1. Recipes for a perfect roast chicken.
2. Helium shortage threatens cryogenics.
3. Via Alex, TED talks for entrepreneurs.
4. Bursts: "…everything we do, we do in bursts–brief periods of intensive activity followed by long periods of nothingness. These bursts are so essential to human nature that trying to avoid them is not only foolish, but futile as well."
5. Sample chapter from Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld.
7. Robert Mundell opens World Chess Championship game.
Oh, thank God. It’s just a Helium-3 shortage. The mylar industry will not be affected.
Somebody decided on the best roast chicken recipes by googling for “perfect roast chicken”? If you’ve ever published a roast chicken recipe but forgot to call it “perfect”, look out!, this guy doesn’t want anything to do with you.
Here’s how to make perfectly roast chicken. (1) Pick an oven temperature between 250 and 400 F. (2) Set the oven to that temp. (3) Pat your chicken with spices of your choice. I prefer a nice jerk. (4) Put in a leave-in oven-probe thermometer into the thickest part of the breast. (5) Put the bird in the oven on a rack. (6) When the thermometer says 165 F take it out and cool the bird for a few minutes. (7) Eat.
The bird temperature, not the oven temp or cooking time (and not the pinkness of the juices or the number of puncture wounds you give the bird while poking in other meat thermometers), is the quality-determining variable. Get the oven probe thermometer and you’ll be glad you did.
What role does helium 3 play in cryogenics?
#4 “There is a little secret that we, scientists, do not like to talk about: The scientific revolution stalled at the gates of natural sciences, bypassing us, humans. ”
A little off topic, but:
It is that we are stalled at mapping complex systems. We do not have the tools to reliably describe complex human behaviors, the climate, or any other hugely complex system.
We need to know our current limitations. Truly smart people become less confident in what they know when one question leads not to an answer, but to many more questions.
I think the key to the chicken is that it must be small, as others have said. No recipe is going to produce a crisp skin and juicy breast and leg meat from a 5 pound bird, short of sous-viding the entire thing. Just can’t be done. If you have the right bird, most of the recipes work.
The “bursts” article is pretty strange. The idea that most people tend do do things in bursts seems true to me. But, trying to tie this into the 19th century’s hopes for scientism? Its funny he mentions we can “predict where an electron will be,” yet fails to mention the inconvenient other point of quantum mechanics that essentially says matter seemingly doesn’t “exist” necessarily, unless it is observed. The world is far more complex and beyond the reach of human understanding than this author seems to want to believe.
Clearly no shortage of helium in any form – no derivatives market exists for it.
The beer can method for cooking chicken has virtue. Also of merit is a wire conical rack inside the chicken with the chicken on end in the oven.
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