After having tried desperately for a long time to update my WordPress blog - with the help of friends, IT people here and there etc. - I’ve had to give up. I just could not do it.
I’ve migrated everything to a new address. It’s slightly less memorable, so please make a note of it!
→ 3 CommentsTags: blogging · blog
Why buy horrible pizzas at Pizza Hut? Make them yourself, it’s easy and VERY satisfactory. I swear your family will love it:
To my horror I discovered that I have NO pictures of any pizza I ever baked. Will correct that on next baking session. Till then, here’s a picture from Flickr.
Pizza dough for four pizzas:
2-3 tsp dry yeast (depending on proving time)
4 dl. lukewarm water
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
app. 700 gr “00″ flour or very strong white flour
Mix everything together (mix the dry yeast in with the flour or alternatively dissolve it first in the water. If you dissolve you’ll need a shorter proving time). Mix & knead till smooth but firm dough. Leave to prove for app. one hour on kitchen counter in cloth-covered bowl. Cut the dough in 4 pieces. (At this point in time the dough can be frozen. Wrap in cling film and stick in freezer. When you take pizza dough out of the freezer, unwrap immediately, then leave to thaw on kitchen counter covered with damp cloth for 4-5 hours). Let the dough balls prove for another hour on the kitchen counter covered by wet tea towel. To be sure that your pizza dough is ready, do the prodding test. Prod the dough. If it raises immediately, it’s not yet ready. If your fingerprint stays for a while, your dough is ready. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin. You’ll need extra flour for this, but don’t use too much. If you use a coarser kind of flour for the rolling, it’ll be easier.
A super simple tomato sauce for your pizza is this:
1 can of peeled, diced tomatoes
a small handful of Basil leaves
a bit of olive oil
salt, pepper
Blend, spread on pizza. Add cheese. Pizza toppings such as grilled peppers, aubergines or halved artichoke hearts go on top of the cheese, before baking. But toppings such as parma ham, rocket or pepperoni should not be added until after the pizza is baked. But then it must happen immediately. A really good and very Italian pizza is potato pizza. It has no tomato sauce and no cheese. Cover with thin slices of lightly parboiled potatoes, add a generous sprinkle of olive oil and chopped rosemary.
Bake in a 250° hot oven. Make sure that the surface on which you bake the pizza it pre-heated. This is important! If you’re not the happy owner of a so-called pizza-stone, you can do it like this: Have two sheets at the ready. Heat one in the oven and put a sheet of baking paper on top of the other one. Once the pizza is rolled out, but before you add any toppings, put it on the baking paper. Then when the pizza is ready and the oven (and the sheet that’s in the oven) has reached 250°, slide the pizza over on the hot sheet. You can’t time the baking. You must keep an eye on the pizza. Ovens vary and people’s taste in pizza also vary. It will rarely take more than 10 minutes, so make sure the table’s laid and your family is ready once the pizzas start going in the oven! Each pizza will feed one hungry person.
This recipe and these guidelines and ideas are all nicked from an Italian pizza-baker in Copenhagen, once interviewed in a foodie magazine. That’s probably why they work!
If you try this, why not let me know how you fare?
→ No CommentsTags: pizza · cooking · food
What do they have in common? On the surface of it, nothing. But I see two things. One - they’re both sign o’ the times. Two - they appear on my blog in the same post…
I found a link to this film on Boing Boing. It’s Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow in a film about the end of (some) copyright. Good! This article, also from Boing Boing is also about copyright. Are we allowed to sell our old CDs?
It was also Boing Boing that pointed me to an Atlantic article that I hadn’t read yet, although I’ve just downloaded the most awesome application to my Iphone, which - among a zillion other things - allows me to read the Atlantic on my phone. Wow!!!! The article is written by a journalist who - at the risk of getting arrested and prosecuted - shows how airport security is much more show than it’s actual security. Really very scary! One of many holes he uncovers, so to speak, is this:
To slip through the only check against the no-fly list, the terrorist uses a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. “Then you print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.”
And now for something entirely different. On The Long Now Blog I found a link to something new. Crowd powered translation. Whenever you have five minutes, you can go there and help out. You can choose something to translate that’s important to you and then just do as much as you can that day. I just tried it and translated a bit of a discussion between Will Wright and Brian Eno into Danish. Click here and see my just translated text as subtitles to this video (only the first two minutes - must do more soon). It’s a cool tool. Imagine an organisation with an important video they want to get out to as many as possible, quickly. They send link - e.g. through Facebook - to the video’s transscript on this site and members from all over the globe can translate it quickly. You can then load the video onto Youtube and from there redirect people, who don’t understand the original language. Cool tool!
It was quite a nice day today and we took it veeery easy. Read the Sunday Times for a couple of hours and then went to Wisley, as we quite often do. It’s nearby and we’re members. They had a farmers’ market and pumpkin carving for children. So Dane carved a small pumpkin, which is now guarding our front door. And David bought dinner, a freshly made game pie. Uhm, it was nice. Dane found some bread in the restaurant and we went to feed the ducks. But it turned out to be more fun to feed the fish! The top picture is made entirely of Wisley’s own apples by Wisley employees. Apple Owl. Looks good, tastes good and even sounds good!
→ No CommentsTags: copyright · film · Web 2.0 · Internet · links · politics · blog · blogging · us
Lately I’ve been writing essays for a course I’m taking at Uni called “Source Reliability”. Readers of this blog will know that I’m rather keen on this subject. We get our essays accepted or not accepted - they aren’t graded. But the professor comments on them, and he liked my latest essay. It’s about Wikipedia and has a debacle between the science journal Nature and Encyclopaedia Britannica as its starting point. If you haven’t heard about the debacle, here’s what it says in Wikipedia (and it’s in fact quite a correct description):
On 14 December 2005, the scientific journal Nature reported that, within 42 randomly selected general science articles, there were 162 mistakes in Wikipedia versus 123 in Britannica. In its detailed 20-page rebuttal, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. characterized Nature’s study as flawed and misleading and called for a “prompt” retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a Britannica year book, and not the encyclopedia; another two were from Compton’s Encyclopedia (called the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on the company’s web site). The rebuttal went on to mention that some of the articles presented to reviewers were combinations of several articles, and that other articles were merely excerpts but were penalized for factual omissions. The company also noted that several facts classified as errors by Nature were minor spelling variations, and that several of its alleged errors were matters of interpretation. Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of Britannica, it used whatever relevant material was available on Britannica’s website.
Below find my essay - only edited slightly for use here (no footnotes etc.). If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing - about a 1000 words - then scroll down to the bottom. There’s my tips for what to think about before you delve into a Wikipedia article.
The battle between Encyclopedia Britannica (hereafter EB) and Nature was intriguing - not least because it, in my view, is somewhat beside the point. Nature’s intentions were honourable, I believe, in letting their very informed readers know if it can be considered worthwhile - not safe - to use Wikipedia for anything. And they seemed to be rather baffled themselves at the result, that yes, it is worthwhile, also for the informed user, to consult Wikipedia. In my view the article did not try to put EB down.
One of the more interesting facts the investigation revealed was that the learned test persons were more sceptical towards the random articles than towards the articles within their fields of expertise. For reasons that I can’t quite understand, many teachers at all levels of the schooling system tell their pupils to NEVER use Wikipedia. Many times I’ve heard well educated and academically trained people say that they never use Wikipedia, because it’s completely untrustworthy. But upon inspection, they have never used it, so how is it that they know? Probably this is why the test persons were so sceptical towards the articles about subjects outside their intellectual comfort zone.
It is also interesting to notice the aggression and fervour with which EB responded to the article. A lot of their response may be correct in a narrow sense, but entirely beside the point, because the Wikipedia articles had had the exact same treatment. And the Nature article is actually quite critical about some things in Wikipedia - like the occasional rather poorly constructed articles and poor readability. This fervour may be related to the sad fact that academia frowns upon academics who choose to put their skills to use for the general public. Nature surveyed 1000 scientists, of which only 10% had ever helped updating Wikipedia. It probably doesn’t improve your academic career to invest time enlightening the public on your speciality.
And then there are all the things you can get from Wikipedia, which EB doesn’t give you. There are articles about every little town or village in the Western World, every politician, every pop group, every artist, every historical person, every technical term or gadget known to man - almost. And then there’s the freshness - the articles updated at the speed of light when events develop. Apart from the way they are created, these two factors are what really separates Wikipedia from EB. And why to some extent comparing them is a bit like comparing apples and pears. And access to EB is on subscription basis. In Denmark and here in the UK you can gain free access to EB via your local library. But unfortunately, most people don’t know this - or just can’t be bothered. In EB you cannot see when an article has been created or updated - or at least I can’t find it. And there are very few outside links and no references.
When I was a child we had two encyclopedias in the house: Lademanns and Gyldendals. I quickly discovered that Lademanns was best for looking up things to do with nature, science and geography because of the many, good colour photographs and illustrations. Whereas Gyldendal was best on history and literature, because the entries were better and longer. But, and this is the point, it never occurred to me to doubt the authenticity of any of the articles. And I wasn’t taught that at school either. I didn’t hear about source criticism (kildekritik) before high school (gymnasiet), where I had a history teacher (an elderly gentleman) who made it an issue. It was the first time I had ever heard of anyone questioning a source. Every time he gave us something to read, he asked us to consider who had written it, why he had written it and who we thought were the intended audience. This simple wisdom has stayed with me always and I try to remember to apply it to all things I read or hear.
The thing about Wikipedia, which could maybe teach many more Internet users source criticism, is exactly the knowledge of how it is written and (not) edited. One must always consider the fact that the article one’s looking at might just have been tampered with by some idiot or a person with malicious intent. Or that it’s written by somebody who has an overblown perception of her own knowledge. This is not a thought that automatically comes to mind when looking up something in EB or another “trusted source”. So I believe that the way Wikipedia is constructed actually encourages its users to be source critical. And that scepticism could even follow the user when she ventures outside Wikipedia and looks at other sources.
Quite often Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for research on a subject. Usually it becomes clear very quickly what kind of person or persons are responsible for a Wikipedia article. Some of them are clearly written by scholars or by extremely knowledgeable amateurs and their sources are often gold, when the goal is to move on to primary sources. Other articles are not so well written or edited and one instantly gets wary. That very often reflects on the sources, which will be few and erratic. And I believe this wariness and alertness to be very healthy for the users.
Setting aside the times I use Wikipedia to look up the full name of a pop star or the use of a technical gadget, I try to ask myself these questions while reading a Wikipedia article:
What kind of person wrote this? Syntax, writing style, approach to subject. Is the faulty English because the writer doesn’t have English as her mother tongue or is it a warning sign?
Why did the person write this? Out of pride, to boast, for political/religious reasons or because the person honestly feels it is her duty to share her knowledge?
Does the article have the feel of having been worked over many times? If so, I check the history and debate pages.
What are the sources like? Are there many? Are they online, off line or a mix? How many of them are readily accessible (not necessarily online, but from a library)?
How sensitive is the subject? Can I maybe believe some parts of the article, but not other parts? This may be the case for quite a few historical articles, where basic facts are agreed on by everybody, but where historians disagree on the interpretation of certain incidents or documents. This is also the case for articles on pharmaceutical compounds.
Am I looking at a subject where recent events have led the article to be expanded or changed? The article about Sarah Palin is an obvious example. One can go back to the version of the article a couple of weeks before she was chosen as running mate for McCain and get an impression from that.
The above rules of thumb could very well be applied to most other sources as well. But with most other sources you can’t check the previous versions…
→ 1 CommentTags: research · source criticism · science · Wikipedia · links · Internet · reading
Before I start my round I want to complain! About you! I can see from my statistics that I have a steadily (okay, ever so slowly) growing group of readers. But so few of you ever bother to comment on my posts? Now, this last post about the Nobel Laureates. Honestly, a good chunk of you must be avid readers like me. So you must also have an opinion of one or more of the last 48 years of Nobel prize winners?
Anyway, that was that out of the way. Marginal Revolution points to an article in a magazine for people with excess money to spend - these guys and gals are very sorry for themselves presently, because they’ve lost money. Some of them big money. The magazine is called Portfolio and the writer Felix Salmon. There’s a great quote:
If you’re running an insolvent bank, and you get a slug of equity from Treasury, your shareholders will thank you if you use that equity to take some very large risks. If they pay off and you make lots of money, then their shares are really worth something; if they fail and you lose even more money, well, there was never really any money for them to begin with anyway.
The Chief Happiness Officer points to this job advert. One of the best I’ve ever seen!
Creative Commons photo found on Flickr.
On Squattercity we can read that the authorities’ reluctance to legalise squat dwellings can lead to uncontrollable fires, death and homelessness. When a fire starts and there are no fire hydrants, there’s not much to be done! The article is about a fire in a squatter city outside Durban, SA. 2000 people were made homeless.
Kevin Kelly, the Internet guru, writes a post that instantly got my attention. He calls it The Expansion of Ignorance. Good title, eh? It’s about how the amount of information, patents and knowledge is growing ever more rapidly. But what’s growing more than the answers is the questions! Which of course leads to his conclusion:
we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance.
And here’s something else to raise your eyebrows: Ezra Klein points to this editorial in the Los Angeles Times (a newspaper, btw, named as “liberal” by some of my Texan family). The editorial advocates a no to a proposal for a new law in the state of California, which will
“…require that calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely.”
The editorial recommends a NO. Because otherwise the state will loose its egg business…
It’s late and I’m tired, having just read a long but very rewarding article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s been a while since I read anything new by him, but rumour has it that he has a new book out this autumn. The article is about prodigies vs. late bloomers. He focuses on late bloomers and explains the misconceptions we have about their lives and talent. His protagonist is the writer (who I’m afraid I’d never heard of, but who must now go on my Amazon wishlist) Ben Fountain. Gladwell writes fabulously - that alone should make you read the article. But if you’re also interested in what makes an artist an artist and why some geniuses might never bloom, you really MUST read it!
→ 1 CommentTags: links · blogging · Internet · economics · credit crunch · blog · politics · us · books · reading · California · Ikke kategoriseret
Below are all the laureates since the year of my birth. I think I’ve read less than half of them, and some of them - like the Quasimodo guy from my yob - I’ve never even heard of. Also, I find it strange that so many of them are best known for writing drama. Except maybe for Marquez, none of them have given me one of those unforgettable literary moments we all cherish. Although a few of the ones predating 1959 have, like Pasternak, Laxness, Hemingway Mann and Lagerlöf.
Is any one of them a favourite of yours? What have you read? Why did you think it was wonderful? I’d really like to know!
→ 2 CommentsTags: reading · books · Ikke kategoriseret
Wauw, for the first time in years I’ve not only heard about the winner of the Nobel prize in literature before, I’ve actually read him and (just went into the living room and counted) actually own three of his books. His name is J. M. G. Le Clezio - here’s the Wikipedia article and here’s the article about the prize in The Times.
His books are easy to read, dreamy and timeless. Unless you’re Danish I can’t lend them to you, because the ones I have are all in Danish translations. Le Clezio writes in French, which I don’t master to the degree of reading anything other than restaurant menus.
I’m happy that the Nobel Prize Committee has finally again chosen a writer, who’s accessible and readable to everyone.
(Picture is snatched from The Times)
Just added: Well, of course I’d read Doris Lessing too (I think most people have, if they were around in the days of apartheid). But her prize seemed to be a tribute more than a “recommendation to the world”.
→ 2 CommentsTags: links · reading · books
The Times yesterday (paper, not online) had a run-down of some of the Sarah Palin videos on the web. There’s the Saturday Night Live version of the VP debate. The “maverick-ing” is to die for.
Then there’s a “trailer” for the film “Don’t cry for me Alaska”. Actually, I don’t find it that funny, but judge for yourself. I think this one about John McCain’s age is better.
On Huffington Post (a liberal online news site) there’s a clip from a talkshow with Alec Baldwin. I really don’t like Alec Baldwin as an actor - I think he seriously lacks talent. But as an impersonator he does pretty well. See him wink and charm as Sarah Palin here. And if you didn’t see the debate and have doubts whether she’d really do that, look here. I saw the debate myself - she really did wink more than once. And for good measure you also get one of her many mavericks here.
Ever wonder about what a Maverick really is? Here’s the answer from m-w.com:
Samuel A. Maverick † 1870 American pioneer who did not brand his calves
1. an unbranded range animal ; especially : a motherless calf
2. an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party
Several of these links are called something with tinyurl.com. Ever wondered what that is? Well, it’s a kind of shortcut you can use, when you want to direct people to a website with a very long URL. Anybody can use it. See Wikipedia’s explanation here.
Here’s Obama’s latest TV ads. And here’s McCain’s. If you watch the “Dangerous” ad on McCain’s site, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the quote is somewhat out of context. Here’s from Huffington Post:
The issue stems from a remark the Illinois Democrat made in August 2007, in Nashua, New Hampshire. Speaking to supporters, the Senator called for an increase of U.S. troops in that war zone because, without the influx, operations were being limited to air raids that resulted in many preventable civilian deaths.
“Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban,” Obama said, “so we’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages, and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
→ No CommentsTags: John McCain · video · Sarah Palin · Internet · links · politics · Barack Obama · us
When we were on our tour of the US last year, one of our favourite states was Louisiana. We found the swamps beautiful and enchanting beyond belief and adored New Orleans (oh, the grilled oysters…). We wanted to take a tour of the swamps and decided that we didn’t want one of the “see an alligator, take a picture, go home”-tours, so we splashed out on a private tour with the Atchafalayan Basinkeeper himself. It was an unforgettable experience - and we didn’t even see an alligator. We saw lots of other things and Dean, the basinkeeper, knew every animal, bird, fish and insect in the basin. Knowing that this fantastic place will disappear within a very short time frame if something is not done, we joined the organisation, that supports the basin. Which of course means we get a newsletter now and then. Not often - since Dean is busy doing things, not just writing about them. Hm. In the latest newsletter he wrote this:
Hurricane Gustav hit the Atchafalaya Basin very hard. Cypress forests are hurricane resistant and hurricanes are actually good for the health of cypress swamps because high winds knocks down “trash trees.” The Atchafalaya’s fish and hardwood forests are not as lucky. Millions of fish died after the hurricane and it will take years for the Atchafalaya Basin’s fish populations to recover.
We bought and read this book about the swamps, what they mean to the eco-system of North- and South America, who lives there and why they are disappearing. It is very well written and researched and I warmly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in environmental issues. Here’s a quote from the book, where the author is talking to a Cajun shrimper (Tidwell, the author, knew nothing about environmental issues when he was first sent to the bayous by Washington Post to write a piece about the dying Cajun culture):
“All dis land around us, as far as you can see, is droppin’ straight down into de water, turnin’ to ocean. Someday, Baton Rouge, one hundred miles nort’ of here, is gonna be beachfront property.”
Oh, and speaking of books. James Lee Burke’s detective Robicheaux operates in Louisiana. This one takes place in the aftermath of Katrina. Both the description of the devastation after the hurricane and the plot are fantastic.
I was actually so fascinated by the swamps that I’m still thinking about retiring in a house on stilts, surviving on a diet of cajun-style cooked shrimp, jambalaya and oysters. As long as there’s Internet…
Egrets, ibises, wood storks, great blue herons, little blue herons, spoonbills and anhingas are feasting on the fish, which have sought refuge here. Photo by basinkeeper Dean Wilson. Above photo also by Dean.
→ 2 CommentsTags: new orleans · books · swamp · atchafalaya · Louisiana · us
Last night, before I settled down to watch the vice-presidential debate, I watched the first of a new series of programmes with Jamie Oliver. I don’t know if it’s become less trendy to like Jamie Oliver, but I actually like him more and more. His life could be easy - very easy. But he’s chosen to rant (his own expression) and thus to make enemies, because lots of people hate ranting. (I do a bit of ranting myself, so know what he’s talking about). He rants about food obviously. But his concern is a country where people have forgotten how to cook. They don’t know what real food tastes like and they certainly don’t know how to shop for it, prepare it, even eat it!
He visited a couple of single mums on welfare. One of them had her children eating out of Styrofoam boxes on the kitchen floor - who needs a dining table, when there are no real meals? - her 4-year old daughter had never 
tasted a home cooked meal in her life. Jamie took a look in her fridge. The vegetable drawers were filled to the brim with - chocolate bars! And there was not a trace of any vegetables, any fruit, any kind of real food in the house.
That’s what he’s determined to change. He wants all of us who can cook to take it upon us to teach other people to cook. He’s even put it into a system. Read about it on his Ministry of Food homepage.
I want to teach some people to cook. I want to take part in this. I’m often surprised at what people have - and maybe even more at what they have not - in their fridges and kitchen cupboards. And at what’s considered “a meal”. When Dane tells me what some of the other children have in their lunch boxes, I’m genuinely shocked. It’s cheese dippers, white sandwich bread with square slices of “ham”, so-called yoghurt (15-25% sugar), rarely fruit and certainly no veg.
I know it’s quite unlikely that any of my readers 1) can’t cook 2) want to learn 3) live near here. But - if that were the case, please drop me a line and we’ll set up a date for a cookery class with a nice meal at the tail end.
If you live far away or just can’t be bothered to have me as a teacher, but still want to improve your cooking skills, I can only once more recommend the excellent Videojug, where you can learn to cook a wide variety of lovely meals. Bring you laptop into the kitchen - and cook!
Btw. what kind of food do you think Sarah Palin cooks for her family?
→ 2 CommentsTags: cooking · health · Sarah Palin · video · England · links · food