Low Probability Events

The problem with "berry" muffins is that the berries tend to dry out -- their juice cooks out into the main body of the muffin. In these muffins, the juice stays inside the pomegranate "arils" -- the little individual seed packets. When you bite into them, you get a little explosion of juice in your mouth.

Dry:

• 2 cups (270g) all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ⅓ cup minced crystallized ginger¹
• 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
• 1 ¼ cup pomegranate arils^{2, 3} (one medium pomegranate)

Wet:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 large egg
• ½ cups honey or ⅔ cups sugar
• ¼ cup oil

In a bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir in crystallized ginger, lemon peel, and pomegranate arils. Make a well in the center.

In another bowl, blend milk, egg, honey, and oil. Add any juice from extracting the arils. Pour all the liquid into the well. Stir just until the batter is moistened; it will be lumpy. Spoon batter into 12 (2 ½ inch wide) or 24 (1 ¾ inch wide) buttered muffin cups, filling each almost to the rim. Sprinkle each with 1-2 teaspoons sugar.

Bake in a 425°F oven until lightly browned (about 16 minutes for large muffins, 13 minutes for small). Remove the muffins from the pan at once. Serve hot, or set on a rack and serve warm or cool.

1. Crystallized ginger is wonderful stuff, but it tends to be pricey. Trader Joe's has "uncrystallized ginger", which is just as good, for a reasonable price.
2. "Arils" are the individual pomegranate "seeds" -- the seed itself, the layer of juice, and the membrane that holds the juice in.
3. Getting the arils out of the fruit can be a bit of a challenge. Try to use brute force and you'll end up looking like an extra in a slasher movie -- the juice stains. There are helpful videos on YouTube, of course. Some of them even work. The way I do it:
   1. Cut around the equator of the fruit, just deeply enough to get through the rind.
   2. Pry the two hemispheres apart
   3. Gently pull the rind apart, loosening the arils
   4. Hold the hemisphere over a bowl, cut side down.
   5. Whack it vigorously with a heavy wooden spoon. Ideally, the arils will just fall out.
   6. Pick out any of the white membrane that finds its way into the bowl.
   7. Repeat with the other hemisphere.
   Here's a YouTube video of the process.

Original recipe

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. The Republicans want it now.

I've been inundated with e-mails lately by Republicans complaining about a video about Hilary Clinton, currently being made by CNN and NBC. They are assuming, without evidence as near as I can tell, that this will be a pro-Hilary pre-campagin puff piece, and they want it stopped.

Rather than deciding whether each thing that comes out is pro- or anti- a specific candidate, fix the whole problem at once. Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. If the Clinton flick is a puff piece, make the stations give the Republicans equal time.

Of course, this would have an effect on the right-wing screamers who tend to just make stuff up. Consider it a beneficial side effect. Broadcasters should not be able to use the public airwaves to deliberately misinform their audience.

1. Zimmerman, in his car, sees Martin "acting suspiciously" (walking while black, ducking into a doorway during a rain shower.)
2. He calls 911.  The operator tells him *not* to follow Martin and that police are on the way.
3. He follows Martin anyway.  He is carrying a gun in violation of his "neighborhood watch" policy.
4. Martin freaks out.
5. At some point, Zimmerman stops his car, gets out, and confronts Martin.
6. Fisticuffs ensue.  Zimmerman, despite outweighing Martin by 100 lbs, gets the worst if it.
7. When Martin has him on the ground and is slamming his head into the pavement, Zimmerman assumes he's in deadly danger, pulls his gun, and shoots Martin.

In this story, Ms Yee did almost everything exactly right, and she did do everything that needed to be done. The only thing she could have done better would have been to hit the "panic button" on her car key. Hard to think of everything ...

It's interesting to consider a case like this in the context of the current gun debate. What would have happened if Ms Yee had had a gun? Best case, it would have played out exactly like it did. Problem is, she had a gun pointed at her. She had no time to get her own (theoretical!) gun into action. Grabbing for it would probably have caused the attacker to shoot. If somehow she did manage to get her own gun out, she'd be in a gun battle at zero range, inside a car. Bad, bad, bad.

Problem with the pro-gun types is that they talk in terms of imaginary scenarios. It's far more useful to look at real-life situations like this one. The main problem with the scenarios that the pro-gun types use is that they ignore the time it takes to get a defensive gun into action -- a dead-flat minimum of two seconds. On the street, a heck of a lot can happen in that two seconds, and experienced robbers know how to keep a situation ambiguous until the last possible instant.

Another problem with the pro-gun types is that they assume that they will always be able to identify a situation requiring deadly force. Cops have trouble with this one. Harmless street person panhandling or robber? Life is ambiguous. Deal with it.

I may do a post later with my views on self-defense and martial arts. I have a lot of experience with American style wrestling, Judo, and Aikido. I have taught (as an assistant, not a primary) women's self defense. My opinions on the subject are pretty much The Common Wisdom, with some additions from experience, plus some things that are probably so "common wisdom" that they never get mentioned.

Yowsah! Ya try to do something simple on Facebook and whadda you get? Another day older and deeper in debt ...

I wanted to get my Facebook notifications as an RSS feed, instead of e-mail messages. Facebook help has nothing; help for RSS leads to info on "subscriptions". No help. Googling gets ways to construct an RSS feed link using the "user ID" (not trivial to find.  It's at <https://graph.facebook.com/[your Facebook account name]> if you want to play with it.), but they all give the error message "This feed URL is no longer valid. Visit this page to find the new URL, if you have access: ", which leads back to your timeline page.  Not helpful.

The alternative was to use an "app", which has access to all your information. One site had instructions for *writing* a trivial app, which was interesting but 'way too much work.

Finally got it. Go to the page <https://www.facebook.com/notifications> and you'll see a list of all your Facebook notifications. And right there at the top of the list is a "Get notifications via:" link, with an RSS option. Works!

Note to the Facebook folks -- when you update features, you also have to update the docs and the configuration screens. The "Get notifications via:" link should be on the Notifications configuration page, for example.

Saint Peter, doncha call me, I can't go, I owe my soul to Mark Zuckerberg.

Nah. Doesn't scan. Or rhyme. Or make sense. Whatever.

One very familiar type of song is the Christmas carol. Although it is perhaps a bit out of season at this time. However, I'm informed by my "disk jockey" friends - of whom I have none, that in order to get a song popular by Christmas time, you have to start plugging it well in advance. So here goes.

It has always seemed to me, after all, that Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in. I refer of course, to money. And yet none of the Christmas carols that you hear on the radio or in the street, even attempt to capture the true spirit of Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States. That is to say the commercial spirit. So I should like to offer the following Christmas carol for next year, as being perhaps a bit more appropriate.

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly,
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say "when."
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens,
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas Day you can't get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore,
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.

Relations, sparing no expense'll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
"Just the thing I need! How nice!"
It doesn't matter how sincere it
Is, nor how heartfelt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What's important is the price.

Hark the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.

God rest ye merry, merchants,
May you make the Yuletide pay.

Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and buy!

So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don't stand underneath when they fly by.

Actually I did rather well myself, this last Christmas. The nicest present I received was a gift certificate, good at any hospital, for a lobotomy. Rather thoughtful.

• Voter suppression:  attempts at voter suppression of any kind need to trigger some intense Federal scrutiny.  The Old South is not the only place where the Powers that Be would like very much to prevent Certain People from voting.  Long lines (9 hours in some cases) are prima facie evidence of voter suppression (or incompetence).  So are shortages of materials (paper ballots, for example).
• Nonpartisan election commissions:  This business of having a partisan office determine all the important parameters of the election has got to stop.  At best, it looks bad.  At worst, it's outright corruption.
• ID:  Needs to be some kind of Federal standard; most of the State ID requirements are unsubtle attempts to suppress poor and elderly voters.
• Electronic voting machines:  Ideally, the voter should mark a card ("fill in the bubble"), which most voters have been doing since elementary school.  Then you can have a machine count the ballots, but there's always the possibility of a recount.  Diebold- type (unauditable) machines must have the source code escrowed, and random machines examined to make sure that the code in the machine matches the code on file.  Any change to software must be tested, tracked, and audited; "midnight upgrades" of any kind are Right Straight Out.  Also, the entire system needs to be auditable (and audited!).  For example, one report from 2008 (hopefully obsolete!) said that the Diebold central vote-tabulating system was based on a Microsoft Access database, with the default password.  First, the password is an elementary mistake.  No programmer with any experience at all should do that.  Second, nobody who knows databases uses Microsoft Access for anything more important than a Christmas card list.  It's just not sufficiently reliable.  The pros use Oracle, or if you want to stay in the Microsoft universe, SQL Server.
• "Instant runoff":  Optional, but very desirable.  This would be ideal for things like primary and local elections, which can have many candidates.  Runoff elections are expensive and inconvenient, and a "straight plurality" leads to elections where the winner gets, like, 15% of the vote.  There are all sorts of schemes, ranging from "first and second choice" to the full-up "Australian ballot".

The biggest political party in the US is neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party. It's the "I didn't vote" party. If the ones who don't bother to go to the polls actually voted, they could take over the country in one election cycle.

Of the things that I consider requirements for Good Citizenship (voting, taxes, jury duty) voting is far and away the easiest, even counting the Getting Informed part. We work hard to make it easy to vote, but half of the population still can't be bothered.

Whether the issue you care about is national economic policy or the pothole in front of your house, if you don't vote, you don't get to complain.