Aetheric Research, Ltd.

A traditional drink from India, Lassi has a lovely cooling taste excellent for hot days and hot foods.  The one ingredient that may be difficult to find is rose water; try a middle-eastern or other ethnic market.

2 c plain yogurt

1/2 c cold water

6 or 8 ice cubes

3 tbs fine caster or powdered sugar

a small splash of rose water

(opt: 1/2 tsp cardamom)

Blend ingredients together until smooth.  Those who frequent smoothie bars will recognize the texture desired immediately.

Optional variants include mango (requiring mango nectar and milk, and taking out the water) and the traditional salty version (with more spices and salt rather than the sugar).

Cooking is always more fun when it produces a flashy result.  Shrimp Fra Diavolo, for instance, is delicious, easy, and impressive.  Crepes Suzette takes the flaming pan to the breakfast table, where the fire is used to reduce the sauce immediately before serving, producing a lovely caramelized concoction.

The history behind the dish is somewhat controversial–the chef who reportedly invented it relayed some unlikely circumstances behind its first (royal) consumer–but it does have a fairly simple method of preparation.

The first part–the crepes–can be made according to whatever recipe you like.  For instance:

1c flour

2 eggs

1/2c milk

1/2c water

2 tbs melted butter

pinch salt

Mix ingredients together; let the batter sit for several minutes to rest.  Oil a crepe pan–other pans will work, but the result will not be nearly as good–and heat it; pour about 1/4c of the batter–five serving spoonfulls, about–into the pan; flip once things solidify a bit, and repeat the process until you have enough crepes to work with.

The ‘Suzette’ part involves an orange sauce, which consists of:

1/2 stick unsalted butter (4 tbs, approx)

3 tbs sugar

The juice of one orange, and the grated rind thereof

1/3 c Grand Marnier or comparable orange liqueur

Melt the butter in a large skillet, and when it starts foaming, dissolve the sugar in it.  When smooth, add the juice and rind of the orange.  Stir.  Reduce the heat to a very low setting.

Fold four crepes in half.  Add them one at a time to the pan, folding them in half again with tongs (so as not to burn your fingers).  Work quickly to make sure the sauce ends up evenly distributed.  Remove from heat, and add the liqueur; wait a moment for it to warm, then light with a match–preferably a long one, to avoid burning your fingers.

When the flames go out, decant the crepes onto plates and serve immediately.

April Fool’s Day is a traditional holiday for the Internet–perhaps the one holiday that is celebrated more on the internet than anywhere else.  The ease with which ‘regular’ websites can be changed out for prank versions, as well as the various subtle ways in which clever hacks can take place, combine to make a holiday that can be enjoyed by both the prankers and the prankees.

Amongst many websites that offer April Fools Day fare, there are certain standouts that reliably serve clever and interesting pranks year after year.  Google is well known for offering several absurd new products and services as pranks, mixed with one new service that is genuine–for instance, GMail was originally offered as a prank.

Thinkgeek offers a front page full of somewhat dubious and zany offerings, though, like Google, they usually end up implementing at least one of them–Canned Unicorn Meat and the iPad Arcade Cabinet, for instance.

Slashdot has traditionally had any number of prank stories on their frontpage, along with dubious ‘features’ and assorted other amusements; just as traditional is the grumbling of the killjoys who decry, every year, the ‘stupid’ practice of engaging in various shenanigans once a year.

XKCD is in 3D today.

Worth noting as an ancillary to the Internet’s celebration is MIT’s tradition of elaborate physical hacks–modifying a rotunda to look like R2D2, for instance.  This year’s appears to be a visit from a certain Doctor.

The military also will occasionally allow a prank or two to be seen in the public domain; this year’s announcement of new headgear for the Army appears to be just such an occasion.  

Keep an eye out for other pranks, and have a happy April Fool’s Day

The peanut butter cookie is a long-time favorite, combining sweet and salty flavors together with a simplicity of manufacture that’s hard to match.  They’re easy enough to make, and like all cookies are delicious when fresh from the oven.

Ingredients:

1 cup peanut butter (creamy or crunchy)
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 egg
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Combine peanut butter, butter, and sugars together; cream together until smooth.  Mix in vanilla and egg, then the dry ingredients.  

Refrigerate the dough for an hour, then form into small balls and place on a cookie sheet; flatten the balls with a fork for the traditional pattern.  Bake in a preheated oven at 375F for 10 minutes, longer for crispier cookies.

Enjoy!

An ‘urban legend’ is a sort of modern counterpart to the old stories of monsters and dragons and the like.  Designated ‘urban’ to contrast with the folklore of older times (some people may prefer ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’), these stories are transmitted and preserved in the same general fashion–by word of mouth or equivalent personal communication, generally–as the older folklore was.

There’s often some overlap with conspiracy stories; the two are not dissimilar in some fashion–though while the conspiracy story assumes malevolent authorities are causing the event, or covering up the event, the urban legend makes no such overt assumptions.  

Urban legends have a vast breadth of topics; the Snopes website maintains an archive of this mythos, including discussions of which parts of which legends have truth to them–because, after all, the most effective ones are often based partly in fact.  

Generally, as with older folktales, there’s a cautionary interest behind relaying the tale–a friend of a friend made a mistake or saw something happen, and as a result your friend is interested in maintaining your safety, and relays the story to help you.  This relaying generally happens personally:  your friend tells you face-to-face or, especially now, in an email–why not forward a notice of some form of danger?  Regardless of the truth behind the caution, the general thinking appears to be that it’s better to give someone a false alarm than to risk that they might come to harm if not warned.

Unfortunately, this is a bit of a memetic hazard; uncritical forwarding of cautionary email can also forward various security threats–compromised attachments, compromised websites, etc.–and can sometimes create a panic that can lead to actual harm.  

Avoiding this particular memetic hazard is relatively easy: don’t relay any story you hear about some sort of danger or other until you’ve verified it to be a real and present danger.  There are numerous ways to research these things; oftentimes, simply running a search on a key phrase from such an email–”Tyson drops labor day” for instance–can lead you to numerous resources that can clarify the situation.

I would encourage anyone who does receive regular emails that turn out to be urban legends from a single person to speak to that person about evaluating the premise of the email before forwarding it.  While you may not change their habits of forwarding emails, you will likely be taken off the list of people to send them to, and as such at least be exempt from whatever scams or other harm they might pass along.

Urban legends can also make for good entertainment, as it happens–they’re frequent fodder for the Mythbusters, who address many of them during their show to show in as explosion-filled a way as possible whether they’re likely confirmed or, as they say, busted.

ESR’s seminal work on the jargon and culture of the common hacker, The Jargon File, defines a significant chunk of hacker folklore.  Quantum Bogodynamics (a play off of the existing field of quantum chromodynamics, which describes quark interactions) is a folk theory deriving from the inconsistent behavior of hardware and software in the presence of those not sufficiently inculcated into the mysteries of How Things Work.  Usually these would be suits–that is, upper management of dubious technical ability–but often enough those who work on the front lines of the IT world will notice a significant bogon flux around certain users.

The bogon is a notional particle that is a charge carrier for entropy, essentially.  Where there are significant bogon levels, machines break down in various ways–they refuse to boot properly; software may throw various errors; printers will jam.  There are enough anecdotal cases of a simple desk move solving problems with nearby hardware–moving the user away from the machine’s proximity stopped the machine from throwing fits–that variations on this hypothesis are widely believed by significant numbers of technical personnel.  

This may be part of the notional reason behind the aura of competence effect; technical personnel are heavy emitters of antibogons (c.f. ‘cluons’ in the original jargon) and as such can purge a recalcitrant system in short order by being nearby.  This also explains why certain formerly technically competent personnel, when promoted to nontechnical managerial positions, lose the ability to perform these feats; being in meetings with various suits surpresses their antibogon production.  By analogy with a breeder reactor, these meetings may cause a formerly clueful person to begin to emit bogons much like the other suits involved.

Bogon production may be related to emotional intensity, as well; the more upset or angered the bogon producer is at the situation, the more likely it is that some critical component will start to fail.  This explains the prevalence of errors in product demonstrations.

As of yet, there has been no literature regarding bogon shielding, but a 6′ air gap between the bogon producer and any component of the machine under diagnosis or treatment usually appears to do the trick.  The effectiveness of sheet lead has not yet been evaluated.

Various occupations have bits and pieces of folklore associated with their work–gremlins, from last week’s FFF, were originally a tale told by pilots and aircraft mechanics before they were fuzzy creatures with a problem with midnight snacks.  The computer world is no exception; various technical occupations have their own bits and pieces of folklore that are handed down over time and which fill the same kind of explicative niche for these people as the gremlins did for mechanics.

The Aura of Competence is an experience common to most support technicians who have worked in the field for any length of time.  The support tech will show up to fix a problem that the customer has reported, and the simple act of showing up is “enough” to make things run smoothly again.  

Numerous “explanations” for this effect exist–some of which involve notional particles called “bogons” which are charge-carriers for “bogosity,” the principle that makes things break down.  The highly selective nature of this kind of entropy nearly always strikes certain select users, and always at times when they were “not doing anything, [they] swear!”

Presumably, the technician acts much like the moderating medium in a nuclear reactor, then, and inhibits the bogon flux, thus allowing the machine to operate smoothly again.

Another variation is when a process (registering someone on a website, say, or printing a document) continually fails, and no amount of coaxing by the user will make the process successfully complete.  Again, the technician shows up and either performs the “exact same” actions, or watches the user do so–and the process succeeds.  The user will generally protest that it had only “just” started working when the technician showed up.

This variant is rather like the koan of the LISP machine, in that the process will only work when someone of sufficient understanding is present.  

This effect may be found in other sufficiently technical disciplines, whenever there is equipment whose functioning is beyond the ability of a layman to fully understand.  Rationally, the users in all the above cases must not have observed some difference in the machine’s setup or the procedure; however, users are not usually very rational and will seek to rationalize that the technician’s presence must have had some kind of magic effect.  Accordingly, it may be in the technician’s professional best interests to play along; users tend to become more than a little resentful if they’re informed that the problem is all in their head, and some of these users may write the technician’s paycheck.

Gremlins first came to the notice of the public from stories of military pilots who claimed to see small creatures causing mishaps with their machines.  Various media have portrayed these agents of entropy ever since, usually in the context of airplanes but sometimes sinking their fangs into other complex machinery.  

In the Information Age, Gremlins would find that their activities would not impact things quite so much as formerly.  With the variety of sensors and diagnostics available, the old standards of severing cables and cutting hydraulic lines would not be as effective; the activity would not go unnoticed, given the ever-watchful ‘eye’ of various processors that are built into engines specifically to counter any such problems.

However, these very same processors give the Gremlin far more opportunity for their shenanigans; being much smaller scale and more vulnerable to interference, a light touch can go a long way towards interrupting vital processes in a way that is even harder to diagnose and repair than it would otherwise be.

The advent of computers in the office grants them even more opportunity, for the paradigm that the computer enables allows for entire new catagories of chaos.  Viruses and worms could well be their agents of interruption, wreaking havoc with the vulnerable hardware and software and causing more work for the IT analogues of the mechanics of old.  

It may well be that gremlins have infiltrated the offices of Microsoft and other large software vendors–new vulnerabilities come out every week for Microsoft products, but those operating systems based on technology developed before gremlins began to take an interest in computers (and those which are open-sourced and hence have fewer opportunities for a sly tweak of a bit here and there, given the number of eyes watching for that) are less influenced by their attentions.

Given the patterns of virus distribution, it may well be that gremlins’ natural habitat has moved to China, Russia, and other less-industrialized nations–this is perhaps unsurprising, given that the older machinery with which they are familiar may still be in use in some of those locations.  

Perhaps the strongest indicator of gremlin activity may be the Stuxnet worm:  beyond simply infecting systems and slowing or stopping them, the Stuxnet worm caused actual damage to machinery–damage that was difficult to fix and in a location that required deep disassembly, a hallmark of gremlin infestation.  That the worm spread far beyond its “target” is, perhaps, a testament to their other work in finding vulnerabilities–and if it were the work of gremlins, then other examples will be likely to show up in the future.

The internet’s ability to camoflage identity may well assist the gremlins in their work.  Their natural love of mischeif could well result in the sort of childish pranks popularly assigned to ‘hackers’ and the like; their elusive, shifty nature meshing well with the milieu involved.  A large part of Anonymous could well be gremlins, recruiting various regular people to camoflage their operations and to extend their troublemaking to the real world.

Gremlins would mesh quite well with the modern world, so long as they kept up with new technology, and would likely achieve some remarkable successes in troublemaking.

Originally the Romans’ answer to Eros, Cupid is typically represented on Valentine’s Day cards as being a small (often naked) cherubic creature with a themed bow-and-arrow, shooting couples in order to induce them to get together.  

So we already have him bookable on indecent exposure, for a start, as well as assault and battery and unlicensed administration of a controlled substance–those ‘magic’ arrows would likely be classified as a narcotic, nowadays.  Additionally, were it to be proved that he had materially assisted in coercing persons who had no intention of sexual conduct to engage in such, it’s entirely likely that he could be booked as acessory to rape.  

It certainly does not look good for Cupid.

Though his victims are unlikely to press charges–they’re generally depicted as being happy with the results–Cupid would still be regarded as a danger to society.  Getting a conviction might be difficult, given the usual overwhelming support for his mission, but his reckless assaults on various persons would eventually lead to some kind of difficulties–probably from an ex-wife or ex-husband, upset over Cupid’s “theft” of his or her lover.  Even if criminal charges were avoided, the civil suits would be ruinous–there would likely be some kind of class-action suit brought in at least one jurisdiction.  

At the very least, Cupid would end up with hundreds of restraining orders, injunctions, and other legal strictures preventing him from carrying out his job at all.  Given the nature of his crimes, there’s no doubt that he’d end up on the sex offender registries in any state that he made his home.  That would lead to further strictures–no residence within a given number of yards of schools or churches, no unsupervised contact with children, etc.

Were he to actually go to prison, his small stature and youthful appearance would not serve him very well–he would come out very badly if he were in the general population, and would likely have to remain in solitary confinement for his own protection.

All in all, Cupid would not integrate very well in the modern world.

The word ‘biscuit’ is very culturally specific–in Great Britain, when they refer to a biscuit, they’re talking about what Americans would refer to as a cookie.  In the US, biscuits are rather different–buttery, fluffy, almost pastry-like in structure but half leavened with baking soda rather than the steam from hot butter.

The perfect biscuits are made in the Deep South, land of fried everything and soul food.  In terms of health, they’re fairly high up on the list of “worst things you can eat”, especially as (as a breakfast food) they are typically served with gravy, with bacon and sausage, or with other greasy, cholesterol-laden artery cloggers.  

They’re also incredibly delicious–when made right.

The basic recipe is as follows:  

2c flour

1/4 tsb baking soda

1 tbs baking powder

1 tsp salt

6 tbs unsalted butter, very cold

3/4 c buttermilk–approximately, may require more or less.

Combine the dry ingredients.  Cut in the butter until the mixture has the texture of coarse meal.  Add buttermilk until you have a wet, sticky dough.  Turn out onto a lightly floured surface; quickly pat down to 1/2″ thickness and cut into biscuits using either a round cutter or a knife.  Bake on a lightly greased baking sheet in a preheated oven @ 450 F until golden brown.

There are certain specific requirements for this style of biscuit:  first, no kneading.  The light, fluffy texture of the biscuit depends on not drawing out the glutens in the flour; this is why the butter is worked in while it is very cold and why, after the buttermilk is added, as little interaction with the resulting dough as possible is called for.  The baking powder does the bulk of the raising work, but the baking soda is required for tuning the mixture–buttermilk is slightly acidic, and the soda will react with this to help the rise.  The arrangement of the biscuits on the baking sheet (as noted in my source for this version of the recipe) also matters:  adjust the separation according to how much “crisp” you want in the sidewalls of the biscuits.

Interesting results may be obtained by adding herbs spices to the flour mixture before the addition of the cold fat and the buttermilk.  If the biscuits are going to be served as an accompaniment to, say, chicken, use herbs that compliment those being used to flavor the chicken–tarragon, for instance.  For pork, a little sage in the biscuits might work.  For nearly anything, some ground red pepper adds a very lovely zest.

With this biscuit recipe, a variant on shepherd’s pie can be made fairly easily:  layer, in a baking or casserole dish, some meat and vegetables, then lay a batch of the above-mentioned biscuits (spiced, preferably) over the top; bake long enough at 425 or 450 to brown the top layer, then reduce heat to 350 F until the ingredients are cooked through.  I have no name for this particular recipe, but having made it several times, it has always turned out quite deliciously.