Cooking for Engineers 432
gbjbaanb writes "It's not often I post about a website, but this one is different. It is Cooking For Engineers. No big deal, you'd think - a web site about recipes and cooking. But go look at how he's presented it. Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world. These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us. Oh yes, although he's been affected by firefox, he blames Microsoft. :)"
Another book previously mentioned on /. (Score:3, Interesting)
XML (Score:5, Interesting)
That could be fun....
Ted Tschopp
Chart Idea Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps a better approach (Score:5, Interesting)
The essential difference is that instead of nesting columns, Axel's style uses only two columns which enables the second column to be very large if necessary. Though I've got to admit that for simple recipies, the cooking for engineer's site looks very good.
PS: Cooking is a great way to unwind after spending all day coding, especially if you don't mind the meal taking a few hours (and glasses of wine) to prepare...
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Interesting)
If this guy had used metric, every US reader would have either left his site right away or e-mailed him to complain about it.
To make matters worse, you wouldn't believe how hard it can sometimes be to find metric measuring cups in America!
Re:My favorite engineer recipe. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mine always says, "Feed me."
I'm a much better cook than she is. That's ok, she's a much better welder. These are modern times. I make the Pad Thai, she makes the locomotives. It works for us.
I read recipies, but I don't "follow" them. I read them to get ideas, just as I use engineering manuals to get ideas, not find solutions. The books never have the questions I'm working on in them. When we ride on trains she'd be happier knowing I had designed it, I'd be happier knowing she'd built it. We don't ride trains much. We know too much.
The trick is to learn your ingredients and processes, then whatever you happen to have in the house (and/or lawn. Dandelions, purslane, violets, clover, day lilies, chicory, all wonderful foodstuffs) becomes your "recipie."
Recipies are great for the beginner or casual cook, but the idea really is to go beyond them, to use them as lab practicums to understand what you're doing and why.
Recipies are rarely presented this way though. Read James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. It's full of recipies, but they're all there to illustrate a point, much as a good engineering manual.
KFG
Re:Charts (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikimeda Cookbook (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Poor guy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And people wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
I totally agree that the article header is pretty offensive, though. I've been a cook longer than I've been an engineer, and I wouldn't trust an engineer that can't follow a simple recipe.
CSS mindwarps (Score:4, Interesting)
My frustration is how he expresses the problem with CSS:
I find that interpretation frustrating.
What is unfortunate is not that a standards compliant browser would properly display IE's mangled HTML/CSS- it's that we have to mangle it for IE in the first place.
I wish more designers would design for the standards-compliant browsers first. Add a ie-kludge.css import every time you detect IE if necessary.
Anyhow... I hope the guy does well. You can't be too upset at a guy's CSS if he has a nice recipe explanation for making Tiramisu on his front page.
Re:What is a cup? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen a cooking book in the UK that uses a measurement of volume for non-liquids in a recipe. I simply have no
I mean, I have tea cups, coffee mugs, my big double sized coffee mug, an expresso cup
What if I've cubed the beef wrong and am in fact putting too little or much in?
And finally, since like forever cooking books in the UK have been dual Imperial/Metric. And finally+1, converting from US English into Imperial can go wrong horribly sometimes because you messed up and have slightly different weights/volumes with the same names. Not that anyone under 35 years old in this country will have ever been taught in Imperial, and even less know that US "English" is actually different.
So my point is, why not give recipes in dual metric and US?
Re:Charts (Score:5, Interesting)
All this to say this engineering book about cooking is just a cook book about cooking and not real science.
Re:Perhaps a better approach (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:VisalC++, good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Those charts are genious.
They look kinda like Nassi-Schneiderman charts [smartdraw.com]...
Re:Poor guy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Try watching good eats w/ alton brown. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a Woman here (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't get it - it's like most recipes I see. (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I look up a recipe - hmmmm. don't have that. don't have that. don't have that... cook for 3 minutes, per side - or until done.
Gee - I can do that (cook 3 minutes per side).
Add my own butter, garlic, and other stuff I would add anyhow, since I have it
Cook it up. Add some butter, grated cheese de jour, half-n-half... call it alfredo. Pour it over rice or pasta!
viola! (that's french for "ta da") The wife loves it! Get laid.
Oh, damn, I'm I rambling again?
Re:What is a cup? (Score:3, Interesting)
Odds are the person you got your banana recipe from is so used to professional recipes that it was more natural to say say 1C than to 1.5 medium bananas. Another possiblility is the recipe was particularly intolerant to variations; I've read recipes where the amount of emulsifier (egg yolk) is calculated to be just enough to bind and so adding even a tiny bit more of something will cause the whole thing to fail -- think about mayonnaise (though I can't imagine banana in such finely balanced recipe).
As an example, say a recipe calls for six eggs. If you live somewhere with big eggs, you'll get a totally different cake to somebody with small eggs. But if you specify 420g of eggs then you'll get the same cake. Likewise, saying a cup of yolks would likewise enable much higher accuracy than saying *shrug* 18? egg yolks.
Not only is it significantly more consistant, with decent electronic scales you'll likely find that it is faster to specify every single ingredient by mass than some by mass, some by volume and some by enumeration.
Of course, if the recipe is tolerant of variations (i.e. just about anything except baking) then this is all a waste of time because anything will work and it is up to the cook to decide the proportions.
Re:yhbt hand (Score:3, Interesting)
Because we're so prideful, we spend a lot of time rationalizing away our shortcomings. We're not good at socializing with people, but we're smart -- it must be that our intellect intimidates them. Or, we belittle social mores as being cultural cruft, saying (in all earnestness) that all that small talk jibber jabber is useless, and that we're choosing not to do it because there's no point. We'd rather not admit that we have a very hard time doing it, and it makes us uncomfortable. We hide behind our intelligence.
Back in HS, jocks taped our buns together and shoved us in lockers and generally tortured us, girls shunned us, and we were generally social outcasts. We are scarred, emotionally, by this treatment. It was cruel, there's no doubt about it. But when I was in college, I had a run in with a bully that tortured me in middle school -- he came up to me, having recognized me, and started making small talk. I didn't know what to do. But it turned out that he was a really nice guy, and it occured to me then that judging a person on actions taken at age 13 wasn't very fair of me; he'd grown a lot since then. He appologized for the way he'd acted. Turns out his home life hadn't been so great.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but my point is, because girls and jocks and the like scare us, we pigeonhole them. We make them out to be 2 dimensional, steryotypical people. We don't bother getting to know them, now that we're out of school and everyone (believe it or not) is a lot more mature. We continue to hide behind our intelligence. We say things like, all those jocks are bagging groceries now, girls just can't think the way we do, etc, etc. And it's silly. It's trite. What it essentially is, is lack of self confidence.
But learning to interact with people is like learning anything, including Linux, Math and Science -- it requires practice and you will be ridiculed for not knowing how to perform basic tasks, just like people on #debian will yell at you for not rtfming and making you feel like a dork for not knowing how to inline assembly into your shell scripts (ha ha), as if everyone can do it.
Learning is tough. Girls, people, social stuff, well, it's scary, and I can appreciate that. But you have to face it, not hide behind silly generalizations and coy superiority. People may not be as smart as you are, when it comes to computers or math, but that's not all there is to intelligence. It's really an extremely worthwhile lesson. And sensitivity, which is hard for us too, and so we belittle it as something "unnecessary and stupid", will get you a long way.
The "girl" thing is especially difficult because unlike with jocks, for the most part, we can't just ignore them -- homosexuals exempted, of course, but I'm sure they get just as nervous talking to a cute guy as we do a cute girl -- because there's the sexual attraction and the need for love and attention from the opposite sex. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this, I'll stop talking now.
Re:Charts (Score:3, Interesting)
PS: my recipe book [gdargaud.net] (warning, 6Mb and all in french)
Re:What is a cup? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless you're in the US, of course, in which case it's 237ml (unless you're talking butter, in which case it's two sticks. I think. And a stick is a quarter of a pound, so a cup of butter would be 227g.) What a mess.
Re:Poor guy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure he was monitoring them, so that he can track when he is totally screwed because his bandwidth costs exceed his net income. Did you miss the point that he was on a 1GB plan (with presumably expensive bandwidth overage charges), and then switched to the highest bandwidth plan available from his hosting provider?
>Can you do that with Coral, or is it 'proprietary info' that only belongs to them, once its on their net?
Don't know, don't care - stats are nice, but I would suggest that avoiding a server meltdown is much nicer. Why ask me anyways? Based on your UID, you should be well aware of the existence of Google [google.com]. And as far as 'proprietary info', take off the tinfoil hat, will ya?
Re:It's a forgery (Score:2, Interesting)
You are spot on re the 'degrees Kelvin' thing though.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html
Re:What is a cup? (Score:2, Interesting)
We get out our weighing scales that weren't built in 1835 and thus weigh without needing to use counterweights and dump the flour in until we have the correct weight - without having to worry about if the flour is packed tightly, or rather loose. What if you need 1.25 cups of flour? Do you keep a different sized 'cup' for every common part-cup?
Measuring by volume just seems silly and horribly inaccurate or vague (not that it really matters when cooking although it can ruin bread). As my banana example showed. Also scales usually have a large bowl on top, so you can keep on measuring out different ingredients into it until it is full, or even better just stick your mixing bowl on top, press the tare button and never even have to transfer bowls and save on washing up!
However we do still use tsp, tbsp, etc. Mainly because they are the best size for measuring small quantities of things like spices, etc.
Re:What is a cup? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Poor guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.
Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.
Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames [nyu.edu] of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.
You are truly paranoid, though. Coral [nyu.edu] is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never really seen angstrom capitalized. Starting it with the "latin capital A with ring above" (Å), as you use for the abbreviation, is definitely wrong.
That reminds me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is the "Hello World Souffle" as an example:
Hello World Souffle.
This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person.
Ingredients.
72 g haricot beans
101 eggs
108 g lard
111 cups oil
32 zucchinis
119 ml water
114 g red salmon
100 g dijon mustard
33 potatoes
Method.
Put potatoes into the mixing bowl. Put dijon mustard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put red salmon into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put water into the mixing bowl. Put zucchinis into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put eggs into the mixing bowl. Put haricot beans into the mixing bowl. Liquefy contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Serves 1.
tech cooking (Score:4, Interesting)
As a software designer that goofs off with cooking, I think I take a more tech approach. For example, I've started smoking various meats and making my own beef jerky, but I've also been trying dozens of different kinds of woods, some plain, some soaked in different types of liquids and alcohol and researching the ways in which the smoking process with different wood imparts flavor to the food. I've also been working on designing a way to interface an electric smoker to a dehydrator to automate the process of making beef jerky with a true smoky flavor.
I have friends who have designed their own cooking grills and monitoring systems. Those things seem more like an engineers approach to cooking. This site, while interesting, isn't anything special.
Then again, maybe this guy is using an overclocked Pentium as his heating element?