Microwave steak

People react as if I'm proposing to put a baby in the microwave to keep it warm in the winter, when I speak of my microwave steak recipe. It really isn't a travesty; it works quite well in making a delicious steak ready to eat!

Here's what I don't like about conventional methods of steak preparation:

You end up with an incinerated outside, and a rare inside, and this gradient gets worse the thicker the steak is. The underlying problem with all fry-only methods is that they all involve heating the inside by transferring heat through the outside. This process inevitably results in an outside that is significantly more cooked than the inside. Some (but not all) cooking methods call for using lower heat. Maybe that works, but even if it does, I like my method better even if it's just for the way it hacks the laws of physics.

The crucial feature of microwave heating that my method exploits is that microwaves can penetrate the interior of the steak. If one were to simply nuke the steak for a minute or two, the steak would cook from the inside out, rather than from the outside in as when one fries it. Mixing the two methods gives me the ideal steak:

Medium rare throughout the whole thickness. Sometimes I've been lucky and there's been no perceptible gradient, other than having a very thin (<1mm) outer edge.

I've found these numbers to work well for me, assuming a single, modest steak (around 150g, just right for breakfast):

1. Heat a saucepan, using maximum heat on my "small" stove plate. Wait until the bottom reaches the Leidenfrost point. (Drip some water into the saucepan to see if it beads up without flash-boiling.)
2. Nuke the steak at 100% power for about 30 seconds. While it's nuking, wipe the bottom of the heated saucepan with an oiled piece of paper.
3. Fry each side for a minute - which is just about how long it takes for the steak to stop sticking to the saucepan.
4. Thick cuts may justify another 30 seconds on each side.

Update: It seems there are other people who use the same technique, although I should point out that "sear to seal the meat" is BS.

Fighting the demon, staying motivated

A few years ago I did the unthinkable: I asked the Internet to diagnose my ills. Specifically, I had somehow, though not specifically, landed on a list of symptoms of depression. Feelings of hopelessness and/or pessimism? Check. Persistent sad or "empty" feelings? Check. Loss of interest in activities or hobbies once pleasurable, including sex? Check. (Sex, LOL.) It seemed pretty clear to me that I had been depressed for years at that point - and that I had probably caught it (it's contagious, did you know?) from someone I interacted with on a daily basis.

I didn't like this diagnosis. I don't want to be depressed. I didn't want to face a future of a hollowed-out personality like the person I'm sure I caught it from. So somehow I managed to "snap out of it" through what felt like a conscious decision. Almost overnight my affect improved, and I started recognizing the seductive depression-thoughts: "You aren't pretty/accomplished/popular/etc. like those other people - in other words, worthless!" Or the most insidious one of all for me: "I'm smarter than all these other people, and I'm nicer than them too, therefore the tragedies of the world hurt me more. Being depressed as a result of how horrible the world is means I'm smart and nice."

Yuck, no more. I'm ashamed of having thought those ways for so long. So much time wasted. During the same period of my self-diagnosis, I was very much into psychology stuff in general. Every day during the long hours I spent at work in those days, I'd be poring over Wikipedia articles and other web pages. Cognitive distortions. MBTIs (I'm quite solidly an ISTP, apparently). Active listening. Models of communication. The meaning of a message is the response it elicits Understanding that, and coping with the ways that others' goals may not be aligned with mine. And always a background of more mathy/techy concepts to mine and repurpose. Game theory. Feedback.

So I have the intellectual tools now to fight the demon. I'm now aware that it's (like) a parasitic personality with "who I really am" as the host. (I don't really like "who I really am" as a concept - it makes a value judgement and mandates a static identity, neither of which I like.) But I still have to fight it - almost every day. I was just an emotionally vulnerable teenager when it started (and was probably a good host from the start), so it had its claws deep in my self-concept. Consciously, I reject that now - I don't want that to be part of "who I really am".

When I notice my mood darkening, I have a few options. Just feeling like I have options helps me to feel like I have some control over my life. Sometimes I go for small victories: I'll go to the garden and clear a little patch of weeds. Sometimes I just bail out and go to sleep, hoping to reboot overnight. And other times a walk with the dog does the trick to clear my mind. I suspect that going freelance has made it harder to find distraction from depressing thought: other people have their own needs, and the fact that they make demands on one's attention serves as an anchor - a sort of social regression towards the mean. I haven't figured out yet if IRC serves as a substitute to provide the grounding effect of having real-life people around. I think it might be channel-dependent: I'm happy when I'm in #Chatania, and less so in an unnamed channel I've finally given up on. Reddit seems to be affectively neutral, but it does tend to suck me in a bit as a displacement for boredom. I like /r/changemyview best so far.

I wish I could more regularly find the muse to do more productive things than reading Internet news, politics, and psychology porn (admit it - that's what these media categories are). There are so many things I could be doing - I could be working on my gEDA fork, or working on that damn MPH website that's been a steady irritant for two years now, or completing some of my woodworking projects. Even just blogging a little more regularly would feel more productive than getting my next hit of Internet. (Thanks A. for taking Essay Saturday seriously and prodding me into action with your entry.)

I'm off to go after a few small victories now. Making muesli and steak 2-course breakfast, then checking on my garden, and maybe sawing some firewood from pruned branches.

P.S. Diet must have an influence too. I seem to have more psychic energy since I've started having steak for breakfast. (Remind me to blog my microwave recipe.) And copious amounts of raisins too.

Building a furnace

I'm building a little furnace for backyard foundry duty, so I can cast parts for some of my zillion other hobbies. I'm not happy with all the brute-force furnaces out there on the Internet, that achieve all their melting power with a MOAR PROPANE! mentality, so I want mine to be one of those virtuous circle devices that work better the harder they work. Enter the air preheater:

Those holes in the side wall are air channels, for the incoming air to soak up some heat from the furnace wall instead of just letting it sink to ambient, unused. Unfortunately the side wall didn't slip out of the bucket as cleanly as I had hoped, and some fireclay got stuck in the corner, breaking out of the bottom of the wall when I turned the bucket over:

I'm glad the channels ended up mostly where I wanted them - parallel to the inside wall right to the bottom. (I made a little jig to help me line up the steel rod, that I used to make the channels, with the inner wall.)

Next I need to build a floor for this furnace, again with internal channels to communicate with the ones in the side wall. A roof might be nice too, but that can be (has to be) a separate part. I probably won't put air channels in the roof, in order to avoid plumbing problems - and so it will be possible to run this furnace without its roof.

Refreshing science fiction

Most sci-fi I see is either insufferably militarist, or hopelessly naive, and besides, most mainstream entertainment is boringly unambiguous. Not so with C 299,792km/s. You should probably not read further if you want to see the movie, there are spoilers below. But watch it again after reading the rest; I understood some things better only the second time, after I'd read some comments on the movie's vimeo page.

Here we have a grave, almost reluctant Malleck leading a mutiny on the Kestros IV, clearly a space warship. While certain in her conviction that her act is just, she is not merely juxtaposed as The Captain's moral opposite. The Captain seems like a reasonable man who merely does not (yet?) share Malleck's ideology: that humanity can do better than build space warships to blow stuff up and wreck planets.

My favourite line of the movie is "That's alright, I don't need them" - in response to the Captain's warning that he can't give her his "launch codes" (presumably for some superweapon). It's the first in-story hint that this is not the usual evil-terrorists-commandeer-superweapon trope-tripe that Hollywood loves dishing up. Immediately after, the film cuts to the retro-style Beyond the infinite "documentary" that's woven into the in-space arc hints at this beating-swords-into-ploughshares theme by negation, when Dr Harold Newman laments, "Since Man has been building tools, he has used them as weapons". It becomes clear with time that Malleck seeks to use the weapon as a tool, exactly as Newman vainly hopes (about untold amounts of energy), "or, to reach new [worlds]."

No doubt there are some hidden treasures in the film I've missed. There is a scene where Operator Hale searches for Lieutenant Kai, and a screen scrolls a list of names with short blurbs, some of them a bit bizarre. For example, there is "Unresolved conflict has led to extreme silliness" and "Bread crumbs are not as healthy as once [blurred]." No doubt some in-jokes among the film crew - and perhaps a nod to some of the Kickstarter campaign's funders?

Overall, I love the film. I wish there was more of it. Some people seem to be troubled by the acting, but it doesn't bother me. In fact, to me it adds authenticity - the characters are technocrats and soldiers, not orators and superheroes. The only scene I find a bit fake is where Kai figures out that something fishy is going on - that the ship is not awash with radiation but is, in fact, hijacked.

Even soldier Kai is human. There is a delightful scene near the end where he figures out what Malleck's motive is, and cracks the slightest smile, as if to say, "Yes, I like this script better than the wargames I signed up for!"

Watch it now, and then figure out a way to subvert your environment so that the world can become a better place.

Yesterday's mistakes and mystery words

guerre is a war. I should have inferred this from the capitalization of the phrase « Seconde Guerre mondiale ».

lors de la guerre then becomes "lors de la war", or "during the war" - a compound "transitive" preposition. (TIL about the idea of transitive and intransitive prepositions.)

fut is some past tense thing; seems to be the simple past of être (to be).

se déroula is like de-rolling - unrolling, in this use more abstractly as in "to unfold, to proceed", or, as Google translates it, "took place". I can't quite figure out the se part.

d'août is just the month of August!

était is the imperfect past tense, again of être.

près de is what you get when you press things together: they end up close to each other. Specifically, près de 40 000 militaires are nearly 40,000 soldiers.

il s'agit frustrates my attempt to find its idiomatic role. It's clearly the "it is about" meaning of the verb agir - to act, but I can't coax Google to translate "it is" back to s'agit without adding an explicit "about" which clearly doesn't belong in the context of "it is the largest deployment".

depuis is just "since".

Learning a new language

I feel like I want to learn a new language, but I can't quite decide which one. Since sometime in my teenage years, when I happened upon my sister's copy of Basic Italian (ISBN-10 4833700301), I've wanted to learn Italian, and for a short time in 2004 I could get by with a few Italian words and a lot of handwaving.

But Italian is relevant to pretty much only one country: Italy itself. So I've been on a search for another language to learn. Ideally one with some chance of economic benefit. I'd considered Spanish (which would open not just Spain, but several South American countries), Chinese (likely to become the dominant economy in the world, but just so damn foreign, and that writing system!), French (some use in parts of Africa, France itself has a decent economy) and Lithuanian (a linguistic interest sparked by a former Venusian interest). For now I'm leaning towards French, so I've bookmarked a few pages and now I think I should read a French Wikipedia article (or at least its introduction) every day.

Today's article is Operation Athena:

L'opération Athéna est la contribution des Forces canadiennes à la Force internationale d'assistance et de sécurité (FIAS) lors de la guerre d'Afghanistan. L'opération fut divisée en deux phases : la première se déroula de juillet 2003 à juillet 2005 dans la région de Kaboul et la seconde d'août 2005 à décembre 2011 dans la région de Kandahar. L'objectif global de l'opération était d'améliorer la sécurité et la gouvernance de l'Afghanistan. L'opération Athéna à Kandahar a constitué la plus longue mission de combat de l'histoire des Forces canadiennes. Avec près de 40 000 militaires canadiens engagés, il s'agit du plus grand déploiement des Forces canadiennes depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

I'll document my progress learning the language by translating what (I think) I understand. Obviously this technique relies quite heavily on the French language's influence on English, and Latin's too. Here goes:

Operation Athena is the Canadian Forces' contribution to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployment to Afghanistan. The operation was divided into two phases: the first, from July 2003 to July 2005, to Kabul and surroundings, and the second, from the end of 2005 to December 2011, to Kandahar and its surroundings. The objective for the global operation was to assist with security and government of Afghanistan. Operation Athena at Kandahar was the longest combat mission in the history of the Canadian Forces. With about 40,000 Canadian troops engages, it was also the largest global deployment of the Canadian Forces' Second Army.

Mystery words:
lors (de la) guerre
fut
déroula
d'août
était
près
il s'agit
depuis

Rolling Jubilee

It's heart-warming to read about people apparently hacking the system to do good. In this case, to make the world a better place by forgiving distressed debt - the people's bailout.

Then again, I can't help but wonder what effects this campaign will have, if it goes beyond a bit of hipster activism. It's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - you can't participate in a market without affecting it. The interesting questions here are, how big a player in the debt market is OWS likely to be, and what is the price elasticity of demand for debt?

Also, while at 5 cents to the dollar it doesn't seem worth getting worked up about it, I'm never quite comfortable with do-gooders taking on a burden that isn't theirs. And yes, that means I don't believe in charity - or at least most of it. Of course there are narrow-interest causes that are appropriate to fund by charitable donations, but others, like this problem of almost ubiquitous quasi-odious [1] debt, are broad social problems. Broad social problems should be addressed by broad social mandates - exactly the sort of thing governments are intended to do. If everybody bears the consequences of a social problem, then I think everybody should also contribute to its solution. By means of, say, income tax. And then you can segue into another interesting topic - how the burden of income tax should be distributed.

And that's the irony here: OWS is all about contrasting the burdens of the 99% with the privileges of the 1%. Like the phenomenon that many wealthy people are able to structure their income such that they pay a far lower effective rate of tax [2] than not-so-wealthy people do. And then OWS go ahead and voluntarily tax themselves with the cost of forgiving debt.

It still seems like a morally positive thing to do, and I still hope they shake things up.

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[1] Nobody held a gun to anybody's head and made them take a $100,000 student loan for a liberal arts major. Other examples may seem more legitimately odious.

[2] Tax in general, not specifically income tax. Which is part of how they do it - by structuring their income such that more of it appears as capital appreciation, which attracts the far lighter capital gains tax.