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.

These mongrels can be quite bad. The world does not need what passes for Mexican food in Britain, Iceland or Mongolia, nor does it need more varieties of fried battered cubes of mystery meat in gloopy over-sugared sauce with cutesy Chinese names (though I will admit to a weakness for both of these travesties). But I’m interested in the ones that are really great. The real triumph is when a mongrel cuisine is so good that it gets exported in turn. I know of some great examples round here:

• The Berliner serves döner kebap German-style, which seems to mean really good döner meat (unlike most kebab houses in London, for example), with similar salads and sauces to the London variant, in a kind of bread I’m more used to seeing served with sausages.
• InChin’s Bamboo Garden serves what is apparently sold as “Chinese food” in India. It’s a glorious mashup with paneer repeatedly standing in for tofu, and a lot of spices I’m more used to seeing in Indian food, with cooking styles familiar either from real Chinese or British-Chinese food.
• ‘Ohana serves Hawai‘i food, which also seems to be the most widespread cuisine on O‘ahu. Some of the dishes are ethnic-Hawaiian, some just general American, and some seem to have come straight from Japan or the Philippines, just like a good proportion of Hawai‘i’s population. But the most interesting ones to see are the true hybrids like spam musubi and curries that have more in common with Japan’s interpretation than any actual Indian food.

There’s at least one more mongrel cuisine that I’d go out of my way to eat if only I knew where to go: the “Nonya” cuisine of the Chinese diaspora in South-East Asia. I’m also intrigued by the Japanese versions of Western cuisine, and endlessly amused by Hong Kong-style Western dishes.

There must be more. Plenty of places I know much less about have had migrants going back and forth for many generations: which have come up with cuisines worth seeking out?

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.

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:

Practical ways to go skiing from central Seattle without a car

To Steven’s Pass

Greasebus
Saturdays & Sundays
Picks up from Snowboard Connection, 263 Yale Ave N at 8am and returns around 6pm
Also has a pickup point in Fremont
Cost: $20
Bonus: biodiesel powered!

MerryMountain
Tuesdays
Picks up from the old MOHAI site,  2700 24th Ave E at 7am and seems to return around 6pm
Also has a pickup point in Kirkland and might pick you up from Monroe on request
Cost: $40

To Snoqualmie Pass

Seattle Ski Shuttle
Saturdays & Sundays
Picks up from the Grand Hyatt, 7th & Pine at 7:45am and returns around 6pm
Also has pickup points in West Seattle and Bellevue
Cost: $35
Only drops off at Snoqualmie Central, but the resort has a free shuttle for Alpental access

To Crystal Mountain

Seattle Ski Shuttle
Mondays, Thursdays & Fridays
Picks up from the Grand Hyatt, 7th & Pine at 7:30am and returns around 6:30pm
Also has pickup points in West Seattle and Auburn
Cost: $40

To Whitefish, Montana

Amtrak Empire Builder
Daily
Departs King Street Station at 4:40pm and gets you to Whitefish early the next morning.
Return train departs Whitefish after dinner and gets you back here at 10:25 the next morning.
Cost: varies; was $158 for a return seat when I checked for this weekend, but bed reservations almost double that.
Bummer: Amtrak won’t let you reserve just a bed like European sleeper trains – you have to reserve a 2- or 4- bed room, which makes this needlessly expensive for solo travelers or groups of 3.

To Whistler/Blackcomb

Amtrak+Greyhound
3 trips a day
Takes about 7 hours, including a very efficiently run transfer at Vancouver train station.
Cost: varies; around $60 each way.

Others?

I’m sure I’ve missed something. Leave a comment if you know of any other options.

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.

The first was a conversation at the 2004 Artificial Life conference. As is always the case with academic conferences, conversations with fellow researchers were at least as interesting as the presentations, papers and proceedings we were officially there for, and we didn’t exclusively talk about work. I had a particularly interesting conversation with a fellow grad student who happened to be from South Africa, and at some point the topic of  Black Economic Empowerment came up.

At the time, I took the Economist’s standard line on the subject, which was to argue that it’s not only intrinsically undesirable to consider race in things like employment decisions, but also a bad idea for practical reasons. The pragmatic arguments were along the lines that people would always find ways to fiddle the system, all the benefit would accrue to the subset of black people who were already relatively well off, and that as a temporary solution it was just storing up problems for when it would eventually be phased out.

My new friend responded, fairly, that I just didn’t understand how crippling the legacy of Apartheid had been. In essence his point was that Apartheid had so restricted black South Africans’ access to education and wealth that they couldn’t now afford to educate their own children in turn. He was adamant that non-discrimination alone would never get enough people out of that sort of poverty trap, and without an active program of fixing that legacy Apartheid might as well still exist. I wasn’t immediately persuaded, but as you can see his argument made quite an impact on me, and it started me on the journey towards thinking about equality as a matter of actively breaking poverty traps rather than just passively getting out of the way.

The second has been watching my wife’s career development. We met in grad school, and at some point I was informed that I was dating the entire population of female American grad students in the computer science department, which was easy given that it consisted of her. She did rather well, getting her Master’s on schedule and lining up an offer of a good job which was how we ended up in Seattle. Since then she’s continued to succeed professionally in the IT industry, which I probably don’t need to tell you is heavily male-dominated.

On the face of it, this might sound like a good argument for the simplistic view of non-discrimination: get direct discrimination out of the way, and a smart woman gets to prove her ability and reap the rewards. But what I’ve also seen is how different her experience of work has been when she’s been the only woman in her team, versus not being alone, versus having at least one woman in the management chain. Even as the big picture of her career progress has involved substantial success and seems to have been a good experience along most of the way, there have (of course) been obvious bumps in the road. Some of those had clearly been caused by working with men who had so little experience relating to knowledgeable technical women that they either dismissed them or were made deeply insecure by them.

It’s clear to me that if my wife had always been the only woman in her team, her experience would have been at best a lot less positive, if not negative enough to have driven her out of the field. It’s also clear from how well she’s done without the burden of being the sole woman on a team that this is not down to any lack of ability on her part.

The third was what I learned from one of the first classes I organised for Sustainable Seattle: Dialog about Race: The Power of an Illusion. This is in general a pretty eye-opening workshop about both the history of racial inequality in the US and the mechanisms by which it’s still perpetuated today even though direct discrimination has been banned for a couple of generations. The specific point that really got me was a claim that almost the entire difference between white and black American childrens’ performance through school could be explained by the huge difference in wealth between the races. As far as I know, this claim is well supported by data; certainly wealth seems to be the dominant variable in determining which if any college a child will go to.

There’s a sliver of good news in that finding: it implies that direct discrimination no longer dominate’s black childrens’ lives in the way it did in Dr. King’s time. But that’s not going to be much comfort to the average black parent, knowing that even if they themselves have the resources to get their kids through college, most of their peers won’t, and most of their peers’ children will fail not because of the content of their character, but because of the colour of their skin. A degree of indirection doesn’t make this any less true; to go back to the beginning of Dr. King’s speech, it remains true after another 50 years that:

…the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity….

It would even have been better news if income had turned out to be the mediating factor, because at least that could have been fixed in one generation, whereas the wealth gap is the cumulative effect of many generations of closed doors.

These were the biggest things, the ones that I’m directly conscious of having moved my thoughts. Along the way there were others, like seeing the burden of unicornism and imposter syndrome, the number of my leads & opportunities that have come in through informal networks, and becoming more and more conscious of just how ferociously our culture tries to shove everyone into a convenient pigeonhole and fights their attempts to leave it.

Over time this set of things convinced me that even if every single person in the world could somehow be persuaded overnight to never again discriminate against anyone because of their group membership, the problems caused by such discrimination would persist. Non-discrimination alone can’t address a lack of resources, role models and peers. Left alone, this problem might resolve itself over a few generations. I’m not convinced it would, at least not without other momentous changes in how we organise society, because poverty traps can be so utterly vicious even without the help of any -ism. But even if it would, why should the intervening generations suffer? What have they done to deserve that? Without a good answer to that question, I see a burden on everyone who has privilege in a given situation—and especially those who control access to financial resources—to actively level the playing field for those who don’t.

This is not to say that the problem is easy to solve, or that well-intentioned efforts to solve it don’t routinely have unintended consequences. I’m still very wary of rigid quota systems in particular. I also think anything that looks at race independent of poverty,  gender independent of childrearing & domestic labour allocation, or nationality independent of language & class, is doomed to fail in a very specific way: by having most of its intended benefit captured by a small, privileged subset of the group it’s meant to help. And I still believe at least one thing I thought 10 years ago: that much of the work of erasing long-established inequality has to be done by and through state schools, which can serve as a great leveller if they’re consistently good.

None of this is a reason not to try. “This terrible problem in the world is difficult to fix” is always reason to work harder at getting it right; never to give up and condemn billions of people to the flames of withering injustice.

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.

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.

Apart from that, he talks as much about Jesus as one would rightfully expect from Christian clergy in a Christmas speech, and in at least one part he’s a bit arrogant about how much his Church really gets to represent and reflect today’s very diverse and rather irreligious Britain. So why, you might ask, would a pro-multiculturalism heathen like me like it so much? Well, I read most religious discourse as though every mention of Gods and their manifestations are coded references to a much broader, less well-defined Divine Ineffable. I hope this isn’t too offensive to people who do believe in the specific God[s] being referenced, but it means that many scriptures—especially the passages about how people should treat each other—still speak to me in powerful ways even though I don’t share the underlying belief systems. I don’t normally bother spelling the substitutions out explicitly, but here’s another particularly good section from the Archbishop’s sermon by way of example:

The life that lives in [or: the story of] Jesus, the everlasting divine agency that is uniquely [uniquely within Christian texts] embodied in him, is like something that is said – a word addressed to us. Because, like any word addressed to us, it demands a response. And the gospel goes on at once to tell us that the expected response was not forthcoming. Before we have even got to Christmas in the words of the gospel we are taken to Good Friday, and to the painful truth that the coming of Jesus splits the world into those who respond and those who don’t [or the painful truth that those who would give their lives to fixing the world are often severely punished for it]. Once the word is spoken in the world, there is no way back. Your response to it, says the gospel again and again, is what shows who and what you really are, what is deepest in you, what means most. What we say or do in our response to Jesus [any inspiring example] is our way of discovering for ourselves and showing to one another what is real in and for us.

I don’t have to share the speaker’s beliefs for the story to be meaningful to me. As for why I need the religious imagery at all, this speech addressed that point more sharply than I’ve been able to do myself [I'll stop with the interpolated notes because you probably get the idea already]:

Finding words to respond to the Word made flesh is and has always been one of the most demanding things human beings can do. Don’t believe for a moment that religious language is easier or vaguer than the rest of our language. It’s more like the exact opposite: think of St John writing his gospel, crafting the slow, sometimes repetitive pace of a narrative that allows Jesus to change the perspective inch by inch as a conversation unfolds. Or of St Paul, losing his way in his sentences, floundering in metaphors as he struggles to find the words for something so new that there are no precedents for talking about it. Or any number of the great poets and contemplatives of the Christian centuries. It isn’t surprising if we need other people’s words a lot of the time; and it’s of great importance that we have words to hand that have been used by others in lives that obviously have depth and integrity. That’s where the language of our shared worship becomes so important.

Meanwhile, this is one of those years when Hanuka coincides with Christmas. I always like it when it does, even though this happening is a major contributor to US culture treating Hanuka like a far more major festival than it really is. If you really want to show your Jewish friends that you’re interested in their culture and respect it, wish them well over the important festivals: Passover, when we celebrate that unlike our ancestors we don’t have to be slaves, and Yom Kippur, when we face up to a reckoning with God [traditional], or own consciences [doing that substitution to fit my own beliefs again]. All the other landmarks of the year pale into insignifance next to those two.

But even though Hannuka basically gets an inflated status in popular culture as a kind of Christmas consolation prize, I still like it when it coincides with Christmas, because I get to do some observation of both. Though my in-laws have never been religious, they celebrate Christmas in the traditional secular sense, and I enjoy joining in. At the same time, much of the meaning that is attached to Hanuka for me is about lighting the candles as an outward reminder that there is a line to be trod carefully between integration and forgetting who we are and where we came from, and it feels more poignant to do that at the same time as celebrating someone else’s holiday, without reservations or contradictions on either side. It’s a reminder that yes, I am still a Jew, and while I don’t have to fight for that right like Yehuda Hamakabi had to, it may one day be necessary again, and we mustn’t shrink from that possibility if the need arises, because if no-one had taken up that fight then there would be no me today (arguably, there wouldn’t have been monotheism left to inspire Jesus and Mohammed, but that gets into eternally-arguable alternative history territory).

And there are still things we need to fight for today. For as much as this is about staking a claim to my own identity, it’s also a powerful story about the simple right to be different. We have never seen a large, interconnected society in which everyone had the unchallenged right to be different in each of their ways. Today it’s not the Jews where I live, but in the West it’s the Muslims; in most of the Muslim world it’s non-Muslims and/or women who wish to have agency in their lives; scattered across much of the world it’s homosexuals, and so on. I don’t know if we ever will see this “fixed” completely, but it’s a goal worth working towards, however we can, and every step towards it is a reduction of evil in the world.

The other day, I listened to a fascinating podcast about Yehuda Hamakabi and the revolt he led, treating it as a historical account with a critical eye. The unsurprising consensus of the guests was that the the First Book of Maccabees is a fairly accurate account, while the second is full of propaganda and has suffered from repeated embellishment. More interestingly, they filled in more context for why the rebellion happened than I had been given in Hebrew classes.

The most startling part of this, to me, was the evidence that Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews—the provocation that started the Maccabee Revolt—was a metastasis of something that started out as an effort to adjudicate an internal dispute between groups of Jews. There are many lessons to be learned from that, but it’s a more complex and more interesting story than the simplistic version I was taught, or the very quick skimmed history given in I Maccabees ch. 1.

This difference is a lesson in itself: a reminder that while scripture is often beautiful and often useful, it’s very limited as a set of a history books, and has often been massively simplified to serve the purposes of its authors. We must pick and choose carefully, even as we find others’ words helpful, if we are to tell our own stories right.

Here are the specific claims made by the article:

• A typical server in a restaurant outside Seattle is covering 3-4 tables
• A typical server in Seattle is covering 5-6
• This difference is because many states allow employers to pay below minimum wage to staff who get tips, while Washington is too decent a place to permit that practice.
• When the minimum wage goes up in January, from $8.67/hr to $9.04/hr, as it’s legally mandated to do, this increase will force poor starving restaurateurs to lay off more servers.
• The alternative is for restaurants to charge “$17 for a chicken sandwich” because apparently that’s how expensive they’d have to get to offset this expense.

Let’s assume for a moment that every restaurant wants to have no more than 3 tables per server. Personally I think 3 tables per server is a sign of a pretty high-end restaurant—the kind of place that really would charge $17 for a chicken sandwich and compensate by telling you the chicken’s name—but let’s grant the author that assumption. And let’s assume that a typical seating lasts an hour and a half. That means the average server is serving two tables per hour, so at current minimum wage they earn $4.34 per table; a markup of $3.28 relative to the disgusting pittance North Carolina restaurateurs are allowed to pay. Even a modestly priced restaurant will make that back from the markup on a single glass of wine!

The argument gets even more absurd when fretting about the coming increase. The minimum wage will go up by 37 cents/hour, or just over 4%. Even if the wages of minimum-wage employees were a restaurant’s entire cost structure, how many layoffs is an increase of 4% going to cause? And then there’s the reality that waitstaff pay is a tiny fraction of a restaurant’s running costs, especially in a city with expensive commercial rents like Seattle.

There is a real threat to the restaurant industry, just mentioned tangentially in the article, but it’s not the inflation-indexing of the minimum wage. It’s the likelihood that most people will cut back spending on little luxuries like dining out in the coming year. How that trend would be influenced by cutting pay for a group of people is left as an exercise to the reader.

Photo by Stephanie Batzer

They’re amazing birds, capable of flying huge distances with long wings that lock into place, and a swooping glide that exploits ground effect to use minimal energy. However, they can’t reliably tell the difference between the delicious and nutritious squid they’ve evolved to hunt and pieces of crap left behind by the plastics industry, so they often eat plastic waste that floats on the sea. They feed their young by regurgitation, and sometimes manage to give their chicks so much plastic that the chick starves due to the lack of stomach capacity left over for real food.

This is the headquarters of the California Environmental Protection Agency:

Though somewhat less impressive than the product of millions of years of evolution, I have plenty of positive things to say about this agency. In particular, they tend to set stricter standards than their Federal counterparts for a wide array of pollution controls, and often manage to lead the rest of the country into doing the same – a valuable service to the entire world. However, they also can’t reliably distinguish between what is good for children and pieces of crap left behind by the plastics industry, in this instance inserting propaganda from the American Chemical Council into a textbook section about plastic bags.

Is it really too much to ask that the people who get to influence a generation of children be smarter than a hapless albatross?

What I learned from that article, and the Language Log post it linked to, was that about the only thing the previous reports got right was that there is a thing called Vocal Fry which some people use occasionally when speaking. There’s no evidence that it’s a new phenomenon (in fact there’s plenty that it’s not), or that it’s specific to women or a particular age group (c.f. Ira Glass using it extensively), or that it does any damage whatsoever. In fact, it’s usually a relatively subtle voice modulation which I think I unthinkingly use fairly frequently and have done since well before any of the singers blamed for starting this trend had any records out.

There’s really no discernable reason why we should be interested in this phenomenon, unless “we” is a fairly narrow group of experts on spoken language. But what is interesting, when a story as pointless as this gets any traction, is the meta game of trying to figure out why it was picked up at all. In this instance, I think the clue is the group supposedly uniquely party to the “new” “trend” – college-age women. The formulation of the story hits an incredible number of media tropes and targets at once:

1. When I watched the video it seemed perfectly calibrated to make young women self-conscious about their speech; particularly the part where people are identifying relatively subtle vocal fry in recorded speech. So we have our first media trope: playing on the insecurities of a group of people to attract their attention and make them feel they must know more about a non-issue.
2. Why women? Well the media loves to portray women as a homogeneous mass, led like sheep by the latest fad, who will hurt themselves terribly if we don’t ride to the rescue.
3. Why this particular age group? Well, they’re old enough to be independent, but young enough to not be respected by anyone older. And they’re generally not understood by people more than a few years older than them, so it’s easy to write outrageous nonsense without most of the audience noticing.
4. The invention of potential harm from something irrelevant, so we can scare people with that.
5. The “fake trend” story. I’m more used to these taking the form of “we noticed two people doing this, so now it’s a trend”, but this seems like the direct complement: “Everyone does this, but if we pretend that it wasn’t so before we noticed it, we can call it a trend.”
6. And finally, blaming popular culture. Clearly no-one in this has any agency, and it’s all Britney & Ke$ha’s fault.