No measure of health

Mongrel cuisines

by eldan Posted on January 22, 2012

I’m interested in mongrel cuisines.

Just about everything I cook myself is mongrel cuisine by definition. I’m culturally rather a mongrel myself, and most of my sources for recipes are not exactly faithful to the culture of their birth. For instance, this evening I made dal, following a recipe from someone who I’m pretty sure isn’t Indian. I’ve never had the “real thing” cooked by someone who grew up eating Indian food at home so I have no real idea how “authentic” this one is and I don’t care as long as it tastes good, which it did.

This got me thinking about how “Indian food” as most commonly seen in Britain is itself both a subset (the default “curry” only representing food from the northern end of the subcontinent) and very much a mongrel, featuring some dishes that appear to have been invented in Britain. Similarly, when I moved to the US I noticed that the more bastardised forms of Chinese food were actually quite different from those I was used to in Britain. It’s possible in the cities with a bigger Chinese population—Seattle or San Francisco, for example—to find food that has more in common with what I’ve actually eaten in China, but the default is beyond mongrel; let’s call it a chimera. Continue reading →

Posted in Food | Tagged Britain, food, Judaism, Seattle, travel | 3 Comments

The inequality cycle

In a comment the other day I alluded to the impossibility of having a society that’s both a perfect meritocracy and highly unequal. I hadn’t actually realised how strong the relationship between these two aspects was, until seeing Paul Krugman’s post “The Great Gatsby Curve” today. Here’s the chart that sums it up:

Note that “elasticity” here refers to the elasticity of a child’s earnings where the controlling variable is the parents’ earnings. The relationship is both stronger and more straightforwardly linear than I had expected.

As always with these things, the points that don’t fall right on the line are interesting to consider: particularly the UK, France & Japan, which has very similar Gini coefficients in 1985, but a fairly wide range of intergenerational earnings elasticity. I have no particular insight into why this would be so, and I’m interested in any ideas you might have.

by eldan Posted on January 20, 2012 | 2 Comments

Climate resources

I’ve recently seen a few great free resources for learning about the climate crisis:

A couple of the regular RealClimate contributors teach a class at the University of Chicago, which they’ve just turned into a free online series: Open Climate 101. I’m thinking of signing up myself – although I know most of the background I still keep learning new things about the whole system works and I bet there are gaps I’m unaware of in my knowledge.

David MacKay, author of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (which is itself an excellent free book) recently announced an update to the UK Department of Energy & Climate Change‘s 2050 Pathways Calculator. This is a great tool which lets you pick a menu of policy options and see how close they’d come to meeting the UK’s stated goal of bringing greenhouse gas emissions down to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. Obviously the absolute numbers are UK-specific, but unless you are or aspire to be a policy maker yourself it’s most interesting as a way of getting a handle on the relative usefulness of the different approaches. I certainly learned a lot from playing with it yesterday:

The goal is achievable!

…but not through supply-side reforms alone – there has to be a reduction in energy demand.

No one option on its own solves the problem, and there are very few that even look significant alone – this is something that needs many co-ordinated steps to solve.

A large rollout of nuclear power is one of the few options that gets a large fraction of the way in one stroke, but it’s also not necessary. The target can be met without any nuclear power at all, so the nuclear question is really about what other corners we’d like to cut.

And finally, it’s a much narrower resource, on one question alone, but I really like this visualisation of the difference between climate and weather:

by eldan Posted on January 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

Getting to the mountains

by eldan Posted on January 17, 2012

Now that we’ve finally had some decent snowfall, I’m hankering for some of this. Since the last time I checked, several new bus services to the nearest ski hills seem to have been launched. I found it a bit of a hassle tracking down the information, so here’s a list for my own future reference and as a public service: Continue reading →

Posted in Seattle | Tagged infrastructure, Seattle | Leave a comment

I was wrong: about “positive discrimination”

by eldan Posted on January 15, 2012

I’ve always believed that it is a Very Bad Thing to discriminate between people based on group membership, especially when the groups are things people don’t choose for themselves (race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, etc). Apart from the obvious damage to the people who get discriminated against, it’s bad for the discriminators who miss out on potential recruits/customers/friends for no good reason.

I used to think that this belief was a simple matter and all its corollaries obvious. Discrimination is bad, so we must not discriminate, end of story. If I’m judging people by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin, I must be doing my part to fulfill Dr. King’s dream, right? By the same token, surely it’s bad to ever consider group memberships at all? In fact, wouldn’t it be better for recruiters (colleges, employers, etc) to just never collect information about race or gender? A decade ago I would have wholeheartedly agreed with all of those, but I’ve learned that there’s more to it.

There were many steps along the path, but three data points stand out in my mind as particularly relevant. Continue reading →

Posted in I was wrong | Tagged education, equality, feminism, I was wrong, liberation, MLK, personal | 5 Comments

Realism versus pictorialism

Until I visited China, I thought the stereotypical Chinese style of landscape painting was completely fanciful. That first visit was an eye-opener in all kinds of ways, one of which was the realisation that the style was very much informed by how the landforms, light, vegetation and skies really looked. I tried to capture the feel of it, rather unsuccessfully because this was the very beginning of my interest in photography so I was barely technically competent with the camera, never mind having a clue about framing:

If you look at a rather better photo from the same area, you’ll get some sense of this. But not exactly, because there is still a world of difference between capturing the feel of a place, and narrow realism that directly represents how it looks.

Today, thanks to Photojojo’s delightful Twitter stream, I learned about a couple of photographers whose work bridges that gap. Long Chinsan and his student Don Hong-Oai composed their photos in the same way as traditional Chinese paintings and used some unconventional printing techniques, for a strikingly similar effect. Here’s one of my favourites from Don:

It’s well worth looking at more of Don Hong-Oai’s work. I should also mention, in fairness to his estate, that he appears to be represented by two galleries in the US, though as is often the case the professional galleries’ websites are terrible showcases for the art: A, B.

One of the things I’m working on most deliberately with my own photography, but finding extremely difficult, is fighting the urge to always try and capture everything realistically. These two photographers are great examples of how much more effectively a mood or atmosphere can be captured when not worrying about realism.

by eldan Posted on January 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

Christmas and Hanuka

by eldan Posted on December 25, 2011

I’ve never said these words before but: the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas sermon is excellent, and well worth a read. Here’s the paragraph that struck the deepest chord for me:

The most pressing question we now face, we might well say, is who and where we are as a society. Bonds have been broken, trust abused and lost. Whether it is an urban rioter mindlessly burning down a small shop that serves his community, or a speculator turning his back on the question of who bears the ultimate cost for his acquisitive adventures in the virtual reality of today’s financial world, the picture is of atoms spinning apart in the dark.

Continue reading →

Posted in Judaism | Tagged Britain, Christmas, Hanuka, Judaism, liberation, moral decay, religions, scripture | Leave a comment

Mongrel cuisines

Getting to the mountains

I was wrong: about “positive discrimination”

Christmas and Hanuka

Machine translation

Comments

Twitter: @eldang

Flickr: eldan

Recent posts

Older posts

Spam Blocked

Share Alike

Meta