Naturally, the slices are all named "Trevor".
As a teenager, nested versions of the shape you describe were one of the things I doodled obsessively rather than listen to whatever my high school teachers were droning on about.
I'm going to need a demonstration video.
I'm going to need a demonstration video.
W-lfs-n, you finished with that banana yet?
That's a very masculine way to slice an apple.
LB, you were right not to let your elders repress your budding apple-fu.
Actually, you could duplicate my nested teenage doodles in appular form by going through your process so as to create the largest possible polygonal core, and then repeating it for additional thin slices, until the core shrank to the point where no more flesh could be sliced from it. Now I want an apple.
I'm so sorry to inform you that you are incorrect. Just slice all the way through. Then pare away from each slice just the portion containing the seeds. Otherwise you (a) waste about 10% of the good flesh and (b) immolate your man card.
If you want to be a Real Man, do what my dad did and just eat the whole damn thing without slicing, including the seeds.
If you want to be a Real Man, do what my dad did and just eat the whole damn thing without slicing, including the seeds.
Yeah, and in one bite, too!
If you want to be a Real Man, do what my dad did and just eat the whole damn thing without slicing, including the seeds.
I'm really not trying to make any kind of point about gender performance, but I eat apples like this. I hate looking for a trash can with an unpleasantly gnawed apple core, and just eating the whole thing seems easier.
I'm very lazy. Masculine? Feminine? Who can tell?
I will throw away the stem. But the stem is small and not gross, so it can be tucked into a pocket or something.
But the stem is small and not gross, so it can be tucked into a pocket or something.
Here, "stem" is a euphemism.
Together, we resemble a half-open camera shutter.
12: - That was my dad's reasoning, too. Unless he could chuck the core somewhere the seeds had a chance to grow.
15: Ok, then. Never mind. LB gets to keep hers, though.
You could just use one of these.
We used 21 in preschool, but none of us were strong enough to split an apple in one go. There mas much tiny-fisted hammering on the top of the slicers. Some found success with a technique that resembled the chest compressions of CPR.
Remarkably, no hand-wedges were ever created.
Aw, I wanted to make the first reference to W-lfs-n's banana-peeling technique in this thread.
21 is used almost daily in my household.
22: It was indeed in my daughters' preschool that I was introduced to 21, and it is used almost daily in our household as well. Under five seconds from announcement of snack desire to snack fulfillment, including a quick washing of the fruit. Works for pears, too.
Yeah, well, W-lfs-n is weird, and hesitates only on occasion to correct people's grammar.
It's also already been established that everybody has a man card, and is concerned about its integrity. It's like nobody pays attention!
I see LB's apple-core eating and raise her an ex of mine who used to eat the entirety of a chicken leg or wing, bones included. The crunching was sort of fascinating.
27 - Isn't eating the bones pretty much normal with frog's legs? Perhaps I was just being played by the Korean guys who introduced me to them.
28: Frog's legs, no idea. Maybe. The chicken wing/leg thing grossed me out, at least initially, but that may be chiefly because I dislike gristle to begin with. The bones aspect was just funny.
This is how I, too, slice apples. While watching me recently, PK asked how it is that I do everything so well.
I told him, naturally, that it's because I am a super-genius.
I'd like to know how to cut a pineapple. I'm serious. I love fresh pineapple, but I never buy it because it seems too difficult to cut the thing (without losing a finger, I mean).
Chinese especially like the end of a chicken wing. It's a favorite part.
32: It cuts easier than it looks like it will. You just need a sharp chefs knife, 10" or so, or perhaps util (serrated). Chop top and bottom flat first. Cut it in half if you want ot mak easier handling. Sitting it on the flat surface (that you just cut) you can trim off the sides, you want to cut fairly deeply from the outer skin because there are eyes/dimples that go in a fair bit (a cm or so) that you can't eat. So just slice round in a circle like that, then trim it. Either core, or cut around the fiborous bit into chunks.
Easier than it looks. Pineapple bruises much easier than you'd think, too.
You could just use one of these.
"One of these" is precisely that against which my technique is a reaction! FAIL! They're impossible to keep sharp, impossible to clean, they're useless at slicing all but the most symmetrical fruit, and they voted for Bush twice. Fuck a bunch of "one of these".
31: I always associate "super-genius" with Wile E. Coyote. He's one of my heroes. Never gives up, though the very laws of nature conspire against him. And that bird is fucking annoying. But delicious, no doubt. One day he will prevail. And he will eat the bones.
I couldn't follow the post at all. And I've never heard of anyone eating the whole apple. I see you don't eat the stem. What about the little crusty part on the end opposite the stem? (That doesn't pass the "not gross to slip in a pocket" test, but also seems like it would be inedible.)
And I can see eating chicken wings whole, although it's gross, but chicken legs? I wouldn't think you could chew through the bones. And that seems like a choking hazard.
Don't most pineapples come with tags with slicing directions right on them? The ones I usually buy do.
32: You can't slice the top off, then slice off the sides as thinly as possible, and then proceed? Or depending on need, slice the top off, then turn the thing sideways and cut slices (including skin), cut those slices in half to create half-circles, or quarters, and then just eat it in a slobbering manner by hand?
I gather the problem is the core, but I've tended to gnaw away at that too, since I love fresh pineapple as well.
Now, dealing with mangoes (beloved) is a challenge.
This is how I, too, slice apples.
Woo! I'm having a super-genius party, and AWB and bitchphd are invited. And LB, since her younger self clearly would have sliced them the right way, had she but apples enough, and time.
Damn, someday I'll learn to preview.
35. Yeah, I've never really understood the plethora of kitchen chopping/cutting gadgets. With a few notable exceptions, they are at best slightly faster than a sharp knife, while also usually being a combination of finicky, wasteful not always working, and a pain to clean.
Same goes for most other kitchen gadgets.
Apples: I just slice bites off the side one at a time as I'm eating them. Flat slices, sideways, if that makes sense. Works fine. I don't need any goddamn symmetrical wedgical slices.
You, Brock Landers, are a disgrace to us all.
Apples: I just slice bites off the side one at a time as I'm eating them. Flat slices, sideways, if that makes sense.
This is what I do.
Now, dealing with mangoes (beloved) is a challenge.
Here's a trick for mangoes you may not know: First cut in half long ways first, pop out seed with twist of knife (chefs, same trick for avocado, doesn't work with a short knife). Now taking one of the halves and a sharp knife, score from the inside it lengthways in 1/2 inch strips, right to the skin. Do the same thing crosswise. You want all the way to the skin but don't poke through. At the end you'll have a "grid" of 1/2 x1/2 squares or a little larger. Now you just hold the long ends with thumbs and push up on the outside in the middle... the whole thing will invert and leave these squared columns of mango you can snip off with your knife or just spoon them out.
the whole thing will invert and leave these squared columns of mango you can snip off with your knife or just spoon them out.
Or gnaw off like a savage, if you're me.
Here's a trick for mangoes you may not know: First cut in half long ways first, pop out seed with twist of knife (chefs, same trick for avocado, doesn't work with a short knife). Now taking one of the halves and a sharp knife, score from the inside it lengthways in 1/2 inch strips, right to the skin. Do the same thing crosswise. You want all the way to the skin but don't poke through. At the end you'll have a "grid" of 1/2 x1/2 squares or a little larger. Now you just hold the long ends with thumbs and push up on the outside in the middle... the whole thing will invert and leave these squared columns of mango you can snip off with your knife or just spoon them out.
This is the sort of instruction set that, half way through, I think should say, "Now go to the fridge and take out the pre-sliced mango."
I ate everything whole as a kid. Apples, kiwis, chicken legs, corn on the cob, sticks of butter, whatever. Not anymore. My desire for completeness has faded. Well, except for kiwis.
48: That's ridiculous. It takes 10 seconds a side if that. I probably could have explained better, but it's dead easy.
Alternative to 45 - slice halves into wedges with skin still attached. Use the skin to give something to hold onto while you eat the flesh.
You did not eat whole cobs of corn.
52: yeah, i was sort of assuming you wanted to do something with the chunks of mango other than scarf them in hand. In retrospect, probably not.
53: I did! Corn cobs aren't so bad. Haven't you ever bit off the top of a piece of corn? It's the same as that, but more fibrous.
45: That's actually the method someone showed me recently, and it was jaw-dropping, impressive. Wow. I haven't really reproduced it without mashing things up, kinda -- I think it matters how ripe the mango is.
I like mangoes so much I've tended to go for the gnawing technique, but you can get strings in your teeth that way, which is a little annoying, not to mention smearing the thing all over your face and hands. When being polite, I slice pieces off, but it wastes so much precious flesh.
My uncle eats cupcakes with the wrappers still on.
To fix a pineapple:
Cut into 4 long wedges.
For each wedge, you take your knife, and saw along the inside of the rind, so that you have a wedge-shaped piece of pineapple sitting inside the shell. (This is easy.)
Leave the wedge sitting in the shell. Now take the knife and cut the pineapple wedge into manageable pieces by slicing it "horizontally" (that is, 90 degrees to the length of the wedge).
In other words, you'll get 6 or so triangles per wedge. One tip of each triangle is the core, and the opposite side of the triangle sits along the shell. Then you eat with a toothpick or fork, and just don't eat the core part.
48: That's ridiculous.
Oh yeah? Well I use the 10 seconds I gain to bone the chicken with one hand and practice my jazz clarinet fingering with the other, so don't talk to me about manly technique in the kitchen.
I tried to eat peach pits but that never really worked.
Also I just eat an apple like a regular human being who just eats their apple.
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Why does nearly every single possible match for me on OKCupid turn out to be 26 years old? That's just barely age/2+7. Presumably there are some 27 year olds out there? 30, maybe even 39 y.o. But no. Twenty-six it is. bizarre.
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you can get strings in your teeth that way, which is a little annoying, not to mention smearing the thing all over your face and hands
I can't believe you're even thinking that, Apostropher. That's disgusting.
57: a few practice runs and you'll get better at it, and it doesn't waste anything. The main reason I learned this ages ago was in a restaurant, as if you do it right you can end up with perfect cubes, and you can do a dozen in no time at all with a little practice (You can do larger than 1/2 inch slices, i just said that as a starter 'cause it's easier to invert)
Oh yeah? Well I use the 10 seconds I gain to bone the chicken with one hand and practice my jazz clarinet fingering with the other, so don't talk to me about manly technique in the kitchen.
That may be so, but your pre-sliced mango probably sucks.
[how do you get the chicken bits out of your clarinet?]
48: That's ridiculous. It takes 10 seconds a side if that. I probably could have explained better, but it's dead easy.
It really is. Gnaw gnaw gnaw.
You can't slice the top off, then slice off the sides as thinly as possible, and then proceed?
I can't? Or wait. You mean I can?
I wonder if there's a diagram in the the Joy of Cooking? You know, like that diagram of the champagne fountain...?
56: I don't believe you. You're going to have to demonstrate this at the next meetup. Did you eat the husk?
68: no, of course not. Just the cob.
I can't? Or wait. You mean I can?
This looks basically like the method I described above. Others work too!
64: Yep, I'm going to get better at that for times when I'm not inclined to just slice and eat. The friend who showed me was totally matter-of-fact about it, and was amused that I was like, "What are you doing, what are you doing?"
I've known people who eat corn cobs.
69: then you didn't really eat them whole.
72: oh fer chrissakes. I didn't eat the cornstalk or the silk or the soil in which it was planted, either!
67: I can't? Or wait. You mean I can?
You can. I wasn't sure what the difficulty in cutting up a pineapple was.
"One of these" is precisely that against which my technique is a reaction! FAIL!
I am forced to recant, then. (Eppur si muove.)
Why didn't you eat the cornsilk?
71: I should have mentioned also, mango can really stick to the seed. With practice, you can get good at eyeballing where to cut so that you are slicing on either side of it, longways, then you get 3 pieces. The middle bit has the seed, but you can cut around it with very little waste that way.
When I was a kid, my dad would slice apples this way:
- place the apple on a flat surface and imagine that it is a human head
- with a knife, cut the apple as if you were attacking the apple-man with a wildly-swung-overhead axe, striking him directly on the crown of the head. stop halfway, as if the axe got stuck on the brainpan or something similarly unpleasant.
- rotate the apple 90 degrees about its core axis and make a similar cut from its bottom. (conversion to radians is left as an exercise for the reader)
- make connecting cuts along apple's equator (so to speak), but only along two non-contiguous quadrants of the apple.
We called these "secret apples" because they continue to look like complete apples, and will actually hold together pretty well unless you pull them apart at the right angle.
None of this will help you eat the apple, of course. But frankly that's not my problem.
I never knew you could eat apples whole; when I found out you could, I did it for a few years in college (handy when eating in lecture), but determined that the slight displeasure I felt at the prospect of having to eat the core was causing me to eat fewer apples.
Now what I tend to do is to eat top-down, since the top part rounds over into pure goodness, plus it leaves me a stable base for putting down mid-apple. The resulting core is more conical than the traditional shape.
77: like the husk, it wasn't served to me.
Wow, I thought the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home was sort of adorably insane for devoting a whole page to how to peel a mango, but, um...maybe not.
(The pre-sliced mangos get me in two ways: the usual gripe that exposure to light/air destroys nutrients, and the pettier "Yuck, just think about how that got that way.")
Why does nearly every single possible match for me on OKCupid turn out to be 26 years old?
a) the demographic skews really young
b) the demographic skews male: there really aren't nearly as many women on there
c) both
83: pshaw. Julia had 11 pages on an how to make an omlette.
82: it wasn't really like that, John. It was more like I wanted to eat everything that was put on my plate than that I took delight in shocking Brock with what I would consume.
Why does nearly every single possible match for me on OKCupid turn out to be 26 years old?
When I was 27 and on OKCupid (the perfect age to be a female there, in my experience), every match I got and every guy who contacted me for a good while was 34.
After a while I realized that it was all the guys who had been focused on everything but relationships, who had suddenly woken up one day at age 34 and were like, hey, I should get a girlfriend.
I didn't eat apples whole, but I saved the seeds and ate them separately. Nice cyanide taste, no joke. Large numbers of cherry pits can kill you, though.
You could have asked.
Asking for the cornsilk makes you sound like a greedy guts.
Someone please answer 37. This is causing me great anxiety. Do you whole-apple eaters eat the anti-stem? (I'm not sure what it's called.)
It takes about 100 grams of crushed (crushing causes the "prunasin" or "Amygdalin" to produce the cyanide) apple seed to make a person of about 150 pounds rather ill. This is around half a cup of seeds. To commit suicide using apple seeds you need to crush and eat these seeds fairly quickly, both to avoid evaporation of cyanide from the crushed seeds, and so as not to lose consciousness before ingesting a lethal dose.
Two cups of seeds in a blender should do it.
Julia had 11 pages on an how to make an omlette.
Well, yeah, I kind of expect cookbook bibles that are 800 pages long and very consciously about How to Cook to tell you that sort of thing. If it had been the Cook's Illustrated The New Best Recipe, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelash. (Maybe one eyelash.)
But this is I think the shortest Moosewood book there is, and it's not heavy on the frills or the how-to cooking techniques. Maybe it's just that they were light on desserts. I'm pretty sure that's where the mango recipe is, and also an amusing one about things to serve with strawberries.
You disgust me, Sifu. What else do you eat? Human toes?
I only recently learned to spell omelette reliably. Spelchek doesn't help.
83 and 86.last make sense. It's not critical because my plan does not involve actual dates for at least 4 months, so I have time to locate non-skewed sources of contacts.
When eating oranges, my seekrit goal is always to remove the peel in one solid piece. I sometimes get things going with a spoon under the peel (concave side towards the fruit) to pop up a big segment.
If you blended the seeds in apple juice you wouldn't have to worry about the necessary cyanide evaporating.
97: score the skin in a spiral top to bottom. The strip should be 1/2 to 3/4 inch wide. Peel the spiral. Tadaa!
It's funny you don't provide a cite for 91, John. Is this a family recipe that was handed down by your wickedly wayward Puritan ancestors?
89: It is the remnants of the calyx (sepals) and stamen.
A lot of those witches knew a thing or two, MC.
It is the remnants of the calyx (sepals) and stamen.
The blossom end, for short.
Chicken feet are kind of annoying. Not a lot of meat per gristle/bone/whatever else chickens have on their feet that's not meat-like.
I'm coming out of my hiatus to say that I independently thought this up and that SB's instructions are a little misleading: "To begin, make a cut with the very tip of the knife tangent to the circle" could mean that you slice a plane of the apple straight off. But obviously one of two different things is meant:
less elegant: start the cut at the point where the line intersects the circle: imagine a ray going from this point outwards, rather than a line subtending the outside circle which is the apple's skin.
more elegant: calculate where the next cut will intersect with the tangent along which you're currently cutting, and start your cut there. If you wanted four slices, for instance, this would mean that you would go along the tangent line until you reached a point such that if you drew an orthogonal line, it too would be tangent to the inner circle. Begin the cut there.
88: Asking for the cornsilk makes you sound like a greedy guts.
People who don't prise off as much of the cornsilk as possible from ears of corn bug me.
The key is to enjoy the gristle. Same with chicken wingtips and pig uterus.
I think I used to eat peanut shells, too. Anyhow, like I said, all this is in the past. Now everything I eat is entirely normal.
Oh, and to comment on this: I see LB's apple-core eating and raise her an ex of mine who used to eat the entirety of a chicken leg or wing, bones included. The crunching was sort of fascinating.
Was he named William?
I only eat the fresh cornsilk, not the dried up stuff. If it's dried up I send it back to the kitchen.
OT: My jaw just dropped when I pulled up the local newspaper's site and saw the headline: " Fight crime: Legalize drugs? Inquirer Editorial."
But no, the editorial board didn't just make a wild turn. Somebody just did a doofus move with vocabulary, and wrote "editorial" when they meant "op-ed."
Rats. Would have be fun. They haven't endorsed anything remotely controversial since they urged Clinton to step down in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal.
You're all insane. None of this is real. This must be a bad trip. No one eats whole fucking chicken legs.
Coconut shells? Clam shells? Pomegranate husks?
We're just trying to build a profile. There's really no such things a "normal" or "abnormal".
If you eat the bone you will most likely get get sick or choke. Damn straight.
115: no, no, does the husk include the internal stuff that's not seeds?
You know what drives me crazy? When a person removes the green bit from a strawberry not with a conical cut around the offending portion but rather by slicing of the entire top of the berry. Crazy, I tell you!
I don't think I've eaten a lobster shell, but I know people who have.
You know what's gross? Little bits of eggshell in the egg salad, that's what. It's probably full of calcium or something, but eww.
Clam shells build strong teeth, fight stomach acid, and have a cleansing effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
111: Not only do I not know who William might be, I haven't been able to envision the apple-cutting method you and Standpipe are describing.
I wonder how Tweety eats kiwis, if he eats 'em whole. Just bite on in, I guess.
You know who really knew how to eat a fucking apple? Fred Astaire.
I did eat whole kiwis as a child, because my mother eats them that way. I later came to appreciate the extent of her mental disorders, and stopped.
I wonder how Tweety eats kiwis, if he eats 'em whole. Just bite on in, I guess.
Yep. Just bite 'em. They're better that way; the skin has a sourness that pleasantly accentuates (what I find to be) the relatively bland sweetness of the flesh of the fruit.
118: Then didn't 34 send you into conniptions? I can only imagine my father's reaction. He cuts out every pineapple eye individually.
120: Sadly, egg salad is gross. Sorry.
This picture from Brock's link demands much more explanation.
In Africa it is common for pregnant women to eat the pieces of termite mound. Very high in iron, and unlikely to be contaminated with human pathogens. I've tried it and it pretty much tastes like dirt.
Heebie, are you getting enough dirt in your diet? I worry.
I eat tofu without even removing the packaging. No, fer reals.
Artistic legacies of certain patients are on display, too. There is an imaginative arrangement of 1,446 items swallowed by a patient and removed from her intestines and stomach. She died during surgery from bleeding caused by 453 nails, 42 screws, safety pins, spoon tops, and salt and pepper shaker tops.
Sometimes I wonder if you have any culture at all, parsley.
The masculine way Astaire ate apples made my knees weak.
58: My uncle eats cupcakes with the wrappers still on.
I did this as a youth. The paper gives it a chewy texture that slowly dissolves, kind of a short-lived cake chewing gum.
I bet Brock doesn't eat the rind of brie.
Jeez, don't any of you have an apple corer? Zips out the core quickly, leaves you with a whole apple and is also good for pears, especially when you're about to poach them in wine. I got my first one from my grandmother.
This thread reminds me that, all joking aside, I tried to form a paper-eating club in middle school.
120: It is actually acceptable not to send a thank-you for lunch if there were eggshells in the egg salad.
140 to 139. If you're still hungry, Stanley, eat the note.
129: Wrong. As with your view of donuts. No need to send a thank-you note for the ruling. This one was gratis.
134: Her nickname is "parsnip".
144: it's okay to leave egg shells in donuts?
"Parsley" is of longer standing.
132: You beast. What a manly way to eat an effete foodstuff.
Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g., clay, coal, soil, feces, chalk, paper, soap, mucus, ash, gum etc.) or an abnormal appetite for some things that may be considered foods, such as food ingredients (e.g., flour, raw potato, starch, ice cubes, salt, blood)...Pica is seen in all ages, particularly in pregnant women and small children, especially among children who are developmentally disabled, where it is the most common eating disorder.
Hmm. When I was a little kid, I loved raw potato. My mother would only let me have a little bit at a time, because otherwise, she said, I'd get worms. Little did she know I was suffering from an eating disorder.
146: Read the archives. Or don't. What do I care. The woman doesn't like donuts. Which is wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong.
148: Raw potato is great. I liken the texture to apples, because I'm weird.
149: I don't follow. She didn't want to eat a donut at some specific time?
144: Wrong. As with your view of donuts.
It's all a matter of preference, ari, geez.
152: There are rules, parsimon. For that pearl, I expect to be thanked. I can't keep giving this stuff away, after all.
I did eat whole kiwis as a child, because my mother eats them that way.
Whole kiwis is totally the way to go. Like Sifu says, improves the taste, and like I say, improves the texture too.
What objection do people have to whole kiwis? The skin, the core, or both?
No donuts at all? Not even boston creme? What about "controversial" donut varieties, like say bagels? Are those out, too?
You know who does a nice egg salad, Ari? Tim Horton's, that's who. And also the doughnuts, of course.
I, too, do not like donuts. I dislike most sweet snack type foods, so it's not like I'm singling out donuts.
157: All the more reason to plan a visit to the ancestral homeland. Do I owe you a thank-you note? I'll send one just in case.
155: how could you object to the core? Are you saying, like, do people eat just the skin?
Do you peel peaches before eating them, Brock? (genuinely curious)
159: you probably just haven't had the right donut.
163 cont'd: which is totally okay! Don't feel bad. You'll get there.
It's never occurred to me to eat the skin of a kiwi -- you must wash off the hairiness of the skin, I'd think.
162: of course he does. Then puts them on a seperate plate from his crustless sandwich of extra-smooth peanut butter and kosher marshmallow fluff.
161: Dude. No, there's that green stuff within the skin yet around the whitish center, which I could imagine some people might think is the only palatable part.
Butternut squash is entirely too difficult.
163 - I do not consider the flattish round custard filled things to be donuts. They are one of the few sweet snack type things I actually like. But they are not toroids, which is essential to donut-ness.
The trick to peeling kiwi is to use a carrot peeler. You can take the skin off while losing little to no fruit.
Of course it's still a terrible mess. If I really thought it was okay to eat the peel, that would make kiwi eating much simpler and easier. But there are rules about this sort of thing.
WHY WOULD I PEEL A PEACH?
Beats me, I thought maybe you had some kind of texture issue. Are you still losing weight, BTW?
171: don't stand on topology, man. The universe of donuts has room for all shapes and sizes. Also those are a hell of a lot sweeter than regular donuts, which leads me to believe you may be insane.
171: "round eclairs"
As for kiwis, I cut them into 4 pieces, then put the whole piece in my mouth, but usually spit out the skin after it has imparted its sourness to the chewing process. Unless the kiwi is overripe and the skin is easy to bite apart without being TOO sour.
Any debate on donuts will need to make the distinction between the sugar-slathered scum vessels of the Krispy Kreme type versus a proper German-bakery-style cake donut. And I believe my position on the matter is already clear.
I'll send one just in case.
Oh yes, please do. And then I'll thank you for your thank you, and you'll then feel obliged to thank me for my thanks of your thank you...and then we'll see which one of us blinks first, okay?
Krispy Kreme are definitely painfully sweet. If I had to pick an ideal donut I'd head right for the unglazed Dunkin Donuts chocolate.
So now we're into three or four hundred comments about the ideal donut, yeah?
My Comcast Internet connection keeps going out while Verizon is harassing me about switching to Fios. I suspect this is not coincidence. (Sent from my iPhone. Grrrrr.)
174: I am still not gaining weight, though am not still losing it. But I've only managed to stem the losses through forced gluttony, with no respite. It's a daily struggle.
176: but usually spit out the skin
Now these are the kinds of eating lessons we need to hear.
Seriously, I eat kiwis by cutting them in half (skin, or peel, and all), and scooping out the interior with a spoon.
I agree vehemently, almost violently, with stanley at 177.
Krispy Kremes are too sweet, full of air, and do not dunk well in coffee, which is the primary purpose of a doughnut. They are an abomination.
They do make a decent pumpkin cake donut in season. Lots of cinnamon & allspice.
Hm, I realized I misdescribed the method. Let's give it another shot, with idealizations!
Model the apple (top-down view) by the circle x2 + y2 = 25, that is, a circle with radius five centered at the origin, and say that the core is described by the unit circle centered at the origin. Then, to cut (for example) four slices in the approved method, draw a line from (-1,1) to (sqrt(24),1) (that is, a rightward line to the edge of the outer circle). Then draw a line from (1,1) to (1, -sqrt(24)) (that is, a downward line). Note that this will cut off a slice of apple since it intersects the previously drawn line. Then, draw a line from (1, -1) to (-sqrt(24), -1), cutting off another slice. Finally, a line from (-1, -1) to (-1, sqrt(24)) cuts off both remaining slices, leaving a square tangent to the inner unit circle at the midpoints of each of its sides.
This example given, you should be able to see how to generalize it to more slices. Naturally, the more slices you make, the optimaler your use of the apple (ignoring losses owing to the knife itself).
177: I try not to discriminate. But, Krispy Kremes are only edible when freshly pooped from the Krispy Kreme donut pooper.
178: We'll already had a guilt-off. And surely you remember who won. I feel lousy for even mentioning it, of course.
But, Krispy Kremes are only edible when freshly pooped from the Krispy Kreme donut pooper.
Indeed. There's a reason the words HOT and FRESH are so emphasized at actual KK donuteries. The day-old ones at 7-Elevens and even worse, in boxes, are a shameful bastardization.
175: Topology is crucial. "Donut shaped" things are toroids. If we accept spheres or oblate spheroids as "donut shaped" we have chaos. Anarchy.
The oblate spheroids with mild custard filling are not donuts, and they are delicious.
Also, I endorse 177. The Donuts I abhor are the Krispy Kreme/Dunkin Donuts things. The kind cops munch. The denser lower sugar type are OK.
Far too sweet, yes, but Krispy Kremes don't require chewing, which is a plus. They just dissolve instantly in your mouth, and the suger goes straight into your bloodstream.
184 clears up a lot of confusion for me.
All pastries should topologically be Klein bottles.
the sugar-slathered scum vessels of the Krispy Kreme type
I'll admit that I was sceptical from the outset. But so many people urged me to try Krispy Kreme, assured me that it would change my concept of donuts, if not of baked goods in general, and change it for the better, that I finally decided to venture forth and broaden my baked-goods horizons. Totally disgusting! What an utter fraud upon the gullible tastebuds of an unsuspecting public, who think they're being offered a donut, or perhaps a doughnut. Well, I'm not surprised that Krispy Kreme can't survive in New York, frankly, and they'd never make it in Canada.
they'd never make it in Canada
Canadians are sweet enough already, I'm told.
Seriously, I eat kiwis by cutting them in half (skin, or peel, and all), and scooping out the interior with a spoon.
This is the only way to eat the things; they even make handy kiwifruit spoons/knives so you can do the whole process with one implement.
On a more OP-related note, a restaurant boss once suggested halving an avocado, removing the pit, and filling the resulting reservoir with a bit of soy sauce. Eat with a spoon. Delicious.
The kiwi is not to be trusted on how to consume his countrymen.
188: There are no "Krispy Kreme/Dunkin Donuts things." There are Krispy Kreme type things that Dunkin' Donuts sells and ... well that's it really. In fact if one were to Venn diagram the intersection between the sets it would be like eating an apple by cutting off a small piece of it with another apple -- an apple made of cutting/sickly sweet raised donuts.
Oh, god, let me tell you motherfuckers, it's a fucking kiwifruit; the word kiwi, properly used, refers to a small nocturnal flightless bird that lays comparatively very large eggs.
They're both brown and fuzzy on the outside though.
Cunts.
199: it's a fucking kiwifruit
I noticed that, and was in the process of being duly chastened.
196: I do the same with balsamic vinegar.
And inside a kiwibird/kiwifruit, it's too dark to read.
Good balsamic vinegar doesn't have pits.
The word kiwi, properly used, refers to people from that small island off the coast of Australia who are obsessed with rugby, sheep and sheeprugby.
203: oh and I bet you peel your soy sauce, too.
We'll already had a guilt-off. And surely you remember who won. I feel lousy for even mentioning it, of course.
Yeah, but I left out the smallpox victims. And also the grandfather who won a scholarship to Queen's in Kingston, but his mother wouldn't let him go to university because she didn't want him to go amongst the Presbyterians, so he spent all his life as a railroader and died in an RC nursing home in Ottawa that was run by the Grey Sisters and that was known as a "House of Refuge for the Irish Poor." But you won fair and square, Ari! and no hard feelings, of course.
You're from Montreal, aren't you?
203: oh and I bet you peel your soy sauce, too.
I assumed b-wo conjugated:
Yo soy sauce.
Tú eres sauce.
Él/Ella/Usted es sauce.
Nosotros somos sauce.
Vosotros sois sauce.
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes son sauce.
we're only interested in measurable donuts, Amit.
#138: Jeez, don't any of you have an apple corer? Zips out the core quickly, leaves you with a whole apple and is also good for pears, especially when you're about to poach them in wine. I got my first one from my grandmother.
Why just core, when you can core AND slice with one simple push?
Yay laziness!
Oops, I left out my surname in #211.
Some fruit skins are a little bit disturbing, let's be honest here.
The kiwi fruit has those tiny little seeds that nobody seems to know what to do with.
62:
Why does nearly every single possible match for me on OKCupid turn out to be 26 years old?
It must be a function of their algorithm, because, at 27, nearly everyone I'm matched with is either 20 or 40. There's a bit of a discrepancy there.
And oh, yes, mm, fruit. I just eat things whole. What's this knife business?
an ex of mine who used to eat the entirety of a chicken leg or wing, bones included. The crunching was sort of fascinating
I once visited a restaurant in Japan with two clients (division president and his head of strategy, both Americans) and the Japanese head of the local subsidiary.
The meal was a succession of chicken parts cooked on bamboo skewers on the hibachi. The first skewer was straightforward chunks of chicken meat. Then it proceeded to marginally acceptable parts like chicken livers and chicken hearts. The two Americans got off the bus at that point. Then came a skewer of something crunchy, which turned out to be chicken vertebrae. I gritted my teeth and continued. The American colleagues could barely conceal their disgust. Then came a skewer of chicken hip joints (the bulbuous, gristly end of the leg bone). I nibbled on one and pleaded satiation.
By all appearances, the Japanese guy was genuinely surprised that the Americans didn't appreciate this little slice of authentic Japanese culture. But then again, maybe he was secretly laughing at us from behind his inscrutable Oriental visage.
I eat chicken hip joints. There's marrow and other good stuff in there. It's a little hard to picture a skewer of them, but I suppose I'd have at it.
On the other hand, I really have no taste for organ meats, at least not in unmolested form.
Now everybody left. Daaaamn!
Hey, did everybody know bologna is fermented? As is sauerkraut! As, for that matter, is that corpse that smells like cheese!
Topology is crucial. "Donut shaped" things are toroids. If we accept spheres or oblate spheroids as "donut shaped" we have chaos. Anarchy.
The twisted braid variety of doughnut (available at Dunkin Donuts, 'natch) preceded the toroid variety, historically speaking.
What, no Banach-Tarski Paradox jokes?
This is unfogged, amit. When making jokes about topology, the Hairy Ball Theorem is preferred.
219: Lebanon bologna is actually a variety of salami, and the importance of fermentation to the production of salami has been previously discussed on unfogged.
The twisted braid variety of doughnut
Ain't that a cruller?
221: yeah, I know. But I've been reading about sauerkraut all day, and you know, fermentation on the brain.
Plus, I was trying to stir up controversy.
COUNTERPOINT: FERMENTED CHICKEN JOINTS TASTE LIKE JESUS!
Ain't that a cruller?
I was referring to the stick-like version consisting of two twisted strands of dough (the "cake stick" at Dunkies). Though, for all I know, the cruller might well have more ancient provenance than the toroid donut, too.
223: No way, man. Jesus tastes like stale Carr's biscuits and cheap sherry.
224: the picture is of a french cruller; the typical cruller (of which the cake stick is a poor imitation, if wikipedia is to be believed) is straight.
Okay, I'll stir controversy some other way: all those fMRI studies about functional specialization of crotch grabbing in male brains? Probably horseshit.
Incidentally, the paper linked in 226.2 contains a really excellent summary of the methodology of fMRI studies, and is generally very straightforward and readable.
If you want to stir controversy at 1am Unfogged Standard Time, you'll have to do better than that. Try "Any woman who isn't out and out ugly can get laid any time she wants."
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Oh, I know I'm doomed to failure. I could be more controversial arguing in favor of closing guantanamo. But it's a really really interesting paper.
But maybe, just maybe, I beat out the comment spam, controversiality-wise.
It may be easier to appreciate the gravity of the non-independence error by transposing it outside of neuroimaging. We (the authors of this paper) have identified a weather station whose temperature readings predict daily changes in the value of a specific set of stocks with a correlation of r=-0.87. For $50.00, we will provide the list of stocks to any interested reader. That way, you can buy the stocks every morning when the weather station posts a drop in temperature, and sell when the temperature goes up. Obviously, your potential profits here are enormous. But you may wonder: how did we find this correlation? The figure of - .87 was arrived at by separately computing the correlation between the readings of the weather station in Adak Island, Alaska, with each of the 3315 financial instruments available for the New York Stock Exchange (through the Mathematica function FinancialData) over the 10 days that the market was open between November 18th and December 3rd, 2008. We then averaged the correlation values of the stocks whose correlation exceeded a high threshold of our choosing, thus yielding the figure of -.87.Love it!
Do you want controversy? I can try, but only because the diner waiter kept bringing me real coffee at 3am.
You know what makes the paper such a damn blockbuster? It's more of an indication that statistical innumeracy extends not just to those who use sophisticated statistics-driven financial instruments, but people doing statistical analysis of brain function! I mean, of all the people you'd hope would have absorbed the lessons of probabilistic inference.
234: One of my friends does health-science-related statistics, and it seems kind of sad how few people doing research in that field bother to hire someone to do the math for them.
235: I mean, math is the field. Without meaningful statistical correlations, you have absolutely no result at all, and yet these people picked a methodology designed to produce spurious correlation. I don't even think they did it on purpose; they all responded openly and cheerfully to a survey about methodology. Unreal.
I can't say much for the writing skills of some of the people in the Modern Language Association, either. I don't even mean that the papers are abstruse; like the formal documents composed by members contain numerous troubling grammatical errors of subject-verb agreement and stuff.
The paper Sifu linked to is indeed astounding. Even consultants are usually too ashamed to engage in that kind of datamining without using a split half technique to validate the results.
235: I had two friends who did statistics and experiment design for medical researchers. The more sophisticated of the two was boggled by the researchers' weak understanding of methods. The other guy was more like a tech, but noted that psych researchers were willing to accept any statistically significant correlation at all as meaningful, regardless of how tiny, whereas biomed researchers actually were a little more demanding.
Sifu, thanks for passing on the link to that paper. It's related to my field, and I know the first author -- I'm going to have to congratulate him for a job well done! It's amazing to me how much statistical innumeracy there is even among first-rate scientists: I put it down to poor training, but that's no excuse.
184: "Assume a cow-shaped apple......"
I saw that paper via Gel/man the other day. It's too, too awesome.
Neither of my friends reported anything as bad as what Sifu linked, though.
When I hear the phrase "sophisticated new statistical methods" I reach for my gun. If they're new, they're untested, and even if they're good, people might not know how to work them right. Work the bugs out for a decade or so.
I have the vague idea that statistical methods used to be used to find results that could also be verified or confirmed non-statistically, whereas now a statistical result counts as science all by itself, even though it makes no sense. And ev psych seems to confirm sophisticated statistical correlations by comparing them to common prejudices.
What appeals to my sheer prejudice is the connection to ev-psych love for fMRI imaging. I feel like saying "You guys are always saying that humans didn't evolve to calculate probabilities intuitively, so you really should have anticipated this kind of fuckup, right?"
244: Yes. I am sure using similar techniques we could establish a correlation between widespread abuse of statistics and fields that are both deprecated by Unfogged and whose content should immunize them from such abuse.
But it would be wrong.
Scientists report with high confidence that we live in a Dyson sphere carved out of a universe-spanning apple. Also, there is a gnome in charge of inverting all of your perceived spatial relations.
You people are weird. Why slice an apple at all (unless you're feeding a small child or cooking)? Surely the whole point of an apple is that you don't need cutlery to eat it.
Man, I am just basking in the confirmation of my prejudices.
Good grief, ben's 184 made me realize that I had completely misconstrued the OP: I thought that SB was describing a method to created ring-shaped* slices that would be slightly wedge-shaped in radial section.
This seemed utterly insane, but I held my tongue in the face of all of the bone- and kiwi skin-eating.
* or flattened donut-shaped
Oh, and Stanley's donut pronouncement gets it exactly right.
In college they only offered raised/yeast/awful fluffy donuts, but I discovered how to make them palatable: wrap them up, put them in my bag, and wait until the various books smooshed it flat. Once they were properly densified, and some of the glazing flaked off in the process, they were a decent pastry. I think I called them "crushed glazed."
249: According to the nihilist heretic Sifu, an apple is already donut-shaped right off the tree.
The kiwi fruit has those tiny little seeds that nobody seems to know what to do with.
What the fuck are you talking about? You just eat them. Does anyone do otherwise?
Hey, man, you're the one who's all worried about what to do about the tiny little brown spot on the blossom end of the apple. If you're still curious, I eat it -- I can't even picture how you could plausibly nibble it free from the rest of the apple.
Anyone who doesn't seed their bananas, though, is just sick.
226.2 is great. Further confirmation that peer review sucks.
I get frustrated trying to pock out the little black seeds from the skin of my strawberries before eating them.
255: it's easier just to peel them.
If you have the proper set of berry tweezers, without which none but a barbarian would attempt to eat berries.
Krispy Kreme? Seriously, you people hate Krispy Kreme? There's no hope left for this country at all. Yes, the gas station ones are gross. I think "the gas station ones are gross" can be applied to pretty much anything, so that doesn't count. The ones that are fresh, from a Krispy Kreme that's doing the baking, though... oh, my heavens. They're bliss. If you watch closely you'll see that tiny fairies are stationed at the end of the line to dust the donuts with sifted, powdered joy.
I have trouble picking the seeds out of my Krispy Kreme donuts. And my skin is covered with tiny, tiny synthetic fibers, too small for the finest berry tweezers to grab.
To be fair, they are a product of my beloved south and thus the sifted, powdered joy might be meth. I'm not sure.
Also I first read 143 as instructional and was confused.
Krispy Kreme is about The South, isn't it?
OT: bitchphd wants to win and is now losing -- to jesus general! -- by more than 100 votes. So please, help a sister out.
You're all insane. None of this is real. This must be a bad trip.
....
What the fuck are you talking about? You just eat them.
Brock's consistency in this thread is perfect.
Krispy Kreme is about The South, isn't it?
As far as I can tell, Krispy Kreme is about demonstrating the fact that even bad baked goods taste pretty good when they're still warm, particularly if the dominant flavor is sugar.
Mmm. If he consistently maintains this stress level around food, no wonder he's skinny.
At least for a bit or too, until the sugar load gets gross.
I feel about the Dunkin Donuts vs. Krispy Kreme debate the way I feel about New York vs. Chicago pizza: they're entirely different categories of food and it doesn't make sense to compare them. Krispy Kremes are more akin to candy than to ordinary donuts.
Now we just need someone from central or eastern Canada to point out that none of the US chains can make a decent donut.
Now we just need someone from central or eastern Canada to point out that none of the US chains can make a decent donut.
MC implied it in 193.
I imagine that donuts play a big role in the seduction of bears.
You know what bears and elephants really like, though? Clover, alfalfa, etc. Don't know why, but if you ever get a chance to feed zoo animals, bring clover.
I believe that exhibited love of clover is the origin of the phrase "in clover," meaning to be living on easy street. I know this because I'm a manly man, of course. Lots of fresh air and sunshine does that for one.
Dirt under the fingernails? Chewing snoose?
Don't be so narrow with your definitions, John. I'm one of the Bond-type manly men: effortless mastery of any number of pursuits, including animal husbandry. The last time I animal husbandried a commie to death it was pretty hott.
Wait, not "hott," I meant to say it was really, uh, awesome.
/fistpump!
271: High sugar content, I think.
Isn't animal husbandry a felony? If it isn't I've been depriving myself of a lot of fun for no good reason.
Little things like laws don't stop real farmers like Jack Bauer and James Bond, Emerson.
The best way to eat a ripe mango is in the bath, because otherwise you can't eat it with sufficient gusto without getting mango juice all over your shirt. (According to JBS Haldane)
And Fred Thompson. I will never forget his jowls as long as I live. Now that's a real man.
Fred Thompson's love of mangos would never let him get elected in a center-right country. Mark Penn was all ready to attack him on that issue if he got the nomination.
"Officer, I'm husbanding this ewe, as the Bible directs us to do."
I used to imagine him eating sausages and gravy, working his jowls and smacking his lips. And now I'm imagining that again, and so are you. Blame Robusto.
You people are weird. Why slice an apple at all (unless you're feeding a small child or cooking)?
My apple slicing experiences are indeed almost entirely restricted to contexts of cooking. I do slice pears (using the same technique described in 42) for everyday eating, however. I just like them better that way.
Fred Thompson's nude love of mangos, that should read.
I just thought of something. Are all policemen really "officers"? Are there any cops whom it would be inappropriate to address as "officer"?
What kind of profession consists of nothing but officers? Where are the grunts, the enlisted men?
I don't care how people cut their fruit, but there are issues to be addressed:
1. togolosh, what's with the 4 months thing? Was it explained in a thread I missed?
2. I recently read or heard, though I've no idea where, that the number of strands of cornsilk equals the number of kernels on the cob. I choose to believe this without doing further research.
I recently read or heard, though I've no idea where, that the number of strands of cornsilk equals the number of kernels on the cob
From the Wikipedia entry for maize
The apex of the stem ends in the tassel, an inflorescence of male flowers. Each silk may become pollinated to produce one kernel of corn.
287.2: Probably from Michael Pollan (I think it is in Omnivore's Dilemna.) They are elongated stigmas and each connects to a potential kernel, which becomes an actual kernel upon pollination from the tassel (pollen travels down the silk).
I've half convinced that every respectable journal in the social sciences should employ a professional statistician whose job is to review every paper slated for publication in the journal. Or, alternatively, as one member of the peer review team, although that would obviously be a much higher workload. Or they could have a stable of statisticians on their peer review teams, and a policy that one must be assigned to every paper being reviewed. Or somesuch other similar arrangement.* Something needs to be done. Time and time again, scientists with one or two stats classes have proven immensely incapable of handling advanced statistical techniques.
290 is a huge issue in medical research, as a lot of MDs have trouble accepting how ill prepared for research their training has left them. Statistics isn't the only area this shows up in, but it's key. Better institutions will hire a biostatician (or dept., if large enough) but policy may not force everyone to consult them. Journal editors and reviewers are not necessarily any better off than the researchers, which is a bit crazy. You can see some very bad work published (and some excellent work also, of course) in journals with a good reputation.
I'm as big a fan of proper use of statistics as the next person, but I'm equally concerned with the conflation of certain doughnut-related issues in this thread. Let's be clear on the real questions:
1. Chains vs. non-chains. Whether or not KK or Dunkin' make good doughnuts is not relevant to the overall cake vs. yeast debate. Obviously, non-chain, small batch, artisanal doughnuts* are usually better. (Offer does not apply in Canada, apparently.)
2. Cake vs. yeast doughnuts NOT from Krispy Kreme. One cannot reach any conclusions about cake vs. yeast unless you're talking about a good cake doughnut vs. a good yeast doughnut, light as air and dusted with sugar. They are both delicious, though, as mcmanus points out, they are not both appropriate for dunking. (Query: Can one bring a class action lawsuit based on the fraudulent representation inherent in Dunkin' Donuts' name?)
3. Anything vs. the canonical Krispy Kreme doughnuts marinated in a bucket of glaze which are in fact disgusting. The hot ones may actually be worse. Because we love RMMP, we will not think less of him for his inherited KK preference.
4. Anything vs. other KK doughnuts. Has anyone ever actually eaten any of the others? I just assume they're bad as well.
*There's a doughnut shop in Austin that is open at seemingly random hours, including late at night sometimes. If it happens to be open when you're driving by, you stop and get some, whether or not you're in a doughnut mood.
Better institutions will hire a biostatician.....
That's what my friend was, a statistician advising biomed researchers at a major (well, second-rank) research hospital. As I said, he was astonished at their ineptness at statistics and research design. (His own training was as a sociologist). Notably, though, he wasn't faculty, wasn't tenured, may not have been full time, and may not have been replaced when he left.
My best story came from an ed department whose head didn't understand statistics but wanted them in all masters theses. My friend in the program shopped for a statistician untill he found one able to conceal the fact that the thesis's data refuted its conclusion.
The donut eating part is what stops me from applying for Canadian citizenship. Sex with bears sounds like fun and I'll probably learn to like curling, but donuts do nothing for me.
Notably, though, he wasn't faculty, wasn't tenured, may not have been full time, and may not have been replaced when he left.
Yes, this can be a problem too. Some institutions really don't take this stuff seriously, which is astonishing. Doing work in the area for the last few years has been something akin to the idea that "working in a restaurant for 6 months will forever change the way you thing about them"
294: Maybe they'd let you get away with just eating their fine Torontoian bagels.
The donut eating part is what stops me from applying for Canadian citizenship.
But this really only applies to part of the country. Move to the west, they'll feel much the same about donuts. Also, more bears.
I've never heard of a "small-batch artisanal donut". It sounds like a small-batch artisanal chicken nugget. But I guess it's an actual pastry that could be made in a small-batch way if there were any businesses that did that.
their fine Torontoian bagels.
It's hard to find good bagels in Toronto. On the other hand, this is true of all cities that aren't Montreal. I've heard if you look hard enough you can find acceptable substitutes in New York, but that may be apocryphal.
The subject of banana-peeling came up the other day at lunch. People were surprised that I peel it entirely before eating. Rough transcription:
Me: "Yeah, is that odd? I don't want to hold a partly-peeled banana in my hand as I eat it; it makes me feel like a monkey."
Co-worker: "Actually, monkeys eat bananas your way."
Me: "Well, a cartoon monkey then."
The real problem is the bananus. I feel like it's inappropriate to throw away any part of the banana but the skin, but I really don't want to bite the nub at the bottom of the banana.
There's a doughnut shop in Austin that is open at seemingly random hours, including late at night sometimes. If it happens to be open when you're driving by, you stop and get some, whether or not you're in a doughnut mood.
Is that by any chance the one on Airport around 50th? If it's even still there. Lived a couple blocks from it for a brief stretch, years ago; it was basically open overnight (regularly so, IIRC), not much if at all during the day. My god they were dangerously good donuts.
299: Oh, Montreal. I forgot which Canadian city y'all have said has good bagels.
Do the Quebecois eat donuts?
But then, they'd hate me because I'm too Canadianish.
304: Nah, they eat Poutine. They'd like you just fine.
302: That's the one, Mrs. Johnson's. I drive past it reasonably often -- on my way to and from, you know, the airport -- and I haven't figured out which nights it's consistently open and once in a while it'll be open during the day. Nor do I know who sells them retail; I need to remember to ask next time I'm there.
287.1 - from the New Years resolution thread and mentioned en passant in the I Got Disappointed By Someone New discussion of Trollopewockets.
My not-really NY resolution is to get back out there and meet some people, hopefully including hot single women with a taste for Real Men nerds. No mentioned was detail such as the scheduling, order of priorities, bill of materials, etc. Now I have revealed one element. The others must remain a mystery, though if anything mind-buggeringly awesome happens I may be unable to resist boasting.
Thanks to AWB among others, when the time comes I will now have in my online dating profile the phrase "Mind of a scholar, cock of a retard."
Here's the thing that's so bizarre to me: I don't know shit from a pickle when it comes to statistics, and yet even I could have spotted the particular errors under discussion here. And yet, these people aren't stupid, and, while their statistics training is likely insufficient, it's almost certainly better than mine. So what's going on?
309: Why assume "these people aren't stupid"?
From what I've seen and heard, new grad students learn not to ask certain kinds of questions, and these inconvenient questions can be systematically unasked for decades since the PhD the graduate student becomes doesn't ask the question either. There's a whole philosophical edifice built up around counterintuitive assumptions and theoretical fictions.
So once a statistical mistake is institutionalized as a paradigm not to be questioned, it's immortal.
309, 310: I know some fairly bright people -- that is, capable of doing some kind of academic work -- who really shut down on any question involving mathematical logic (might be able to do calculations by cookbook methods, but can't think about them). I've told the story about the researcher I worked for doing data entry and programming when I was in high school, who wanted me to reenter all the data from a study, because I'd entered incomes in thousands of dollars (that is, "16" for "16,000") and she wanted to be absolutely sure that the standard deviation of the data would come out the same with the three extra zeroes in there.
She wasn't conventionally stupid, but even simple math made her sense of logic shut down. If the people doing these studies are honest (and they might not be -- this could be conscious fudging for more exciting results), it sounds as if they have similar issues.
The paper attempts to answer the question posed in 309, but it's not really a satisfying response:
"Interestingly, we suspect that the
problems brought to light here are ones
that most editors and reviewers of
studies using purely behavioral measures
would usually be quite sensitive to....
It may be that the
problems are not being recognized in
social neuroscience because of the relative unfamiliarity of the measures,
and the relatively greater complexity of
the data analyses. Moreover, perhaps
the fact that the papers report using
procedures that include some precautions
relating to the issue of multiple
comparisons leads reviewers to assume
that such matters are all well taken care
of.
308: I guess I'll have to be satisfied with that, though you didn't actually say why there's a 4-month delay. I hope you realize that you will have to liveblog at least the first and last 15 minutes of each date (maximum awkwardness!).
Also, you must date at least 30 people, to form a decent sample.
Also, the less comfortable a set of researchers are with their command of the stats, I would guess that the less clear they are likely to be in describing what they've done. I wouldn't be surprised if things like this made it past reviewers because the final writeup didn't convey how they'd done the data analysis.
Sex with bears sounds like fun and I'll probably learn to like curling
Is that the bears' preferred term for spooning, or what?
A feature of fMRI stuff is that it generates an absolute shitload of data, and analyzing it is often (a) automated and (b) applied by rote. This kind of thing can lead to big mistakes. Once your mistaken method is published, it can be copied as authoritative.
made it past reviewers because the final writeup didn't convey how they'd done the data analysis.
But this is a failure on the part of reviewers, and in a very real sense the buck stops at the editor.
This is a hard problem.
and analyzing it is often (a) automated and (b) applied by rote.
which is the sort of thing that leads to 295.last.
Typical methods for automating this sort of thing are far from where they would need to be for me to be happy with it.
316: someone didn't read the whole paper! Yes, they say exactly this. (Which is why they had to survey the researchers about their methods. Ideally that's all supposed to be laid out in the papers themselves.)
But 316 is right, preventing this is the whole point of reviewers/editors.
313: one potential reason might be that the two analyses -- of the relevant voxel cluster, and then the regression to find correlation -- happen months apart and are performed by different people. Also, information about the relative accuracy of the various metrics might not be right at hand. Third, I think the paper does a really good job of making it obvious in retrospect, but keep in mind a lot of these papers didn't feel the need to go into enough methodological detail to answer these questions; they just may not have been on people's minds. None of this is to excuse it.
Second "316" in 322 s/b "320".
someone didn't read the whole paper!
Or someone was craftily plagarizing the paper. I actually did see that bit, what I was attempting to add to it was the possibility that the research teams who understood the stats well and didn't make this error also wrote clear methods sections, while the more confused research teams wrote more confusing descriptions of their methods, thus unintentionally concealing their errors.
295: Doing work in the area for the last few years has been something akin to the idea that "working in a restaurant for 6 months will forever change the way you thing about them"
The highschool research assistance job I mentioned, with the standard deviation thing, is probably why I'm not a social scientist. It was a silly reaction in retrospect, but I came out of it thinking "If that was even remotely normal, I can't work in this field."
The reviewing issue is a big deal, and I don't know of any way to effectively improve it.
When I finished grad school, I had something like ten or a dozen peer reviewed publications (counting reviewed short papers at conferences not just journal papers). Some of my colleagues near the end of their careers may have had something like that number over an entire career. Which in no way suggests that it's an equivalent amount of work -- quite the opposite. These days things are chopped up into sort of "minimal publishable units", and if you fail to play the game that way you are in trouble.
The number of journals has exploded, the number of publications expected to get a position or to get tenure has exploded, but everyone has the same amount of time that they used to, if they're lucky.
Maths isn't as hard hit as some areas yet, but it's increasing in terms of these expectations. It used to be pretty reasonable to expect a mathematician reviewing a paper to work out all the proofs independently themselves, just to verify (expected, not always done of course). That takes a lot of time.
I probably get 4-5 review requests per month. If I accepted them all and reviewed them with the above sort of care, it would be literally impossible for me to do any research of my own.
For all of us, this is unpaid work, done out of a sense of obligation to service work in the field. You can't very well complain about your own N papers/year not being reviewed if you won't do N yourself. But there is increasing pressure to produce, and decreasing time to review, and the only thing that keeps things done well is your own sense of responsibility and a careful editor.
To be honest, I'm surprised the situation isn't much worse than it is.
One thing that would help is if more disciplines placed academic value on checking results, rather than "new" work (which often isn't, anyway). I'd much rather read a careful study of existing approaches with verification than half the blather that hits my desk these days.
Soup, don't tell me this stuff. When I grumble about the things I grumble about, I tacitly assume that things are better in disciplines I'm unfamiliar with.
John, if it makes you feel better, everyone I know takes this stuff pretty seriously, and tries to do as many as they can. And some of the pressure to produce things has resulted in papers that are very easy to reject, without much time.
The thing I'm worried about isn't so much the status quo, but the fact that the trend is unsustainable. Some of this probably has to do with the vagaries of the publishing industry.
The physicists are largely operating off pre-print servers now, which means no review at all but a sort of social networking effect as to what is trusted at first. Of course, it gets reviewed before it actually ends up in a journal, but by that point it's old hat.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is more of this sort of development, but I think the checks and balances need more work.
I can't believe I missed the opportunity to be opinionated about food.
1. I own a corer, but using it for ranything other than coring a whole mess of apples to stuff inside a goose or for a pie or something just makes an extra implement dirty. If you're cutting one apple for someone, Standpipe's method is the way to go.
2. Soup is right about mangos, although I would think that using the "cut perfectly in half then hack the knife into the seed, twist to remove" method wouldn't work on very ripe ones. I could be wrong, though, as I always use the "slice off-center n either side of the seed, hatch, then pop inside out forr pretty presentation" method, which has the other advantage of letting the cook eat the "messy" central bit by peeling and slicing chunks directly off the seed.
3. Pre-sliced mango is an abomination, as it is inevitably green (and would have to be, in order to hold its shape). Unless you're making green mango salad, but in that case, a non-pre-sliced mango would be green enough to julienne yourself easily.
4. Cutting pineapples is not hard, as Soup has explained.
5. Kiwis are indeed best eaten with the boiled-egg method (slice in half, scoop out insides as one would with a boiled egg in an egg cup). But for salad or whatever, fine, you peel the thing carefully with a sharp knife and slice. This, of course, requires a fairly firm fruit rather than a mushy one, but mushy kiwis tend to taste a little fermented anyway.
6. "Kiwi" is perfectly FINE for the fruit. Whether it refers to the people, the fruit, or the bird is clear from context. Don't be silly.
7. Fresh donuts are fucking amazing, but Krispy Kreme sucks. Tim Horton's, surprisingly (what with being Canadian and all) doesn't.
My typing has really gone to shit. I need to cut my nails.
Hardly surprising, B. Canadians have the clear upper hand in toroidal foodstuffs.
(you're right about the cut both sides off-center thing about mangos, which I mentioned in an update post later. Very ripe ones will make a mess from the center)
The physicists are largely operating off pre-print servers now, which means no review at all but a sort of social networking effect as to what is trusted at first. Of course, it gets reviewed before it actually ends up in a journal, but by that point it's old hat.
My sense in physics is that peer review in journals absolutely sucks. Maybe I've had really unusually bad luck, but I have not yet submitted a paper for publication that didn't get a harsh review from some idiot who completely missed the point (and, generally, made comments that suggest they didn't read past page 2). By that point it's been on the arxiv for six months and been cited ten times or so. Luckily, in every case the editor agrees the referee is unreasonable and sends it to someone else who accepts it with minimal changes. I can't believe that a system like this is useful if my experience is remotely representative.
I once had the fun experience of being asked to review a paper that was bumblingly (and probably unknowingly) reproducing something that's been well-known since the 60s; I recommended it be rejected, and it was, but of course the author just turned around and got it published somewhere else without even making revisions or citing the original work it was basically copying.
Meanwhile, everyone reads the preprints and forms opinions early, and you'll get a much better evaluation of something by asking someone competent what they think of it than by looking to see where it eventually got published.
333 is basically what I meant by the checks and balances needing sorting out. I don't publish in physics really, so I'm relying on mostly 2nd hand but it matches what your sayd. arxiv works for some value of "works", but it has undermined the traditional review role without completely replacing all of its aspect.
The proliferation of journals etc. makes the publication of bad papers only too possible. Most people I know feel that this isn't such a big deal. Good journals are more careful, and if anything it makes people (hiring/tenure commitees, whoever) look more carefully beyond # of pubs. I don't know that this belief is fully justified, but it seems to be prevalent.
Meanwhile, everyone reads the preprints and forms opinions early, and you'll get a much better evaluation of something by asking someone competent what they think of it than by looking to see where it eventually got published.
Right, but it is sensible to have concerns about the long term performance of this system. On the face of it, it seem entirely too likely to fall into cliquishness and trend following of the sort that double blind review etc. at least tries to address.
Least Publishable Units are one of the reasons I decided to move from academic track towards more applied physics. LPUs are a bastardization of what science should be. Reviewing a substantive paper is not much harder than reviewing an LPU, so the proliferation of LPUs sucks up reviewer time on trivial things. It also clutters up the world with papers that might be relevant but really aren't and makes it much harder to get to the meat of things. This leads to an increasing difficulty in developing familiarity outside one's own narrow area of specialization, which hurts cross-fertilization, which hurts overall scientific progress. The end result is people excruciatingly expert on just one tiny little subject area, with large barriers to entry.
The enormous problem that I see developing down the line is that the barriers to entry extend not just to people coming in from adjacent disciplines but also to future students of the subject - the written record is so polluted with LPUs that unless someone sits down and summarizes the results in a book or in Reviews of Modern Physics it may well be simpler to rederive the results from scratch than to dig through the piles of crap surrounding the actual meat of the subject. The alternative proffered by the profession is to study under one of the existing experts in the field, but that's often just a handful of people and if the subject has been dormant for a while may be one person or even none.
Long story short: Togolosh feels about the LPU culture of science pretty much the way Emerson feels about Analytic Philosophy.
335: exactly. It's manageable but annoying and frustrating at the moment, but the incentives are all fucked up and getting worse --- which is why the trend is unsustainable. Unsustainable in the sense of maintaining/creating a good environment for good science to be done in.
I get pretty bleak about too, at times. Tenure track will spit you out if you don't play along, and you probably won't even get on the track if you haven't done a bit of it already.
There's also to some extent a desire to be nice to people and not confrontational, which complicates things. There are whole communities of researchers happily plugging away at projects that have pretty much been doomed to failure from the start, but people are rarely willing to publicly say that what these groups are doing is worthless, and if they do they just get accused of being arrogant and not taking the time to properly appreciate the work. I'm not really sure how to deal with this; often people working on these sorts of things are perfectly good at teaching basic physics, so it's not really unreasonable for them to have faculty jobs. But once these communities get big enough, they can review each other's work, and it keeps getting published, and students get stuck in dead-end groups without realizing it. I dunno. It's a mess.
I think that happens in all disciplines, essear.
The problem is, is it possible to curtail this sort of situation without also cutting off genuinely new work from unpopular/unknown people or directions. The situation you describe is relatively harmless, while too much trend following is potentially deadly. Of course, most of the people off in the weeds aren't going to do much interesting. But some of the best work always comes from there, and making it harder for that to survive is a huge risk.
There are whole communities of researchers happily plugging away at projects that have pretty much been doomed to failure from the start, but people are rarely willing to publicly say that what these groups are doing is worthless,
Doomed and worthless in your opinion and in mainstream opinion, but certainly not in the opinion of those researchers, right? That doesn't bother me--that's bascially how science is supposed to work. Maybe one day there will be a breakthrough and mainstream opinion will change.
That being said (and tying the two subthreads together), this is more or less my wife's opinion of fMRI research as a whole (even ignoring any statistical irregularities)--it's a measure of bloodflows in various areas of the brain, and that's all. It reveals nothing deeper. (I'm too ignorant to have much of an opinion on the subject, personally.)
There are whole communities of researchers happily plugging away at projects that have pretty much been doomed to failure from the start...
My area of specialization is Fusion, so I have no fucking idea what you are talking about here.
338: I agree that it's relatively harmless, but it is still a bit troubling that often the best way to figure out if something is good or not is to ask someone good about it, or do the work to understand it yourself. For an outsider, it's hard to tell who's making sense and who isn't.
I think similar dynamics become more pernicious when you look at science that has policy implications. If a self-sustaining community of people can set themselves up inside a field and manage to publish junk even in sciences that are relatively useless, how much worse can it get when there are corporations and thinktanks that want to influence the results?
So far I don't think is too awful -- most peer-reviewed research on climate change gets the basic science right, for instance -- but I don't really see any strong protection against it getting much worse.
So far I don't think is too awful ... but I don't really see any strong protection against it getting much worse.
yeah, this is my concern too.
If a self-sustaining community of people can set themselves up inside a field and manage to publish junk even in sciences that are relatively useless, how much worse can it get when there are corporations and thinktanks that want to influence the results?
Um, this much worse?
344: The thing about that is, I don't know that the research community can do much about it. A think tank or government organization or corporation can create a body of research nearly out of thin air and proclaim it as backing. So long as the media and thereby public accept the mere fact you can find a someone with a ph.d to sign up for it as some sort of relevant scientific weight, it really doesn't matter what researchers have to say.
We can self-regulate all you want in terms of shutting out bullshit, and that won't change anything. You can create "The International Journal of Stuff Brock Likes" tomorrow, and start issuing press releases the day after citing it.
This is particularly true when media outlets chase controversy over truth. On very nearly any scientific question, you can find someone with a ph.d, maybe even in a research faculty position, to say something controversial about it. Or at least something that can be edited to appear controversial. This has absolutely no bearing on the weight of evidence, or the strength of a particular scientific consensus (or lack thereof).
How likely is it to see that discussed though. More often, it seems, media and policy people go looking for papers & people who they can use to support the position they already had. You can't get rid of this, you can only put it in context.
On LPUs: a friend of mine at the late beginning of his career met a precocious PhD younger than him who may already have had tenure. She was in sociology or psychology. She was a cheerful, focussed, disciplined person and she was happy to share her wisdom. One thing I remember was how to carve up one unexceptional paper into 5 LPUs. There was networking and logrolling involved IIRC. She also was totally on top of the publication requirements of various school, and the various weights given to different criteria. She must have been in her mid to late 20s and had her next 20 years or so planned out in articles-per-year / books-per-year, with various steps up from status to status and school to school sketched roughly in.
It really demoralized my friend because she seemed to have little interest in the subject matter, and her only goal was to retire young. Everything was organized around getting out of the field with as much money as possible as early as possible.
My friend ended up getting tenure in a mediocre state school and thinks of it as a pretty good way to earn a living. AFAIK his intellectual goals and curiosity are sitting on a shelf somewhere undisturbed. Most of my academic friends ended up resigned to disappointment that way, but happy to be paid pretty well for a not-too-hard job.
On very nearly any scientific question, you can find someone with a ph.d, maybe even in a research faculty position, to say something controversial about it.
You probably think that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus. But it isn't!
||
OK classics nerds and others--say a fella was trying to name a business, and was looking for a word that described spontaneously self-organizing organization, or the spring forth of life from nothing. Bonus points if it implies "mind" "art" or "creativity." I'm thinking Athena bursting forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus, here.
(Describing a "virtual agency," a network of freelancers that organizes as needed to provide all the services of a full-service branding/ communications firm. AKA Chopper and friends.)
kthxbye
|>
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OK classics nerds and others--say a fella was trying to name a business, and was looking for a word that described spontaneously self-organizing organization, or the spring forth of life from nothing. Bonus points if it implies "mind" "art" or "creativity." I'm thinking Athena bursting forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus, here.
(Describing a "virtual agency," a network of freelancers that organizes as needed to provide all the services of a full-service branding/ communications firm. AKA Chopper and friends.)
kthxbye
|>
Everything was organized around getting out of the field with as much money as possible as early as possible.
Precocious maybe, but strange. Anybody willing and able to put that sort of effort into gaming it could make vastly more money in another field. It isn't even close.
Something referencing slime molds probably isn't what you're looking for.
I'm thinking Athena bursting forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus, here.
Which she did after he swallowed Metis, which was followed by him developing a splitting headache which was cured by [I forget who] taking an axe to his skull. The name would imply that it causes its creator a headache.
max
['Still thinking.']
Apeiron? But 353 probably markets better.
352--not really, no. But, you know, primordial soup referencing, maybe.
Apeiron taken. Pluribus and unum both taken.
this is going to turn into another band name thread.
346 bears a disturbing resemblance to my ex. Smart, but also well versed in how to work the system to extract maximum career benefit from any given piece of work. Not corrupt in the way some LPU-mongers are, but canny.
345 illustrates one of the dangers of credentialism and the gatekeeping role of academia. If you can subvert the credential system and/or some element of the relevant academic field you gain enormous payoff for only modest effort.
Also, I realized that my 341 may have sounded hostile, which it isn't. At one point my career path offered a smooth slide into a role as junior Orc in the service of the One Ring, with potential advancement all the way to Uruk-Hai, all while watching the actually promising concepts die the death of a thousand cuts. My current path is riskier, but much more rewarding. Plus, no tricksy hobbitses.
Something with "emergence" "chaos" or "complexity" in it?
Demiurge?
362: the gnostic take on that has allusions chopper probably doesn't want.
"Emergence" is almost certainly taken. Anthill? Bee Hive? Naked Mole Rat Colony?
I'd totally employ the latter, btw.
BLEG! Is there any way I could get some of you to vote for Bitch in the 2008 Weblog Awards? Voting closes in like an hour and a half and we are so close to winning...
Two votes for naked mole rats.
"termite Queen"? They're very prolific.
I've voted every day for five days, leblanc! I can't vote again until 10:00!
You can get good bagels in Toronto at the St. Urbain Bagel location at the St. Lawrence Market. I was disappointed when I tried another St. Urbain location, so it's worth sticking to the Market. Plus at the Market, you can turn around and buy some Pacific salmon bits at the counter which was directly behind you while you ordered your bagels, then go to one of the cheesemongers for fresh cream cheese. There are many fine breakfasts that aren't this good.
As for other toroidal foodstuffs, I'll eat Krispy Kreme if it's there and I would probably order the chains KK-Tim Hortons-Dunkin, but my preferred raised donut is still from the Daylight Donuts on Sheridan Ave. in Tulsa. Their coffee wasn't ever that good, though, so I'd always just get a carton of chocolate milk.
By so close I mean that we are only down by 75 votes. 75! Out of like, over twenty thou.
Did my bit. Had I known sooner, I would have been a Chicago voter. (Early and often)
365: wait, a web poll mentioned on unfogged without robots?
times have changed.
Now I kind of want to form Naked Mole Rats, Inc.
Emergence, emerge, no on demiurge (I don't want to have to explain it a billion times).
Maybe swarm? There's something about consumption and overpowering there that I don't like.
"Omnium". It's Flann O'Brien's term for a primal substance that can be transformed into any other substance.
375: Way too obvious. Already taken at least twice.
What's the technical term for when crystals form upon the striking of a blow to the crystallizing substance?
I love that 378 is the name of the journal of the philosophy of chemistry.
379: Oh wait I know! Not the answer to your question, but it's like that. Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva.
You could call your company "fop" for short.
Urthona? One of Blake's zoas, the source of inspiration and creativity.
387 also represents primordial darkness, tho.
I like the idea behind 386, but the word ain't gonna work.
I like [capitalized because borrowing for a name, dropping the accents]:
Sustema - 'a whole compounded of parts'
Caterva - 'a crowd, a troop, a band' as in sorta like a barbarian horde
Autoretor - 'self-made'
Sophron - 'self-controlled'
Poros - 'creative ingenuity'
max
['Yeah, mangled. Oh, well.']
Sustema has potential. Conjures system and sustainable. Ooh, but I like something with "conjure" -- like y'all conjure up the needed products without the client having to do the work.
Prime Nova? Ultra Magnus? Optimus Prime? Excellion? Dinobot? Maximal? Waspinator?
Dinobot, definitely. How could you not work with a company called Dinobot?
365: Vote, damn your eyes, or I will force us all to go through blogging about another excruciating recount process.
Oops, that's the main voting page. Fuck all those other blogs. Vote here.
Oh, and in re. company names, Mr. B.'s and my favorite was always "Zymogenetics." I mean, how Jetsons-cool is that?
A little slow, but it's never too late for donut advice:
I've never heard of a "small-batch artisanal donut". It sounds like a small-batch artisanal chicken nugget. But I guess it's an actual pastry that could be made in a small-batch way if there were any businesses that did that.
Not "artisanal" in the modern, SWPL sense, but in the classic sense:
Saturday mornings in the Strip, Sunseri Sunrise Bakery, which closed its storefront (alas), sets up on the sidewalk and sells fresh-baked breads of all descriptions (including German-style pretzel rolls) as well as donuts made a dozen or two at a time. They sell out by noon or so, but if you happen to have handy a sweet-looking little girl who really wants a donut, they might make one more batch just for you. I recommend the cinnamon. Iris would recommend chocolate iced with colorful sprinkles.
Better-Maid Donuts in Sheraden (I think), on Steubenville Pike rising out of the West End Valley. Run by 2 brothers out of a little pink house, open "6 am to Sell-Out." Actually crisp crusts on the cake donuts.
$0.50 apiece at both places, but Better-Maid will give you a randomly large number of donut holes for that much if they're close to sellout.
Sunseri Sunrise Bakery, which closed its storefront (alas)
Alas, indeed.
Chthonobot Conjurers!
max
['"Call us and we'll send a robot to kill you."']
"Call us and we'll send a robot to kill you."
I though that was RaptoMatic.
Those of you with a couple hours to spare should watch this talk, which starts now:
http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/seminars/moser/moser.htm
She does climate change and behavior research, which not enough people focus on.
Sustema has potential. Conjures system and sustainable. Ooh, but I like something with "conjure"
Exorkizo ('to adjure')! But then it gets worse from there. And the Latin is conjugare.
I though that was RaptoMatic.
Choppermart!
max
['Chop smart, shop Choppermart!']
Sure Megan. We're talking about killer robot dinosaurs (dinosaur robots?) and you have the temerity to suggest some of us might have a couple hours to spare for something `important'. Pshaw.
Right now you can see the exciting milling about, with no sound.
Thanks, Megan, now I can feel good about my procrastinating.
I chatted with her once at a conference. She suggested I start a blog.
Did you tell her blogs were for losers and nerds?
399: You can, of course, make your own donuts. My Dad had a handheld donut-shitter thing that he occasionally used to make donuts. Bought from sears in the early 70's I think.
I couldn't do it because I have a stark terror of pots of really hot oil. Which is sensible, because that shit is seriously dangerous. One of my highschool girlfriends had a big nasty burn on her thigh from a hot oil cooking accident. Still, shouldn't let the thought of agonizing pain and years of surgery and rehabilitation discourage you from trying to make something moderately disgusting to eat.
341: Fusion research was definitely not the sort of thing I had in mind when I said "projects that have pretty much been doomed to failure from the start"; I was thinking not of things that might fail because of funding/impracticality/etc, but of things that are likely to fail for well-understood theoretical reasons, the sort of thing that could only work if our basic understanding of physics is deeply flawed.
415 reminds me of an accident involving a new, incorrectly sized, engagement ring and a commercial deep fryer.
399: JRoth understands how the world should be.
Not "artisanal" in the modern, SWPL sense, but in the classic sense
Furthermore, fuck the SWPL sense of this. It's a damned useful word and concept.
Quoth the speaker: "Californians seem to be better people than the rest of the United States."
The Golden Emerods would be a good name for a band.
(In reference to climate change awareness/motivation to change; I don't think she meant it to sound that way.)
She's lived in Colorado, so she's objective.
I've been to Colorado, they're not objective.
Denver is an objectively bad location for a hub airport.
Quoth the speaker: "Californians seem to be better people than the rest of the United States."
Well, d'uh. I don't think I can be bothered to watch something that just repeats what everyone knows to be true as something new!
She really is the only person I've come across who is talking about how to influence people in practical terms.
I just read Diffusion of Innovation. It is pretty good. Maybe the classics in a field are classics for a reason.
431: really? I thought the whole recent divisiveness in the environmental movement was about just these issues.
Maybe my sampling is different. I don't spend a whole lot of time with enviros doing advocacy.
Dear god. She's talking about feelings. Like those matter.
B. lost by 30 votes, because you people didn't care.
Huh. Avoided dystopia doesn't motivate the rest of you?
We should rout out the uncaring 30 and execute them.
I voted for B, even though she implicitly sided with Standpipe on the slicer/corer issue. Because that's the kind of forgiving motherfucker I am.
Megan, will you just do a blog post about her talk? I'd much rather read her ideas presented in your voice, if it's all the same to you. And by the way, are there good donuts in Sacramento?
F'reals? I can see not wanting to listen along, because speaking pace is slow, but I don't think I have value to add to her talk. Also, I suspect I like her talk because our voices are similar.
Good donuts in Sacramento? Don't know of any special donuts, but Willie's H&C (Broadway and 16th) has beignets. I'm a big fan of Willie's H&C breakfasts.
Beignets is donuts, so yeah, that sounds good. I'll try it. And sure, I'd rather have the spiffy Megan prose than the slow presentation. But I was mostly paying you a sidelong compliment.
I would rather have my toenails pulled out than listen to anyone speak online. God invented writing so we could communicate faster.
So, yay for a summary blogpost!
Naw, she's interesting and funny! It wasn't painful at all to listen to her as part of my employment.
Furthermore, fuck the SWPL sense of this. It's a damned useful word and concept.
Oh, I wouldn't go that far; I just wanted to clarify that the donuts I was listing weren't made by some earnest young'n using hand-milled flour and expeller-pressed sunflower oil, or some such. So few things are made on any artisanal basis anymore that it's hardly surprising that the SWPL connotation has come to be dominant.
ou can, of course, make your own donuts. My Dad had a handheld donut-shitter thing that he occasionally used to make donuts. Bought from sears in the early 70's I think.
This reminds me of another source! The Gandy Dancer, the little bar appended to the Grand Concourse, runs this brilliant little donut contraption on Sunday mornings for people waiting to get into the super brunch next door. This little device includes a hopper, which drops smallish pre-donuts into a little basin of hot oil. I think that somehow the donuts are flipped, for proper cooking, before rotating around to a little conveyor belt that lifts them from the oil and allows the excess oil to drop off before dropping them into a bowl of cinnamon sugar. Warm, crisp, free, amazing. Also a scam, since bellies full of free donuts don't have a lot of room for smoked fish or roast beef at the (truly impressive) buffet, but so be it.
When I was little, there was a vending machine that made donuts like that down at the South Street Seaport. It was exactly as you describe, except not free, and I thought it was the coolest machine in the whole world.
She's talking about taboo topics! She brought up development, the concept of perpetual economic growth and population growth! She admits that no one will talk about them! She points out that we're always willing to have other people do population control.
A couple more talks like this and she'll go up on the pedestal with Darrell Steinberg.
Omphalos
In particular, with reference to the Omphalos hypothesis from Philip Henry Gosse's (Edmund's father) wacky solution to the problem of creation.
There was a device equivalent to the one in 445 at this orchard I visited during apple picking season as a kid. The plain, unglazed, un-anything'd donuts right off the conveyor were so goddamned tasty.
They also sold fresh caramel apples which, assuming you could ever get your teeth unstuck from them, were also fantastic.
You don't have to be dead to be boring, John.
454 was meant to act as a defibrillator. The thread must be dead.
Of course, Weekend at Bernie's demonstrated conclusively that "dead" does not imply "boring."
I saw a little snippet from House again and man I hate that show. I realize this is old hat for you guys but I've been able to avoid that show till now.
But now I realize why I hate it so much. The things that you want to make good TV shows are exactly the things you want to avoid in an intense medical setting. Drama, conflict, intense personalities, debates. If you've got two or three people around who might or might not die you don't want any of that shit. You do everything you can to make things routine, businesslike, impersonal, flat, etc.
I was only "ancillary personel" but from time to time I'd be in a fairly intense situation and thank god it asn't like that.
Dude, it's not a documentary. Don't most TV dramas sort of, you know, dramatize things?
No, they're all true to life. Especially the crime procedurals. Police departments fire women if they age visibly, and criminals routinely confess on the stand.
Yeah, but it's not just that hospital wards tend not to be dramatic, the way hardware stores tend not to be dramatic. Hospital wards make every effort to be as undramatic as possible. It's a functional necessity. I've been in a room after a patient had died who they thought they could save, and it's totally flat.
Nearly everything is not dramatic. That is why we invented drama, because we were bored.
And by totally flat I mean that you know that many of the people in the room is going to feel awful for several days, but no one's saying much of anything.
457: instead arguing strongly for "dead" equaling "truly awful".
Crimes are dramatic. Love affairs are dramatic. Wars are dramatic. Feuds are dramatic. Disasters are dramatic. Divorces are dramatic.
464: So would you rather watch Weekend at Bernie's or House?
Festivals for Dionysos are dramatic.
And while I think that young MDs tend to be a bit better looking than average, being high achievers in every goddamn thing, they're not as good looking as the doctors in House, and there are plenty of non-young doctors.
If the point is that a real hospital would not at all have any of the drama that one sees on medical dramas, this seems obvious. House is clearly not meant to be modeled off of a real doctor, rather on a fictional detective (Homes), Wilson is modeled on a fictional doctor (Watson). Besides I thought the fun of House was in the clash of personalities more than anything else.
You know what else totally isn't a sizzling cauldron of intrigue and lust? Your average law firm.
Unlike all the other TV dramas, which faithfully represent the attractiveness of the relevant profession.
I get the criticism in 461, though.
To me it's as incongruous as having acrobats and mariachi bands in almost every scene. Seriously.
Reasons I find House entertaining: the arrogant assholes remind me of people I know, respect, and work with (not to say me); in showing a pattern of hypothesis-forming and rejection after empirical tests, it's the best TV representation I know of science (sure, the details are bullshit, and half the tests should kill the patient); and, um, Thirteen is hot.
For some reason, 460 and 462 are totally cracking me up. I imagine Cala saying them in a slightly world-weary, older sister way.
I watched Grey's Anatomy for a whole season, transfixed by the sexiness of the young doctors having sex with each other, before the cloying vapidity drove me away.
The problem with House is that the medical mysteries are so opaque to the viewer that you have to completely abandon yourself to the show's self-parodic mumbo-jumbo: "Elementary: The anemia and hyporexophagy are clearly the result of an unborn conjoined twin at the base of the patient's spine that obviously has tertiary syphilis."
You know what's a super, super boring job? Spy.
Crime solving is not dramatic. It's mostly paperwork.
Love isn't all that dramatic. Wars are mostly boredom.
Divorces are dramatic, but not usually entertaining.
I mean, fine, don't like the show, but "I was in a hospital once and it wasn't like that at all, plus, the cast is too nice to look at" is a strange criticism.
Besides I thought the fun of House was in the clash of personalities more than anything else.
That's 90% of it.
Well, no, Sifu; law firms tend to keep it to a bare simmer.
max
['And skim off the foam!']
475: If one like science fiction, this is par for the course. And also part of the fun.
hyporexophagy
Oh no! Our child is eating too few kings!
doh. "If one likes science fiction..."
478: You got your barrister in my barrista!
I worked in a hospital for about seven years. From time to time I was one of the people at a crisis, though that wasn't really part of my job.
The arrogance is realistic. And a lot of doctors do fuck a lot, but then, a lot are conservative Christains or workaholics.
I think that one place you might get those dramatic showdowns is at high levels of decision making in government or business, e.g. Cheney v. Rumsfeld or Rove v. Powell.
To me it's as incongruous as having acrobats and mariachi bands in almost every scene.
Our family had the same feeling watching Quincy, M.E.. My mom would occasionally point out factual errors, but generally it seemed that the writers neither knew nor cared much about forensic pathology per se, so they didn't go into detail.
478: You got your barrister in my barrista!
Foam-skimming while making broth at a bare simmer has nothing to do with coffee or baristas, Ms. la.
You don't skim your espresso before you put it in the fridge to chill, Ben? You probably don't eat enough kings, either.
Where did I go wrong? I ate a core
Somewhere along in the bitterness.
And I would have stayed away from the n-sided center
Had I known how to slice an apple.
That's what your mom said and it didn't make it right for her, either.
When I did see people relating intensely, it was always about pecking orders and the like, never about medicine or patients. Usually someone being reminded that they were lower on the totem pole than they wished.
I don't eat nearly enough kings.
Isn't there some sort of Latin/Greek mixing going on in that word?
I'll never eat an apple at an event again, because this whole thread makes me realize that a lot of those apple slices are contaminated with human blood. I bet most of you guys just wipe off the slice and put it right on the platter.
A guest at a party at my apartment this summer, kind of an odd guy, cut himself while cutting up bread. He semi-staunched the bleeding with a napkin and kept cutting, placing pieces of bloody bread on the platter for people to dip into hummus and whatnot. He didn't take my polite hints to stop bloodying the bread, and the lights were low, so our guests became hematophages.
Health questions aside, the going to hell part will be painful.
435/7: Maybe this is risky, but I confess. I've ignored so many requests to vote in contests for blogs I like that now I feel I have to ignore new requests or it wouldn't be fair to previous ones.
475/479: That kind of thing bugs me, unless the episode after the unborned conjoined twin was completely occupied by House fending off reporters and camera crews. That stuff just doesn't happen on a normal day. I'm a science fiction fan, so I don't have a problem with actual impossibility, but I do have one with improbability. Terrorists or disease victims with superpowers make good drama, but physically disease victims with long-lost twins or terrorists on every streetcorner or whatever require the viewer to accept as real a world that doesn't exist.
A quote (from memory) from a Douglas Adams character put it well. "Sherlock Holmes said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. I reject that entirely. Once we have identified the impossible, it must be the case. The impossible is merely something we can't understand under the current laws of science, and lord knows there are lots of things like that, but the unlikely are things that go against human nature, which we understand extremely well."
House is clearly not meant to be modeled off of a real doctor, rather on a fictional detective (Homes),
Who was modeled on a real doctor (Joseph Bell, an old boss of Conan Doyle's, who used to pull the "I see you've recently returned from Canada; is that where you learned your trade of lampshade design?" stunt on patients.)
You might get me to watch one of those dreary medical drama shows if you put a random mariachi band in every couple of scenes.
500: Like whenever doctors approach the patient's bedside, they're preceded by a mariachi band, and they deliver their diagnoses in the form of corridos. That would be beyond awesome.
Listen, I'm as big a fan of Cop Rock as anyone but we have to accept that it's never coming back.
Like whenever doctors approach the patient's bedside, they're preceded by a mariachi band, and they deliver their diagnoses in the form of corridos. That would be beyond awesome.
Scrubs?
Holy fuck! Is that for real? Kitty!!! I am not well equipped to handle this!
Since one is reading this thread, I can just repost that over here and pretend nothing happened.
No one! No one is reading! Poop!
In the end, everything is read.
