As someone who does this often, I enjoyed this article. I usually boil 4 or 5 at a time and the problem for me is not the "done-ness" but why are they so hard to peel? The article claims the following:
As anyone who's had fresh-from the hen eggs will tell you, they do fry up beautifully, giving you tall, tall yolks, and tight whites, and trying to peel a very freshly laid boiled egg is difficult—the inner membrane of the shell has a tendency to stick to the white, giving the peeled egg a pockmarked appearance. But these differences disappear within a few days after the egg has been laid. Since eggs in the supermarket can spend up to 30 days before they even hit the shelf, followed by a further 30 days before they hit their expiration date, the point is pretty much moot.
Unfortunately, it is not moot because occasionally, 3 out of the 4 will be easy to peel but one will not. Why is this the case? This is even with an effort to buy a carton of eggs and keeping it in the refriegerator for 1 week.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Measuring BMI
The optimal BMI seems to be 22 according to Wii Fit. It seems to be based on this on women and coronary heart diseases.
This result is based on the assumption that BMI can be accurately measured when it facts it varies over the course of the day. What if my BMI ranges between 21.7 and 22.5 over the day? P.S. It doesn't - my BMI is over the 22 cutoff which makes me wonder who made the 22 cutoff seem so great.
This result is based on the assumption that BMI can be accurately measured when it facts it varies over the course of the day. What if my BMI ranges between 21.7 and 22.5 over the day? P.S. It doesn't - my BMI is over the 22 cutoff which makes me wonder who made the 22 cutoff seem so great.
Thanksgiving openings
Noticed over the past Thanksgiving that the following 2 restaurants were open:
1. Cracker Barrel
2. Pizzeria Unos
Any others?
Perhaps with more stores open, Thanksgiving will be a happier time. See this MR story, for instance, which suggests that Sunday's the unhappiest day in Germany perhaps because there is so little shopping available.
1. Cracker Barrel
2. Pizzeria Unos
Any others?
Perhaps with more stores open, Thanksgiving will be a happier time. See this MR story, for instance, which suggests that Sunday's the unhappiest day in Germany perhaps because there is so little shopping available.
What I've been reading
And these made me stop to think.
1. Under the Influence : the unauthorized story of the Anheuser-Busch dynasty, by Peter Hernon and Terry Gainey.
Besides the usual revelations about misbehavior and brushes with the law over drinking and driving and auto accidents, the part of the book that was eye opening for me was the Prohibition era and the extent of the corruption and cronyism that was prevalent. It's a reminder to me to read up a little more of the Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandal.
Some bits that I found interesting: The original AB founder did not like beer - he preferred wine; AB supported mostly Democrats for much of its existence until the later part of the 20th century (after Nixon) because of Roosevelt's repeal of Prohibition; the most common payoff was in terms of distributorships to favored politicians and their relatives.
Question: How did the temperance movement gain so much momentum to lead to Prohibition and then die off with its repeal?
2. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway.
I found this to be tragic, sad and mainly depressing. The reviews on the jacket made me wonder if the reviewers ever read the book. Her father and brother dies, and she finally abandons her mother to come to the U.S. just as her mother seems to be on the verge of what in retrospect appears to be onset of Alzheimer's. There was no postscript in the edition I read as to what happened after her successes in the U.S. but I suspect that they may have been bittersweet.
I enjoyed the prose and the first chapter on the flora and fauna of the Australian outback reminded me a little of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her writing is wonderful and she can draw those tears out. Perhaps I should follow up with True North.
Some reviews that made me wonder if I was reading the same book:
"The Road from Coorain is a small masterpiece of scene, memory, and very stylish English. I've been several times to Australia; this book was the most rewarding journey of all."-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Sheer delight." --Washington Post
3. Physics for the Rest of Us, by Roger Jones
This was not as enlightening as I had hoped to be. The first half of the book was readable and comforted me in that my confusion during high school Physics was justified. Quantum theory and chemistry's approach to reactions were at odds with each other and I still remember the difficulties in keeping them straight. The latter half seemed a little disjointed and the chapter on quantum electrodynamics was more confusing that I had hoped it would be.
The book asserts the following which made me rethink:
1) If we can write an equation for some physical process does this necessarily imply that we have determined causality?
2) If we can measure something does it make this measurement objective? Can we separate the subjective from its measurement?
I may excerpt some parts of the book in another post.
1. Under the Influence : the unauthorized story of the Anheuser-Busch dynasty, by Peter Hernon and Terry Gainey.
Besides the usual revelations about misbehavior and brushes with the law over drinking and driving and auto accidents, the part of the book that was eye opening for me was the Prohibition era and the extent of the corruption and cronyism that was prevalent. It's a reminder to me to read up a little more of the Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandal.
Some bits that I found interesting: The original AB founder did not like beer - he preferred wine; AB supported mostly Democrats for much of its existence until the later part of the 20th century (after Nixon) because of Roosevelt's repeal of Prohibition; the most common payoff was in terms of distributorships to favored politicians and their relatives.
Question: How did the temperance movement gain so much momentum to lead to Prohibition and then die off with its repeal?
2. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway.
I found this to be tragic, sad and mainly depressing. The reviews on the jacket made me wonder if the reviewers ever read the book. Her father and brother dies, and she finally abandons her mother to come to the U.S. just as her mother seems to be on the verge of what in retrospect appears to be onset of Alzheimer's. There was no postscript in the edition I read as to what happened after her successes in the U.S. but I suspect that they may have been bittersweet.
I enjoyed the prose and the first chapter on the flora and fauna of the Australian outback reminded me a little of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her writing is wonderful and she can draw those tears out. Perhaps I should follow up with True North.
Some reviews that made me wonder if I was reading the same book:
"The Road from Coorain is a small masterpiece of scene, memory, and very stylish English. I've been several times to Australia; this book was the most rewarding journey of all."-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Sheer delight." --Washington Post
3. Physics for the Rest of Us, by Roger Jones
This was not as enlightening as I had hoped to be. The first half of the book was readable and comforted me in that my confusion during high school Physics was justified. Quantum theory and chemistry's approach to reactions were at odds with each other and I still remember the difficulties in keeping them straight. The latter half seemed a little disjointed and the chapter on quantum electrodynamics was more confusing that I had hoped it would be.
The book asserts the following which made me rethink:
1) If we can write an equation for some physical process does this necessarily imply that we have determined causality?
2) If we can measure something does it make this measurement objective? Can we separate the subjective from its measurement?
I may excerpt some parts of the book in another post.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Leaning against the bubble
This speech by Chicago Fed president Charles Evans was thought provoking:
... I prefer to see policy reacting to apparent exuberance in asset markets and the problematic risk exposure this could create, rather than initiating action out of a strong conviction that these particular assets are overvalued. ... One advantage of using financial stability as our metric is that it does not require a central bank to take a stand on whether the assets in question are overvalued. Rather, the responses would be implemented whenever there are concerns that asset prices may experience a sharp decline in the future, regardless of whether this decline is driven by fundamentals or by the bursting of an asset bubble. [emphasis mine]
Why am I troubled by the phrase emphasized?
... I prefer to see policy reacting to apparent exuberance in asset markets and the problematic risk exposure this could create, rather than initiating action out of a strong conviction that these particular assets are overvalued. ... One advantage of using financial stability as our metric is that it does not require a central bank to take a stand on whether the assets in question are overvalued. Rather, the responses would be implemented whenever there are concerns that asset prices may experience a sharp decline in the future, regardless of whether this decline is driven by fundamentals or by the bursting of an asset bubble. [emphasis mine]
Why am I troubled by the phrase emphasized?
Did regulation cause the financial crisis?
This was the question posed by the Atlantic Business Channel on the Recourse Rule:
Under the Recourse Rule, an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security, such as a mortgage-backed bond, received a 20-percent risk weight, compared to a zero risk weight for cash and a 50-percent risk weight for an individual (unsecuritized) mortgage. This meant that commercial banks could issue mortgages–regardless of how sound the borrowers were–sell them to investment banks to be securitized, and buy them back as part of a mortgage-backed security, in the process freeing up 60 percent of the capital they would have had to hold against individual mortgages. Capital held by a bank is capital not lent out at interest; by reducing their capital holdings, banks could increase their profitability.
Yet on closer look by the blog post in the Federal Register ruling:
The [regulatory] agencies expect that banking organizations will identify, measure, monitor and control the risks of their securitization activities (including synthetic securitizations using credit derivatives)...Banking organizations should be able to measure and manage their risk exposure from risk positions in the securitizations, either retained or acquired, and should be able to assess the credit quality of any retained residual portfolio…Banking organizations with significant securitization activities, no matter what the size of their on-balance sheet assets, are expected to have more advanced and formal approaches to manage the risks.
Again from the blog post:
It is telling banks to handle this themselves, because the “science” of risk management is well provided within private financial services, and it is better for it to be handled this way rather than with the crude tools public regulators used. And I think that this narrative, that new changes to banking regulations were more friendly to the financial community in the general move to deregulation, is a real challenge for those who think that markets would have been able to do better without any regulation – what stopped them this time around?
The question is this: Is this new regulation really deregulation? If so, new regulations (or deregulations) should be scrutinized a little more closely to observe its (unintended?) consequences instead of the seemingly hands off approach taken?
Under the Recourse Rule, an AA- or AAA-rated asset-backed security, such as a mortgage-backed bond, received a 20-percent risk weight, compared to a zero risk weight for cash and a 50-percent risk weight for an individual (unsecuritized) mortgage. This meant that commercial banks could issue mortgages–regardless of how sound the borrowers were–sell them to investment banks to be securitized, and buy them back as part of a mortgage-backed security, in the process freeing up 60 percent of the capital they would have had to hold against individual mortgages. Capital held by a bank is capital not lent out at interest; by reducing their capital holdings, banks could increase their profitability.
Yet on closer look by the blog post in the Federal Register ruling:
The [regulatory] agencies expect that banking organizations will identify, measure, monitor and control the risks of their securitization activities (including synthetic securitizations using credit derivatives)...Banking organizations should be able to measure and manage their risk exposure from risk positions in the securitizations, either retained or acquired, and should be able to assess the credit quality of any retained residual portfolio…Banking organizations with significant securitization activities, no matter what the size of their on-balance sheet assets, are expected to have more advanced and formal approaches to manage the risks.
Again from the blog post:
It is telling banks to handle this themselves, because the “science” of risk management is well provided within private financial services, and it is better for it to be handled this way rather than with the crude tools public regulators used. And I think that this narrative, that new changes to banking regulations were more friendly to the financial community in the general move to deregulation, is a real challenge for those who think that markets would have been able to do better without any regulation – what stopped them this time around?
The question is this: Is this new regulation really deregulation? If so, new regulations (or deregulations) should be scrutinized a little more closely to observe its (unintended?) consequences instead of the seemingly hands off approach taken?
Prius update
Made it from DC to northern NJ in slighly over half a tank of gas - 53 mpg. We were getting 44 mpg in the city. This is a far cry from the 60/51 mpg advertised but I noticed that the 2010 Prius is advertising as 51/48 mpg.
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