WANT!

A modern, WORKING reconstruction of the famous Babbage Difference Engine, constructed by The Science Museum in London (who have the original, too), funded by Nathan Myrhvold of Microsoft riches. It's supposed to go on display May 10 for a year, and then will sit in Nathan's living room.

How cool is THAT?

It's pretty simple, and wonderfully tasty. I cut the chicken (three breasts worth; must have been a mutant chicken) into chunks and marinated it with a bit of brown sugar, pimentón (spanish smoked paprika; substituted for chile powder) kosher salt, a bit of freshly gorund black pepper, and olive oil. Stir up well and set aside while the rest is prepared.

I set the rice cooker going, and made the cilantro-lime pesto. Three cloves of garlic, a handful of walnuts (because we don't have peanuts and I couldn't find my first choice, pinenuts) and half a pasilla pepper (since the store was out of anaheims). Buzz that in a "food processor fitted with the steel blade, or in a blender", add a bunch of cilantro and half a bunch of flat or Italian parsley, and drizzle in olive oil until the consistency is right. At this point I tasted it and corrected seasoning; it needed about half a teaspoon of salt to mute the bitter parsley taste and tranform it into bright herbal notes.

Scrape into a bowl, rinse the food processor work bowl and dump in the dishwasher.

At this point, pretty much everything was set. I peeled an onion, cut it into wedges and skewered it for grilling. About 15 minutes before the rice was done, I fired up the gas grill, and while it was heating I skewered the chicken chunks, now a nice reddish color from the pimentón, and when the grill was hot grilled them and the onions for about ten minutes, turning about every 2-3 minutes.

For plating, I chose two small fish-shaped plates (because they were clean and matched!), filled a small rice bowl with rice and inverted it onto the tail end of the fish. I put a heaping tablespoon of the cilantro pesto on the head end, spread it out a bit and put four chunks of chicken on, flanked by two wedges of the grilled onion. A parsley leaf on the rice mound completed it, and I called Alene for dinner.

It was very tasty, the herbal pesto complemented the smoky pimentón well, and the chicken was tender.

This would make a nice quick summer dinner, since the only appliances I used were the food processor, rice cooker and outdoor gas grill. No oven or stove action to heat up the house.

I recommend a nice pinot grigio with this. A light salad would work too.

I recommend NOT watching a TiVo'd episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike learns to sex chicks, since it's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. It's pretty gross, actually.

(Next time I do something like this I'll take a picture before serving. Of the plate, not the chicks.)

(Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the link.)

(In a fully appropriate typo, I first put "Tuscan Hole Milk as the title...)

This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. But when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times.

The article goes on to explain how some psych experiments fell into the same trap most of us do when thinking about this problem Interesting reading, check it out.

I'm inordinately proud to announce that Helix has been nominated for a Hugo award in the "Best Semi-Prozine" catagory, to be voted on and awarded at Denvention.

Even if we don't win, the nomination isa pretty nice validation of our existence.

W00T!!!1!

Personally, I think if you're too stupid to STOP and finsih your
message you DESERVE to walk into a lamppost.

Think of it as evolution in action.

These charges were dismissed, and the restraining order rewritten, correctly this time.