Come join me at the new cww.blog! today!

The blog, itself, will remain available for posterity (and to jog my memory about things once in a while!), but I'm not going to post anymore, and comments will no longer be allowed.

To those of you who have posted insightful and interesting comments here over the years: thank you very much for your participation!

Exciting!

The three-year anniversary of my blog is coming up in May, but I fear the content I'm able to contribute here may be petering out. Writing about road blocks and orange juice and other things like that can only sustain me for so long, after all.

It would be nice to tell you about beer festivals and museums and travel, but, quite frankly, I've hardly gone anywhere lately. I may make an appearance at the American Craft Beer Fest in June, though, and if you're in the Boston area, you're welcome to come along!

Jugo de naranja

There's a problem with loving orange juice in America, though: we have awful oranges!

I just came across a BBC article (warning: it's from 2006) about Brazil's orange trade, and it rekindled my desire for really good orange juice. The people in Florida and other southern states may think they know how to grow oranges and make amazing juice, but when compared with Brazilian orange growers, those southerners certainly have a lot to learn.

About this time last year, I spent two weeks in Buenos Aires and drank, quite literally, gallons of orange juice and grapefruit juice that had been produced in Brazil and other places in South America. Normally, I wouldn't quite drink gallons of the stuff in two weeks, but it was just incredible! The flavors were so strong and sweet that, when I returned to Pittsburgh, fruit juice tasted like little more than water.

The difference wasn't just in the strength of the juice. It was an all-around different taste, and if the boxes of orange juice hadn't been labeled jugo de naranja and stamped with pictures of oranges, I may have never realized I was drinking something that came from what we Americans naively call an orange.

I have searched for juice from Brazilian fruits in grocery stores across the northeastern United States since my orange juice revelation, but I have come up dry, empty-handed, and decidedly unjuiced. Where do I find this life-giving nectar?

The S&P 500 Index follows 500 well-capitalized stocks around the world, and the chart above shows its performance over the last three years. I added the white lines and the blue line.

We are in a recession. This isn't a correction anymore, and I decided so around the time represented by the blue line. If it were a correction, the S&P would have bounced off that lower white line and continued along its merry way, between the white lines. It tried, but it failed.

The white lines represent the borders of a "channel" the S&P index has been following for several years, and just as the index was above the channel for a while, I believe it will now be below the channel for a while.

I've been suggesting to friends and family over the past six months that they should sell their broader-based investments (like S&P 500 mutual funds, blue chip portfolios, and so forth), and I hope they've listened.

Some economic pundits were caught saying just last week that the sub-prime crisis is over. However, just this past weekend, J. P. Morgan bailed Bear Stearns out of an almost-inevitable bankruptcy, following the collapse of even more of its sub-prime investments. Ah, Bear Stearns, that well-respected Wall Street powerhouse, profitable every year since its inception in 1923 and with a stock price of $160 a year ago, finally bought by a rival at a scant $2 per share.

It's not over! I wonder who's next?

While looking at information on the fig, I noticed it was remarkably similar to the banana. Which is neat, since I'm allergic to the pesticides used on bananas and can therefore only eat organic bananas, and organic bananas are difficult to find in New Jersey. Super Stop & Shop in Clifton, however, carries organic figs. But not organic bananas.

So, here's my basic analysis of the nutritional content of figs and bananas, normalized by making the mass of the two imaginary samples equal at 100 g. This seems to be about two-and-a-half small figs or a small-to-medium banana.

OK, so they're not that similar, now that I'm looking at them side-by-side, but the potassium amounts compare pretty well in terms of the number of figs (seven or eight) versus the number of bananas (maybe two?) I'm willing to eat in a single sitting.

The officer apparently asks some percentage of drivers to pull over to the side of the road and submit to a quick "safety" inspection of their vehicle. However, I've seen a few cars and a utility van towed already.

I found a Road Block Registry for New Jersey on the web, but it mainly seems like a bunch of complainers. I'd probably complain, too, if I were delayed by a checkpoint on my way to work or I thought I were being racially profiled by the police. Unfortunately, I was unable to briefly locate any other substantial web-based documentation of these checkpoints.

At any rate, I took some pictures. Enjoy.

Road Safety Checkpoint, Newark, NJ. Click to enlarge

I use Austin Bush's recipe, but I modify it a bit, since some of the ingredients are difficult to find in America.

So, just follow along with Austin, but feel free to use the following substitutions.

• Galangal: Use ginger root but only about two-thirds of the suggested "thumb-sized piece".
• Lemongrass: It's difficult to find in American supermarkets, so if you can't find it, you could try a paste, which is what I use.
• Coriander: Use cilantro, and for the coriander root, use plenty of cilantro stalk.
• Straw mushrooms: Any small type of mushroom should work well, as long as they're not the ridiculously common white kind.
• Chili peppers: For two servings, use two medium-to-large jalapeño peppers plus a couple teaspoons of crushed red pepper.
• Kaffir lime leaves: I just omit these because I don't know what would be a good substitute. Just use lots of lime juice, instead! The juice of two whole rolled limes seems to work well.

Beautiful soup. Read Austin's recipe and enjoy thoroughly!

The most reasonable of these goals, I think, is to "make solar energy affordable." We've come leaps and bounds in the past 10 years in this field, thanks to generous venture capital funding and some really bright guys who, incidentally, are also mostly graduates of MIT.

The most vague of these goals must be "engineer the tools for scientific discovery." I suppose that probably means building better microscopes, telescopes, and tweezers (not kidding), but perhaps its wording could be somewhat more definite?

Overall, setting goals like these is a Good Thing. I can only hope the NSF is actually going to form task forces and invest heavily in achieving these goals.

In other news, I would like to thank everyone for their enjoyable comments on my video with Dorian from the weekend, both on this blog and on YouTube. I showed the video and comments to Dorian, and, based on his new critical acclaim, he now thinks he will be the next Puss in Boots. He doesn't seem to understand he needs to work on that sexy Antonio Banderas voice first!

Also, check out this photo of an amazing kim chi market stall. Mmmmmm...

Mitt Romney dropped out of the Republican race after spending $35 million and getting a few doughnuts and cups of coffee for it. John McCain is the comeback kid at 71, according to the BBC, and Mike Huckabee probably really wants to be McCain's vice president. Ron Paul, the grassroots campaigner from Texas, didn't fare too well, but nobody really expected him to fare well, anyway.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are roughly tied, and, well, are there really any other Democrat candidates?

Since the 2004 presidential election started heating up, Andy Tanenbaum has run a lovely election prediction site at electoral-vote.com, which I use to keep an eye on various interesting elections around the country. It's worth keeping in your bookmarks or on your del.icio.us page.