jlet.org — Jack Letourneau

Delicious

• Crowded Wet Mushrooms: A Beautiful Thing

  Everything you know about sautéeing mushrooms is wrong! The traditional orthodoxy has it that mushrooms must not be soaked in water and preferably should not even be rinsed, lest they become soggy. But it turns out that absorbed water keeps mushrooms from drinking up all the oil in your sauté pan as they cook down, and thus mushrooms that are soaked end up less oily than dry ones after sautéeing.

  February 4

• How to Make the Best Chili Ever

  Serious Eats blog entry from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who does stellar Cook’s Illustrated-style recipe writeups online when he’s not actually working for Cook’s Illustrated. I’ve been meaning to make chili at some point this winter, but access to good dried chiles here in upstate NY is hard to come by.

  January 22

• Text input speed testing

  Six-way time trial pitting pen and paper against a standard QWERTY keyboard against four portable devices: the good old Apple Newton, a couple of Palm PDAs, and the iPhone virtual keyboard. Surprised how well the iPhone fared; I’m kind of slow at typing on my iPod Touch but it could just be for lack of practice.

  January 21

• Flight Delays

  Infographic comparing the percentage of delayed or cancelled flights at ten U.S. airports from last year and this year. It’s good information to know, but Edward Tufte would shiver at the chartjunky decision to make bar graphs out of airplane window shades.

  January 15

• Easy Web data collection with mechanize and Beautiful Soup

  I’ve done some web scraping with Python before to pull weather conditions and forecasts down to my computer at home; if I need to get fancier than that, a proper library for maintaining state across multiple HTTP requests may be the better way to go.

  January 8

• Adrian Beltre’s Fielding 2006–2009

  Clips of the new Red Sox third baseman flashing the leather with the Mariners. The new pitching and defensive emphasis of the Sox will be something to watch in 2010.

  January 5

• The Up-To-Date Primer: A First Book of Lessons for Little Political Economists

  An introductory text written (almost) exclusively in words of a single syllable, on the topic of Georgism: the idea that government should be funded solely by a tax on land value (exclusive of improvements), rather than income taxes, sales taxes, and so forth.

  January 2

• Ninth Circuit Says Police Officer Can Be Sued for Tasing

  One hopes this ruling won’t be yet another 9th Circuit decision that gets overturned by SCOTUS. The “tasers keep people from getting shot” message is terribly disingenuous; police seem very comfortable using tasers at the slightest whiff of perceived disrespect or lack of compliance, not just in situations where they would otherwise have drawn their firearms on citizens.

  December 30

• The Language of Food

  Very interesting blog touching on culinary topics through the lens of linguistics and historical research.

  December 19

• What Keeps Mankind Alive?

  I’m getting in the Christmas spirit listening to William S. Burroughs doing Bertolt Brecht. Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts!

  December 16

• Want to be an MLB.com stringer?

  Would be an awesome job for someone with time flexibility (e.g. a freelancer of some sort); go to baseball games and gather real-time data for MLB’s stats division. I’m sure they’ll get an avalanche of résumés.

  December 4

• The Michelin guide and its undercover inspectors

  Feature article from the New Yorker on the Michelin food guides, including interview material with a (pseudonymous) Michelin inspector covering New York City. One might not agree with the Michelin guide’s critical philosophy, but it seems hard to claim they lack thoroughness in their execution.

  November 19

• Le pain brun vapeur

  French-language TV piece from Radio Canada discussing Boston brown bread in a can (“pain brun vapeur cuit en conserve”). On the fly I can manage to get about 25% of what’s being spoken; a bit more on replay.

  November 11

• How we discovered the be-all, end-all turkey recipe

  An L.A. Times food section article from a few years back wherein the Zuni Café dry brining method once again proves to be the best way to cook a great bird.

  November 11

• Varick Street Detention Center Assailed by Bar Group

  A private prison in New York City where detainees are held without charges, without legal representation, and without oversight. Worst line of the article: “When she asked that the lawyers’ letters of legal advice be forwarded to detainees who had been transferred from Varick, she said the warden balked, saying he had to consider the financial interests of his private shareholders.” It’s like a new director’s cut of “Brazil.”

  November 2