Keys Corner

Guides to herbs and spices

John — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:51:05 +0000

I’m doing a bit more cooking since I took early retirement – Ruth is still working, so it falls to me to prepare the evening meal in the week. I like messing about modifying recipes and these guides to herbs and spices are a useful summary of their properties:

The Kitchen’s Quick Guide to Every Herb and Spice in the Cupboard describes each herb or spice and tells you what characteristics they have and what foods they complement.

Frontier’s Tips For Using Spices looks at things the other way around and tells you for each type of food which spices and herbs will pep it up.

Thorium could be the answer to the energy crisis

John — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:34:40 +0000

The Daily Telegraph points to thorium as a way out of the energy crisis.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. “Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

The problem seems to be that the nuclear industry isn’t really interested in investing in new technology, they have invested too much in the current ones. Nuclear plants which are on the drawing board today will be around for up to another sixty years, so why try to master a new technology when you could refine the existing one?

There are advantages, however, to thorium plants:

It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed.
It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving.
Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. (The plants would be much smaller and less expensive).
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, and it’s available all over the globe, so there’s no possibility of a cartel of thorium producers who could block its use.
It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. (It emits too many high gamma rays)

What state is the UK education system in?

John — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:04:28 +0000

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

Judging from today’s results, it’s now virtually impossible to fail an A-level. The overall pass rate climbed for the 28th year in a row, with 97.6 per cent of A-levels being graded A* – E. Sceptics used to joke that you only needed to write your name at the top of the paper to pass an A-level, but given the appallingly low levels of literacy in this country it seems probable that more than 2.4 per cent of candidates failed to do that. From which it follows that A-levels are now so easy you can pass one without managing to write your own name. A simple “X” will suffice, even if the rest of the paper is completely blank.

[NB: A* is the new "best" grade, the pass grades then run from A to E in decreasing order of merit, F is a fail]

OK – the author admits he might be exaggerating slightly, but if only 2.4% of students are failing the exam used to decide whether you can go to university, and over 8% are getting the new “ultra-difficult” A* grade (with 27% getting the old top level A grade), there has to be something wrong with the papers being set, or the way they are being marked.

According to the Guardian, research at Durham University has found that a candidate who would have got a C two decades ago would get an A now.

Now, it could be that the quality of education has improved enormously in the last 2 decades, but in the same Guardian article, they state that the UK’s relative position in the OECD’S “Pisa Study” has dropped since 2000:

According to a respected international study, the OECD’s Pisa survey, the UK fell from fourth in the world for school science in 2000 to 14th six years later. It slipped from 7th to 17th for reading and eighth to 24th in maths. The findings were based on independent tests of children’s ability.

Pity the poor school leavers in the UK this year who will be trying to convince universities that their results justify getting a place to study there, as well as the universities, who will be finding it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

26 Years ago today

John — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:52:40 +0000

My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

Ronald Regan’s infamous sound check, which resulted in part of the Soviet army being put on alert for 30 minutes after word of the statement reached the Soviet Union.

Quirky kitchen appliances

John — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:03:14 +0000

An egg-cuber from thekitchenstore.com

There is no end to the number of unusual gadgets that you can buy for your kitchen. Dark Roasted Blend has a selection, with photos. You can, for example, get a slimline toaster that produces toast with smilies on each piece, a rabbit-shaped mixer or a roll-up microwave cooker. Good ideas for unusual presents, but you might have to hunt down the supplier for some items!

“Efficient” British banking services

John — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:25:07 +0000

Whenever I have the misfortune to deal with British banks I am inevitably impressed by their lack of speed when dealing with customer requests. The latest example: we decided to close our joint UK bank account, since we don’t actually need it, and it just tied up money keeping the account in credit. (I won’t name the bank to protect the guilty). I wrote to them on 30th June requesting them to close the account and transfer the balance to our German bank using SWIFT.

On 23rd July (over three weeks later and after three phone calls to the branch asking why nothing was happening) they wrote back to tell me that to close the account and transfer funds abroad I would need to provide a certified copy of both Ruth’s and my passports with a specific text that the official doing the certification had to include on the copy.

We sent the copies back the day the letter arrived, on 26th July, and last Friday (30th July) I noticed that the online internet access to the account had been deactivated (a good sign). Today (2nd August) at 8:30 this morning, the passport copies arrived back in the post. The balance arrived on our German account this evening.

Total time to process: 33 days.

I don’t think, by the way, think that this is atypical. We have had several similar experiences with another of the British “Big Four” banks when we were administering my mother’s affairs in the last four or five years before she passed away.

Bees and Butterflies

John — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:34:36 +0000

Bees and butterflies in the garden

Today has been a lovely day – not too hot at 22°C and the insects have been enjoying the sun as much as we have.

Maximizing the chance of surviving a plane crash

John — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:30:22 +0000

Back in 2001 the US National Transportation Safety Board published a report on the survival rates in air crashes (PDF, 800 KB). They are much better than you might think:

Nearly 96 percent of the occupants involved in a Part 121 aviation accident over the past 18 years survived the accident, and in over 46 percent of the most serious of these accidents (accidents involving fire, serious injury, and either substantial aircraft damage or complete destruction), more than 80 percent of the occupants survived.

Nonetheless, there are several things you can do to improve your chances of surviving a crash. There is an article on Wired’s “How To” Wiki, summarising the main points – it’s not long, and is worth reading if you are going to be flying in the near future.

Another trip to Valencia

John — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:59:35 +0000

Hotel Catalonia Excelsior, Barcelonina, 5 (to the right in the picture)

We flew down to Valencia on Sunday afternoon for a couple of days to meet Antonio, our architect. The design of the house is nearly finished to the stage where we can apply for planning permission, so we went to discuss some final details and to meet some of the potential suppliers. Quite a lot, in fact. We were in meetings from 9:30 until 15:00 hrs. A good job that the Spanish eat lunch late, so we were able to get a good meal after we finished.

We also met María Pedro for the first time, the landscape architect who Antonio put us in contact with some time ago. Up until now, our contact with her has only been via e-mail. She is a friend of his daughter and has just set up in business after studying in Spain and doing “industrial periods” in Scotland and Canada. We are very happy with the progress to date, and are hoping that Antonio will be able to submit the plans for approval before Spain shuts down for the summer holidays over the month of August.

We stayed at the hotel in the photo above, which turned out very well – it was completely quiet (no, we weren’t the only guests!), and there was no traffic noise either. At only 58 Euro for a double room (without breakfast, which we bought round the corner at a café for 5 Euro for the two of us, instead of 26 Euro in the hotel) it is very reasonably priced. We’ll probably try to stay there again next time we need to meet Antonio.

As we packed all our meetings into the Monday, we had the Tuesday free and did a little sightseeing, going to the Central Market, the Plaza Redonda and and the National Ceramic Museum. The nice thing about Valencia is that it is very compact, so we walked between the places we visited.

Central Market - Valencia

Useful tool to check amazon book prices

John — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:33:42 +0000

There is a useful tool to check which amazon store has the cheapest price for books, including international postage. (Unfortunately it won’t check egg poacher prices).

Check out CheapRiver.com. They do a browser plug-in which will allow you to check worldwide and find the cheapest location to order from. The differences are sometimes . . . → Read More: Useful tool to check amazon book prices

Microwaved poached eggs cook the yolk too fast

John — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:30:28 +0000

We have an egg poacher, which is a good few years old. Probably a number of decades old, in fact:

Our trusty egg poacher

You add water below the four “cups”, grease each cup with a little olive oil before adding an egg and let it boil with the lid on until the eggs are poached. Simple. (The preceding link to Wikipedia shows how real poached eggs should be cooked – too difficult for me first thing on a Sunday morning!) Except that over the years eggs seem to have got bigger. Our local supermarket often only has large sized bio-eggs, and these overflow out of the cups when you crack them. Which makes a horrible mess.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought some microwave egg poaching containers on E-Bay:

The microwave egg poachers (well, two of a set of four)

I have experimented with microwaving the eggs in them at different powers and for different times, but have come to the conclusion that you can’t avoid cooking the yolks before the whites are cooked. Which is fine if you like hard-boiled eggs. But we prefer our eggs runny in the middle.

So for now, it is back to the drawing board. Ruth found something which looks like it might work, at amazon.de. But the price didn’t work for me – 50 Euro for four bits of plastic is too much. However a quick check at amazon.co.uk showed that they were only five pounds for two there (plus postage, but even so the bill is less than 26 EUR for 4, which is still not cheap but a darned sight cheaper than from the German store! Right now, I am waiting for them to arrive.

Online security

John — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:41:09 +0000

There have been a number of reports in the last days of iTunes app developers apparently accessing other iTunes users’ accounts to buy their applications, to increase their rating on iTunes. People have had bills of $100 or more generated for apps and books that they didn’t order.

It is not clear at the moment how the accounts have been hacked – whether Apple has a problem at their end or whether the users affected had weak passwords which have been hacked. However, there a couple of things I have done to reduce the risk of being “stung”:

Changed my passwords to be stronger, by following these suggestions:
- Use more characters than the minimum required by Apple
- Make sure the passwords consist of a mixture of upper and lower case characters, one or more digits and special characters such as “§ $ % & / ( = ?”
- Don’t use a password which is a single word found in dictionary, but where some characters have been substituted with similar digits (i.e. containing Leets, e.g. “pa55w0rd” for “password”). Leet passwords can be cracked with a dictionary attack almost as easily as words in “clear” text.
Deleted all my credit cards and bank details defined as payment methods and replaced them with a pre-paid Mastercard which I recently ordered to pay Ryanair with. This card never has more than a few hundred Euro pre-loaded, often much less. It limits my financial risk and means if I have to have the card cancelled, it don’t affect the rest of my life.

Note that potentially, any credit card or bank account details you have permanently stored in an internet account for a supplier are similarly at risk. Other suppliers where I have updated my password and credit card details are Amazon and Google Checkout. The risk is same in both cases – a crooked employee could copy the credit card details or their server could be hacked from outside. I think although Amazon and Google are both security conscious, it doesn’t hurt to take these relatively simple precautions.