Sous Vide

I've been interested in sous vide for about a month now, and I finally got the tools and the nerve to do it. The experience was rewarding because the meat was superb and the cooking was—believe it or not—easy.

First, I found a cooler at Costco for $25. You'll probably have one of these around the house. Costco also sells good meat, so I bought 3 pounds of USDA Choice flank steak.

Flank steak is hard to cook normally. I've burned my share of these. Usually I'd butterfly the steak so that there isn't much meat left in the center, so that it cooks a little easier. None of this is necessary with sous vide.

Instead, I seasoned the steak as per usual, and then I rinsed the salts off and dried the steak with paper towels. Then we put the steaks into gallon-size ziplock bags. We used the immersion technique, and some massaging to get all the air out.

The next step is to put the meat in the cooler full of 134ºF water for 3 hours. We could have cooked for less time, but we decided to do 3 hours to be safe because this was our first attempt.

Maintaining the temperature while waiting is pretty easy. I put about 120 cups of water into the cooler to begin with. The formula for raising the temperature is to heat a 15-cup pot full of water to 10 times the desired change in temperature. So if my cooler is at 132º and I wanted 134º, then the difference is 2º and I'd need to heat 15 cups to 152º, and then remix the water. I hope that makes sense. To be clear, I took 15 cups of water from the cooler, heated it on the stove, and then recombined the water into the cooler.

The cooler normally drops temperature at approximately 1º every 30 minutes. As luck would have it my cooler was positioned in the sunlight and actually maintained perfect temperature for the entire two hours. However, when the steaks were introduced the temperature dropped and I needed to add more heat a few times fairly quickly, but that period passed and the following period was maintenance-free. So it was even easier than I expected.

When the steaks are cooked, we pulled them out and dried them off. Rob seared the steaks in an iron skillet using clarified butter. Chris cooked some fantastic spinach and veggies. Nealon played on the porch in the sunlight. Nicole slept. Perfect.

The flavor was really good. This method of cooking can be extremely easy, especially once you develop a process. As the summer months come, I'm sure that temperature can be regulated by opening and closing the blinds.

Natasha helped clean up. I think we ended up using every utensil and pan in the house, and we had to run the dishwasher twice that day. The guys are good at keeping clean while they worked, but Natasha deserves special mention for all of her hard work.

Thanks to everybody who participated! And thank you to the scientist-chef who invented the technique. Please try it yourself too, it is easier than it appears.

Reblogging

I use Google Reader to plow through RSS feeds. I used to share a bunch of stuff, so that if you hooked-in to my shared feed you could see the stuff that I liked the most on the internet. It was fun, even though I'm pretty sure that nobody read my shared feed.

Starting in about December, Google Reader began collecting all the junk that other people liked and creating their own top stories feeds. Which made my shared feed completely worthless, because very rarely would I find something that I liked that wasn't also duplicated on the customized feeds. My shared items are merely a subset of Google's shared items. Their list is better. Nobody in their right mind would look to my feed for entertainment when they could take from Google. So there isn't much point in having me pick and choose favorite content.

There isn't much joy in discovering "new" content if Google is parked right next door with a bigger and better list of discoveries.

Camera Update

I've been geeking out with my photos lately. I'll show some of the more interesting results.

First, I was curious as to how I actually use my zoom lens. A zoom lens is one that can change field of view, meaning that you can zoom in on stuff. Most of my lenses are the opposite, called prime lenses, and they give you one field of view and cannot change.

Back to the zooms. I searched for all images that used my Pentax DA* 50-135mm f2.8 lens, and then from those I computed the number of shots taken at each field of view. I knew that I hit the stops on the wide and narrow ends more than I used the middle, but this tells me more exactly what I actually do. Here's the chart:



62% of my shots were at 50mm or 135mm. That is a whole lot. Depending on your point of view, this either means that I should stick to primes or that 38% percent of the time I like the flexibility of the zoom. Or you could say that even if I used the zoom at one extent or the other, it is like having two primes mounted on my camera, giving me a great deal of flexibility. Or you could say that I'm a fool, because I use the most compromised positions on my lens (things in the middle are better optimized, see Feynman's story on plastic gearing).

Next, we take a peek at which lenses I'm shooting most. The gray/black pies are lenses which I've sold for one reason or another. The colored slices are in my current bag. This graph doesn't account for my preferences over time. I've only had the DA 35mm f2.8 for a year, and it is already catching up to the 50mm.



Last, I compiled some data on which apertures I use the most. This is a neat graph.



This one is neat for a few reasons.
First, you can see my favorite apertures right off the bat! f8.0 makes any lens look good. And most of my lenses are full-open at f2.8, so that one gets a lot of action. f1.4 is the max for the 50mm, and it gets used a lot too.
Second, this graph shows the difficulty in making meaningful graphs. Not all ranges in the graph are equivalent. The ranges could have been made equivalent. I could have made buckets the size of one stop, or made each bucket contain the same number of shots and had the range indicate preference. Maybe a scatter plot would make more sense. Maybe a hybrid scatter plot could indicate the number of occurrences at each point. And so on.
Third, the data shows a number of shots at f27-f38. Which is weird because I don't think anything I own goes beyond f22. So the whole thing could be fake anyway.

Lastly, I got a new camera yesterday. The Pentax K20D is here to replace my K10D. I put my K10D up for sale at my work's version of craigslist and got a buyer within minutes. Yay.

Keep your eye out for future shots at ISO 3200 and occasionally ISO 6400. Or maybe some 21fps sequences. It is gonna be awesome.

Cell Phone

As a rule, as time progresses technology becomes cheaper and easier.

But not with cell phones.

My first cell phone was purchased in Germany for 100DM (about $50). It didn't come with a contract, all the grocery stores sold prepaid cards, it was easy to use and cheap. I love cheap stuff. Text messaging cost about 2¢, you only paid to send text (free to receive), and I could make a prepaid card last for a long time because I didn't talk much. This plan made texting the cheapest and preferred option. Further, ICQ could send messages for free from the internet to a cell phone, and nobody would pay. The transition from landlines to reasonably priced cell phones was liberating and reasonably-priced.

When I came back to the states, I bought a phone with a 1-year contract for $30/mo. Texting cost $0.10 to send and $0.10 to receive. Because my minutes were plentiful, it actually cost more to text than it would to make a phone call. The phone was free with contract. ICQ would not send text to this phone for free.

My next phone cost $200 and came with a 1-year contract. Ouch.

My next phone was $200 with a $100 rebate (which I forgot to send) and came with a 2-year contract. The monthly price for the minimum minutes went up to $40.

My current phone was $70 after rebate. The outside LCD screen broke within two months of regular use. I'm not a brute, I treat my stuff nice. In fact, when I sold a bunch of DVDs to Amoeba Music in Berkeley, the dealer told me that I take really good care of my stuff and they would like to see me come back to sell more stuff. I think the phone must be prone to breakage and was a design flaw flowing from cost-savings and corner-cutting. The message is clear—I should have paid more for a better phone.

What's worse is that I chose my phone by-the-numbers, using a scheme that didn't work. My phone has the biggest battery I could find. I like to charge my phone once per week. But instead of using a big battery to extend standby life, my new phone uses 3G, which apparently uses the bigger battery to power more frequent and intense bursts of energy-draining communication with the cell towers. Despite my large battery, my battery life is less than ever. And if I accidentally hit the GPS button (which I don't pay to enable), the phone will die within hours doing a service that doesn't benefit me.

These days, modern phones are internet enabled. But, true to form, the prices have gone up yet again. Now you have to buy an internet plan in addition to a voice plan. The internet plan runs around $40/mo, which rivals the price of my home internet plan. Ouch. I don't pay for this option either.

If I could, I would turn back the clock to 2001 and use the cell phones and cell phone plans of that era. The service was stellar, the prices cheap, and the phones were a little bulky but useful.

Open Letter to Yogurt Makers

Make containers that don't explode when opened.

PDFEdit

The IRS has PDF tax return forms. Normally, if you want to enter your own values into the form you download Adobe's Acrobat. Normally, I think Adobe makes shoddy products that I don't want to use. So I thought I'd use a free alternative.

First, I used fink to install kpdf. Which worked fine, if you want to read PDFs and you don't want to edit them.

So I searched around and discovered PDFEdit, which is supposed to edit PDFs.

It isn't available in my package manager, fink, so I downloaded the source and tried to compile it. I'll share some notes here because I found some oddities.

I used fink to get all required libraries. This puts them in /sw/lib. No big deal.

Configure required the following command:
>sudo ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-boost=/sw --with-boost-libdir=/sw QTDIR=/sw/lib/qt3

Notice that the QTDIR is set on the command line. Which is weird, because it is in all of my environments already. But without this addition, the command won't work.

now, if you try "sudo make", the script will barf on what appears to be a ranlib command. So I tried the command interactively to see about the error, and it worked fine. Turns out the problem is QTDIR again, so the following command worked:
>sudo make QTDIR=/sw/lib/gt3

And once again, "sudo make install" won't work without QTDIR, so once again:
>sudo make install QTDIR=/sw/lib/gt3

Now the program runs, and to the extent it is capable, it works. But "works" is different than "works as expected". Sure, PDFEdit will let you edit PDFs, but you need a degree of patience that I don't possess. This tool is, in my exaggerated opinion, a single step up from using a hex editor to modify PDFs.

Look at this screenshot (click to enlarge):


You simply selected a field, the social security number, and then use the panel on the right to pick out the PDF element from a tree, and then use the panel on the bottom right to insert a new value. I'm not sure whether to select l, m, s, l, or m from the object list. I'm not confident that changing any of these values will avoid PDF corruption. The process is scary.

If I'm scared by this software, I can't imagine what other users feel.

I'll stick to a pencil.

Sometimes it is fun to goof around

#!/usr/bin/python

fiblist = [0, 1]

def fib(n):

  if(len(fiblist) < n):

    fiblist.append(fib(n-2) + fib(n-1))

  return fiblist[n-1]

Because sometimes it is more fun to goof around than to do homework.

My first version didn't keep a list, so the recursion got hairy quickly.  I tried fib(100) and waited long enough to expect an out-of-memory error for the VM stack rather than an answer.  The list version (shown) is as fast as the blink of an eye for fib(100), but it overflows to Long and I'm not sure whether Python retains significance or only retains magnitude.

I've always liked the fibonacci series.  When I read The DaVinci Code, I remember getting most of the mysteries right without cheating.  I think one or more had to do with this series, but I don't remember anymore.

In grade school math we had to draw a poster based a geometric theme.  I drew a series of circles whose centerpoints lied on a logarithmic spiral with diameters of the Fibonacci series filled with colors whose wavelengths approximated the Fibonacci numbers over the visible spectrum for the number of circles that fit on the poster.  It took a long time and a lot of thought.  I received a "C" because there "wasn't enough math."  In truth, the geometry was there but not perceptible if you didn't know where to look.

I liked my poster and I didn't care about the low marks.

Besides Dan Brown's Fibonacci parlor tricks, another source of "mainstream" Fibonacci goodness comes from Tool's song Lateralus.  The syllables in each line arpeggiate the Fibonacci Series.  There are tons of logarithmic easter eggs too, such as the lyrics starting 1.617 minutes into the song.  Swing on the spiral.