Food Trucks Suck

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There. I said it.

Food trucks are as supposed to be as much a part of LA culture as hot dog stands are for New York. Well, New York wins this one. My experience with food trucks is that they: 1. are slow, 2. serve tiny portions, and 3. aren’t any better than a walk-in eatery. Also, lately, they 4. are expensive, and 5. have incredibly long lines because every hipster thinks they’re the greatest food in LA.

I suspect a lot of the older food trucks that serve the neighborhoods actually are very good. Certainly they filled an important niche, since they served food in places and at hours that people otherwise couldn’t get food. They were operated by people who were from the areas they served, had native knowledge of great ethnic foods, and rapport with their customers.

But now that food trunks have become trendy, the experience has become diluted with mediocrity. I’m not saying that trendiness, by itself, leads to medocrity. But in this case the thing that became trendy was a bad way to serve food. Food trucks have tiny inefficient kitchens. They aren’t designed to serve a lot of people quickly, and they aren’t designed to serve a wide variety, but that’s exactly what people are trying to use them for.

For now, people are impressed enough by the “experience” to not notice they’ve stood in line for twenty minutes to get a small portion of food that’s not very good at a high price. If the food was actually good or unique, as with the old neighborhood food trucks of yore, maybe it’d be worth it, but these days most aren’t. So how long will this trend really last?

The Dress

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So apparently the most controversial thing to ever happen is this dress that no one can agree what color it is, and the illusion is so strong that some narrowminded actually think it’s a hoax perpetuated by half the population.

The science behind the illusion isn’t really that controversial. Some people’s visual systems see it (incorrectly) as a white-colored dress in shadow; other people’s visual systems see it (correctly) as a blue dress in the light. It’s a well-known effect called color constancy, and you can see a bunch of relatively innocuous examples of it on the Internet.

What’s interesting about this illusion (to me) is just how little context is needed to get the illusion for some people, including myself sometimes. There is a narrow strip of overexposed background on the upper-right corner, and that is apparently enough to cause our brains to think the dress is in shadow. So I wondered whether an object in the foreground, say another dress, that was clearly in the light, could thwart the illusion.

People who only see the dress as gold and white: how do you see this image? I did nothing at all to the color of the original dress; I only added the red dress in front of it (and a little drop shadow).

I sometimes see the original image as white and gold, but never this one. For me the dress is always blue and black in this image.

Yinzerstan: My Civ 5 Mod

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This is the wen site of the Yinzerstan mod for Civilization V. I will add some spiffy images and screenshots at some point. For now, here is a brief description of what I did.

I wanted this to be a fun and humorous homage to the city of my birth, Pittsburgh.

The leader of Pittsburgh is Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a person a lot of Pittsburghers probably never heard of. He is closest thing to a founding father that Pittsburgh has. As a young man, he was a friend of James Madison. He became a frontier justice in the Pittsburgh area soon after the American Revolution, and eventually ended up on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He founded a school that grew into the University of Pittsburgh.

I’ll be honest: I wanted a different person as Leader. When I think of all the important people in Pittsburgh history, and ask, which one would I want to be my leader, it’s a very easy choice. However, no matter how great a leader he would be in real life, I highly doubt Mr. Rogers would approve of his image being used in a game where an effective strategy is often to attack anyone you see on sight. Even when it’s at its most pacifist settings, it’s still a pretty violent game. To say nothing of the fact that his estate still owns rights to his likeness. So, I chose Hugh Henry Brackenridge instead. Well, at least we get a history lesson out of it.

A lot of the generic buildings from Civ V have been replaced by specific examples in unique to Pittsburgh. For example, Giant Eagle replaces the Granary, The Benedum Center replaces the Theatre, and the Allegheny Observatory replaces the ordinary Observatory. For the most part, these buildings behave identically to their counterparts. (Though I had to take out the ridiculous +2 Science you get from jungle tiles for the University of Pittsburgh.)

There are four buildings which have special behaviors, though. The three sports venues (PNC Park, Heinz Field, and the Consol Energy Center, which replace the Colosseum, Circus, and Stadium, respectively) each add +1 Faith to the empire. Yeah, that’s pretty much a joke on the importance of our sports teams in our life. (I briefly considered having PNC Park yield +2 Faith, but the Pirates have been good for a few years now, so that joke wouldn’t work any more.) Although I didn’t really try to balance the game in general, I did remove the ability for Yinzerstan to build a Temple. (However, you can still have a temple if you capture a city that built one.)

The fourth building that has special behavior is, of course, the Steel Mill, which replaces the Factory. The Steel Mill requires both an Iron and Coal resource to build (the Factory only requres Coal) but it results in a massive increase in Production.

For the icons representing the buildings, a lot were photographs I took myself. In other cases I used Creative Commons licensed files from Wikipedia.

The cities in Yinzerstan I named after Pittsburgh suburbs and neighborhoods. The order is kind of biased toward the east suburbs (since I grew up there) but I tried to mix it up. I was never a fan of the north suburbs so I only included fewer of those. I limited it to Allegheny County.

I am thinking about some making some sub-mods that only use suburbs in a single cardinal direction, and another one just for neighborhoods within city limits.

In the meantime, if you don’t like the order of the suburbs I’ve chosen, you can try to find the XML files where list the cities and change them.

A couple other random tidbits. The icon for Yinzerstan of course had to be the Steelers logo, which is actually a logo for the Steel industry, that is used by the Steelers. (Fun fact: the organization that owns the logo also tried to get the Cleveland Browns to wear it.) The theme colors are black and gold, of course. And, for lack of a better source of names, I named the spies after sportswriters.

Me complaining about people who complain about the ice bucket challenge

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All right, all this complaining about the ice bucket challenge is starting to annoy me to the point where I’m actually making a post about it.

(For those of you reading this three or so days later, after the viral sensation sweeping the Internet today has been forgotten, the ice bucket challenge is a personal challenge to your Internet friends to either donate $100 to ALS foundation, or to donate $10 and post a video of you dumping a bucket of ice water on yourself, while challenging more of your friends. The ALS foundation reports that it is a highly successful charity drive, netting them over $7 million.)

1. All you people who say how stupid it is to do something so as to avoid giving less of your own money to charity? Well guess what: that’s how many charity drives work in practice.

Someone might spend $1000 dollars to run in a charity 5K race, then spends several months getting sponsors so that they are on the hook for less of their own money. It turns out the promise of spending less of your own money is a big motivating factor to collect donations, which is why many charity drives are structured that way. Maybe you’re taking advantage of base human nature, but it works.

No matter how stupid you think ice bucket challenge is, it’s pretty much the same thing on a smaller and less formal scale. People have the option to donate their own money, or to donate less of their own money but instead do something to collect dontations from other people. There is no enforcement of it, so many people can and probably do cheat, but based on reports of record dontations, it’s obviously many people are taking it seriously.

IOW, it’s working, and it’s working on the same principles that some other charity drives use (that no one complains about).

2. The amount of water “wasted” is paltry. Here’s the thing: it’s a one time thing. Very few people are ever going to throw more than one bucket of ice water on themselves in their entire lives. The lifetime amount of fresh water lost to the ice bucket challenge is 5 gallons per participant.

Yet most of you have no problem dumping 20 gallons of fresh water on yourself EVERY DAY just to keep clean. If you made a pie chart showing water use from showering versus water use from ice bucket challenge, the ice bucket challenge slice would be too thin to see.

If you can justify using all that water to keep yourself clean, then you’re being really unfair to condemn using a miniscule percetage of that water for what is clearly an effective way to collect charity dontations.

So, to summarize, the ice bucket challenge 1. works the same way other charity drives work, and 2. uses far less water than people use for showering in one day, and 3. is highly successful. So just shut up.

How to chop an onion without crying

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How to chop an onion without crying. It’s one of the most famous questions that everyone has a dozen answers to, none of which work; it is a question rivaled perhaps only by how to stop hiccups [1].

But I have the answer.

But first, let’s do a quick review on why onions cause us to cry [2]. Onion cells produce a lot of irritating sulfur compounds that give them a unpleasant flavor. This evolved as a defense mechanism to prevent animals from eating them. When chopping onions, we break through the cell walls and cause all those sulfur compounds to be released into the air as vapors, which then go on to wreak havoc with our eyes. And here is the crucial fact: those sulfur compounds don’t just leech out into the air all at once. A little bit gets out right away, but most of these vapors aren’t released until the newly exposed surfaces react with the air a little and internal fluids start to permeate out. Most of the sulfur compounds won’t be released until a minute or two after chopping.

So much most people already know. So the answer is to work fast, right? No, not quite, we’re still missing something.

I take about a minute to chop half an onion. I can usually get through the first half without any problem at all, but by the time I get to the second half my eyes start to hurt and I’ll have to step away. So it would seem that the second half of the onion had already sat there too long; when I sliced into it, the sulfur compounds were sitting there waiting to leech out and attack my eyes. Right?

Wrong.

The sulfur compounds that attacked my eyes were not coming from the second half of the onion, they were coming from the first half… which is now fully chopped, still sitting on the same cutting board, and right at the point in time where the sulfur compounds really start to come at you. We as humans have a tendency to think that the problem is what we’re focusing on at the moment (in this case, the second half of the onion which I was currently chopping), but oftentimes the problem is really something else (the first half that I’d already finished chopping).

Realizing this was an epiphany. It instantly became obvious how to chop an onion and not tear up:

When you’re done chopping the first half of the onion, move the chopped onions to another part of the kitchen, away from your eyes. Then chop the second half of the onion.

If you follow this advice, and you can chop each half of the onion in about a minute, you should be able to finish both halves without tearing up.

Footnotes

[1] Which is easy, actually: you just will yourself to stop hiccupping. Works 99% of the time.

[2] Actually, onions don’t make me cry at all; they just make my eyes hurt like hell. For whatever reason my body has no lachrymal response to my eyes being chemically burned by sulfur compounds, so I have to either induce tears, throw water in my eyes, or just deal with it. But for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll just call it crying.

My Pulled Pork Tacos

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This is my pulled pork taco recipe, which has got me nearly universal praise (the only exception being some friends who eat kosher who couldn’t praise it for obvious reasons).

Pulled Pork Tacos

Finely chop up one cup of carrots, one cup of celery, and one cup of onion. (And don’t be a lazy ass about it; chop them down to the size of peas. Chop the carrots lengthwise so you don’t end up with medallions. Chop the celery lengthwise at least once to get rid of the U shape. If I see any U-shaped celery pieces, I will find you and hurt you.)

Get about 2 pounds of pork shoulder. (And do use shoulder. Save your loins for grilling or pan searing; today we braise.) Cut the shoulder into 2- to 3-inch cubes.

Lightly grease an cast iron dutch oven. (Note: If you are taking proper care of it it should already be lightly greased. Don’t worry, I don’t always do it either.) Get the dutch oven holy hot, then sear the hell out of the pork shoulder, all six sides of the cubes. At least three minutes per side at high heat. Remove the pork, and turn down the heat to medium, add the mirepoix and simmer for about 5-10 minutes (using the residual heat of the pan to get a nice sizzle—just for sound effects really, I don’t know it if makes it taste any better). Then add the pork back, cover the pork with chicken stock, some beer or white wine, and about cup of salsa. (Homemade would be great but there’s good jarred stuff. No beans in the salsa please.)

Cover the dutch over and simmer for awhile, then put the dutch oven in your real oven set to 250 degrees: just enough to boil the water. Check every so often to make sure there’s enough liquid left so it doesn’t burn.

When pork is tender enough to pull apart with a fork and much of the fluid had been reduced, remove from the big oven and pull the pork apart. (You could strain the mirepoix out if you wanted to, but I like to keep it in.)

Serve with Mexican toppings and tortillas.

Variations

Obviously using beef instead of pork is a simple variation. Ordinary stewing beef like you buy packaged at a supermarket (usually shoulder or chuck) would work fine, but you can up it a little by going for a flavorful cut such as sirlion tip or tri-tip. (Again, save the tenderest guts for dry heat.)

I find that braised beef can use a little ”something”. The braising process leaves it a little off: ”slightly” stringy and ”slightly” more bland than it should be. So I sear the beef in butter: it help bind it a little and enhances the flavor.

My most hated fictional protagonists

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The vast majority of time, whenever we read a book or watch a movie or TV show, we sympathize with, if we don’t actually like, the protagonist. This is because the writer controls our exposure to the character and can present the character in a sympathetic way, even when the character has attributes we don’t like.

Some other stories deliberately make the protagonist unlikable or unsympathizable. But again, the writer is controlling our perspective, only now they’re presenting the character in an unsympathetic way.

But once in awhile, a storywriter will intend to write a sympathetic protagonist, but fail. That’s what this post is about. This post is a list of fictional sympathetic protagonists I hated and actively rooted against.

Toru Okada, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles

Toru Okada, from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, is my fourth most hated protoagonist. Actually hate might be a strong word, and I suppose my hatred mostly isn’t actually personal against Toru. It’s mostly that I didn’t want Toru to ever come into contact with anyone. Toru was basically a bum who had a house thanks to family, and was as ineffective and useless a main character as I’ve ever seen. But somehow, in the rare times he ever did anything, everyone he came into contact with ended up with major psychological trouble, at least until some shady people recognized his “talent” and exploited it.

Toru, by virtue of being the one of the most ineffective and useless people ever written down, was the one who deserved the psychological trauma he was causing others. Not that the other characters were any good—in fact, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is probably the only book I’ve ever read where I didn’t like a single major character (note: until Wheel of Time)—but they were at least doing something.

Jack Tripper, Three’s Company

Jack Tripper and the Three’s Company gang basically exhibit what I like to call sitcom-think. Basically it means that as soon as you suspect someone might disapprove of something you did, you go to ridiculous extremes to prevent that person from finding out, and oftentimes the scheme is obviously not something that can be sustained. To a certain extent this kind of thinking to drive half-hour sitcom plots so a lot of sitcom characters have it, but Jack Tripper takes it to an unbearable extreme, and he never learns anything, ever.

There are other sitcoms where people never learn anything (Seinfeld is a classic example) but in those, the character is at least somewhat high-functioning in their default state. Jack Tripper is the kind of character whose whole reason for existing is to learn a lesson. In other works, that’s the sole reason this kind of character would be a protagonist, and you can never feel a catharsis until that character learns their lesson.

But we never have a catharsis in Three’s Company because Jack never learns, in fact he never even faces any seriously negative consequences at all.

I realized how bad I hated Jack Tripper when I was watching Three’s Company once, and realized that I was actively, from the bottom of my heart, rooting for the thug Jack was trying to avoid. I’m not just saying that to be edgy or to exaggerate: I really, from the bottom of my heart, wanted the thug to beat up Jack Tripper.

Aron Trask, East of Eden

I am not sure whether John Steinbeck actually wanted us to like Aron Trask, per se, but we definitely were supposed to symathize. I didn’t. In fact, I think one of the most delightful things I ever read was the scene were Abra burned all his old love letters.

I hate to say it, but Aron represents (to an extreme extent) some of the faults I see in myself, so maybe I’m being unfair. (I should mention that I am talking about the Aron from the novel; in the movie a lot of the subtext on Aron came to the surface, giving him more of an edge which actually made him less nauseating.) Aron is the prototypical fragile pretty-boy. As a youth Aron was shielded from reality, by virtue of being the favorite by everyone on accont of being so pretty and sweet. As a result he became one of those people who believes anything can be overcome by the power of love—not just any love, his love specifically—and is genuinely wounded to his very core when reality happens and everyone doesn’t share it. And—this is the nauseating part—his reaction to reality is to double down and get even more idealistic and then get even more wounded when his efforts still produced no results.

I can only imagine what his evenings with Abra were like, she being forced to listen as he got more and more crazy and earnest over how powerful their love was and that it could overcome anything.

Bleagh.

Nikolai Rostov, War and Peace

My most hated character of all is Nikolai Rostov from War and Peace. I read War and Peace the very boring summer before I headed off to college, and I may have misunderstood Tolstoy’s intent. But Tolstoy seemed to intend Nikolai and his sister Natasha (also not one of my favorites) to represent normal average people who were swept up in the events of the Napoleonic Wars, but in fact they were pretty much just the redneck trash on the lower-end of Russian nobility. Honestly, the Rostovs in general could very well have been a reality TV family with all their drama.

You might have noticed a theme in characters I don’t like: they tend to be ineffective people who react to difficult circumstances with even more ineffectiveness. Nikolai is no exception: he pretty much sucked at everything he tried. But what made Nikolai truly insufferable was that, not only did he think he was just a great guy in every eay, the other characters did too.

So. Nikolai Rostov, in his actions and thoughts, is probabaly the biggest pussy ever set upon paper, but the author, all the characters in the book, and Nikolai himself, thought that he was this great awesome guy. As a result, everything he did wrong (which was, in fact, everything he did) was forgiven… because he was such a great guy. And we are supposed to feel sorry for this great guy when all this bad stuff happens to him—a good portion of which was his own fault—and oh, by the way, when he backstabs his own cousin, breaking his promise to marry her so he could marry an heiress (who deserved better) so he could get weasel out of the gambling debt he got himself into, we’re supposed to think, “Ah, there’s a guy who got things done in the end.”

I wanted to strangle him right through the page.

I highly suspect Tolstoy intended for the in-universe sympathy for Nikolai to be ironic. I hope so, because other than the Rostovs, War and Peace has a lot of good characters and was a great story. But if it was ironic he played it perfectly straight: maybe until the epilogue where Nikolai’s nephew has no respect for him but does respect Pierre and his father Prince Andrei.

Faile, Wheel of Time

Oh God, Faile. It’s not much of exaggeration to say I stopped reading Wheel of Time because of her. Even without her, I’m sure I would have stopped at some point because she’s just the worst of an entire cast of awful characters who I was starting to see would never get better. But the moment I decided to put the book down forever, it was largely because of Faile, and she made everyone around even more stupid than they already were.

It was Chapter 16 of the fourth book; it was probably the worst thing I had ever read in my entire life, a long argument with her boyfriend who loved her for some reason and was trying to make her hate him so she didn’t accompany him into danger. It was ten relentless pages of this awful argument, neither one of them managing to communicate even the tiniest bit of understanding, and she stayed at an intensity level of 11 the whole time.

I did actually finish it, and intened to read on, the but the coup de grâce came right after, when the one remaining main character who hadn’t yet done anything stupidly melodramatic (Lan) panicked like a baby when he found out his crush was going to go on a mission, after 3+ books of being nearly completely implacable.

If not for Faile, I probably could have dealt with Lan’s melodrama and at least made it to the end of the fourth book. But I didn’t read past the end of that chapter.

Quantum thought of the day

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I don’t think I’d trust quantum randomness to generate cryptographically secure passwords or encryption keys. At least not for anything important.

Here’s the problem. When you use quantum randomness, you are giving demons a perfect opportunity to sabotage you. Ok, let’s step back, because you’re probably saying “What the…” right now.

Of course, we don’t know that demons exist. Let’s face it, scientific investigations into supernatural beings have consistently shown no evidence of them. So, if demons do exist, their effects are going to be subject to the laws of physics; thus, the only chance they have to manipulate things in the real world is through non-deterministic processes. That means quantum effects.

Furthermore, whatever effect they have has to also obey quantum probabilities (otherwise it would be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which is a statistical law, yes, but if demons made a habit of breaking it, we’d notice). This severely limits what the hypothetical quantum demons could do. Because of the second law, quantum effects rarely come into play in the macroscopic world.

But it can become an issue when scientists start rigging the real world to react to quantum effects. The classic thought experiment is, of course, Schrödinger’s cat. (Briefly, the scientist puts a cat in a box with a vial or poison gas. The vial is hooked up to a Geiger counter, and will release its gas if the Geiger counter detects an alpha particle. The counter is aimed at a sample that has a 50% chance of releasing a an alpha particle in one hour.) Now, suppose a scientist sets up a Schrödinger’s cat experiment. And condsider that there is no scientific test that can distinguish between a natural random decay and a demon-manipulated decay. This means, if there is a demon who really, really hates that cat, then that cat is pretty much dead meat. (Well, it’s not dead meat until the scientist opens the box and observes it, but you get the idea.)

The only limitation that a demon has is that, if the scientist decides to run 100 Schrödinger’s cat experiments, the demon will have to keep the results to around 50 alive / 50 dead. If the demon hates all cats then there’s not much it can do, it can only kill about half of them. However, if the demon hates just one cat, you can bet that cat will be among the dead.

Now, instead of this silly cat experiment, let’s say we’re using quantum randomness to generate encryption keys to secure important data. A demon wanting to sabotage your data security can potentially manipulate the random values to introduce a weakness into the key.

Now, I’m not saying demons exist. They probably don’t. But still, if I had something really important hanging in the balance, I’m not so sure I’d trust demons not to exist.

Note: I’m only being half tongue-in-cheek about this.

I don’t really think there are demons manipulating quantum interactions. But if push comes to shove, and something really, really important is on the line, this is something I would think about when choosing a strategy. If I needed an absolutely secure key to stop a nuclear missle launch, I’m not so sure I’d trust a quantum random key when a deterministic, pseudo-random key can be nearly as secure.

On the other hand, if the situation were dire, let’s say maybe I was trying to brute force a password override to stop the nuclear launch, I’d maybe consider using quantum random values while praying that a benevolenet demon could help find the code faster.

List of Things I Refuse to Start

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I, having been myself for more than 3 and a half decades, have learned a few things about myself. One thing being, I am very good at abstention but very bad at moderation. For this reason there are many things I refuse to do even once, for fear that I might become hooked and have to face the looming burden of abstaining since I don’t trust myself to moderate.

Here’s a short list of those things.

  • Alcohol
  • Any other drug prone to habit-forming
  • Multiplayer online games
  • Any sleeping pill at all
  • Golf
  • Sudoku

This post will be missed

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File this one under the “Is this the kind of thing you spend your time thinking about?” files. I don’t care. It bothers me.

If someone close to you dies, do you miss them? If someone you like can’t make it to an event you’re attending, do you miss them? Of course you do.

So why, if you miss them, do you say, “You will be missed”, instead of “I will miss you”? What, are you afraid to commit to it or something? You miss this person, wish they were here, but you can’t even muster the never to say it in the active voice.

And don’t give be any bull like, “Well, I was just saying it’s generally true and is not specific to me.” Pshaw. You can say, “We’ll all miss you”, or, “Everyone will miss you”, and not have to be a generalizing non-commital pussy.

So the next time you miss someone, say it, and own it, and don’t just generalize.

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