o blog autonautas.net já está pronto e lindo e no ar. é o site que montei com o Fabio para contar nossas experiências de viagem e tudo o mais o que vem pela frente. fotos e vídeos e histórias etc enfim.

todos os álbuns de fotos de outras viagens e outros passeios já estão publicados por lá. fiz também um primeiro post porque a passagem só de ida para Fortaleza já está comprada. já começou. vamos na noite do dia 7 de agosto. enquanto isso os preparativos.

e temos página no facebook, que é uma forma de acompanhar as atualizações a partir de agora. ou assinar um dos feeds.

hein hein.

tragedyseries:

New items, including a print of today’s image, are available in the emporium!

This talk presents a tool for creating data-driven visualizations, like D3, but via direct manipulation of the picture itself, like Illustrator.

This may be my opus.

In the midst of a zombie apocalpyse, an infected man struggles to save his infant daughter. This was one of the finalists in Tropfest Australia 2013.

In the comments on io9, there’s this note:

For those who don’t know, one of the conditions of entering a film in Tropfest is that is must contain ‘the signature item’, which is announced at the previous year’s festival. This year’s was ‘Balloon’.
When shown next to the other films, it was this use of the balloon that made the film all the more heart-wrenching.

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

- Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the founding father of Dubai

Social Roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your Facebook account.

Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it’s time for you to play Social Roulette.

Social Roulette is a collaboration between Kyle McDonald, Jonas Lund and Jonas Jongejan. The source code is available on GitHub.

I'm going to do some writing about discrete probability theory. Probability is an extremely important area of math. We encounter aspects of it every day. It's also a very poorly understood area - it's one that we see abused or just fouled up every day.

I'm going to focus on discrete probability theory. What that means is that we're going to look at things where the space containing the things that we're going to look at contains a countable number of elements. The probability of getting a certain sequence of coin flips, or of getting a certain hand of cards are described by discrete probability theory. On the other hand, the odds of a radioactive isotope decaying at a particular time requires continuous probability theory.

Before getting into the details, there's one important thing to mention. When you're talking about probability, there are two fundamental schools of interpretetation. There are frequentist interpretations, and there are Bayesian interpretations.

In a frequentist interpretation, when you say the probability of an event is 0.6, what you mean is that if you were to perform a series of experiments precisely reproducing the event, then on average, if you did 100 experiments, the event would occur 60 times. In the frequentist interpretation, the probability is an intrinsic property of the event. For a frequentist, it makes sense to say that there is a "real" probability associated with an event.

In a Bayesian interpretation, when you say that the probability of an event is 0.6, what you mean is that based on your current state of knowledge about the event, you have a 60% certainty that the event will occur. In a strict Bayesian interpretation, the event doesn't have any kind of intrinsic probability associated with it. The specific event that you're interested in either will occur, or it won't. There's no real probability involved. What probability measures is how certain you are about whether or not it will occur.

For example, think about flipping a fair coin.

A frequentist would say that you can flip a coin many times, and half of the time, it will land on heads. So the probability of a coin flip landing on the head of the coin is 0.5. A Bayesian would say that the coin will land either on heads or on tails. Since you don't know which, and you have no other information to use to be able to make a better prediction, you can have a certainty of 0.5 that it will land on the head of the coin.

In the real world, I think that most people are really somewhere in between.

I think that all but the most fervent Bayesians do rely on an intuitive notion of the "intrinsic" probability of an event. They may describe it in different terms, but when it comes down to it, they're using the basic frequentist notion. And I don't think that you can find a sane frequentist anywhere who won't use Bayes theorem to update their priors in the face of new information - which is the most fundamental notion in the Bayesian interpretation.

One note before I finish this, and get started on the real meaty posts. In the past, when I've talked about probability, people have started stupid flamewars in the comments. People get downright religious about interpretations of probability. There are religious Bayesians, who think that all frequentists are stupid idiots who should be banished from the field of math; likewise, there are religious frequentists who think that Bayesians are all a crop of arrogant know-it-alls who should be sent to Siberia. I am not going to tolerate any of that nonsense. If you feel that you cannot read posts on probability without going into a diatribe about those stupid frequentists/Bayesians and their deliberately stupid ideas, please go away and don't even read these posts. If you do go into such a diatribe, I will delete your comments without any hesitation.

"Dude, are you doing the Dove ad now?  That was so April 15th...?"  Yes, I realize I missed the meme train, but it's better to be right than part of the debate, especially when there is no debate, this is all a short con inside a 50+ year long con.  Remember House Of Games?  "It's called a confidence game. Why, because you give me your confidence?  No: because I give you mine."

"What's with you and fin-de-Reagan David Mamet?"  It's not my fault Dove cast Joe Mantegna as the sketch artist, and anyway if you want to understand the world today, you have to understand how the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History Of The World was educated.  See also: 9 1/2 Weeks. 

Here's how you run a short con, pay attention:

Everyone likes to know the secrets of the game, and this scene certainly satisfies. Joe Mantagena shows a famous psychiatrist (played, tellingly, by David Mamet's future ex-wife) how a short con is done, how it's improvised, and he makes it look so easy.  Really easy, except for the part where you have to connect with a perfect stranger and make them like you.  Did you find yourself wondering if you had the skills to pull it off?  Better watch it again, sucker.

Quick test for a con: what questions does it not occur to you to ask?  While you were memorizing the language and the pacing of the scam, you didn't ask yourself, why didn't Mantegna take that guy's money at the end?  Why did he let him off the hook?  "He was just doing it as an example." Oh, like when a guy says he'll put in just the tip, "I want to see if it fits"?   It's not like the psychiatrist doesn't know he's a thief-- that's why they were there in the first place.   So he purposely didn't steal the money to make the psychiatrist feel at ease, feel closer to him.  To earn her confidence by first giving her his.  She's the mark.  The aborted short con is part of an unseen long con.

But the genius of the scene is that while you, the viewer, are criticizing the stilted dialogue or the improbability of the success, "dude, that would never work in real life!" if you search your sclerotic heart you will find that you yourself felt good that Mantegna didn't take that guy's money, that he let him go.  It endeared you to Joe, it made you feel more sympathetic to him, like he's an ethical thief, like he's Lawful Neutral.  In other words, he's given you his confidence.... which means that the true mark is you. 

Women are their own worst beauty critics.... At Dove, we are committed to creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety... That's why we decided to conduct a compelling social experiment that proves to women something very important: You are more beautiful than you think.

"Oh my God," you might say, "I know it's just an ad, but it's such a positive message."

If some street hustler challenges you to a game of three card monte you don't need to bother to play, just hand him the money, not because you're going to lose but because you owe him for the insight: he selected you.  Whatever he saw in you everyone sees in you, from the dumb blonde at the bar to your elderly father you've dismissed as out of touch, the only person who doesn't see it is you, which is why you fell for it.  Even mirrors fail you.  Hence a sketch.


II.

The gimmick that propels the Dove ad is a comparison between subjectivity and objectivity, though in this case objectivity is defined as however well Mantegna can use a charcoal pencil.  Why not just use a photograph?

Because when it comes to beauty, we all know photographs can be manipulated, especially in ads, especially by Dove.  So the ad frees you from your cynicism and goes with a new standard of beauty, one that, like yoga or genetics, has been around for a long time AND you know very little about it; it hasn't been over-critiqued, you haven't watched it fail over and over, and thus seems pure, fantastical, true.  The artist's sketch.   How can anything this lovingly and precisely created not be the real thing?  And nothing makes a middle aged neurotic happier than 45 minutes alone in a loft with a good looking man who requires no sexual contact and just wants to listen to you talk about yourself, unless he's also sketching you attentively in natural light.  "Can I offer you a Pinot Grigio?"  Slow down, Christian, you're making me woozy.  There is not enough quantitative easing in the universe to prop up this fantasy, but at $3000000000000 you can't say America's not committed to the attempt. 

The mistake in interpreting this ad is in assuming the ad is selling based on the women and their beauty.  If that were true, it would be counterproductive: if they are naturally beautiful, if the problem is actually a psychological one, then they certainly don't need any beauty products.  A beauty ad operates by creating a gap between you and an ideal: by creating an anxiety that can only be mitigated by the product.  But this ad reduces anxiety and avoids cynicism.  Therefore, it is not a beauty products ad.  It is selling something else.  This is why there aren't any products in the ad.

Dove is telling you you don't need to do anything to be beautiful, but it knows full well women must do something to themselves to feel good about themselves, and if they don't need makeup then at least a moisturizing soap. All Dove needs to solidify this is to be recognized as an authority on beauty-- real beauty, not fake, Photoshopped, eyeliner and pushup bras beauty. 

It is the sketch artist who is the most important character in the ad, the ad is selling him.  That's why he doesn't just draw the sketches, he sticks around to chaperone these women to self-awareness.  By the way he is depicted you understand that he knows beauty, inner and outer; he is part father, part lover, expert in what makes a woman valuable.  For you to accept him, he can't be married; but since in real life he is, they only show you the right hand-- the part of him that almost autonomously draws beauty.  He is an authority on appearance, he is the "other omnipotent entity" that decides whether  "you are beautiful." 

The ad lets the women become beautiful without selling them anything.   It lets them win.  It lets them win.  It endears them and you to Dove, it makes you feel more sympathetic to Dove, like it's an ethical beauty products company, like it's Lawful Neutral.   It gave these women its confidence; it gave you, the viewer, its confidence. 

And then-- spoiler alert-- it will screw you and take your money.

III.

That Dove wants you to think of it as the authority on beauty so it can sell you stuff makes sense, there's nothing underhanded about it and hardly worth the exposition.  The question is, why do they think this will work?  What do they know about us that makes them think we want an authority on beauty-- especially in an age where we loudly proclaim that we don't want an authority on beauty, we don't like authorities of any kind, we resist and resent being told what's beautiful (or good or moral or worthwhile) and what's not?

You may feel your brain start trying to piece this together, but you should stop, there's a twist: where did you see this ad?   It wasn't during an episode of The Mentalist on the assumption that you're a 55 year old woman whose husband is "working late."  In fact... it's not even playing anywhere.   You didn't stumble on it, you were sent to it, it was sent to you-- it was selected for you to see.  How did they know?  Because if you're watching it, it's for you.

Here you have an ad that was released into the Matrix, it is not selling a product but its own authority, and it is not targeting a physical demo, age/race/class, it is targeting something else that operates not on demography but virality.  Are you susceptible?  So while you are sure you most certainly don't want an authority on beauty,  the system decided that you, in fact, do very much want an authority on beauty.  The question is, which of you is the rube?

"But I hated the ad!"  Oh, I know, for all the middlebrow acceptable reasons you think you came up with yourself.  Not relevant.  The con artists at Dove didn't select these women to represent you because you are beautiful or ugly, any more than the street hustler selected you for your nice smile.   They were selected because they represent a psychological type that transcends age/race/class, it is characterized by a kind of psychological laziness: on the one hand, they don't want to have to conform to society's impossible standards, but on the other hand they don't want the existential terror of NOT conforming to some kind of standard.  They want an objective bar to be changed to fit them-- they want "some other omnipotent entity" to change it so that it remains both entirely valid yet still true for them, so that others have to accept it, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about look at your GPA: you know, and I know, that if college graded you based on the actual number of correct answers you generated, no curve, then you would have gotten an R.  Somehow that R became an A.  The question is, why bother?  Why not either make grades rigorous and valid so we know exactly what they mean, or else do away with them entirely?  Because in either case society and your head would implode from the existential vacuum.  Instead, everyone has to get As AND the As have to be "valid" so you feel good enough to pay next year's tuition, unfortunately leaving employers with no other choice but to look for other more reliable proxies of learning like race, gender, and physical appearance.  Oh.   Did you assume employers would be more influenced by the fixed grades than their own personal prejudices?   "Wait a second, I graduated 4.0 from State, and the guy you hired had a 3.2 from State-- the only reason you didn't hire me is because I'm a woman!"  Ok, this is going to sound really, really weird:  yeah.  The part that's going to really have you scratching your head is why did either of you need college when the job only requires a 9th grade education?

Which is why those that yelled "Unilever owns Dove and Axe!" like it was an Alex Jones tweet, those who felt tricked/used/violated that Unilever has a sexist side to it, those who thought the ad was hypocritical or  "anti-feminist" are still being duped, detecting hypocrisy is 100% the play of the rube, go ahead and yell indignantly as you continue to be fleeced.  Figuring out the short con is part of the long con, see also House Of Games, for a non-spoiler example if the street hustler is shifting the cards and you think you're able to follow them, then you're still going to lose AND your pocket is being picked.  "Can't bluff someone who isn't paying attention," Mantegna told the shrink helpfully-- he's telling her the scam, no, she didn't listen either.   So let's go to the places where people pay attention, go to the "intelligent" media outlets where all the suckers hang out, and observe the most common criticism about this Dove ad: it has no black women in it.  Never mind it does, that's a very telling criticism: why would you want black women in it?  It's not the Senate, it's an ad, no, don't you hang up on me, why do you want blacks in the ad?  Because it would represent the diversity of beauty?  Because without them, it sends black women the wrong message about society's standards?  Your answer is irrelevant, the important part is that whatever your answer, it is founded on the assumption that ads have the authority to set standards.  Which is why, in your broken brain, the reflex is to complain about the contents of the ad, not assert the insignificance of ads.  The con worked.  Of course it worked: they selected you.

"Well, not authority-- power.  You can't deny their power is massive, but of course I'm not a stupid, I don't think it's legitimate."  I'm sorry, no, you are stupid.  You'll let it have power over you in exchange for the right to brag that you know its not legitimate.

This is the same problem with people who want to ban Photoshopping in magazines or want bigger women to be featured in ads.  You all have the internet, right?  It seems crazy to worry about how beauty is portrayed on TV and ads when there are blonde billions (rated on a scale of one to ten) getting double penetrated literally underneath your gmail window, but that obsessive worry about what's on TV or what's in an ad is completely predicated on the assumption that the ad, the media, has all the power to decide what's desirable.   And therefore, of course, it does.   But the important point is not that you believe this to be true, the point is that you want this to be true.  You want it to be true that advertising sets the standard of beauty because in the insane calculus of your psychology you have a better chance of changing Dove than you have of changing yourself, turns out that's true as well.

Dove, et al sympathize with your powerlessness, so since you can't get anywhere near those  impossible standards, ads give you a chance of making some kind of progress: a little moisturizing soap and a positive message and maybe you get closer to the aspirational images of the women in the ad.  "Those women are aspirational?"  Of course: they're happy, Dad told them they're good.  It feels like improvement, it feels like change, and I hope by now you understand it's only a defense against change.

The obvious retort is that ads are everywhere, you can't ignore them.  But there are rats in the ceiling of your favorite restaurant, and you ignore them no problem, you don't even look up.  That's the real Matrix you make for yourself continuously, in analog, not digital-- overestimate this, disavow that, a constant transduction of reality into a safe hue of green, until by the time you get to bed you're physically exhausted but your brain can't downshift.  "I have insomnia."  Time for a Xanax.  Yes, it's Blue. 

"Everybody gets something out of every transaction," said Joe, explaining why people want to be conned.  That's what ads do for you.  They'll let you complain that they are telling you what to want, as long as you let them tell you how to want. 

"Shouldn't my parents have taught me how to want, instead of yelling at me about what to want?"  You'd think that, let's check in: have you shown this ad to your 14 year old daughter yet?  Oh, you sent it to her on Facebook, that was helpful.  What did you tell her about the ad?  "Well, even though it's an ad and they're trying to sell you Dove soap, there's a positive message in it."  No other ways to deliver positive messages?  "Well, the ad is really well made, and it communicates the message more powerfully than I ever could."  But if the medium is the message, shouldn't you NOT show her this ad?

David Mamet has some excellent insights, but for practice what you preach wisdom you have to defer to a Wachowski sister: stop letting the Matrix tell you who you are.  



IV

Did the way the sketching sessions were conducted remind you of anything?  The women aren't in yoga casual, no one's wearing sneakers-- they got a little dressed up for the appointment.  Observe the way they talk about themselves, trying to find just the right words because, you know, their inner experience is very complicated; and the unfinished, hesitating haste with which they take their handbags and walk out at the end leaving the artist behind.  The loft is certainly an inviting, comfortable setting, warm and safe, but it doesn't belong to them.  They know they are merely visitors in a shared space.  That setting is exactly like therapy.

You may think this is merely my (a psychiatrist's/House Of Games viewer's) biased perception of this, except that a) they're in San Francisco, where the main output is  crematorium roast coffee and cash-only psychiatry, and b):

My father was emotionally very distant-- and so was my mom.  And I didn't get the emotional comfort I needed...

It's been really clear to me over my life that I've made really bad choices, and that's a reflection of my self esteem.  I chose the wrong jobs, the wrong husbands...

I use a toolbox of things I tell myself.... whenever I hear negative thoughts about myself, I remind myself I have to use what's inside me, my authentic self, to feel good about how I am.

This isn't every woman I've ever been stuck next to on the A train who spotted me with a psych journal or a flask, this monologue is in the ad.  Let's find out why: anybody watching this ad in therapy?  Anybody watching this ad ever fantasize about what it would be like being in therapy?  What a coincidence.

This woman is roots deep in therapy, she thinks about herself in the language of "insight oriented therapy," how has this strategy worked out for her?







Yikes, an Oscar Wilde novel.  But the thing to notice here is not that this thinking has failed but that this thinking has BOTH failed AND she thinks it has worked amazingly well for everything else EXCEPT her perception of her physical appearance, her self-esteem; only in that one single area does she "have more work to do on myself."   If you ask her about her capacity for empathy or her social/political beliefs or her "values"-- those aren't evolving, those are evolved, they are unassailable.  "I have a lot of love to give."  How do you know?

I'm not picking on her, any woman who has to raise two kids on her own or with a husband has my unconditional support, but truth hurts, that's how you know it's true. The confidence with which she knows how her perception of self-esteem affects everything in life, "it couldn't be more crucial" is not an insight, it is not wisdom gained from years of therapy: she has been conned, it is society's long con so her pocket can be picked. 

The ad's association to therapy here was probably not planned but it was inevitable, just as Mantegna selecting a psychiatrist and not an engineer or a cook or a stripper as the mark in House Of Games was inevitable.  It is the only system of rules based on self-deception, it  encourages the illusion of "self" separate from behavior.  And as long as psychiatry uncritically elevates identity over behavior, it makes it-- not the patients, it-- an easy mark for con men with their own agenda: SSI, the justice system, gun control, schools, whatever.    "It's called a confidence game.  Why, because you give me your confidence?  No: because I give you mine."  Take a minute, think it through.

Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself.  But fake society also made you feel good about yourself, it propped you up.  The reason you got an A and not an R and believed it is because you actually believe you are an A kind of guy, Math, English, History, Science, PE, and Lunch notwithstanding.  A, not R.  But if everyone deserves it, it has no value.  Which is why getting  it is unsatisfying. 

Self-esteem is relative, advertising knows this, which is why it operates on comparisons between you and the aspirational people in the ad that seem better because they own the product.  The Dove ad dispenses with the aspirational people and actually compares you to you.  But that's not you, it's aspirational you, "wouldn't it be great if people saw me in an idealized, sketchy kind of way?"   But even as it does this, it pretends self-esteem is innate.

One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it.  You won't.  That's not just okay, that's the point. It's ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die.  And it will have been worth it.

You can't see it, but since this is America, the problem here is debt.  Not credit card debt, though I suspect that's substantial too, but self-esteem debt.  They're borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they'll be able to pay it back.  Melinda's 26, at that age some self-esteem debt is reasonable as long as you use it to hustle.  But what happens if you overspend now and can't pay it back by the time you're 40?  Look above.  Time for therapy or a moisturizing soap.  There's not enough quantitative easing in the universe to prop up this fantasy, but you can't say America's not committed to the attempt.



http://twitter.com/thelastpsych


Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

Get your brunch on.

Mothers are important. Mothers are many people’s gateway to food and cooking. On the Modernist Cuisine team, this is no exception. Nathan’s mother famously let him prepare Thanksgiving dinner when he was only nine years old, kicking off a lifelong love of cooking. Sam Fahey-Burke first began making buckeye cookies with his mother as a child. Johnny Zhu’s mother provided the inspiration for our recipe for Microwaved Tilapia. So, it is perhaps fitting that Mother’s Day has traditionally been a day of cooking and eating. In this light, we assembled a brunch menu with a few favorites from our library.

Because it’s not brunch without eggs:

Striped Omelet
Liquid Center Egg
Scrambled Egg Foam

More than mere toast:

Chorizo French Toast
Garlic Confit on Toast
Barley Salad with Spinach Pesto
Bagels with Sous Vide Salmon

Remember to eat your vegetables:

Asparagus with hollandaise
Deep-Fried Brussels Sprouts

As sweet as she is:

Frozen Fruit Rolls
Lemon Curd
Popping Buckeyes

Artist Benjamin Dewey’s Tragedy Series consists of, quote, “Depictions drawn from regrettable accounts of the less fortunate for purposes of instruction; so that one may avoid similar missteps.” They are wonderful, unlikely, tragedies, all drawn in a vintage style that somehow make the surreal nature of their subject material seem plausible. A few of my favorites are 265, 255, 277, 290, and 48 (also Sassy Yaks is totally going to be the name of my next band).

Fortunately, lest the plight of these multiple tragedies become too overwhelming, he also presents occasional Sadness Reprieves such as this and this.

He sells prints of some of the tragedies on Etsy and you can see examples of his other art (he’s a professional comic book artist) here.

A while back I stumbled upon this link, which details ten unusual eBay purchases. One of the items was what purported to be an 18th-century Vampire Killing Kit. It was more likely a Blomberg Kit (which have a murky and tangled past of their own), but I quite liked the idea of such a project so I decided to take a crack at making one myself. I gave this one to my Secret Pumpkin this year, but my notes are below if you’d like to make one of your own.

Although this project is somewhat on the involved side, no single piece is particularly difficult; there are just a lot of pieces and it takes a while to put everything together. However, I think the results are worth the effort. You can create a stripped-down version to carry around as a prop when you go clubbing, or display a full kit on a bookcase as an decorative object. Plus you can also use it to kill vampires, should you encounter any.

First I had to decide what items to include. A quick canvass of the Internet turned up a surprising number of sites devoted to “vintage” kits; I chose interesting equipment from a variety of sources, and came up with the following list:

• Wooden mallet
• Stake
• Large cross
• Various blessed medals (the Seal of Solomon and medals depicting St. Michael are supposed to be particularly effective)
• Small box containing several vials or bottles of vampire-fighting substances:
  • Holy Water
  • Garlic (in this case, powdered “Flour of Garlic”)
  • Cemetery earth
  • Brimstone
  • Holy incense
  • Salt
  • Poppy seeds
  • Coffin nails
  • Thunderstone (fragment of iron meteorite, claimed to be effective against dark forces)
• Coffin key
• Bottle of “trophy” fangs
• Mysterious note in Latin

The Secret Pumpkin exchange is supposed to have an upper cost limit so I couldn’t get too elaborate, but some other items that you might wish to include are:

• Anointing oil
• Faery Stone
• Bat’s Head Root
• Ritual dagger
• Brass Phurpa
• Surgical scissors
• Metal tooth pliers
• Metal syringe
• Prayer book or Bible, preferably in Latin
• Rosary with crucifix
• A leather valise, compartmented box, or similar container which would keep all of this equipment carefully organized (seconds count when you’re fighting vampires, and you don’t want to grab the brimstone when you need holy water)

The mallet was an inexpensive woodworking mallet, which was artificially aged: It was whacked with a hammer, gouged with a screwdriver, abraded with steel wool, then stained with a dark wood stain.

The stake started life as a piece of 2×2 lumber. It was cut down to reasonable stake size (you can ask the hardware store to do this for you; one piece of 2×2 should yield several stakes) and then one end was whittled to a point. A dremel tool was used to cut a shallow channel about 2″ wide around the other end and to carve a little cross shape on two opposite the sides below the channel. The stake was then aged the same way as the mallet. The little crosses (unfortunately not visible in the photo above) were filled in with a darker stain. Finally, rough twine was wrapped around the stake in the carved channel and hot-glued in place.

The cross was found at a craft store in the decorate-it-yourself wood section. It had a hole in the back for hanging on a wall; that was filled in with wood putty and then the wood was aged as for the mallet and stake. A small saint’s medal (which was bought on eBay but can also be found at many places online) was bound to the front with sinew thread.

The box for the vials was a wooden recipe box found in the same section of the craft store as the cross. It was similarly aged, then some little strips of leather (which originally came from an upholstery sample swatch) were hot-glued over the little channels that recipe boxes have for no reason I can fathom. The leather was made to look worn by going over it with sandpaper. A metal cross (which I think originally came from Oriental Trading, although they don’t seem to have the same style now) was hot-glued on top.

The glass vials came from a variety of sources; the matching ones for the garlic and similar substances were from Specialty Bottle; the mismatched ones were left over from some past project. The glass and corks were aged with a bit of stain. The labels were scans of handwriting (my sister does calligraphy as a hobby and was kind enough to write out the list of words I gave her; any “handwriting” font would work too) which were printed out and then aged. I initially tried dipping the paper in tea but the result wasn’t dark enough to suit me, so I wound up diluting brown acrylic paint with water and brushing that over the paper.

The actual contents of the vials were mostly stuff available around the house: The “flour of garlic” was garlic powder from the spice cabinet; the poppy seeds were likewise from the pantry; the cemetery earth was potting soil; the salt was simply rock salt (and the “holy water” was just an empty vial, since one would assume that’d evaporate eventually). The “thunderstone” was, y’know, a rock (although for added veracity you can buy real ones: Search for “tektite.”)

A few of the items were more authentic: Brimstone is just another name for sulphur, which is extremely cheap; I got the holy incense from the same vendor. The coffin nails were likewise authentic; you could use any small nail but I liked the antique look of the heads on these.

The “coffin key” was a real antique skeleton key; it was found on eBay (it was actually part of a set of six different ones that was sold as one lot, so there were leftovers for other projects). It was too big to fit in a vial so I sewed a simple little bag out of scrap muslin dyed with strong coffee.

The “trophy fangs” were fox teeth.

The Latin note, also penned and scanned by my wonderful sister, had text as follows: “Is est Sanctus Res ego sum decessio secundum ut meus pius futurus adsuesco assuesco obviam Malum, Nox noctis Ingredior Nosferatu, Lamia quod Intentus. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.” Which translates roughly to, “This is the Holy Thing I am leaving behind to my own kind to be used against the Evil, the Night Walker, Nosferatu and vampire. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” That note was aged with dilute paint as for the labels, then the edges were carefully burned to make them ragged.

When the gift was shipped to my Secret Pumpkin, the following note was included:

Vampire Hunter’s Kit

Provenance:

Shadow Manor acquired this assemblage in 2013 from a combined estate auction in Philadelphia PA. It was one of several offerings in a small series amongst what was otherwise a rather commonplace collection from the estate of Charles Gibson Jr. of Clover St., Philadelphia PA.

These items were listed as follows in the auction guide:

“The following four offerings are being separated from the main body of the estate due to their similar and curious origins. These items were discovered beneath the floorboards in a second level bedroom by Mr. Gibson during a renovation project at his Clover St. townhome in 1973. These pieces are tentatively dated to mid-1930 due to several pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer from May-June of that year having been used to line the cache where the objects had been stored. As to their original source, it should be mentioned that Mr. Gibson purchased his home on Clover St. in 1961 from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The Archdiocese owned this home from 1914 – 1961, and it was used exclusively as a rectory during that period. Accordingly, and without prejudice or further inference, we offer the following items:

1. A collection of diverse items, all originally contained within a badly-disintegrating leather valise and thus offered as a group:
   1. One wooden cross with a saint’s medal bound thereto with sinew.
   2. One wooden box holding several vials labeled as follows:
      1. Brimstone powder
      2. Salt
      3. Several coffin nails
      4. Flour of garlic
      5. Cemetery earth
      6. Holy incense
      7. Poppy seeds
      8. A “thunderstone,” or fragment of iron meteorite, widely claimed to have power against dark forces.
   3. One cotton bag containing a coffin key.
   4. One glass vial, intended for holy water.
   5. One small corked bottle containing a number of sharp fangs of some animal of unidentified species.
   6. One large wooden mallet, well worn.
   7. One wooden stake, carved with a crucifix.
   8. One handwritten note, in Latin.

(Our note: Shadow Manor attempted to acquire the items below as well, but our agent was outbid.)

One inscribed first edition copy of Montague Summers’ 1928 treatise “The Vampire. His Kith and Kin. – ‘The Philosophy of Vampirism’ ” Title page inscription reading: “To my dearest Ambrose, treasured ally in the only war that matters.”

One folding metal spade of U.S. military issue.

One pair of men’s black workboots, well worn.

She seemed pleased with the effort (there are more photos of the kit at her post, and I yoinked the one above from there as well because hers turned out better than my reference shots. Photography is not my long suit).

Incidentally, as for the optional kit items mentioned above:

Anointing oil could simply be olive oil or other oil of your choice (I didn’t include it in the kit I mailed for fear it might leak).

Faery Stone is another name for Staurolite, which frequently grows into a natural cross shape. You can buy the formations online at both gem-and-mineral shops and metaphysical/witchcraft suppliers. They often come polished as jewelry, but the rough uncut type might look nicer for the kit.

Something called “Bat’s Head Root” is often sold as a protective magical charm, purporting to be a rare root from Mexico. They’re actually either the seed pods of Martynia annua (which you can see here, halfway down the page) or the fruit of Trapa bicornis (seen here). Either will work, since you’re interested in the shape more than the provenance.

The ritual dagger could be any knife you want; wooden-handled athames are inexpensive and could be aged as for the other wooden items in the kit.

A Phurpa is a Tibetan “magical dart” that’s used to ward off evil. They’re widely available at both metaphysical/witchcraft sites and at import stores.

The surgical scissors, tooth pliers, metal syringe, Latin prayer book, and rosary are all available on eBay in various sizes and price ranges. Shop around until you find the perfect piece for your kit.

The leather valise can be purchased on eBay as well, or you could make a carpet bag, velvet-lined box, or some other container. What you’re mainly looking for is something fairly old and beat-up, which is large enough to hold your gear but small enough to carry easily.

So that’s the kit. It was a lot of fun to build, and the result was very satisfying.

Humor always helps. I thought I would share these with you. Personally I like the one about hiding the bodies!
Mother Nature blew in some chilly temps and we may get a snowflake or two tomarrow. Good thing I put all my veggies under recycled plastic bottles so if we do get frost they should be ok.
Wishing all you Moms a wonderful Mothers Day! My wish list includes a new sprinkler and some new garden gloves.  Oh and no cooking at least for the day!

Last time I moved into a new neighborhood I posted multiple flyers about my missing rattlesnake until I practically got fined for too-much-awesomeness.  Or “being a nuisance” according to the Home Owners Association.

This time when moving into a new neighborhood I decided to do things differently.

Very differently.

Or, as Victor says, not really so differently at all.

I’ll keep you (and these) posted.

I’ve made rules that I’m trying to implement in my life.  Want to see them?  Probably not.  But here they are anyway:

RULES FOR LIFE

1. Don’t be shitty.

2. Don’t make happy people sad.

3. Don’t make sad people sadder.

4. If more than two people tell you that you’re being an asshole, consider that maybe you’re being an asshole.

5. Flush the toilet behind you.  You’re grossing us all out.

6. Support the under-dog.

7. Critics aren’t automatically bullies and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you ignore all of them out of hand.  That being said, it sucks to read shitty stuff about yourself so find an honest friend to read your criticism and tell you if it’s something worth listening to or if the critic is just a crazy fucking douche-canoe.

8. Real bullies are complete assholes but they can’t recognize themselves as such so maybe spray paint an “x” on their forehead so that we can all just recognize them from a distance and ignore them.

9. Be stupid.  Be childlike.  Be ridiculous.  Be happy.

10. Don’t use the word “literally” when you really mean “figuratively”.  It literally makes me want to stab you a little but I don’t do it because that’s illegal and also because I have a very limited amount of knives.

11. Read more.  Watch shows that inspire you.  Embrace whatever makes you geek out.  Even if it’s Laura Ingalls.  Because Laura Ingalls is fascinating and there’s nothing wrong with obsessively knowing every detail about her life and death.  Stop judging me.  

12. Bite off more than you can chew.  You can always spit it out on the floor if you decide you don’t like it.  Women do it all the time.

12b. Embrace your flaws and foibles.  If people make fun of you, kick them in the back and then blame it on a ghost.

14. Don’t let other people on the internet tell you what to do.  Unless it’s this list.  Then I guess just use your best judgement.

15. Become a pirate.  Or a monster truck.  Or a space toddler.  Or a jacket.  That’s my favorite one.  I just jump on someone’s back and say “Sorry.  You looked cold.  Zip me up.”  It’s awesome.

16. Do something nice for someone you love.

17. Do something nice for a perfect stranger.

18. Do something nice for you.

19. Do ‘The Robot’.

20.  Add your own.  Go ahead.  You can’t fuck this up any more than I have.

 

My good friend Jennifer May Nickel has launched her website! She's an amazing costume designer, so please give her all your jobs, Hollywood people.

Hey geeks! Only 2 days left to making Gaming in Color happen (and get some video games for your support!).

Boulder, Colorado, 1989: the young Norwegian’s phone rang. On the line was his mother in Oslo, where it was already evening; dark with a November chill. She needed to tell him that his beloved grandfather had gone to take a short nap. But he had not woken up: he had had another heart attack in [...]

The post Frozen dead guys appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

por Emiliano Augusto

Um dos meus aforismos prediletos de Nietzsche é aquele sobre a caixa de Pandora. Todos conhecemos o mito: Pandora abriu a caixa e soltou todos os monstros presos em seu interior no mundo. A única coisa que ficou na caixa, encolhidinha lá no fundo, foi a esperança. E, por isso, para o bigodudo, ela é o pior dos monstros: os outros se apresentam como tal, eles saem pelo mundo barbarizando e anunciando sua monstruosidade, enquanto a esperança nos faz acreditar que ela é outra coisa, frágil e que necessita proteção. Porém nós não devemos nos enganar, ela estava aprisionada numa caixa de monstros, junto com os seus semelhantes.

O que me interessa para esse texto é essa estratégia que algumas monstruosidades adotam não só para esconder sua face, mas para caminhar por onde nem deveriam aparecer, e ainda se passarem por necessárias. O seu fundo da caixa geralmente são o apelo à liberdade de expressão, à democracia, ou a ambas. Se temos dificuldade de lidar com monstros anunciados, não fazemos a menor ideia de como agir quando nos defrontamos com a barbárie dissimulada.

A estratégia de dissimulação é muito simples: basta passar um verniz de democracia sobre o discurso com tendências totalitárias, e voilá, eis uma série de pessoas bem intencionadas inutilmente tentando debater contra um totalitarismo que não tem a menor intenção de ser penetrado pela democracia que está em sua casca. E metade dos contra-argumentadores perdidos ainda perguntarão, ingenuamente em voz alta, se em nome da liberdade de expressão aquilo deve ser tolerado, ao que o dissimulado se agarrá com unhas e dentes e de onde nunca mais arredará pé.

Mal eles sabem que apenas alimentam o mal. Creem que porque esperam que seu discurso e seus argumentos devem ser ouvidos, ponderados e discutidos a fundo, todos os argumentos merecem o mesmo. Nada mais longe da verdade. Alguns argumentos não querem nada disso, porque sabem que seus absurdos constituintes não resistiriam a qualquer exame mais detido. Tudo o que os quem pronuncia quer é que o absurdo ganhe o status de normalidade. Que ele apareça como só mais uma teoria em meio a muitas outras num meio em que cada qual tem a sua validade.

Portanto, o meio mais equivocado de responder à barbárie é responder a ela nos mesmos termos em que ela se apresenta. É preciso sempre estar atento à monstruosidade de fundo. Se ela vier com a cara de “contra”, não se deve dizer “a favor”; se ela vier com a cara de “não”, não se deve dizer “sim”. Antes, é preciso expor sua verdadeira face: rasgar a sua máscara de meritocracia quando ela na verdade é determinismo naturalista; arrancar a faixa de democracia de quem na verdade deseja esmagar todos os outros que não forem os seus.

Só é necessário responder quando isso faz parte do processo de desvelamento. No primeiro mês, organiza-se um abaixo assinado, joga-se o jogo dentro dos trâmites, seguem-se os protocolos. Aí vem a inevitável traição. No segundo mês, invade-se o palácio com guilhotinas, porque a barbárie já anunciou: ela só joga dentro das regras quando a regra é conveniente, quando não, vale o que ela quer, e é ingenuidade achar que se pode fazer valer alguma regra contra quem segue regra seletivamente.

Da mesma forma, é bobagem utilizar argumentos contra quem sabe que seus pressupostos não resistem a uma boa argumentação. “Ah, mas pelo menos gerou discussão”, dirão alguns. Não, o segredo para termos boas discussões é não termos más, o tempo é escasso. Algumas coisas não devemos legitimar com o suor e o tutano; tem coisa que, porque a existência é ofensiva, só pode ser respondida com uma boa e velha ofensa: ora, vá tomar no meio do seu cu.

Scientists’ work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so routine it almost seems inevitable. But what if it’s not the best way to do science? 

Although the act of publishing seems to entail sharing your research with the world, most published papers sit behind paywalls. The journals that publish them charge thousands of dollars per subscription, putting access out of reach to all but the most minted universities. Subscription costs have risen dramatically over the past generation. According to critics of the publishers, those increases are the result of the consolidation of journals by private companies who unduly profit off their market share of scientific knowledge.

When we investigated these alleged scrooges of the science world, we discovered that, for their opponents, the battle against this parasitic profiting is only one part of the scientific process that needs to be fixed. 

Advocates of “open science” argue that the current model of science, developed in the 1600s, needs to change and take full advantage of the Internet to share research and collaborate in the discovery making process. When the entire scientific community can connect instantly online, they argue, there is simply no reason for research teams to work in silos and share their findings according to the publishing schedules of journals. 

Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing difficult problems are all disincentivized. Following 17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of science in the 21st.

The Creation of Academic Journals

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

~ Isaac Newton

Into the 17th century, scientists often kept their discoveries secret. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz argued over which of them first invented calculus because Isaac Newton did not publish his invention for decades. Robert Hooke, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo Galilei published only encoded messages proving their discoveries. Scientists gained little by sharing their research other than claiming their spot in history. As a result, they preferred to keep their discoveries secret and build off their findings, only revealing how to decode their message when the next man or woman made the same discovery. 

Public funding of research and its distribution in scholarly journals began at this time. Wealthy patrons pooled their money to create scientific academies like England’s Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, allowing scientists to pursue their research in a stable, funded environment. By subsidizing research, they hoped to aid its creation and dissemination for society’s benefit. 

Academic journals developed in the 1660s as an efficient way for the new academies to spread their findings. The first started when Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, published the society’s articles at his own expense. At the time, the market for scientific articles was small and publishing a major expense. Scientists gave away the articles for free because the publisher provided a great value in spreading the findings at very little profit. When the journals market became more formal, almost all publishers were nonprofits, often associated with research institutions. Up until the mid 20th century, profits were low and private publishers rare. 

Universities have since replaced academies as the dominant scientific institution. Due to the rising costs of research (think linear accelerators), governments replaced individual patrons as the biggest subsidizer of science, with researchers applying for grants from the government or foundations to fund research projects. And journals transitioned from a means to publish findings to take on the role of a marker of prestige. Scientists’ most important qualification today is their publication history. 

Today many researchers work in the private sector, where the profit incentives of intellectual property incentivize scientific discovery.

But outside of research with immediate commercial applications, the system developed in the 1600s has remained a relative constant. As physicist turned science writer Michael Nielsen notes, this system facilitated “a scientific culture which to this day rewards the sharing of discoveries with jobs and prestige for the discoverer… It has changed surprisingly little in the last 300 years.”

The Monopolization of Science

In April 2012, the Harvard Library published a letter stating that their subscriptions to academic journals were “financially untenable.” Due to price increases as high as 145% over the past 6 years, the library said that it would soon be forced to cut back on subscriptions.

The Harvard Library singled out one group as primarily responsible for the problem: “This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.”

The most famous of these providers is Elsevier. It is a behemoth. Every year it publishes 250,000 articles in 2,000 journals. Its 2012 revenues reached $2.7 billion. Its profits of over $1 billion account for 45% of the Reed Elsevier Group - its parent company which is the 495th largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization. 

Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers. Since every article is published in only one journal and researchers ideally want access to every article in their field, libraries bought subscriptions no matter the price. From 1984 to 2002, for example, the price of science journals increased nearly 600%. One estimate puts Elsevier’s prices at 642% higher than industry-wide averages. 

These providers also bundle journals together. Critics argue that this forces libraries to buy less prestigious journals to gain access to indispensable offerings. There is no set cost for a bundle, instead providers like Elsevier structure plans in response to each institution’s past history of subscriptions.

Source: “The Economics of Ecology Journals”

The tactics of Elsevier and its ilk have made them an evil empire in the eyes of their critics - the science professors, library administrators, PhD students, independent researchers, science companies, and interested individuals who find their efforts to access information thwarted by Elsevier’s paywalls. They cite two main objections.

The first is that prices are increasing at a time when the Internet has made it cheaper and easier than ever before to share information. 

The second is that universities are paying for research that they themselves produced. Universities fund research with grants and pay the salaries of the researchers behind every paper. Even peer review, which Elsevier cites as a major value it adds by checking the validity of papers and publishing only significant and valuable findings, is performed on a volunteer basis by professors whose salaries are paid by universities. 

Elsevier actively responds to each challenge to its legitimacy, refuting point by point and speaking of “work[ing] in partnership with the research community to make real and sustainable contributions to science.” Deutsche Bank, in an investor analyst report, summarizes Elsevier’s arguments:

“In justifying the margins earned, the publishers point to the highly skilled nature of the staff they employ (to pre-vet submitted papers prior to the peer review process), the support they provide to the peer review panels, including modest stipends, the complex typesetting, printing and distribution activities, including Web publishing and hosting. REL [Reed Elsevier] employs around 7,000 people in its Science business as a whole. REL also argues that the high margins reflect economies of scale and the very high levels of efficiency with which they operate.”

How do their arguments stand up?

One means of analysis is to compare the value of for profit journals to non-profits. Within ecology, for example, the price per page of a for profit journal is nearly three times that of a non-profit. When comparing on the basis of the price per citation (an indicator of a paper’s quality and influence), non-profit papers do more than 5 times better.

Source: “The Economics of Ecology Journals”

Another is to look at their profit margins. Elsevier’s profit margins of 36% are well above the average of 4%-5% for the periodical publishing business. Its hard to imagine that no one could do the centuries old business of publishing papers at lower margins. The aforementioned Deutsche Bank report concludes similarly:

“We believe the [Elsevier] adds relatively little value to the publishing process.  We are not attempting to dismiss what 7,000 people at [Elsevier] do for a living.  We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.” 

Libraries point to the high cost of journal subscriptions as a problem. It has been reported as far back as 1998 by The Economist. But now even the world’s wealthiest university cannot afford to purchase access to new scientific knowledge - even though universities are responsible for funding and performing that research. 

No One to Blame but Ourselves

For critics of private publisher’s monopolization of the journal industry, there is a simple solution: open access journals. Like traditional journals, they accept submissions, manage a peer review process, and publish. But they charge no subscription fees - they make all their articles available free online. To cover costs, they instead charge researchers publication fees around $2,000. (Reviewers not on payroll decide which papers to accept to spare journals the temptation of accepting every paper and raking in the dough.) Unlike traditional journals, which claim exclusive copyright to the paper for publishing it, open access (OA) journals are free of almost all copyright restrictions. 

If universities source the funding for research, and its researchers perform both the research and peer review, why don’t they all switch to OA journals? There have been some notable successes in the form of the Public Library of Science’s well-regarded open access journals. However, current scientific culture makes it hard to switch.

A history of publication in prestigious journals is a prerequisite to every step on the career ladder of a scientist. Every paper submitted to a new, unproven OA journal is one that could have been published in heavyweights like Science or Nature. And even if a tenured or idealistic professor is willing to sacrifice in the name of science, what about their PhD students and co-authors for whom publication in a prestigious journal could mean everything?

One game changer would be governments mandating that publicly financed research be made publicly available. Every year the United States government provides over $60 billion in public grants for scientific research. In 2008, Congress mandated (over furious opposition from private publishers) that all research funded through the National Institute of Health, which accounts for 50% of government funding of science, be made publicly available within a year. Extending this requirement to all other research financed by the government would go a long way for OA publishing. This is true of similar efforts by the British and Canadian governments, which are in the midst of such steps.

The Costs of Closed Publishing: The Reinhart-Rogoff Paper

The controversy over the 2010 paper “Growth In A Time of Debt,” published by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in the American Economic Review, illustrates some of the problems with the journal system. 

The paper used a dataset of countries’ rate of GDP growth and debt levels to suggest that countries with public debts over 90% of their GDP grow significantly slower than countries with more modest levels of debt. 

To the media that covered their findings and the politicians and technocrats that cited it, the message was clear: debt is bad and austerity (reducing government spending) is good. Although they discussed their findings with more nuance, Reinhart and Rogoff obliged Washington by discussing how their findings supported the case for deficit reduction. 

But this past April, a group of researchers from UMass Amherst revealed that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was wrong. Like many economists, the researchers had been trying unsuccessfully to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings. Only when the Harvard economists sent them their original dataset and Excel spreadsheet did the UMass team discover why no one could replicate the findings: the economists had made an Excel error. They forgot to include 5 cells of data. Noting this mistake, and the exclusion of a number of years of high debt growth in several countries and a weighting system that they found questionable, the UMass team declared that the effect Reinhart and Rogoff reported disappeared. Instead of contracting 0.1%, the average growth rate of countries with debt over 90% of GDP was a respectable 2.2%.

The mistake was caught, but for 2 years the false finding influenced policy-makers and informed the work of other economists.

Bad Incentives

Moving to open access journals would expand access to scientific knowledge, but if it preserves the idolization of the research paper, then the work of science reformers is incomplete. 

They argue that the current journal system slows down the publication of science research. Peer review rarely takes less than a month, and journals often ask for papers to be rewritten or new analysis undertaken, which stretches out publication for half a year or more. While quality control is necessary, thanks to the Internet, articles don’t need to be in a final form before they appear. Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, also notes that, in his experience, “the most important technical flaws are uncovered after papers are published.” 

People celebrate the discovery of new drugs, theories, and social phenomena. But if we conceptualize science as crossing out a list of possible hypotheses to improve our odds of hitting on the correct one, then experiments that fail are just as important to publish as successful ones.

But journals could not remain prestigious if they published litanies of failed experiments. As a result, the scientific community lacks an efficient way to learn about disproven hypotheses. Worse, it encourages researchers to cherry pick their data and express full confidence in a conclusion that the data and their gut may not fully support. Until science moves beyond the journal system, we may never know how many false positives are produced by this type of fraud-lite.

A Scientific Process for the 21st Century

Although scientists are the cutting edge, there are many instances of missed opportunities to make the process of science more efficient through technology.

As part of our look at academic journals and the scientific process, we talked with Banyan, a startup whose core mission is open science. A surprisingly illuminating moment was when we learned how much low hanging fruit is out there. “We want to go after peer review,” CEO Toni Gemayel told us. “Lots of people still print their papers and [physically] give them to professors for review or put them in Word documents that have no software compatibility.” 

Banyan recently launched a public beta version of their product - tools that allow researchers to share, collaborate on, and publish research. “The basis of the company,” Toni explained, “is that scientists will go open source if given simple, beneficial tools.” 

Physicist turned open science advocate Michael Nielsen is an eloquent voice on what new tools facilitating an open culture of sharing and collaboration in science could look like.

One existing tool that he advocates expanding upon is arXiv, which allows physicists to share “preprints” of their papers before they are published. This facilitates feedback on ongoing work and disseminates findings faster. Another practice he advocates - publishing all data and source code used in research projects along with their papers - has long been called for by scientists and could be accomplished within the journal framework.

He also imagines new tools that don’t yet exist. A system of wikis, for example, that allow scientists to maintain perfectly up to date “super-textbooks” on their field for reference by their fellow researchers. Or an efficient system for scientists to benefit from the expertise of scientists in other fields when their research “gives rise to problems in areas” in which they are not experts. (Even Einstein needed help from mathematicians working on new forms of geometry to build his General Theory of Relativity.) For a full account of his proposals, see his excellent essay, “The Future of Science.”

But none of these ideas are likely to take off on a mass scale until scientists have clear incentives to contribute to them. Since publication history is all too often the sole metric by which a scientist’s work is judged, a scientist who primarily assembles data sets for others to use or maintains a public wiki of meta-knowledge of the field will not progress in his or her career.

Addressing this issue, Toni references the open spirit amongst coders working on open-source software. “There’s no reward system right now for open science. Scientists’ careers don’t benefit from it. But in software, everyone wants to see your GitHub account.”

Talented coders who could make good money freelancing often pour hours of unpaid work into open-source software, which is free to use and adapt for any purpose. On one hand, many people do so to work on interesting problems and as part of an ethos of contributing to its development. Thousands of companies and services (including Priceonomics’s price guides) would simply not exist without the development of open-source software.

But coders also benefit personally from open-source work because the rest of the field recognizes its value. Employers look at their open-source work via their GitHub accounts (by publicly showing their software work, it can effectively function as a resume), and people generally respect the contributions people make via open-source projects and sharing valuable tips in blog posts and comments. It’s the exact type of open pursuit that you would expect in science. But we see it more in Silicon Valley because it is valued and benefits people’s careers. 

Disrupting Science

“The process of scientific discovery – how we do science – will change more over the next 20 years than in the past 300 years.”

~ Michael Nielsen

The current model of publicly funding research and publishing it in academic journals was developed during the days of Isaac Newton in response to 17th century problems. 

Beginning in the 1960s, private companies began to buy up and unduly profit off the copyrights they enjoyed as the publishers of new scientific knowledge. This has caused a panic among cash-strapped university libraries. But the bigger problem may be that scientists have not fully utilized the Internet to share, collaborate, and invent new ways of doing science. 

The impact of this failure is “impossible to measure or put an upper bound on,” Toni told us. “We don’t know what could have been created or solved if knowledge wasn’t paywalled. What if Tim Berners-Lee had put the world wide web behind a paywall. Or patented it?”

Advocates of open science present a strong case that the idolization of publishing articles in journals has resulted in too much secrecy, too many false positives, and a slowdown in the rate at which scientific discoveries are made. Only by changing the culture and incentives among scientists can a system of openness and collaboration be fostered. 

The Internet was created to help scientists share their research. It seems overdue that scientists take full advantage of its original purpose.

This post was written by Alex Mayyasi. Follow him on Twitter here or Google Plus. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.

Dear nerds, here are a few of our favorite articles of late. Hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as we did.

Read More »

Stand-up comedy is perhaps the most difficult form of public speaking. In normal public speaking, if you give a speech that’s not well received, the audience will just stop paying attention. Stand-up comedians stand on stage telling jokes. When their punch lines fall flat, everyone knows right away. No one laughs and the room is filled with a palpable, awkward silence. Sometimes a member of the audience yells at the comedian “You suck!” This is called heckling and is generally considered acceptable behavior by the audience.

You have to be fairly brave, confident, or deluded to start performing stand-up comedy. But what if you stuttered? What if your entire life, teachers, classmates, and strangers grimaced when you spoke? Even if your dream was to be a stand-up comic, would you pursue it?

Nina G stutters and she’s a pretty darn good stand-up comedian in San Francisco. She is fearless on stage, rattling off clever jokes, bantering with the audience, and all the while stuttering and pausing without a hint of self-consciousness. When we saw Nina G perform, we asked ourselves, “Who is this person?” Did she not get teased and bullied as a kid? Did she not struggle with public speaking when she was younger? How did she come to embrace the ruthless world of stand-up comedy?

You can see from this clip that Nina is both very funny and comfortable on stage. For those of you unfamiliar with stuttering, you can also see that yes, Nina stutters while on stage (warning: language NSFW).

In software, there is an expression that goes “That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.” When the iPhone was released, for example, Steve Jobs famously argued that its lack of Flash video support was a feature that meant longer battery-life and fewer device crashes. A less optimistic person might have called it a bug, since most of the web’s videos were in that format at the time.  

Nina embraced a neurological condition and completely owned it as part of her comedy product. She took what some might call a limitation (stuttering) and is trying to build a comedy career around it. We think that’s pretty neat, so wanted to find out more after seeing her perform.

This is the story of Nina G, the world’s only female stand-up comedian that stutters.

What It’s like to Stutter as a Kid

When you see Nina perform onstage, she exudes self-confidence. That wasn’t always the case. Nina wanted to be a stand-up comedian ever since she was a little kid, but didn’t work up the nerve to do it until her mid-thirties.

I wanted to be a comedian since I was 11 years old but I didn’t really think of it seriously since I stuttered and that wasn’t something that comedians did. I remember from being a little kid just loving comedy. Steve Martin, Saturday Night Live, I loved it.

Anytime I had to do a book report, it was about comedy. In college, whenever I could, I’d write papers analyzing stand-up comedians and their impact. Whenever I had free time as an adult, I’d go watch live comedy. I always just loved comedy.

Nina grew up in Alameda, California, a suburb of San Francisco. When she was eight years old, she started stuttering. Around the same time, she was diagnosed with a learning disability. Compared to her learning disability, stuttering actually wasn’t a big deal:

Going to Catholic school with a learning disability was the big problem. The school was so set in its ways they wouldn’t do anything to accommodate me unless my parents fought for it.

When I started stuttering at the age of 8, it was no big deal for my parents. My Dad had a hearing impairment; my Mom’s mom had polio. This was just something that happened, part of life. They were always really supportive.

Nina’s parents didn’t think of her stuttering as something that needed to be fixed. It was just a part of life. Nina’s childhood speech therapist was also a great source of support, helping her learn how to communicate more effectively without treating stuttering as something wrong with Nina. 

Four percent of children stutter but only one percent of adults stutter. For some people, stuttering goes away as they get older. Others have it for life. Many fall on a continuum in between.  

Nina recalls the first time she stuttered in front of a large public audience and what the consequences of that experience were:

I remember in 7th grade I was in the student government, and during the ‘inauguration’ you had to say your name in front of the whole school. I practiced and practiced so I could say my name without stuttering. But then, on the day of the inauguration, I couldn’t say my name. I just stuttered in front of the whole school instead of saying my name. Afterwards, I was sure everyone would be laughing at me.

But you know what? People didn’t laugh at me. Afterwards a girl came up to me and said “Nice job Nina.” I thought at first she was being sarcastic, but then I realized she really meant it.

There was one exception. Right afterwards, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, this 8th grader. A second grade boy came up to me and said “Hi n-n-n-n-Nina.”

My friend the 8th grader got down on one knee to look the 2nd grader in the eye and told him “If you ever say that again, I’m going to tell the whole school you have a tiny [redacted].”

To Nina, the consequences of stuttering in front of the entire school were relatively minor. People didn’t seem to mind. Instead, she found that having an “advocate” that “had her back” was extremely valuable, whether that advocate was fluent or stuttered. Sometimes when you have a disability, you just need someone to defend you, even if that means berating a second-grader.

Howard Stern As Disability Advocate

As Nina became a teenager, she recognized stuttering as part of her life. We were surprised to learn that she credited The Howard Stern Show as playing an important role in her coming to accept her stuttering. 

For Nina, The Howard Stern show was the first time she saw someone in the media “stutter openly.”

Howard Stern was the only show I ever watched where one of the main characters stuttered. Stuttering John was a part of the show. They made fun of him like everyone else and he wasn’t treated any differently on the show because he stuttered. He was the first person I ever saw on TV that was just stuttering openly.

Stuttering John would go around interviewing celebrities and it was be really interesting to see how people reacted to him. I was fascinated by what assholes people were. Chevy Chase once told him, ‘Maybe if someone hit you, you’d stop stuttering.’ I still hate Chevy Chase because of that.

Nina wanted to be a comedian since she was 11, but she didn’t regard it as a realistic goal. Comedy and television were places for people that spoke fluently, not for someone like her:

I didn’t think I could be a comedian because I stuttered. There was no one on TV that stuttered unless it was a “very special episode” with a character that had a problem because they stuttered.

You just get the message that comedy is not the place for you. TV was a place for fluent people.

Instead, Nina focused her energy on being an advocate for disability rights. Nina remembers what it was like growing up and the issues she encountered because of her disability:

It’s the teachers who treated me badly that I blame because they had the power. I did a presentation with a friend in school and my friend got an A and I got an A- because I ‘didn’t speak clearly.’ Of course I didn’t speak clearly. I stutter, you [redacted]!

She went to community college and then transferred to Berkeley. She later earned a graduate degree and became a full time advocate for people with disabilities. For the next decade, she spread the message that those with disabilities are okay the way they are and that it’s society that needs to fix itself by better accommodating those with disabilities.

Hitting Middle Age Without Giving Your Dream a Try

Nina entered her mid-thirties having simultaneously accomplished a lot and not enough. On one hand, she had a successful career advocating for individuals with disabilities. At the same time, she still dreamed of being a comedian, and had never given that dream a shot since she stuttered.

Nina thought of herself as “doing pretty well for someone with a disability.” She still let her stuttering define her. She would speak up less often than she’d like so she wouldn’t subject others to her stutter and generally be more meek than she ought to be:

I was comfortable in my own skin, but I still let my disability limit me. Like I wouldn’t talk as much as I would otherwise so I wouldn’t make other people uncomfortable. I would be in relationships that weren’t always good for me because of self esteem issues I carried around from stuttering and my learning disability. I was in a state like, ‘I’m doing pretty well in life for someone with a disability,’ but I was still letting my issues around my disabilities limit me.

Everything changed in 2008 when Nina attended the annual conference for the National Stuttering Association, which she hadn’t attended since she was a teenager. Nina credits attending this conference as being a turning point for her life.

2008 was the year when I changed and completely owned who I was. I went to the Stuttering Conference. I hadn’t been since I was 19 years old.

Being around all these people that stuttered, I realized how differently I was acting back at home. I was afraid of “taking up too much space” by subjecting people to hearing me talk. I was being meek and small, and I didn’t realize it until I was around all these other people who stuttered and I was able to be myself.

It was a four-day conference, but by the end I was changed.

When Nina came home from the conference, she immediately severed relationships with the people in her life whose behavior contributed to Nina thinking less of herself because she had a disability.

She also decided that stuttering would no longer be an excuse to not pursue her dream of stand-up comedy. Right after the conference, she enrolled in a stand-up comedy class and was on her way to giving her dream a try.

How to Make it in Stand-Up Comedy

The odds of “making it” in the stand-up comedy circuit are slim. From chatting with San Francisco comedians, the last household name they can point to that emerged from the local comedy scene was Dana Carvey, and that was two decades ago. It’s not only difficult to become famous, it’s nearly impossible to make a living wage.

Almost all stand-up comics start their careers by going to “open mics.” Anyone can perform, but audiences are generally small. Open mics are a good way for stand-up comedians to get stage time and improve. Of course, you don’t get paid for performing at open mics.

The next step up from open mics is getting paid about $10-$50 to do a short set (5-10 minutes) at an event put on by a promoter. Promoters rent out a venue and sell tickets to the show. Comics that build enough relationships and work at it for a decade can sometimes string together enough of these paying shows to earn a living wage. Most don’t. Occasionally during this process a comic is “discovered” and ends up with his or her own TV show as the next Louis CK. But that is rare.

A feature from The New York Times sheds light on the finances of stand-up comedians. The beginner stand-up comedian in the article earns $2,500 a year from comedy and makes her living as a receptionist. The comedy veterans in the article have put in 10+ years of work and make between $65K to $85K a year. They have to do things like perform on cruise ships, find voice gigs and podcast sponsors, sell CDs, and generally hustle hard to make a living. An experienced comedian, Eugene Mirman, represents the top of the pyramid. He makes $200K a year. To make that kind of money, he has regular TV credits and headlines large comedy venues. Yet he’s not a household name. For that reason, he finds his current success very tenuous:

“There’s no one thing that makes anybody unless you’re on a hit show that has your face on it,” he said, “and even then, however famous or successful anyone gets, it can all go away.”

Nina G Takes the Stage

In February 2009, Nina dove headfirst into standup comedy. She started filling all her free time with it. Her first experience onstage was validating:

The first time I performed, it’s not like I was amazing. But it was like ‘Ah, this is right for me.’

Stand-up comedy is a difficult craft to master. If you spend an evening at The Brainwash, a San Francisco laundromat that doubles as an open mic stage, you’ll notice that most of the performers are still trying to figure out how to be funny on stage. You’ll also notice that most of the audience is comedians waiting to go on stage.

Nina threw herself into the Bay Area’s open mic scene, performing almost every night after work at a show in San Francisco, Berkeley, or Oakland. After a few months, Nina landed her first paying gig, which paid $10. The first year, she sunk almost a thousand hours into practicing, writing, and driving to comedy shows that generated only a few hundred dollars in total revenue.

In many ways, stuttering is an asset for Nina on stage. When you see Nina at a show, you remember it because you’ve likely never heard a performer tell a story or joke about what it’s like to stutter. It helps her stand out among the sea of male performers talking about comic books, being gay, and their crappy love life.

When asked if doing stand-up comedy was particularly challenging because she stutters, Nina demurred. Stand-up comedy is hard for everyone, she told us. But she deals with issues unique to her as a comedian. 

For starters, many audience members aren’t sure whether it’s okay to laugh at her (it is). They worry that it’s making fun of Nina’s disability to laugh at her jokes about stuttering (it is not). 

Others think Nina fakes her stutter. They literally can’t believe that someone who stutters is a stand-up comedian. Nina’s YouTube page frequently has comments from viewers accusing her of being an impostor. 

Finally, Nina could stutter during the punch line of a joke, which would throw off the comedic timing. Jokes generally have a setup, followed by a snappy conclusion called the punchline. If the punchline isn’t delivered with the proper snappy timing (if Nina stutters, for example), it can fall flat even if the joke is well written. To compensate for that, Nina writes her jokes with a particular structure so that the joke will be funny even if the timing on the punch line is slightly off. 

Nina has also turned her experiences as someone who stutters into some of her best jokes. A guy she met at a bar who told her to “spit out” her name when she stumbled over it is now the butt of one of her mainstay jokes. When someone asked her why she couldn’t stop stuttering “like that King’s Speech guy,” she worked into her set what parts of the movie were accurate. It’s funny, but also informative.

Nina has embraced the educational aspect of her comedy. She started touring with a group of comedians with disabilities on the “Comedians with Disabilities Act.” They travel around the country and perform in front of much larger audiences than Nina’s typical shows in San Francisco. She’s also started putting on disability training seminars for companies that are a mix of comedy and corporate training. She sells shirts at her shows and recently self-published a children’s book about accommodating disabilities.

Despite her growing commercial prospects, Nina will make only a few thousand dollars from stand-up comedy this year and still has her day job as a disability advocate. She performs about 25 shows a month, but she only gets paid for one or two of them. Recently she performed in Memphis, Tennessee, and was paid $800 for the show. But she had to pay for her own plane ticket, so she only netted $200. Even when you start getting paid to perform, it’s hard to make money in comedy.

Conclusion

In one of Nina’s sets, she tells the story of a comedy club manager who tells Nina that if she keeps practicing and doing opening mics and getting out there, one day she’ll finally have the self-confidence to stop stuttering.

Nina’s response to the manager crystalizes her story perfectly:

If you get up on stage and you stutter, then maybe self-esteem isn’t your frickin’ issue.

Plus if I stopped stuttering, I wouldn’t have an act. So let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

We all have characteristics that mark us as different. When you’re a kid, that can mean being bullied or told your dreams are out of reach. Even if no one tells us that explicitly, we may get that idea implicitly. Maybe from watching TV and noticing that no one on the screen looks or talks like us. And as a result, we may have regrets later on in life about the things we never tried.

As a child, Nina got the message that she couldn’t become a stand-up comedian because she stuttered. But one day, she decided to ignore that message. She tried stand-up comedy, and she was good at it. She channelled her differences into a unique perspective. While every other comedian makes jokes about male genitalia, Nina makes jokes about male genitalia and social justice. If Nina makes it big as a stand-up comic one day, that “and” will have made all the difference.

This post was written by Rohin Dhar. Follow him on Twitter here or Google. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.

If you’d like to support Nina G’s comedy career, you can purchase her children’s book about disabilities, Once Upon An Accommodation.

Fazer hambúrgueres em casa é um hábito normal. E carne picada é algo que habitualmente compro e tenho em casa. Claro que escolho sempre no talho a carne que quero para picar, e esta é picada à minha frente, e nunca compro carne picada pré embalada que, se lerem bom com atenção o que vem escrito na embalagem é muitas vezes “preparado de carne picada”, que além de carne tem pão ou farinhas, além de muitos “E” e outros aditivos dispensáveis.
E uma das finalidades da carne picada – seja frango, porco, peru ou vaca – é fazer uns saborosos hambúrgueres caseiros.
Estes foram para um dos habituais jantares de domingo no sofá e, em vez das habituais batatas fritas, tiveram como complemento um nutritivo creme de legumes.

Ingredientes para 2 pessoas:

2 pães de hambúrguer
250g de carne de porco picada
1 ovo
4 colheres de sopa de pão ralado
½ cebola ralada
Sal e pimenta q.b.
2 fatias de queijo
1 colher de sopa de maionese

Preparação:

Numa taça coloque a carne picada. Pique a cebola finamente e junte-a também à carne assim como o ovo e o pão ralado. Amasse bem para unir todos os ingredientes e forme depois 2 hambúrgueres mais ou menos do mesmo tamanho.
Aqueça bem uma frigideira, ou uma chapa anti-aderente, e grelhe os hambúrgueres de ambos os lados, temperando-os com um pouco de sal e pimenta. Quando estiverem quase prontos, cubra.os com uma fatia de queijo e deixe-o derreter com o calor da carne e da chapa ou frigideira. Aproveite e toste também os pãezinhos.
Barre cada um dos pães com um pouco de maionese e junte o hambúrguer de queijo, tapando com a outra metade do pão.
Sirva com uma salada de folhas verdes ou com uma sopa de legumes para uma refeição simples mas completa.

Bom Apetite!

You might make some friends with this shit here. Roasted strawberries and coconut flakes make this salad look classy as fuck but it’s still a choice delivery method for all that fiber and antioxidants. Make some room on your plate for this nutritious motherfucker.

We did this with our friends at FoodBeast. Check their shit out. I’ve been reading dessert recipes over there for the last hour, I should probably get back to work. 

 

ROASTED STRAWBERRY SALAD

16 medium strawberries, about 1 pound

1 teaspoon olive oil

a pinch of salt

½ cup coconut flakes (you can use sliced almonds to save some cash) 

¼ cup lemon juice

3 tablespoons red wine vinegar

3 tablespoons olive oil

a big bunch of basil, chopped into thin strips, about 2/3 cup

salt and pepper to taste

1 big head of lettuce (green leaf, spinach, butter, whatthefuckever kind of lettuce is fine)

Warm up your oven to 400 degrees. Cut the green tops off the strawberries and throw that shit out.  Slice the berries in half lengthwise. Toss them in a bowl with the teaspoon of olive oil and salt. Mix that shit up good so everything is coated. Put the strawberries cut side down on a cookie sheet. I hate doing dishes so I usually cover the cookie sheet with foil or something because the strawberries can release some juice and it’s annoying as fuck to clean. Roast the strawberries for 10 minutes. Throw the coconut flakes in their own section on the cookie sheet and then roast them at the same time for 3 more minutes or until the coconut looks toasted. Let everything cool the fuck down to about room temperature.

Mix together the lemon juice, vinegar, and oil in a small glass.  Toss the lettuce and the basil in a big bowl and add as much of the dressing, salt, and pepper as you like. Make sure everything is coated and then put the strawberries and coconut flakes on top.  Arrange that shit so it looks nice. If you don’t feel like fucking with the oven then just leave the strawberries raw. I don’t give a shit JUST EAT A FUCKING SALAD or 10.

Serve 4 people as a side or 1 jolly green giant

We are very excited to announce that as of today, 1 May 2013, Tim Wendelboe offers international shipping. Since opening our doors in 2007, we have consistently been asked to ship our coffees overseas. Until recently this was not possible, as we didn’t have an affordable and consistent shipping partner to deliver coffees on time and for a reasonable cost. We are committed to delivering the best possible coffee to our customers, so shipping and customs delays were a deal breaker for us.

International orders are sent once a week. Orders placed by midnight (GMT)+1 on Tuesday will be roasted on Wednesday and ship on Thursday. Shipping will take between one and two business days within Europe and two to four days to the rest of the world.

The whole team can’t wait to share our coffees with friends and new customers around the world. The current staff favorites are Finca Tamana from Huila, Colombia and the newly arrived Tekangu from Nyeri, Kenya that will be released on Tuesday the 7th of May. (You can pre-order the coffee in the web shop this week)

I returned from a trip to Finca Tamana earlier this week and can attest that our partnership with this farm is continuing to produce benefits for both the farmers and our customers. Tekangu flew off the shelves last year and we expect it to do the same in 2013 . Our work with the Tekangu Cooperative Society has also resulted in quality improvements, most notably from the introduction of new drying tables funded by Tim Wendelboe customers in 2010.

There are also other spectacular coffees coming in soon from El Salvador, Ethiopia and Honduras.

We have exciting offerings planned for the webshop, so please check back for new coffees and packages.

You can also follow Tim Wendelboe on Instagram and Twitter.

To order Tim Wendelboe coffee to your door and to learn more about delivery times and pricing, please visit our web shop.

By SCOTT HEIMENDINGER
Associated Press

When made just right, mashed potatoes are the ultimate comfort food: smooth, creamy, warm and filling — not to mention a perfect vehicle for gravy.

But how to get them perfectly smooth and creamy? Too often ridding mashed potatoes of those pesky lumps forces you to overwork the spuds into a gummy, grainy mess. Or you end up adding so much cream and butter that the dairy drowns out the flavor of the potatoes.

If you like your mashed potatoes fluffy, the answer is fairly straightforward. Choose a floury variety of potato, such as Maris Piper or russet, pass the peeled, boiled potatoes through a ricer, then mix in just enough butter and milk or cream to moisten.

But if you’re after a silkier texture — more like what the French call pommes puree — stick with waxy potatoes, such as Yukon gold or fingerlings. You also should try a modernist technique pioneered by food writer Jeffrey Steingarten and refined by the British chef Heston Blumenthal. It adds a step, but it is well worth it.

Steingarten discovered that gently heating the potatoes for a half hour or so in warm water before they are boiled profoundly improves the result. This is because as the potatoes soak in water at about 160 F (70 C), the starch in them gelatinizes, producing a smoother puree on the tongue. The granules that contain the starch also firm up, making it harder to rupture them during mashing.

Recently our research chefs perfected yet another modernist method that yields an amazingly smooth and slightly sweet potato puree, and all without adding any butter, milk or cream. The secret is to deploy a little trick of biochemistry that converts the starch in the potatoes into sugar.

The key to this culinary alchemy is an enzyme known as diastase. Don’t let the fancy name put you off; this ingredient is quite natural (it is derived from malted grain), and you can buy it online or at stores that sell brewing and baking ingredients. The enzyme typically is sold in in a ready-to-use form called diastatic malt powder.

Like other enzymes, diastase is a protein whose complex molecular shape allows it to accelerate chemical transformations with amazing speed and specificity. When you eat a starchy food like bread or potatoes, enzymes in your gut help break down the starch into simpler carbohydrates (such as sugars) that your body can burn or store for energy. By adding diastase to our mashed potatoes, we’re simply getting a jump on the process.

The trickiest part about using diastatic malt powder is measuring the right amount. It’s potent stuff, so you really should measure ingredients by weight. After you have peeled and cubed the potatoes, weigh them. For every 100 grams of potatoes, measure out 1 gram of diastatic malt powder. So 1,100 grams of peeled, cubed potatoes calls for 11 grams of malt powder.

Now fill a pot with water and add 2 grams of sugar and 3 grams of salt for every 100 milliliters of water. Simmer the potato cubes until they are tender, 30 to 40 minutes, then drain. Stir the diastatic malt powder into the potatoes, then pass the mixture through a ricer.

The riced potatoes next get sealed in a zip-close plastic bag, which is set in a pot of hot tap water (about 125 F) for a half hour. The warmth activates the enzyme and starts it gobbling up the potato starch. When the 30 minutes is up, empty the bag into a pot, then heat the puree to at least 167 F (75 C) to halt the enzymatic activity.

That’s it. Even with no butter or cream, the result is sweet and amazingly smooth. If you are avoiding dairy or limiting your intake of fats, this technique may just renew your love affair with the potato.

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Click here for our Dairy-Free Potato Puree recipe made with diastatic malt powder.

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Photo credit: Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine, LLC.