Clam Chowder
I've made this clam chowder every other week for the last couple of months.
It's starting to gather odd ingredients, so before it becomes unmakeable,
or I get sick of it, I thought I'd write it down.
It sure is good.
- a russet potato, 1/4 inch cubed
- half a yellow onion, minced large
- a few celery stalks, chopped
- one clove of garlic, minced
- fresh clam bits in juice, 1 lb.
- a can of chicken broth
- a chicken bullion cube
- 1 1/2 cups of water
- fish sauce, five healthy squirts
- corriander, whole, hollow of your palm-ful
- pepper corns, whole, hollow of your palm-ful
- turmeric, an irresponsible shake's worth
- a small pinch of saffron
- a couple bay leaves
- sea salt, to taste
- a shake of black pepper
- parsley
To cook: start by frying the potatoes in a little oil in a big skillet. My new favorite oil is grapeseed oil because it's good at high heat and doesn't taste strong like some others (including olive oil) can. Throw the onion in too. You want a little bit of browning to happen before they go in the broth. When the potatoes and onions are showing progress, add the garlic and the celery.
Put everything else in a pot. Turn up the heat. Dump the potatoes and stuff in. Bring to a boil and then simmer for a while--at least until the potatoes are cooked through.
My experience is that this soup gets better as the days go by.
But it has never lasted long enough to tell you how it will be by week's end.
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I've published a couple of books. My favorite of the two was High Performance Computing. It came out at a time when "high performance computing" meant parallel supercomputers, like Cray machines and weird massively parallel matrix architectures. The book covered that, but it also talked about more pedestrian stuff, like the new breeds of processors coming from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Intel.
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I would almost say that I had no business writing the book,
since I was not (still am not) an academic, and that was an
area for more lettered men and women.
But I had a lot of practical experience.
I'd just left Multiflow Computer,
a parallel supercomputer start-up out of Yale,
where I'd spent much of four years optimizing scientific code to
run on our own bizarre architecture.
I completed the book when I was working at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) in 1993. UTRC was a goldmine for information about the computer architectures from the 50s and 60s. A lot of the engineers just reaching retirment age had worked with the IBM 704 and other neat old computers. They still had the manuals! |
High Performance Computing started to age by the late nineties, and the publisher took it out of print. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan wrote me and said "I'll update it!," which he did quite ably, and it went back into print for a time. Interestingly, High Performance Computing still shows up in the reference lists on syllabi. And it sells for more than it did when it was in print! That makes me happy—a 16 year-old computer book that's still relevant. Read chapters 2 and 8.
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The second book,
Getting Connected, was about
Internet plumbing.
I wrote it during the time when people were just starting see
what the Internet was all about.
Getting Connected never got the audience I hoped for,
but it became the reference book that the sales
teams at UUNet and Bell Atlantic were given, and that translated into
a lot of business for Atlantic Computing, my company, through the 90's
and into 2000.
Eventually, that led to the sale of
the company.
Both books have been translated into other languages. I have Japanese and Chinese versions. |  |
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Other Content
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Portions copyright © 2009, Kevin Dowd
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I want my own diesel freight engine
A bright headlamp would light the alley and throb in tune with the locomotive. When she throttled up, kids would pinch each other and the neighbors would step off the trap rock. A pulse of power would be enough to send her squeaking and groaning to the far end of the track.
And the tractor has lights that throb in time with the engine. I've almost got my wish. This is a picture of me (headphones) taken from the Helsingen Sanomat in 1982, when I was a nuclear engineer for Combustion Engineering. I was at the power plant in Loviisa working on a project for the OECD to see if artificial intelligence/human factors safety systems could help a power plant operator during an emergency.
I might be wearing your shirt. That's it in the picture. I found it at the hole-in-the wall beach in Niantic, washed up in the seaweed. It took many launderings to get the smell out. Maybe you'd be happy to know it got to see Finland. The idea here is that just as photons may, with varying probabilities, arrive at different locations in space, so might they arrive at different times. Were a photon to arrive in the immediate past, the interpretation would be that it traveled faster than the speed of light. This could help explain faster-than-light observations in the lab.
The object is to use a single photon detector—in this case a photomultiplier tube, with a light source. The circuit has a start button. When the button is pushed, the detector will shut off and the light source will turn on. The idea is to note whether the detection occured before the light (in this case an LED) was illuminated. If the indicator comes on, then a photon was detected before the button was pressed.
The applications are unbounded. It starts with me repeatedly winning the lottery. I built mine with a photomultiplier tube and a 1000V power supply I found on eBay. If you build this, you'll probably need to refrigerate the tube to avoid thermal noise. In my case, my house was cold. And, if the indicator comes on unexpectedly, is the device broken? Maybe it's just working really, really well?
A Ponderable
My fish scare me.
It's just there.
I went to the store in an automobile.
You're looking up at the stars?
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