JDP's "Virginia Octoberfest Sausage"

I whipped this up last weekend for a picnic.  I wasn't expecting it to be awesome, but it was. :-)

Don't be fooled by the simplicity of the ingredients list. This is really about a magical transformation into a gustatory delight.

The essence of it is to broil some firm link sausage and then braise it further in sauerkraut with malty beer.  Here's how I do it:

• 24 oz. Kielbasa  (or other sausage of similar characteristics)
• 32 oz. Sauerkraut
• ½ cup Malty, not hoppy, beer, such as Porter
• 1 Tbsp Caraway Seeds  (may omit if you really loathe them)

The quantities are approximate.  Those listed above are as typically packaged.

You'll need a heavy baking dish, appropriate to the combined quantities above. I used a 9x13" baking dish, deeper than a cake pan.

Step 1: Heat the sauerkraut, with the caraway seeds added. I did this in a slow cooker, but the stovetop or microwave work as well. If you're using a quick method, i.e. microwave, you can put off this step until later when you need the hot sauerkraut.

Step 2: Cut the sausages into 1" chunks, and put them into the heavy baking dish.  Using your oven's "low" broiler setting, broil the sausages until good and brown, tossing and turning them from time to time, about 30-45 minutes.

Step 3: Transfer the hot sauerkraut into the baking dish, carefully.  Add the beer; and mix all thoroughly.  Set the oven to bake -- 375°F, and bake for about one hour, tossing and turning from time to time.  Let the sauerkraut get toasty on top, but not burned.

Serve at the table directly from the baking dish, using a large wooden spoon. :-)  This goes well with a crusty baguette and spicy German mustard.

How Yelp Does Friends

My good bud Tony asked how "friends" are done on Yelp. Here's my take on it.

First, it's important to remember that Yelp's raison d'etre is reviews. All else is secondary.

Yelp's friend-like features, of which there are two, are both oriented toward the discovery of new reviews. In some sense, posting a review on Yelp is analogous to posting a status update on other services.
You have a "stream" or "feed" of reviews recently posted by persons you follow. This is a good way of winnowing down the main feed of all reviews.

There are two ways to get someone's reviews in your feed: you can follow them, or you can be their friend. I'll explain the differences.

When you follow someone's reviews (the Yelp term for "follower" is "fan"), the relationship is private, known only to you. No one, including that other person, knows that you are following him/her. This is an asymmetric, Twitter-like relationship, except it's anonymous as well. Each Yelper knows the total number of his/her fans, but cannot know who those people are. Consequently, no approval is required to follow someone. Just go to their profile and click the "follow" button. He/she will get a notification that they got one new follower, but that's it.

Yelp's "friends" are, as with other services, mutual, symmetric, and public. You request to be friends with the other person and he/she has to accept (or decline). Your profile lists links to your friends; these connections are public.
But being friends with someone has no effect, other than to add that person's reviews to your feed. It does not confer any additional visibility into their profile, or anything like that; and you can't restrict the visibility of parts of your profile to just your friends. It does not enable any more intimate connection, such as private messaging, over and above what you already have.


On G+ I had said:

In my own view, I've come to disregard the number of friends someone has on Facebook, but I'm still quite aware of the friends number on Yelp. It's almost a class thing. Someone with 500 "friends" on Yelp is qualitatively different from someone with 5.

And Tony asked, "Why? What is it about Yelp friends that means you are more impressed by a large number of them?"

One point I want to make up front is that anything I'm about to say is a generalization and that there are certainly plenty of exceptions. But the overall patterns are more or less true.

First, Yelp is primarily a local phenomenon, whereas Facebook has no locality biases built in. Sure, most people's circle of real-life friends tend to be rather local, but that's a sociological phenomenon, toward which Facebook is agnostic. Yelp, on the other hand, is specifically local to the cities where it operates. Of course, people do travel or move to other cities, accumulating connections in each; but by and large, people select their friends -- which, remember, are only interesting for their reviews -- based on their reviews of local businesses. The locality factor is important because it necessarily constrains the number of people available to be your "friends". (And we must also not forget that Facebook has orders of magnitude more users than Yelp does.)

Secondly: On Yelp, you don't have a "wall". The only thing you can do is write reviews and talk in the public forum (Talk threads). Whenever you post in either place, your post is "signed" with your "avatar" (an iconified version of your current profile pic) and your friends and reviews numbers. Every time you see someone's face, you also see their friends and reviews numbers! In the Talk threads in particular, this is interesting because the threads are completely public; any yelper from any city can (potentially) post in any thread. So you tend to see a pretty wide range of people. Contrast that with Facebook, where (a) wall threads are limited to circles (to use G+ term) defined by the owner of the wall, and (b) each post is "signed" with the author's name and face, but not their friends count.

So, ultimately, I think it's just about becoming sensitized to the oft-repeated stimulus.

Hocus Pocus, Abra Cadabra

By now it's generally accepted that the magical phrase "Hocus pocus" is a corruption of the Latin liturgical phrase "Hoc est corpus meum" ("This is my body...") spoken by Catholic priests at the critical moment in the Mass.

Unfortunately, the magical phrase "Abracadabra" does not have a similarly well-established origin. Here is my hypothesis.

Through a mechanism of corruption like that which produced "Hocus pocus", "Abracadabra" has its origin in the Latin liturgical phrase "Ave verum cadaver" -- "Hail, the true cadaver", i.e. of the slain Christ.
(However, it is interesting to note that "Abracadabra" sounds more similar to the plural form, "Ave vera cadavera". What bodies this could have been referring to, I don't know...)

Jar-Jar, you're a genius!

If you're a nerd, in that you have more than a little experience with D&D or other RPG, particularly as a DM/GM, and you've seen all the Star Wars movies, then you need to read Darths & Droids.

Seriously.

dirtgirl - "best worst bug" lyrics

A slug!  A slug!  My best worst bug!

Now guess what ... garden pest
That I like less than all the rest
It leaves a slimy track each place it goes

It slides around and has no feet
And eats the things I like to eat 
My garden's getting smaller as it grows 

Come on now, shoo, go away 
Don't come back another day 
Take your slimy track back when you go
You'd do best to disappear
Molluscs just aren't welcome here
A slug is my best worst bug, don't you know

Of all the pests that I have seen
Hiding in my garden green
A slug is quite the worst that I have met

Weevils, worms, and butterflies
And even little grubs with eyes 
All eat less and make a better pet 

Come on now, shoo away 
Don't come back another day 
Take your slimy track back when you go
You'd do best to disappear
The sign says "slugs not welcome here"
A slug is my best worst bug, don't you know

View the video on youtube. It's awesome!

The -aught words

I've been thinking about the words which rhyme with "caught".
I noticed that, with very few exceptions, they all derive from words which do not rhyme. Bizarre. But that's English. Gotta love it.

word	derived from
ought	owe
brought	bring
caught	catch
fought	fight
taught	teach
thought	think
fraught	freight
onslaught slaughter	slay
distraught	distract
draught	draw (though it's generally pronounced "draft")
sought	seek
wrought	wreak
claught	cleek
bought	buy
haughty	high
flaught	fly

What will kill you if there is a nuclear detonation

What will kill you if there is a nuclear detonation?

More than you might think.

Broadly, effects of a nuclear blast fall into two categories: electromagnetic radiation, and kinetic blast.

In the first category, we have:

1. Nuclear radiation.

This is the gamma rays, neutrons, and other ionizing radiation resulting directly from the nuclear fission and fusion going on at the heart of the bomb. Some of this stuff travels at the speed of light, so it will be the first thing that hits you. If you are at a great enough distance, it will merely give you cancer, from which you may die some months or years down the road. At distances closer than that, it will disrupt your body's electrochemical systems (i.e. your brain) and kill you instantly. Nice.

2. Infrared radiation.

Otherwise known as radiant heat. Also being electromagnetic in nature, this reaches you with the visible flash. At great enough distances, you may simply feel the warmth; as distances decrease, you will experience first, second, or third degree burns. (A third degree burn is defined as "charring".) As more of this radiation continues to pump into you, you will be incinerated. At very close distances, you will simply be vaporized -- more or less instantly.

The other category includes effects which are propagated by the atmosphere, as opposed to radiation, which needs no medium and can travel quite easy through empty space.

When a nuclear bomb detonates, it creates a fireball of rapidly expanding plasma and gas. The pressure within the volume of the fireball is enormous -- almost not worth contemplating. But outside the fireball, a pressure wave expands outward very rapidly, well in excess of the speed of sound. At any given instant, the atmosphere outside this radius is "normal", and the atmosphere inside this radius -- the zone of the blast's effect -- is very high pressure and very hot.

If you survived the radiation emanating from the bomb, then you have to contend with the following effects:

1. High pressure.

The "over-pressure" within the radius of the wavefront can be enormous, depending on the distance. Once the fireball has stopped expanding, the pressure within the radius diminishes with the volume -- that is, as the cube of the radius. But consider that humans cannot survive overpressures of more than a few pounds per square inch. You will be "crushed" by the pressure. At the very least, you will not have the strength to take a breath against that pressure.

2. High wind.

The wavefront travels outward from the center of the blast faster than the speed of sound. Behind that wavefront, the atmosphere is following at a very high speed (again, depending on the radius and the time since detonation). Wind speeds of over 200 mph are typical. A wind speed of 50 mph is sufficient to knock you down and slam you into whatever obstacles are nearby. A wind speed of 80 mph is more than enough to drive loose debris through your body. Winds over 100 mph are very hard to survive. Assume that a wind speed of 200 mph is going to be fatal, in some way or other.

3. Heat.

The atmosphere behind the wavefront has been heated by the nuclear blast. Temperatures well over 120 degrees are typical (again, depending on the distance and the time since detonation). If you do manage to suck in one breath, your lungs will be cooked. Otherwise, you are baked.

Given the above considerations, arranging your survival through a nuclear detonation is a difficult endeavor.

And then, if you succeed at that, you'll have to contend with the longer-term effects of the blast. Besides the obvious destruction of habitat, these effects have to do with lingering radiation, which are of two main forms:

1. Nuclear fallout.

The fireball rises very rapidly into the atmosphere, and typically evolves into a vortex, i.e. a "smoke ring". The convective action of this process is strong enough to draw quite a bit of soil and other surface material into the air. This material is vaporized and, through intense bombardment of nuclear radiation, made radioactive. Eventually this material condenses again into dust particles of the elements or simple compounds: iron, silicon dioxide (sand), and so on. These particles precipitate onto the ground at some distance downwind of the detonation, covering you and your environment in radioactive material. Worst of all, these dust particles get inhaled, subjecting your lungs and internal organs to ionizing radiation at very close distances. This is cancer city.

2. Direct radioactive conversion.

The intense nuclear radiation from the bomb blast directly converts matter, within a certain radius, into radioactive isotopes. Thus, some circular area centered on the blast will be an uninhabitable "hot" zone. But unless you have some kind of radiac, you won't know; these radioactive emissions are completely undetectable to human senses. If you so much as walk through this zone, you will be looking at lethal cancers in the not too distant future. It could even kill you outright.

I have not addressed other potential post-apocalyptic sources of death, such as zombies, day-glo-mohawked gasoline freaks, or trigger-happy survivalist bunker-dwellers.

Have a nice day.