Two of my friends have already commented (snidely, of course) on my previous post. They seem to think that I live-blogged my dinner, but such was not the case. The second course came along a couple of hours after the first course, after the scallops had settled a bit…
My beautiful bride outdid herself for the second course, creating another simple, perfectly finished seafood dish: pan-fried salmon with a sauce of fresh lemon juice and zest, fresh dill, garlic and butter, served over bow-tie pasta with pesto, fresh-grated Parmesan, and pine nuts.
I ate until I was near bursting. And because of that, the dessert course shall be postponed until another evening. Now I must go drink a large glass of a fine Cabernet…
Ahhhh… Now if I could only convince the wench that every day was my birthday!
Monday, September 10, 2007
Birthday: First Course...
Today is my birthday, and this year I'm as old as some of the dirt in my yard. Since 9/11, I can't help but associate my birthday with that awful day – today I celebrate getting older; tomorrow I remember and honor the ghosts of 9/11.
But today my lovely bride is doing her best to help me celebrate. We just finished the first course of what will be a long, drawn-out celebratory meal. For this course, she cooked one of my favorite foods – sea scallops – and they were simply spectacular. Note the past tense: those scallops are now happily lodged in my stomach.
She fixed them in a very simple manner, but oh, my they were delicious. She first fixed a light sauce with a touch of garlic, fresh tarragon, lemon zest, and salted butter. She drizzled this over the scallops and then broiled them for just a few minutes. The tops were lightly browned, and they were absolutely perfectly done (and that's quite tricky with scallops, as I know from many times that I've overcooked them). Yum!
I can hardly wait for the second course…
But today my lovely bride is doing her best to help me celebrate. We just finished the first course of what will be a long, drawn-out celebratory meal. For this course, she cooked one of my favorite foods – sea scallops – and they were simply spectacular. Note the past tense: those scallops are now happily lodged in my stomach.
She fixed them in a very simple manner, but oh, my they were delicious. She first fixed a light sauce with a touch of garlic, fresh tarragon, lemon zest, and salted butter. She drizzled this over the scallops and then broiled them for just a few minutes. The tops were lightly browned, and they were absolutely perfectly done (and that's quite tricky with scallops, as I know from many times that I've overcooked them). Yum!
I can hardly wait for the second course…
This Week's Puzzler
This week we delve a little into the history of technology – relatively recent history, which I am ancient enough to have personally participated in!
The ubiquitous personal computer is based on a “microcomputer chip” such as an Intel Pentium. Microcomputers first appeared in the 1970s, initially as the brains behind primitive four-function electronic calculators. Several companies produced early microcomputers powerful enough to be considered a general purpose computer, but arguably the first such microcomputer was the Intel 8008 – a primitive and slow little computer that was nevertheless quite a revolutionary device.
Unlike most earlier digital computer technology, the 8008 was cheap enough to be accessible to the hobbyist community, and a tiny little company produced an 8008 kit within weeks of the chip's initial release. This kit created quite a stir in the hobbyist community, and hundreds of nutcases like myself bought one. The kit was really just a bag of parts and a schematic – to assemble the kit required mainly wire-wrapping, a bit of soldering, and the ability to provide an adequate power supply.
I had my kit assembled and running in two days, and I was thrilled – I actually personally owned a computer! At the time, I was a DS (computer repair technician) in the U.S. Navy, and the computers I worked with there were the size of a large refrigerator – and yet not as powerful as the little 8008 that I kept in a cardboard box. I'm sad to say that I've long since lost that assembled kit. Advances in technology were fast even then, and it was only a year or two until that kit was obsoleted by a succession of more advanced microcomputer systems, based on chips like the 8080, Z80, 6800, and 6502.
What was the name of that wire-wrap 8008 kit? Display your geekiosity, and vote your answer at right...
The ubiquitous personal computer is based on a “microcomputer chip” such as an Intel Pentium. Microcomputers first appeared in the 1970s, initially as the brains behind primitive four-function electronic calculators. Several companies produced early microcomputers powerful enough to be considered a general purpose computer, but arguably the first such microcomputer was the Intel 8008 – a primitive and slow little computer that was nevertheless quite a revolutionary device.
Unlike most earlier digital computer technology, the 8008 was cheap enough to be accessible to the hobbyist community, and a tiny little company produced an 8008 kit within weeks of the chip's initial release. This kit created quite a stir in the hobbyist community, and hundreds of nutcases like myself bought one. The kit was really just a bag of parts and a schematic – to assemble the kit required mainly wire-wrapping, a bit of soldering, and the ability to provide an adequate power supply.
I had my kit assembled and running in two days, and I was thrilled – I actually personally owned a computer! At the time, I was a DS (computer repair technician) in the U.S. Navy, and the computers I worked with there were the size of a large refrigerator – and yet not as powerful as the little 8008 that I kept in a cardboard box. I'm sad to say that I've long since lost that assembled kit. Advances in technology were fast even then, and it was only a year or two until that kit was obsoleted by a succession of more advanced microcomputer systems, based on chips like the 8080, Z80, 6800, and 6502.
What was the name of that wire-wrap 8008 kit? Display your geekiosity, and vote your answer at right...
Flying Pigs at NASA!
This has turned out to be quite a week of flying pigs! NASA/GISS has released the source code for their global temperature data aggregation – something that many climatologists and many anthropogenic global warming skeptics have been demanding for years. Jim Hansen, the GISS chief scientist (don't even think about getting between him and a liberal reporter), noted the release in a particularly grumpy ungracious email – he really does act more like royalty than he does a scientist…
I found two good posts about this release: one on Climate Skeptic (a new blog dedicated to anthropogenic global warming skepticism, written by the same guy who writes CoyoteBlog), and one on Steve McIntyre's excellent Climate Audit site. Steve is the ‘amateur’ climatologist who's been asking tough questions for the past couple of years – and getting mostly incoherent anger from the likes of Jim Hansen as a result. To me, Steve is the epitome of a professional scientist. Jim (how dare you question me!) Hansen, on the other hand, dishonors his profession on a regular basis by displaying exactly those attitudes and behaviors that are supposed to be avoided by scientists: opacity (e.g., the secret data “adjustment” methodologies), intolerance of debate, and a reliance on faith instead of reproducible experiments and verifiable facts.
The just-released data and programs are available at this link on NASA's site. I took a quick look through them; nothing exhaustive. It's a mish-mash of Python, Fortran, C, and shell scripts; from this software engineer's perspective it looks like something cobbled together by a convention of drunken chimps. My starting assumption, were I to review this in detail, would be that it is badly broken. The challenge would be to prove that assumption wrong, and my guess is that it would be a daunting challenge. I'll let someone else tackle that one!
I found two good posts about this release: one on Climate Skeptic (a new blog dedicated to anthropogenic global warming skepticism, written by the same guy who writes CoyoteBlog), and one on Steve McIntyre's excellent Climate Audit site. Steve is the ‘amateur’ climatologist who's been asking tough questions for the past couple of years – and getting mostly incoherent anger from the likes of Jim Hansen as a result. To me, Steve is the epitome of a professional scientist. Jim (how dare you question me!) Hansen, on the other hand, dishonors his profession on a regular basis by displaying exactly those attitudes and behaviors that are supposed to be avoided by scientists: opacity (e.g., the secret data “adjustment” methodologies), intolerance of debate, and a reliance on faith instead of reproducible experiments and verifiable facts.
The just-released data and programs are available at this link on NASA's site. I took a quick look through them; nothing exhaustive. It's a mish-mash of Python, Fortran, C, and shell scripts; from this software engineer's perspective it looks like something cobbled together by a convention of drunken chimps. My starting assumption, were I to review this in detail, would be that it is badly broken. The challenge would be to prove that assumption wrong, and my guess is that it would be a daunting challenge. I'll let someone else tackle that one!
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