organization in Bulgaria and Pakistan; they refused and kept the money to themselves. Hence, I do not trust them anymore, as they seem not to be contended with what I have left for them.

Betrayed by his greedy family; that's really sad. If only there were estate attorneys in the United Kingdom who specialized in helping wealthy people arrange for their assets to be distributed as they wanted at the time of their deaths. So sad.

The last of my money which no one knows of is the huge cash deposit of twenty eight million united states dollars ($28.000.000) that I have with a Bank. I would want you to help me collect this deposit on my behalf and distribute it to charity organizations in your country. I would want you to keep 20% of the funds to yourself and share the rest to charity organizations in your country. Reply this email as soon as possible if you are capable to handle this transaction on my behalf. My regards and Love to you and your family members. God be with you,

Water Stanley

Oh, I'm sorry, there is going to be an appeal to my greed. "Water" is going to trust me, a complete stranger, to donate over 22 million dollars to charities of my choice, keeping only about five and a half million for myself.

Once again, a scammer who hopes I'm stupid enough to believe there are absurdly wealth people who have no idea how to handle money. Do not fall for this crap, people! The rich don't get that way by being idiots.

Silly TV: Deadliest Warrior

Spike TV has been running a new show lately that I find amusing, in an MST3K sort of way. The show is Deadliest Warrior, and it purports to determine which of two historical “warriors” would prevail if they had to fight.

Each week on Deadliest Warrior, a new episode will pit two of the most feared warriors civilization has ever known against each other. Along with the use of 21st century science and the latest in CGI technology, each episode enlists warrior-specific world-class fighters and experts to provide insight into what makes these combatants tick, analyzing every facet of their unique skills of destruction, culminating in a head-to-head final fight between two legends of the battlefield that will produce the deadliest warrior.

Recent match-ups include “Gladiator vs Apache”, “Viking vs Samurai”, and “Knight vs Pirate”. The general setup of the show is to get some “experts” to evaluate the weapons used by the warriors in the contest, feed this information into a “state-of-the-art computer program”, and get an “objective” conclusion about the result. Each warrior has special advocates pulled in to argue for their side during the evaluations, and the smack-talk flows thick.

I’m surprised that they don’t hit any of the “classic” matchups that I would expect: “Pirate vs Ninja” or “Knight vs Samurai”, for example. They seem to prefer throwing opponents with radically different fighting styles against each other. The outcome of such a contest would really be determined more by the circumstances of the fight than by the equipment of the combatants. For instance, in “Gladiator vs Apache”, the outcome would largely depend on whether the battle was more like a woodland ambush or an arena bout.

Alas, the show never addresses the circumstances of the fight. The evaluation revolves entirely around the amount of damage the combatants' weapons can do to various ballistics gel dummies, pig bodies, and other human analogs. It goes without saying that the choice of weapons assigned to each combatant will significantly affect the outcome of a contest.

As a quick example, we’ll look at one contest: “Samurai vs Viking”. Each warrior comes to the fight with four weapons, with each weapon assigned to a category: long-range, mid-range, short-range, or special. The weapons assigned to the Samurai are the katana (short-range, the classic Samurai sword), naginata (mid-range, a pole-arm used for both slashing and thrusting), yumi (long-range, a type of bow), and kanabo (special, essentially a weighted club). The Viking comes to the fight with a great axe (short-range), long sword (mid-range), spear (long-range), and shield (special).

The show’s methodology is to directly compare the long-range weapons to each other, the short-range weapons to each other, etc. The evaluators give an “edge” to one warrior or the other for each weapon type, depending on which weapon did more damage in their tests. I don’t really know how their “state-of-the-art computer program” works, but I’d have to guess that it starts the combatants at long-range and performs some kind of test to see if one warrior kills the other. If there’s no kill, it advances them to mid-range and tests again, and so on until it finally gets a kill at short-range. The program runs through the entire procedure 1000 times, and the warrior with the most wins is declared "the deadliest warrior" (shown in a dramatization that apparently does not try to simulate the computer outcomes in any meaningful way).

I immediately see a problem with their evaluation, though. They evaluated the Viking shield based on how much damage it could do with a shield punch, compared to the damage that could be inflicted by the kanabo. It goes without saying that the kanabo is a more practical way to deal damage than a shield punch, but the usefulness of the shield as a defense was never really evaluated.

For instance, they compared the yumi to the spear and concluded that the Samurai would have the advantage at long range. Now, I won’t dispute that the yumi has superior range and accuracy, but the Viking shield apparently wasn’t factored into the long-range portion of the contest. Bows were a well-known weapon to the Vikings, and any Viking with a grain of sense would put his shield up in front of him upon noticing that his enemy was armed with a bow, allowing him to close the distance in relative safety.

The shield would remain a factor at mid-range. If the Viking succeeds in blocking a stroke from the naginata with his shield, he can move inside it’s range.

And the shield continues to be a factor at short range. Here, the Samurai may decide to draw his katana, but the Viking has no incentive to abandon the protection of the shield to use the two-handed axe. In close combat, the Viking would probably continue using the long sword, if he had one (the reason many Vikings carried axes being that they were much less expensive than swords). The shield continues to afford extra protection for the Viking, allowing him to attack without being as vulnerable to counter-attack, and there’s a very real possibility that a katana slash would bite into the edge of the shield and stick, trapping the blade. Effectively disarmed, if only briefly, the Samurai would be extremely vulnerable in such a situation.

I’m not saying that the Viking should have won this match; I’m just saying that many factors affecting its outcome were overlooked. For instance, in their heyday, Samurai were primarily horse archers, not footmen. A Samurai on horseback with his bow would have a considerable advantage, as he would be able to maintain his distance and repeatedly attack his opponent with little danger of a counter-attack. As I said, the circumstances of these fights would have a huge effect on their outcome.

Even their weapon-to-weapon comparisons are dubious. For instance, their comparison of the Pirate cutlass to the Knight's broadsword resulted in an “even” evaluation, despite the fact that the cutlass is exactly the sort of weapon against which the Knight's armor (listed among his assets) would be most effective.

And let's not even start on their characterizations of which warrior had honor, discipline, and courage on his side; they don't really affect the outcomes, anyway.

So Deadliest Warrior is really a show about smack-talk and breaking things, not a serious scientific evaluation of historical combat practices. The outcomes seem to be based much more on popularity than on any real science, since getting a desired outcome is easy to achieve simply by choosing which weapon comparisons to make to give the desired results.

"Intelligent Designer" comes back in the comments

"Intelligent Designer" (Randy) finally got around to responding (see the comments) to my response to his refute...

Our different perspectives about the nature of DNA do indeed account for some of our disagreement. I don’t consider DNA to be a hodgepodge of genes in no particular order interspersed with vast amounts of gibberish. Instead I think that the majority of DNA appears to gibberish because the current scientific understanding of DNA has barely scratched the surface of what is really there. It only makes sense that scientists would figure out what the protein-coding sequences of DNA do first. It doesn’t make sense to jump to the conclusion that the rest of it is junk.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that you are right about the nature of DNA. Even in that case my argument is still valid. As you recall my calculation regarding the probability of information used a 151 character sequence. The average length of a gene is 1210 base pairs and is hardly equivalent to the three of four letter words used in your example.

Randy has taken the safe approach by claiming that the DNA that is currently considered "junk" by geneticists will eventually be found to be important. It's safe because it's a position that can't be falsified. There's no way I can possibly prove that "junk DNA" will never be found to have an important function. He can lurk in that nebulous "one day we may discover its importance" realm forever, because he has until the end of the universe to be disproven. All I can say is that since he can not show that "junk DNA" has a function, there's no evidence of a function. Generally speaking, the burden of proof is on the person who asserts the existence of a thing, not the person who denies it. To use a cliche, I can assert that there's an invisible, intangible dragon living in the shed behind my house, but do you have any reason to believe my assertion? Without any evidence that junk DNA serves a purpose (beyond adding to the medium in which mutation and subsequent selection can work), there's no reason to assume we will eventually find one. So "Yes", Randy, it does make sense to assume that DNA that has no known function is junk.

As to the rest of his case, no I don't see the validity. The average length of a gene may be 1210 base pairs (I haven't done a fact check on that), but the current average length of a gene is irrelevant. There are certainly many shorter genes, and there's no reason to assume that the current average must apply all the way back to the original molecule that started the process of evolution. I've already linked to a good explanation of abiogenesis, which works with self-replicating molecules that are composed entirely of junk DNA. You can get the ball rolling with pure static, so you don't need to have hundreds of base pairs in some kind of functional code for evolution to begin. From abiogenesis forward, any DNA strand that forms the simplest of productive genes is gravy.

The Ticking Time Bomb Challenge

I’m hearing this argument on talk radio a lot lately.

You are a government agent who has discovered a plot to set off a nuclear weapon in the US. You have captured one of the terrorists involved in the plot, and you are convinced that your captive knows where to find the bomb. You are also convinced that the bomb will go off in just a few hours, so time is of the essence. Would you torture the captive to make him tell you the location of the bomb?

This argument is designed to get you to admit that the federal government should not publicly outlaw “aggressive interrogation” techniques like waterboarding. If you say “yes”, you agree that such techniques should not be forbidden; if you say “no”, you put the well-being of one terrorist ahead of the lives of thousands of American citizens.

Let me go on record as saying that the government should unequivocally outlaw torture. Not only is it unethical, it’s an unreliable means of getting information. Victims of torture do not necessarily tell the truth. Generally speaking, they tell the torturer whatever they think will make the torture stop, whether it’s true or not. In the hypothetical situation, the interrogator really doesn’t have a way to tell if the captive is lying; anything the captive says could lead agents on a wild goose chase, making it even less likely that they’ll succeed in stopping the bomb.

But let’s say that I really am convinced that my captive has the information needed to save thousands of American lives and that I’m convinced I can get that information from him in time to do something about it. In that case, yes, I will use “aggressive techniques” to extract the information. I will not, however, complain when I’m sent to prison for torturing the guy. If the information was worth his pain and suffering, then it’s also worth my personal freedom.

Can we give this argument a rest, now?

Overachievement

This is a picture I took on my last trip to Pennsic, made into a poster with the BigHugeLabs motivational poster maker.



The Ashleys should get a kick out of it.

Reclaiming the Blade

This is apparently due for DVD release soon (if it isn't out already).

SciFi’s Ghost Hunters

I have roommates who find Ghost Hunters amusing. I suppose it is, if you like watching a study of how not to conduct proper scientific research.

If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), which consists of a couple of plumbers and their friends, go to “haunted” locations and attempt to verify whether paranormal activity is occurring. Needless to say, these people have little idea how to properly conduct such an investigation, and their methods are ripe for confirmation bias.

Normally, the TAPS crew visits a location in response to a request from the owners or residents. Their first action upon arriving is to question the “witnesses” of “paranormal” events, asking what they thought they saw and where they thought the saw it. With these “hot spots” identified, they set up cameras and microphones to record activities in those particular locations. The team then spends the night at the site, wandering through the hot spots, trying to provoke reactions from “spirits”, and recording any “significant” instrument readings or “personal experiences” consistent with the stories they were told. Need I mention that they do this in the dark, making them all the more susceptible to “chills” and other spooky feelings.

Like I said, their method is ripe for confirmation bias. Any unexplained noise or “chill” or draft is easy to attribute to paranormal activity. They do dismiss many events that can easily be traced to something mundane, but they seldom actually dismiss claims of a haunting (if ever - I've never seen it happen), because there are always a few “personal experiences” for which they found no specific mundane explanation.

The most obvious thing that their method lacks is any type of control, and I mean “control” in the scientific sense often associated with drug trials. In a drug trial, some test patients get a placebo instead of the drug being tested, so they have the same experience as the other patients, just no actual chemical. The patients don’t know whether their drug is the real thing or a placebo, so they can’t prejudice the results of the test with their knowledge (it's well known that receiving treatment -- even placebo treatment -- affects the expression of a patient's symptoms).

TAPS could do something similar in their investigations. First, they need some blinding. The investigators who spend the night in the site looking for evidence of paranormal activity can’t be the people who interview the original “witnesses”; knowing where events are supposed to happen taints the evidence. Second, they need to create some “placebo hot spots” – attribute some paranormal activity to locations on the site where the witnesses haven’t actually reported anything. Write out the full list of “hot spots” and “placebo hot spots” – with no distinction between them of course – for the investigators who will spend the night at the site. Finally, have a third team of investigators (more blinding) to analyze the evidence that the on-site team gathered without actually speaking to the on-site team first, again seeking to minimize confirmation bias.

If the experiences of the site's witnesses are connected to actual paranormal events, you would expect the true “hot spots” to generate significantly more instrument readings and “personal experiences” than the placebo “hot spots”. If there’s no significant difference between the two, then you can safely dismiss the activity in the “hot spots” as investigator error.

But Ghost Hunters would never institute such a rigorously scientific method of investigating a “haunted” site. That would inevitably result in an endless string of negative results, and they won’t be able to generate ratings with results like that, so they will undoubtedly continue to use the useless protocols they currently follow.

Nostalgia

Some YouTube whiz crashed Airwolf into Star Wars. I am amused.

Skeptics' Circle 108

The 108th Skeptics' Circle has been posted, and since I'm a participant, I figured a link was in order.

Wine at the Grocery

There are a couple of bills before the Tennessee legislature that, if passed, would permit grocery stores in the state to sell wine. Naturally there are lobbyists on both sides of this bill, but some of them are full of hot air.

Chuck Groover is the senior pastor of Victory Baptist Church in Mount Juliet. He argues that making wine available in more places will lead to more alcoholism.

“Convenience for a few should be the last justification for making higher alcohol-content drink, wine, more accessible to the public by allowing sale in grocery stores.”

Fine, Chuck. Why don’t you show us some statistical evidence that alcoholism rates are higher in states where wine is available in grocery stores compared to states where it isn’t?

Statistics from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism show that Tennessee does, in fact, have one of the lowest alcohol consumption rates in the country. Average consumption in the US is 2.27 gallons per person per year, while the average consumption in Tennessee is less than 2.00 g/p/y. Is it because Tennessee doesn't allow wine to be sold in groceries?

Wikipedia conveniently has a comparison of alcohol laws by state, so let’s examine them.

Other states at the bottom of the consumption rate chart with Tennessee include Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia. Of these, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia (five out of nine) allow wine sales in grocery stores; Kentucky and West Virginia even allow distilled alcohol sales in grocery stores.

States that forbid wine sales in groceries include Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming. Of these, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wyoming (six out of fifteen) are at the top of the NIAAA charts with consumption rates greater than 2.50 g/p/y.

Where’s the connection, Chuck? I don’t have a big stake in this vote, but your reasoning (that wine sales in grocery stores increase alcoholism) doesn’t hold up to statistical analysis. More than half of the states at the low end of the alcohol consumption scale permit wine sales in groceries, and over a third of the states at the high end of the consumption scale forbid wine sales in groceries.

Perhaps Pastor Chuck should confine himself to Biblical arguments instead of making unsupported claims about the effects of wine availability on alcoholism rates.

Incompetent Design: Am I Refuted?

Randy Stimpson certainly thinks that he has definitely refuted the arguments I made about “specified complexity” way back in 2005.

I pointed out in my original article that two phrases of a given length (in which the same set of characters are available) are equally unlikely. Randy thinks that in my rebuttal of the probability argument against the Theory of Evolution, I somehow missed the point. I don't see how I did; maybe he's trying to introduce a new point.

To save length, I'll use my own character strings. Let's compare, shall we? If you read my previous article, these will be familiar.

WETHEPEOPLEOFTHEUNITEDSTATES
OMECIHUATLACEUCUCYOTICIHUATI

My first trick was to put these phrases side-by-side, noting that the odds of drawing either at random was the same. I would ask, which of these contains “information”, though. Randy has added some criteria for information.

1. It consists of properly spelled English words.
2. It is grammatically correct.
3. It makes sense.

Put that way, the first phrase obviously contains information; it lacks space and punctuation, but there's obviously a sensible phrase of English words in there. Of course, if you read my other article, you know that the second phrase also makes sense, it consists of two obscure (but related) words that I chose from another language. I was attempting to point out, at the time, that patterns and “information” are contextual: the first phrase is much more obviously information to an English-speaking audience than the second, but they both contain information. Now let's look at a really random string.

VJVUFORMHLBFBXIXSBNEUISLAFJHY

This string is not one that I carefully constructed. I set the caps lock and then just randomly pecked around the keyboard, only restricting myself to staying on the letters area and not hitting the same key twice in succession. Even so, I still managed to get a properly spelled English word by accident. Does that mean that this string contains information?

Randy's problem is that he thinks DNA must be constructed exactly like English sentences. Every word must be spelled correctly, the word order must be correct, and the sentence must be coherent when everything comes together the first time. Unfortunately for him, DNA doesn't look anything like that. DNA looks much more like my third string: it's mostly gibberish, but every once in a while there's an actual gene found in the DNA strand. An actual piece of DNA might look more like the following string.

DSSADIINUNITEDSDFIOVOFRNTHEVNMCVUIWECVNJSTATESASEWNMPEOPLEASDF

Sure, it looks like gibberish at a glance, but if you sort through it carefully, you'll find all the words you need to make my first phrase in there (although you may notice that “THE” only appears in it once). This structure is analagous to the human genome. The great majority of the human genome doesn't code for anything, and the portions that do code for actual proteins are scattered all over it, not neatly organized.

Randy asks “What is the probability that a random character generator would produce a grammatically correct sequence of characters that makes sense?”, but it's not an accurate analogy, because DNA isn't a sequence of characters that make sense. It's a hodgepodge of genes in no particular order.

A more accurate question might be “What is the probability that a random character generator will produce a sequence of characters that forms an English word?” Notice that I accidentally came up with one within eight characters (honest, I did not put “FORM” in there on purpose).

Now, suppose that you have a rather faulty mechanism for reproducing your strings. Letters occasionally get added, removed, or substituted. In fact, whole sections can get moved around, duplicated, or deleted. Through many copies of copies, words will form. Some will get broken again, but some will stick around for a while. Suppose you start throwing out strings that don't have a particular word: you'll stop having strings that lack that word. As more words emerge, they, too, can become necessary in subsequent copies. After many copies of copies, what might you have? Something like my fourth string, perhaps?

To Randy I can only say, I don't think I'm the one getting it wrong.

Food Porn: India, Italy, and the Carribbean

I've had some cooking pictures sitting on the camera for a while, and I've finally gotten around to downloading them, so here's a mass food porn post. First, we made moong dal, a lentil curry, a while back. At least, we made it with red lentils; various recipes on the internet call for split peas and moong beans. The recipe for this one comes from a book, 50 Great Curries of India, by Camellia Panjabi.

I think I'm okay sharing the recipe, since I had to do a bit of substituting. Besides, this is a free plug for the book, right? Anyway, the ingredients include...

• 1 cup of red lentils
• 1 can of diced tomatoes with green chilis
• roughly one cubic inch of ginger root, peeled and chopped
• 3 teaspoons of minced garlic
• 1/4 teaspoon of powdered tumeric
• salt to taste
  
• cilantro to taste (which is a lot, in my case)
• 1 tablespoon of butter

I brought five cups of water to boil in a large pot, then added the lentils, tomatoes, ginger, most of the garlic, some salt, and the tumeric. When it came back to a boil, I lowered the heat, covered it, and let it simmer for half an hour. Then, I tossed in cilantro and let it simmer a bit more while I browned the remaining garlic in butter. The "golden brown and delicious" garlic then goes into the pot, and the curry can be served over rice. Better yet, put the moong dal and rice in a tortilla.

Second, I was scrounging for lunch one day and found we had some packaged gnocchi in the cupboard. A bit of net searching and a further check of on-hand ingredients later, I was able to make this sage-parmesan gnocchi (with a bit of grilled chicken thrown in).


And finally, tonight I really wanted to do something with some black beans that were already cooked, so I found a recipe for Jamaican Curried Rice. In the spirit of "fusion", it too goes well in a tortilla.

And I actually remembered to take some pictures of the process for this one.

D&D: For Lack of a Better Topic

When in doubt, I can always write about D&D games. Last night, the storied picked up exactly where it left off; they had defeated the twigblights, but they were still a long way out in the woods.

Showing that they are, in fact, catching on, the party conducted a thorough search of the darkwood grove and turned up quite a bit of loot left behind by previous victims of the twigblights. This new wealth secured, they set about retracing their steps back to the village of Myre, which Eileen again managed without incident (with her +11 on Survival checks, she only needs to roll a 4 to navigate, even in pretty bad circumstances).

Arriving back in Myre, they found their contact, Alian, who arranged for them to travel back down river with some “lumberjacks” who were floating logs downstream to the lumber yards of the city of Reicha. The lumbermen had a barge loaded with smaller wood that floated in the mass, and there were a couple of canoes on board that they used when they needed to move around the river to break up log jams or keep logs from floating away. The number of logs wasn’t the huge, river-clogging mass that you might see from clear-cutting with modern equipment, but there were still quite a few, and the barge had to stop periodically to keep the whole shipment together. This meant that travel back downstream was considerably slower than their original trip upstream.

(Note: I really know next-to-nothing about how a real log flow would work, but my players don't either, so... yeah.)

Well, one of the stops to break a log jam seemed to be taking forever, and the barge captain sent someone out in the second boat to see what was taking so long. The party decided to help, but the remaining boat wouldn’t hold them all, so they decided to go log-skipping to shore and move up along the bank to where the first boat was trying to clear the log jam. Hilarity ensued as, one by one, the party members failed their Balance checks to stay standing on the floating, bobbing, rolling logs. Everyone ended up swimming at some point, and a couple of rescues were even necessary for people who went under amid the bobbing logs (hooray for strong-swimming half-orcs).

When everyone was finally on shore, they traipsed upstream to where the boats had met at the log jam. There, they found the first boatman dead, apparently stabbed from behind with a rough wooden stake. Suddenly alert to danger, Eileen spotted some kind of creature hidden among the floating logs and took a shot at it with her sling. She missed, and it took off, crawling away among the floating logs, it’s passage only marked by the occasional disturbance among them.

Krag (the half-orc) broke up the log jam, and the party returned to the barge, now watchful for danger. There were no further incidents that day, but Eileen spotted the creature again during her watch that night. She woke Krag and the others, but the creature again fled before they could try to engage it.

The trip downstream continued the next day. One of the boatmen went out to clear another log jam, and Wellby (the halfling ranger) spotted the creature on shore, apparently up to no good. Wellby took a shot with his bow that landed solidly on target, and the thing again fled. Wellby and the others set off for the shore, hoping to track the creature down, and that’s where the night’s session ended…