Essay Web Blog

I happened across this site, which belongs to Danny Vendramini, a TV producer and scriptwriter, with an interest in evolutionary biology.

Neanderthal face reconstructed by Vendramini, Copyright themandus.org

He has written a book called “Them and Us”, in which he propounds the hypothesis that Neanderthals were:

• Very different looking from most modern representations – much uglier, hairier, and far less human-like.
• That they were brutal, intelligent, tool-using predators, who preyed upon modern man in the areas where they came in contact, specifically, the Levant.
• That being the prey of Neanderthals was the most important factor in human evolution, and that it was responsible for the flowering of art and sculpture, the technological innovations in the tool making industry, perhaps even the flowering of language – all of which happened around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
• And not only that, it was responsible for the evolution of the human body type, including features that distinguish us from other apes, such as decreased hairiness, the development of a prominent and protruding nose, different body posture and gait, etc.
• Finally, he lists a whole range of human behavioral traits, such as preference for symmetrical faces, fear of the dark, abominable snowman myths across various cultures, etc. as some sort of racial memory of Neanderthals, whom we fear and despise, because they preyed upon us.

Now at first read, this appears to be the work of a misguided though enthusiastic kook. He seems to have no formal qualifications in biology or paleo-anthropology, and is self-taught. He makes the first few chapters of his book available online, and from a quick read, he seems very dismissive of arguments that run counter to his thesis, for example, the loss of body hair in Homo sapiens. He mentions other theories, such as the thermoregulation during the transition from forest living to life on the savannah, but he dismisses them so hastily that it looks like he doesn’t really understand them all too well. Some of the examples he gives (such as big cats are predators, and some of them live in hot climates, why didn’t they lose their hair?) have reasonable answers in the literature, but he makes no mention of them. Instead, he pushes his theory, that we lost body hair because of sexual selection – we didn’t want to look like those ugly, murderous Neanderthals – it became a taboo to look like them.

Profile reconstruction of Neanderthal face, Copyright themandus.org.

Superficially, some of this may make sense. We certainly can’t rule out the role of sexual selection in the loss of body hair. But making the jump from “might be possible in a mundane way” to “it was a response to Neanderthal predation” is a very long stretch. He does this in many, many different areas, not just body hair.

Now I understand that he offers this as a hypothesis. He is not saying this is how it happened, just that this is how it might have happened. Which is fine, but the supporting evidence is very thin. Further, in his enthusiasm to bring in every possible argument to bear, he adds so much speculative and flimsy stuff that it makes it seem like he can’t distinguish between science and fantasy. To name a few, he finds some supposedly “universal” human traits such as xenophobia, preference for bathing and cleanliness, loyalty to the group, self-sacrifice, patriarchy, aggression, and many more, and ties them all into some imagined “prey psychology”, which developed as a result of humans being the victims of Neanderthals.

To be fair, he is not alone in this. Many so called “evolutionary psychologists”, or evolutionary biologists in general, make sweeping generalizations and assumptions, based on the flimsiest evidence. To me, this is an example of science turning into social narrative, the trivialization of science. You don’t need rigor and reasoning based on solid evidence, you don’t need to be cautious, to make no claim beyond the evidence – all you need to do is to tell a good story, preferably sensational enough to get picked up by the popular press, and give you your 15 minutes of fame.

Neanderthal with spear, Copyright themandus.org.

Part of it is the problem of generalists versus specialists. Evolutionary biologists or evolutionary psychologists (*shudder*) are generalists, tying together a lot of details from anthropology, genetics, sociology, psychology, etc. to make some broad claim. But in doing so, they often lack the specialized knowledge of each individual field – they lack sufficient knowledge to not over-generalize, and sometimes end up making silly blunders. They tend to trivialize and gloss over problems that are ambiguous and not resolved, picking the interpretation that favors their own theory, often not realizing that the foundation is very shaky.

And then there are those who disconnect with reality altogether, like Vendramini, when he goes off about connecting “fear of the dark” to nocturnal predation by Neanderthals or similar arguments. The pity is that he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s doing. In trying to add weight to his arguments, he is throwing in every last thing he can think of. And so he’s mixing in things that have some weight and credibility (like, we don’t really know exactly what Neanderthals looked like, perhaps they were more ape like than modern representations; or we don’t know exactly what human-Neanderthal interactions were like, there may well have been violence), with things that are utter nonsense, such as fear of the dark. So the good stuff gets mixed with the bad, and taints everything as trash. Further, it creates a bad impression of the writer, in that he doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish science from fantasy.

To top it all, he really appears serious about this airy-fairy stuff. He has another theory (and another whole website devoted to it), which propounds something he calls “teem theory”. In simple terms, the theory is that nasty stuff that happens to us and creates powerful negative impressions gets imprinted on non-coding regions of our DNA, and thus becomes heritable to future generations. This is what he uses to explain things like fear of the dark, xenophobia, etc. – that these bad experiences with homicidal Neanderthals became imprinted on our DNA, and continues to manifest in modern behavior.

That would be a whole other discussion and a whole other blurb on this blog, so I don’t want to get into it at this time. Briefly, he looks at instinctive behavior of a certain kind, such as certain animals instinctively recognizing their predators and avoiding them, concludes that such behavior must be coded into the DNA, since it’s untaught and not learned, therefore DNA must provide a mechanism for coding our fears. Such ideas ignore a whole realm of evidence, that a huge range of predator-avoidance behaviors are in fact learned, and that interpreting specific instances where they don’t appear to be learned is over-generalizing. Yes, there are instincts that are heritable, but the actual mechanism of how they work, what exactly is coded in the DNA, are very much unknown. Making it out to be something as specific as xenophobia is very imaginative, but poor science.

Neanderthal, hunting. Copyright themandus.org.

I see evolutionary biologists make similarly specific claims, that generosity and altruism are hard coded in our genes – all sorts of stuff like that. I consider it all very unlikely, an over-specification of something much broader. Perhaps what we are inclined for is social cohesiveness, being social animals, and specific instances of it are just a manifestation, they are not individually hard coded. It’s possible to take a population of rats, breed for either aggressiveness or docility, and in a very few generations end up with two distinct populations that are behaviorally very different in that respect. It’s been done. It doesn’t show anything very specific, other than that “fight” responses and aggression are more marked in one population than another, perhaps through some simple hormonal trigger. Going from that to very specific theories about brain centers dealing with aggression, or “cooperation” or something similar is not warranted by the evidence.

While I find his theory not convincing, it did make me wonder about a few things. What exactly do we know about how Neanderthals looked like? Forensic recreations based on bones have to be somewhat an exercise in guesswork, on prior knowledge. I agree with his point that they are not at all comparable to forensic recreations of humans. After all, we have a huge body of knowledge of what humans are supposed to look like, so our guesses are founded in a great deal of prior information. We don’t have a similar body of knowledge of what Neanderthals looked like, so our reconstructions may err on side of making them look too human (or conversely, less human) than they really were.

We have no casts of their soft tissues. We don’t know how hairy they were. We don’t know how much their noses protruded. We don’t know how big their eyes were, how erect their spines, how prominent their musculature. For all of these things, we make educated guesses, but some guesses are more educated than others. For example, the musculature is hinted at by the shape of the bones, the sites of attachment of various muscles to the bones. So this kind of guess can be trusted to a greater extent than say, the guess about how hairy they were, or what their skin was like, or how symmetrical their faces were.

So our picture can’t be very precise, there is some range of possibilities, within the constraints set by the bones. Just how wide that range is, I don’t know, and I wonder if they could have looked like the pictures on his web site. I don’t personally know of any physical evidence that goes against his reconstruction. Perhaps some more knowledgeable people can add to this. But it occurs to me that if Neanderthals looked sufficiently ape-ish, sufficiently non-human, it would explain why we find no evidence of human-Neanderthal interbreeding in the genomes. It would discourage (though not necessarily prevent) the two species from interbreeding.

I look forward to more information which should become available as the Neanderthal genome is fully sequenced and annotated.

Internet advertising is running into trouble. Over the years, Internet ads have become ever more intrusive, morphing from the simple text-based ads of the early years, to flash based animations with embedded audio. Today’s ads clamor for attention much more forcefully, and therefore distract the user from the content they want to see.

Users have fought back with ad-blocking add-ons to their browsers. So far, the only browser that fully supports such add-ons is Firefox. Google Chrome will also introduce an extension scheme in version 4 of their browser (already in beta and available for download), and there are a couple of ad-blocking extensions already available for it (AdThwart, AdBlock) , though neither is as good as Ad Block on Firefox just yet. The market penetration of such extensions remains poor – it’s estimated that only 4% to 8% of Firefox users actually install and use Ad Block, though it’s been around for years. And Firefox (all versions combined) is installed on less than a third of all computers out there. So at this time, ad blocking extensions are not a major threat to ad revenue.

However, it seems likely that the popularity of such ad blocking extensions will continue through word-of-mouth advertising. Some of their success is linked to the success of the Firefox browser itself, which has continued to gain market share. Google Chrome is also a fast growing browser, and when it starts to offer extensions (in a non-beta version, which will be in a few months), it will likely also carry some ad blockers along with it. Anyone who has used an ad blocker knows for himself how immediately and profoundly it alters the web-surfing experience for the better, making surfing much more pleasant. So it’s not like ad blockers are a hard sell. I think that even if ad blocking isn’t a revenue threat to the ad industry now, it will become a threat in time.

This has hurt revenues in the web publishing industry. It’s not just extensions like AdBlock, which has a fairly negligible market presence – it’s more that users are simply ignoring ads. Coupled with the fact that non-ad revenue is also down, since fewer people buy newspapers or magazines; the result is that publishers are facing serious problems, shown in the number of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs in the industry.

Now I am not one of those who have a pathological hatred of  ads. I realize that much of the valuable content on the web is not produced by part-time hobbyist bloggers; it’s produced by people to whom publishing is a profession. These people don’t have other day jobs – they feed themselves and their families through the content they create for the web. They deserve to be paid for their work. And if they are not paid, they will be forced to turn to some other line of work to pay their bills, and the web will be poorer for it. For example, although news bloggers provide a lot of value added service, without the original news gathering efforts from paid journalists, there is only so much bloggers can do to recycle each other’s stories.

So far, very few people have figured out how to make money off a pay-to-view site. This may eventually change if Rupert Murdoch has his way. Any site that makes money off the internet would probably love to put their content behind a pay wall if they could, if they thought it would increase their revenue. But this has not worked for the large majority of people who have tried – it has only made viewers turn to alternative sources for similar content. Alternative sources are made viable by news aggregators like Google, who undermine pay wall protection by leading users to competitors who aren’t behind a pay wall. Clearly, things will not change until publishers band together in significant numbers and act together.

I don’t know when or if this will happen. However, I know that markets are driven by money, and eventually, a business model that produces poor revenues will be supplanted by one that produces better revenue. Whether that will be pay walls or court injunctions against the likes of Google or something else, I can’t say. But something will change.

For decades, ads supported a large fraction of the publishing industry. Over time, they became a proven way that worked for both publishers and readers. Publishers got their revenue; readers got cheap content, subsidized by ads. This worked well in the print medium, but somehow it has not translated well to the internet. I’d like to ask why, and suggest ways in which it could be made to work again.

I think the primary reasons why ad revenues have started to fail are:

1. Ads have become intrusive to the point that they are an annoyance even to those readers who might be inclined to buy, and people are starting to tune them out.
2. There is no good system for pricing internet ads, as there is for print and TV. Simple pay-per-click schemes don’t go far enough. They don’t sort out the public into marketer-friendly demographics where it’s possible to know well in advance how much an ad should cost, and what’s the most effective place to place it.

The first is relatively easy to deal with, but it requires some coordination and a great deal of work by someone with credibility enough to make it work. This is what I would propose. First, work out a standard that takes the annoyance factor out of ads. Second, create a certifying authority that vets ads and approves those that are non-annoying, and gives them a digital certificate of approval. Third, create a mechanism in ad-blocking products that permits certain ads to go through. Fourth, create a scheme that lets content providers serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to appear.

Each of these steps has major technical and organizational hurdles to cross, and even if they are crossed, it will never be 100% effective. However, it does not need to be 100% effective. It only needs to be reasonable enough to convince a majority of users, and non-threatening enough that people don’t care to expend a great deal of energy to circumvent it.

Let’s take each of these steps one at a time.

Taking the Annoyance out of Ads

Here are some rules for ads that would make them much less annoying for me. No doubt others could add items I have forgotten:

1. No pop overs or pop unders. Nothing that would open another window or tab in your browser unless you explicitly and deliberately click on the ads
2. Ads must not cover up or obscure content that the user visited the page to read. You must not require the user to acknowledge the ad by clicking a “close” or “go away” button before he is allowed to read the content. That only makes him hate you, and hate the ad provider.
3. No flashing, no animation, no movement of any kind. This is like asking a person to read a page in a book while ambulance lights flash and flicker in the background. They are distracting and make it harder to read the page.
4. No audio. Pages should never load with any audio playing. Audio should only be enabled after a deliberate and unmistakable click from the user, specifically requesting the audio.
5. Goes without saying, but I’ll add it anyway. Ads must be vetted for malware, browser hijacking, and similar exploits.
6. No mixing ads with copy. In other words, don’t use fake underlines and highlights on content, trying to fool the reader that such highlights or underlines are relevant to the content, when in fact they only point to ads.
7. Privacy concerns: although it’s useful for ad servers to keep track of users, and I would not suggest that they do away with this powerful mechanism that the internet provides for targeting ads, there should be some easy way for users to opt out of it. If you don’t provide it, users will build their own, and then you will be worse off than if you had just provided it in the first place.
8. 8. Ads should not unduly slow down page loads. More specifically, content should never have to wait for a slow ad server to be displayed.

I’d like to mention one more point, but separately from the list. That point is ad ratio. If your page is 75% ads and 25% content, your users will notice that. They are not stupid. This is not something that should be enforced by the ad certifying agency; it’s up to whoever owns the web pages in question. This is where that second agency I mentioned, the one that figures out ad prices, comes in. It may well be more profitable for some little company to create pages which are 4/5th ads and 1/5th content, in the hope that the greater number of ads will offset the decreased number of users. But this should reflect in the cost of those ads, which pay-per-click systems don’t always do. Print and TV have long-established means to price ads, with companies that survey and measure such things down to the last penny. The internet needs the same.

Certifying Agency

Not much to be said here. It could be a private corporation, or it could be a volunteer effort. There is really very little work to do, so long as the guidelines are very clear. Either an ad passes those guidelines and receives the certificate, or it doesn’t. Checksums and hashes can make sure that the certificate is paired with a specific ad, and that the ad producer can’t modify the ad after it’s been approved. Again, the point is that the guidelines should be clear enough that even a machine could figure out whether to approve or reject an ad.

Ad Blocking Software

This is the easiest part. Ad blocking browser extensions (and perhaps someday the browser itself) would have a built in mechanism that allows the user to select which ads will come through, simply by checking a box in the configuration. The browser or extension downloads the certificate from the authority, and vets each ad to make sure it’s been signed with the proper certificate.

Ad Serving

This is the hardest part to solve, technically. This is what the web server needs to implement at the content end. The goal is to serve content only to browsers which allow certified ads to go through. To figure out how this might be done, consider how ad blockers work now.

There are several mechanisms, depending on the browser and extension. The best implemented is Ad Block on Firefox. This mechanism is based on a feature built into the Gecko engine, which is used by browsers like Firefox or Thunderbird. The feature is called “content policies”, and it’s simply an object that gets called whenever the browser is asked to load a page. It looks at the content (the address, plus some other stuff), and based on that, it decides whether to allow the content or not. Extensions like Ad Block simply define content policies. How they do so varies. One way is by maintaining a list of ad providers, and simply blocking their IPs. This is a really good way, because it prevents the browser from even downloading the ad, so you save bandwidth too, and the page loads faster. Another is by searching the text (through regexps) for stuff that is likely to be found in ads and not in content.

Chrome extensions at present don’t allow a mechanism for ad content not to be downloaded, since Chrome’s engine (Webkit) doesn’t have that feature from Gecko. So the ad content is downloaded, but after download the extension checks it against similar publicly available lists and also examines the text, and hides content that it thinks is an ad.

There are problems with both approaches, and also with the implementations. At present, it’s possible to create scripts on web pages that can detect the presence of Ad Block, and simply refuse to serve pages to browsers which have Ad Block installed. However, it’s still fairly uncommon to see a site that actively refuses to serve to Ad Block-enabled browsers. More often, it’ll just post a notice to the web page with something like “we know you’re using Ad Block, if you enjoy the content on this site, please consider turning off Ad Block or donating – here’s our PayPal button”.

It’s really not practical to expect users to turn Ad Block on and off individually for different sites, depending upon how much they like the content. Some will do it, but most will just keep Ad Block on, and ignore your message like they ignored the ads previously.

It’s also possible for users to circumvent the ad-block detection. But this also leads nowhere – it just produces a constant state of war, where content providers continue to develop ever smarter ways to detect Ad Block and users continue to invent new ways to circumvent it. This process never ends, as we’ve seen with various DRM schemes. No one really wins in the end.

Instead, we need to come to a consensus. This will only happen if content providers understand the very real problems faced by users, and take them seriously. And if users understand that content providers need to make money to continue working, and ads are a much better alternative than pay walls, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

This is a recipe I’ve been using for a while. I sort of came up with it on my own, after tinkering with various recipes I found on the web. It’s very similar to a lot of “tempered” dal recipes found in cookbooks, but the spices have been adjusted to my own tastes.

If you look up recipes for dal on the internet, you’ll find hundreds. Maybe more. They all vary in details, like which spices were used, how much of each, when they were added, etc. Partly this is because India is a big country, with many distinct cuisines from different parts of the country. So dal cooked in the north won’t be the same as dal cooked in the south, or west, or east. Even within a region, there are dozens of variations. Mughlai style food uses a lot of different spices, but not a lot of each. South Indian food might use fewer spices, but some of them will be pretty strong – enough red-hot chilis, for example, to burn your mouth.

So this is my distillation of many such recipes that I have tried. I’ve stuck to what I consider are essential spices – those which I’d definitely notice a lack of, in the finished product. At the end, I’ve provided a short list of what else some people add to dal.

Which Lentils?

First, get the right sort of lentils. There are lots of different legumes or “pulses” eaten in India. While cooking methods for each are similar, they are not exactly the same. This recipe is for brown lentils (whole, not split), commonly known as “masoor” in India.

Brown lentils are very easy to find in most American supermarkets, but be aware they are not exactly the same as Indian brown lentils. Indian lentils are generally smaller in size, more rounded and less flat. They may look darker, though the darkness of supermarket lentils is variable, from greenish to reddish to brownish. Indian lentils have a much richer and more robust flavor.

Comparison of Indian and American Brown Lentils

Brown lentils can be found in Indian grocery stores, where they are known as “masoor dal”. Whole brown lentils, like in the picture above, are sometimes labeled “matki masoor”. It’s worth it to get the real thing and not the supermarket imitation. There really is a difference.

Ingredients and Method

This is a “tempered” dal, meaning, the dal is cooked in two separate stages, which are combined at the end. The purpose of tempering is to keep the butter and fat-soluble spices separate from the rest of the stuff, and cook them for a much shorter time, so the volatile oils in the spices mix in with the butter, and don’t disappear or acquire an off flavor due to the longer cooking time of the dal itself.

Take 1 cup of lentils (dry volume), and soak in 5-6 cups of cold water for about an hour. Then wash the lentils thoroughly in cold water.

In a large pot, add the following:

- the pre-soaked, washed lentils from the step above
- cold water – 4 cups
- turmeric powder – 1 heaped teaspoon
- amchoor powder (dried green mango) – 1 level teaspoon
- garlic – 3-4 cloves, peeled and crushed
- onion – 1 small onion, chopped
- ginger – either 0.5 teaspoon powder, or a half inch piece fresh, crushed to a paste
- bay leaf – 1
- salt: about 1.5 teaspoons, or to taste (kosher)

Bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer, cover the pot, and let it simmer for about 30 minutes to an hour, until the lentils are thoroughly cooked, but not mushy.

Meanwhile, prepare the “tempering” mixture. It will take about 10-15 minutes to prepare, so you can start working on it about 15 minutes before the lentils are cooked.

In a large frying pan, melt about 1/2 or 2/3 of a stick of butter. When the butter is hot, start adding stuff in the following order:

1. add half a teaspoon of cumin seeds, fry for about 30 seconds until the seeds start to crackle and pop and turn slightly darker. Don’t burn them.

2. add one medium chopped onion, fry it while stirring frequently, until the onion changes to a golden brown color. This is different from typical onion-frying instructions, which tell you to fry until it becomes transparent. You are not frying to extract onion flavor (it’s already there in the lentils from the other onion which you added to them). You are frying to caramelize the onions, to get the sweetish-caramelized-fried-onion flavor, so make sure they’re golden brown.

3. meanwhile, in a small bowl, mix these spices – 1 level teaspoon of red chili powder, 1 level teaspoon of ground cumin, 1 level teaspoon of ground coriander, 1 pinch of asafoetida powder. These are all dry powders, so put them in a small cup or bowl and mix them up. Then, after the onions have finished frying and turned golden brown, dump all these mixed spices into the frying pan.

4. Continue to fry for a while, stirring constantly to prevent the spices from sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning. At this point, you might want to turn the heat down to medium (if you had it on high while frying the onions), just to be safe. If it looks like there is any danger of burning the spices, have some water handy, and add a teaspoon or so to prevent burning. But they won’t burn if you turn the heat down to medium and stir constantly.

5. Fry until the oil starts to separate from the spice/onion mix. This can take anywhere from a minute to 5-6 minutes, depending on how hot your stove is, and whether there was any moisture from the onions remaining in the pan before you added the spices.

6. When the spices have fried, add half a cup of diced tomatoes (canned are fine). Continue to fry until the tomatoes lose their moisture and the oil starts to separate again, which could take another 5 minutes or so.

Bringing Everything Together

Now you are ready to combine the cooked lentils and the tempered spices. Remove the bay leaf from the lentils if it bothers you. Then dump the lentils (with cooking liquid and all) into the frying pan with the spices. Mix everything well. Reduce the heat to simmer, cover the frying pan with a lid, and let simmer for 5 minutes. Then turn off the heat, and let the frying pan sit on the stove for another 5-10 minutes before serving. If you like cilantro, you can sprinkle some fresh chopped cilantro on top, just before serving.

Dal is typically served over a bed of rice, usually basmati rice in North India, or shorter/stickier rice in South India. But it can be eaten with almost anything – Indian style “roti” or “paratha”, “nan”, etc.

Other Spices

Here are a few spices that I don’t use for dal, but some other people do.

1. Cardamom and Cloves: they sort of go together, if you add one, you usually add the other as well. If you were to add these, you’d use 4-5 green cardamom pods (cracked open) and 5-6 cloves. They can be added to the spice mix which goes in the frying pan, after the onions have finished frying. They can add subtle flavors, but I think they’re more useful for other Indian dishes, and other dals. Brown lentils have a more robust, earthy flavor, and don’t really need either of these.

2. Mace (known in Indian groceries as “Javitri”). This is sort of like nutmeg (in fact, it comes from the same plant), but with a milder flavor. Again, I would probably use it for a lighter and creamier dal, not for this recipe.

3. Fenugreek (known in Indian groceries as “methi”). This is actually not a bad thing to add. It has a characteristic smell, which will be more dominant than the actual flavor. A pinch or two of fenugreek added to the spice mix won’t hurt, and may possibly improve the taste for some people. Fun fact: fenugreek has been used for millenia by people all over the world, as a galactogogue – something that increases milk production in lactating women. Unlike some folk remedies, it actually works.

4. Carom Seeds (known as “ajwain” in Indian groceries). These are more common in South Indian style dals. I never add them. They have a flavor like thyme, only more powerful. You never, ever add them directly to the food. If you use them, use a small amount (1/4 teaspoon to start with), and fry them well in oil to temper them and make them milder.

5. Black Pepper and Garam Masala – These are both added to increase the “spiciness” of the dish. I don’t add either. Black pepper makes food hotter, and this dal is plenty hot enough with the powdered red chili anyway. Garam Masala is a mix of spices, many of which are already added separately in this recipe, and not needed. If you do add either, the best way would be at the end. Do not fry either black pepper or garam masala. Instead, when you add the cooked dal to the fried onions and spice mix at the end, add both or either of these directly to the food. They don’t need to be cooked.

Some Variations

Although dal with rice is very yummy (and healthy!) and can be eaten often, sometimes you will want to vary it a bit. Fortunately, brown lentils go well with a lot of stuff, so it’s easy to vary the recipe by adding something to it.

I usually add potatoes or spinach (one or the other, not both). For potatoes, use a low starch potato like yukon golds, which hold their shape after cooking. Take two medium potatoes (for the amounts in this recipe, which has 1 cup of raw lentils), peel them, and dice them into fairly small pieces. Add them directly to the lentils at the start, and cook along with them.

If you’re using spinach, take a pound of leaf or chopped spinach, and cook it along with the lentils. You might think that this is overcooking the spinach, since the lentils can easily cook for 45 minutes or an hour before they are done, while this is way too long for spinach. But remember, this is an Indian dish, and the purpose of the spinach is mainly to thicken the dal gravy and impart a flavor, so it works well this way.

How to Eat Dal

Most Indians eat dal with rice (preferably basmati), and that’s probably my favorite way to eat it as well. However, dal is very versatile, and there are plenty of other uses:

1. With bread, in a sandwich. If you have a sandwich grilling machine, leftover dal makes an excellent grilled sandwich. Take 2 slices of bread, butter each on one side, and put some dal in the middle (non-buttered side). Grill in a sandwich maker, or frying pan.

2. In salads. Cold dal goes great with salads. Just make sure it’s not watery, and that you adjust the amount based on the spiciness. You don’t want it overwhelming the salad.

3. With pasta. If I have leftover dal, I sometimes make a pasta sauce out of it. Warm the dal in a frying pan over medium heat. The dal should be fairly dry, so drain it first if it’s too watery. Add about a cup of sour cream per cup of cooked dal, stir until everything is well mixed and warm. Great with shell pasta or macaroni.

Finally, a note on the consistency of dal. If you follow the recipe exactly as described, you’ll have some water in the dal at the end. Remember, dal thickens when it stands, so you’ll end up with less water than you can see at the end of cooking.

This is actually perfect, if you’re planning to eat the dal with rice. Since rice is also dry, the moisture in the dal is a welcome addition. However, if you want to make a grilled sandwich out of the dal, or add it to pasta or salads, you might want drier dal. You can do this in two ways, either reduce the water in the recipe by up to one cup, or else take the lid off the pot during the final 10 minutes of cooking, and let some of the water evaporate. I prefer the second method, but it’s up to you.

Why would you want to do this?

Because you’re using Windows. Because file fragmentation is a problem with every version of Windows, and it inexorably slows down your computer the longer you use it. Because browser caches are some of the highest file activity regions on your disk, which means they make the disk fragment very quickly. You don’t want your operating system or programs disks to be fragmented that fast, do you? So you make a separate scratch disk, just a tiny one, and place all browser caches and other fast changing files there.

Except that unlike Firefox or Internet Explorer, Chrome doesn’t let you choose the browser cache size or location. Instead, it dumps it right on your OS disk, which is about the worst place to have a browser cache.

Here’s how you can change the location of Chrome’s cache, despite the laziness of the programmers. What you do is manually create a directory for the cache on a disk of your choice. Then you set up a symbolic link from the default Chrome cache location to this new directory you’ve created. Chrome still thinks it’s dumping files in its default location, but the files are really going to a different disk.

Step by Step Instructions (Vista and Windows 7)

1. Shut down Chrome if it’s open. Now open Task Manager and look under the Processes tab to make sure there is no Chrome process running. This is necessary because even after shutting down the browser, the process often continues to run for a while to do housekeeping tasks. If it’s running, it will have locked the files you need to move, so the process won’t work. Make absolutely sure it’s not running.

2. Next, open Windows Explorer, navigate to where you want the cache to go, and make a directory there for the Chrome cache. In my case, I made a directory called “Chrome Cache and Profile” on drive S, as shown in the picture below.

3. Next, navigate to where Chrome stores its user profile. This will usually be:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data

Move the entire “User Data” directory to the other drive, and make it a subdirectory of the new directory you just created in the previous step. So in my case, I moved it from the default location listed above to S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data.

4. Now open an elevated command prompt. This means that you right-click on the command prompt icon in the Start Menu, and choose “Run as Administrator”. In the command prompt window, enter the command:

mklink /J “C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data” “S:\Chrome Cache and Profile\User Data”

Make sure you replace {username} with your own username, and change the directories as appropriate in your case. The quotes around the directory names are necessary, so leave them there.

That’s it. You’ve created a symbolic link from the default location to the new location of the User Data directory. Because you used the “/J” switch, Windows created what’s called a “junction”, which Chrome can’t see, so it continues to think that the directory hasn’t been moved, and proceeds as usual.

Note that if you did exactly like I described above, you’ve not only moved the Chrome cache, but the entire User Data directory, which also contains stuff like cookies, bookmarks, etc. If you don’t want to move the rest of this stuff over, dig deeper into the User Data subdirectory, and locate the cache subdirectory, which will be:

… User Data\Default\Cache

In that case, you could just make the symbolic link at that directory level, rather than at the User Data level. It’s up to you.

If you’re using Windows XP or Windows 2000

Windows XP and Windows 2K have the ability to make symbolic links but don’t come with a command line tool to make them. So if you’re using either of these two operating systems, you’ll need to download a tool to make them. Microsoft Technet offers Junction, which is a tiny utility that lets you add symbolic links in either XP or 2000.

The command would be:

junction C:\path-to-directory\User Data “S:\path-to-directory\User Data”

Make sure you fill in the proper paths to the source and linked directories, and also note that the second set of quotes is required.

Other Methods

Some people use a different method for changing the cache location, which is to start Chrome with an argument pointing to a separate directory. For example, if you wanted the cache to be located in S:\junk, you could make a shortcut to start Chrome with the command line:

C:\path-to-chrome-executable\chrome-exe –user-data-dir=s:\junk

This would work, but there are problems because a browser isn’t always started from a shortcut. Many other applications often invoke the default browser to display HTML stuff. So if Chrome is started by some other application, or in any way other than through your shortcut, it will still dump files in the default location and not in your junk directory. For this reason, I prefer the symbolic link method.

I like the start button in Windows 7, specially the search feature and the ability to pin frequently used programs to both the start menu and the task bar (just right click the icon and choose “pin” or “unpin”). In Windows XP, I had all my programs on the start menu sorted into directories, so that it was easy to find any of them. I agree that the search feature makes this sort of redundant, but I am one of those people who can’t bear to see stuff just thrown into the “All Programs” menu without any attempt to organize it.

So I rearranged the programs in the All Programs list on the Start Menu to look more like XP. The image on the left shows the Start Menu, and the image on the right shows what happens when you click or hover over “All Programs”. As you can see, the programs have been arranged into directories, like “Communications”, “Utilities”, etc. This makes it much easier for me to find programs, and to keep track exactly what I have on this machine.

Here’s how to do it. Like Windows XP, Windows 7 also keeps program short cut locations in two places, depending on whether the program was installed just for the current user or for all users. However, the two locations are different in Windows 7.

Programs installed for All Users now go to:

 C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.

Programs installed for your user account only go to:

 C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.

Since most programs are installed by default for all users, the easier way is to go to the first location and make directories there. I typically make the directories “Office” (for MS Office, and related stuff such as font managers, scanning and OCR, etc.), “Viewers and Players” (for anything used purely for viewing a file, such as video and DVD players, audio and mp3 players, file viewers such as PDF, XPS, Lit viewers, etc.), “Communication” (for all web browsers, IRC, instant messengers, fax or terminal apps, etc.), and “Utilities” (for a bunch of miscellaneous stuff). Each directory can be nested, for example “Utilities” has nested subdirectories containing programs related to file/disk compression, disk operations (such as defrag, mounting virtual volumes, etc.), system (such as CPU-Z, Sisoft Sandra, Memtest and Prime95, etc.), hardware (such as mouse or keyboard settings, CoreTemp, Speedfan, etc.), and security (such as virus scanner and firewall, packet sniffer, Spybot, etc.).

Not only does it make easier to find programs, because you know exactly where to go instead of scanning a long list, it also makes it very easy to tell which programs you have installed. I know there are other ways of doing this, such as using the search feature, or checking Control Panel for installed programs. But I like stuff organized. And after a while, I tend to have so many programs installed that there’s no way I’d remember their names to search, nor at times even recognize their function if I happened to see the name in Control Panel. But if I have the Start Menu organized, then if I see a listing such as Start Menu > Programs > Video > VirtualDub, then I instantly recognize that VirtualDub was that program I downloaded off the web six months ago to edit videos.

I recently switched from Windows XP to Windows 7. This was a big switch for me, since I had avoided Vista, so I went pretty much from an 8 year old 32 bit operating system, to the newest 64 bit OS from Microsoft. As you can imagine, it has been a learning experience.

My main reason for the switch was to get more memory. Some of my applications – Photoshop and 3ds Max in particular; use massive amounts of memory. I was living under the 32-bit OS limitation, which meant about 3.4GB of usable memory. This was not enough. Switching to 64 bit Win 7 has allowed me to expand the system RAM to 16 GB.

The transition has not been very smooth, though I don’t blame Windows 7 for that. Since I never bothered with Vista, I have skipped a step and am learning the changes of two versions simultaneously. So it’s mostly my own inexperience.

I plan to blog a few of the problems I encountered. Perhaps they’ll help someone else going through the same thing, or other people might have suggestions or advice for me.

I have some basic recipes in this blog – here’s how to cook rice, and here’s one for making Indian style black beans. It’s my attempt to make cooking approachable to someone completely unfamiliar with cooking. This is the state in which I found myself some years ago, when I first moved out of the parental home and started living alone. Cooking was a mystery to me, but food is very important, and I love home-cooked food. So I had to approach this completely on my own, with nothing but a few cookbooks and some long distance advice from my mother.

I am a fairly good cook now, but I prefer recipes that need little kitchen time and few ingredients. I don’t care if it takes 4 hours to cook, so long as I don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes in the kitchen. So in this blog I only write about stuff that is easy to make and doesn’t require a large commitment. Here’s my recipe for pork/rice with paprika. This is easily a main course for any meal.

Ingredients

• pork tenderloin: 2 pounds, defrosted
• rice: 1.5 cups, extra long grain, preferably basmati
• powdered paprika: about 2 heaped teaspoons
• powdered cumin: 1 teaspoon
• garlic powder: half a teaspoon
• ginger powder: half a teaspoon
• freshly cracked black pepper: half a teaspoon
• salt: to taste (I usually add 1-1.5 teaspoons)
• 2-3 medium onions, chopped
• 2-3 large green bell peppers, seeds removed, and chopped
• a couple teaspoons of oil: olive oil or canola
• 1 – 1.5 sticks of butter

Method

Start by turning on the oven to 450 degrees, and let the rice soak in a large pot with at least 2 inches of cold water covering it.

In a small bowl, mix all the dry spices and salt. Add enough oil to make a paste. Canola oil is best because of the high oven temperature, though you can use olive oil if you wish. Wash the pork tenderloins in cold running water, pat them completely dry with paper towels. Usually, tenderloins are sold in pairs, so a 2 pound package will have 2 tenderloins of approximately 1 pound each.

Put them in a roasting pan, and spoon the spice/oil mixture over them carefully. Spread the spice/oil paste until it completely covers the surface of the meat, making sure to baste both sides. Then adjust the tenderloins in the roasting pan so that they are about an inch apart, and the fat side is up. Pork tenderloins have very little fat, but they have a silvery membrane with a tiny bit of fat in it. You don’t have to remove the membrane, just put them with whichever side has more of the silvery stuff facing up. Make sure the tenderloins aren’t poking over the edge of the pan – if they are too long for the pan, fold the thinner end under itself so they fit within the pan.

After the oven has preheated to 450 F (the amount of time this can take varies with the oven, it will be at least 15 minutes if not more), put the pan with the tenderloins on a rack in the center of the oven, uncovered. Set the timer for 15 minutes at 450 F, to give the meat time to brown. After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 250 F. Continue cooking until the internal temperature of the meat reaches about 150 F. This usually takes about an hour at 250 F (not counting the first 15 minutes at 450 F). Don’t cook any longer than an hour at 250 F, or the tenderloins will dry out — remember, tenderloins have very little fat and can easily get dry if you overcook them. After they have cooked, remove the pan from the oven and let it sit on a counter for at least 15 minutes before messing with it any further.

While the tenderloins are cooking, cook the rice. Make sure it’s soaked for at least 30 minutes (45 minutes is better). Then wash the rice in 2-3 changes of cold water. Drain the water, then add a measured 2 cups of cold water to it. Bring it to a boil, then turn the heat to low, cover the pot, and let it cook for 25 minutes. After it’s cooked, remove it from the stove and let it cool down – with the lid on. Do not remove the lid to speed up cooling. It should be allowed to cool for at least 15 minutes before it’s used further.

Melt the butter in a large skillet (has to be large, eventually the rice will be dumped here as well, later in the recipe). Add the chopped onions and chopped green bell peppers, and let them fry in the hot butter until they are slightly brown.

At this point, you could add other spices to the frying onions if you wished. I sometimes add crushed dry red pepper, and some Indian spices, but they are not necessary.

If you time things right, the onions and peppers will finish frying about 15 minutes after the pork tenderloins are done and the rice is cooked. It’s important that both the tenderloins and the rice be allowed to cool on a counter for at least 15 minutes after removing from the stove or oven, before you use them further in the recipe.

Cut the tenderloins into small cubes (I prefer them really small, like quarter-inch cubes), and toss them in the pot with the onions and green peppers. There will be some fat that has drained out into the roasting pan. It’s not a lot, and it’s very flavorful. If you like, you can drain this fat directly into the skillet with the onions as well. If you’re trying to cut down on fat, oh well, don’t bother. Stir everything around for a minute or two.

Finally, dump the rice into the skillet. Turn the heat down to medium-low, stir occasionally to mix the rice in with the meat and fried onions/peppers/spices. The goal is the mix everything thoroughly, to coat the rice grains with butter from the pan so they don’t stick together. It’s now ready to serve.

Just before serving, I like to make a final check on the salt. If you had about 1.5 teaspoons of salt in the original spice rub used for the meat, and if you didn’t toss the liquid that drained out into the roasting pan, but added it to the skillet along with the rice, then you should have enough salt in the prepared dish. But if you tossed the roasting liquid or didn’t have enough salt to begin with, you might want to add a bit more to the skillet at this time. At any rate, you must check for salt before serving, very likely it will need some adjustment. The easiest way to ruin a dish, specially a meat dish, is to not have enough salt. Salt brings out the flavors in meat. I also add some chopped cilantro right before serving, but that’s optional. Mix it all up and serve hot.

Makes about 3-4 servings for hungry adult males. More, if you’re a girl.

Notes

This is very much “comfort food”, which I identify as basically any form of meat (roasted is more “comforty”) plus a starch, suitably salted. The starch could be rice or potatoes, both have their uses. This sort of food has a very primal appeal to our taste buds, possibly going back to when our ancestors first discovered the miracle of cooking, roasting meats and roots at their campfires. Onions and garlic and their botanical kin were probably among the first flavors to be added to food. This is an extra dimension that food holds for me, to be able to use it as a means to relate to our ancestors, to see and smell and taste what they did. Historical food has the same attraction, which is why I sometimes try out historical recipes from Roman times, or medieval food.

Like most stuff with spices, this can be easily refrigerated. If you are cooking for one, simply divide it up into portions in ziplock bags. It easily lasts 2-4 days in the refrigerator. Just nuke it in a microwave before serving.

Learning how to add salt is one of the earliest cooking skills that needs to be mastered. Unless you are following a recipe exactly, you’ll have to make a decision about how much salt to add. This is not a trivial decision; it’s one of the most important things you can do to enhance or ruin the flavor of food.

There is no exact science to it. Use good salt. Iodized salt sucks. I prefer kosher salt for general use, sea salt for specific recipes. Start by tasting whatever you intend to salt, to get a “baseline flavor”. Add salt sparingly, in steps. You can always add more, but taking it away is harder. Don’t dump it on to one spot in the food, sprinkle it evenly across all the food, then mix thoroughly and taste it. Does it taste better than the “baseline” taste? How does it taste different? You sort of have to learn this for yourself, because no one can explain to anyone else what “properly salted” ought to taste like. You have to experience it yourself. Adding salt in steps, a little bit at a time, then checking the taste, is the surest way to learn. After some time, you’ll be able to taste the food once, eyeball the amount of food, and know how much salt to add without measuring a damn thing. But it takes a little bit of practice. To me, the ideal amount of salt is that which makes the food just short of salty. Meaning, I shouldn’t be able to taste the salt specifically (unless I’m eating potato chips), but the flavors in the food should be maximally developed by the salt. You may prefer a bit more, but you will very likely not prefer less. Just experiment a bit and see what you like.

This line of thought was provoked by an article I read talking about the importance of cooking food in the development of modern humans.

I’ve come across a number of articles that talk about the importance of a change in diet in human evolution. The theory is that human diet suddenly improved dramatically, and this marked increase in the availability of calories and nutrients was responsible for the growth of the brain. The improvement in diet is generally tied to either the switch from a primarily herbivorous diet to meat eating, and/or to cooking.

Both make sense in terms of calories and nutrients. Meat is certainly a more densely packed source of nutrients than plants. And cooking increases the bioavailability of nutrients, as it breaks up cell walls and structures that hinder our digestive enzymes from reaching the goodies inside cells.

Of course, this still leaves us without an actual mechanism. Evolution requires heritable changes in the genome. These happen largely by  accident, though their selection depends upon what is advantageous to survival and reproduction. At this point, we don’t know very well exactly which genes are responsible for the differences in our brains, say compared to chimpanzees. We don’t know when these changes first appeared. We don’t know what connection they have to an improved diet.

So one part of evolution, that which is related to the genomic changes responsible for our large brains, is mostly unknown to us. Therefore, I think that ideas such as the change-in-diet leading to big brains scenario, tend to ignore the unknowns and focus only on the natural selection side of evolution. They make certain assumptions, for example, that a large brain will be selected, because it enhances survival and the chance to reproduce. This can be somewhat justified if one thinks about  it (large brains, specially the growth of the forebrain is what allows us to make long range plans, analyze complex problems, etc.), and also there is fossil evidence that shows that in fact it was selected. Then there is the assumption that a large brain requires a nutrient rich diet, which can also be justified on the basis of the caloric expenditure in maintaining a large brain. A commonly offered statistic is that for a person at rest, of the amount of energy required to stay alive, the brain uses 20%, or 1/5th. The brain is obviously much less than a fifth of the body in terms of mass, yet it uses an extraordinary amount of energy, in proportion. If you keep the total mass of an organism constant, but increase the size of the brain in proportion to the rest of its body, then such an organism will require a more nutrient rich diet. In effect, you have increased its energy requirements, but have not given it bigger jaws to chew food, a bigger gut to digest it, bigger claws to hunt with, etc.

In fact, both anatomy and the fossil record show that humans became less capable of acquiring food as their brains grew, if we look solely at such biological markers such as tooth/jaw size. Homo erectus had smaller jaws than his ancestors, which would have made it harder for him to grind foods down and extract the most energy from them. Our gut became smaller, and less capable of extracting energy from plants. Our muscles became weaker, less capable of overpowering other animals through brute strength alone.
One would think that the timing of these changes would have some correlation with our behavior or change in diet, or the control of fire (for cooking). Unfortunately, the timing is much harder to pin down. No one really knows when humans first learned to control fire. Homo erectus, with his small jaws, evolved 2 million years ago, but the evidence for the widespread use of fire by humans at this time is scanty at best. Most anthropologists don’t believe that fire was used by humans this early, at least, not in any regular, controlled manner, such as would be needed for cooking. Soft tissues don’t fossilize well, so while we can study humans and chimps today and recognize that the chimp gut is much more suited for eating raw plant material than the human gut, we don’t really know when we evolved our more carnivorous digestive systems.

This leaves a chicken versus egg conundrum. Which came first, the big brain or the adaptations to the big brain lifestyle? Which was responsible for the other? This may be a silly question on the face of it, because obviously one is useless without the other. What’s the point of having a modern jaw or gut if you don’t also have the bigger brains that give you the means for filling that gut with food? On the other hand, how do you sustain that brain and give it energy without eating a more nutrient-rich diet?

So it seems that speaking in terms of absolute causality, one thing causing the other is somewhat simplistic. They probably both happened together, one reinforcing the other, and happened gradually. We didn’t go suddenly from a chimp-sized brain to a human-sized one, as we know from the fossil record. There are many intermediate stages of the brain growing progressively larger. The change in diet, therefore, and the behavioral changes accompanying both the change in diet and the larger brain, must have happened concomitantly.

It’s interesting at this point to bring in the factor we’ve ignored all along – that there must be genomic changes that produce all the anatomical differences – jaws, teeth, gut and brains. These genomic changes also need to be accounted for, and tied into the selection mechanism. A high nutrient diet is obviously not enough; otherwise large cats such as lions and tigers would be smarter than us. They might not cook, but they eat enough high nutrient food to be able to support bigger brains. They have evolved as long as us, why didn’t they learn to cook,  why didn’t they evolve bigger brains?

This brings us back to selection, and fuzzier areas of anthropology such as social behavior and interactions, etc. We have bred dogs for a few thousand years, for example, and we have breeds of dogs today that look very different from each other. Not only is there is a difference in size and color of the fur, but there are also differences in the brain. Some breeds of dogs are smarter than others. We did this by a fairly simple process of selection – pick dogs that have the traits you want, breed them to produce a new generation, keep selecting for the desirable traits and reinforcing them through successive generations. Even with no knowledge of DNA or even Mendellian genetics, our ancestors were able to do this for dogs. We have also bred cows, pigs, goats, sheep, etc. – the modern domesticated forms of which are quite different from their wild ancestors. Not to mention the similar and parallel process of breeding food plants.

So even without postulating major and sudden changes in the genome, those which suddenly introduced a “game changer” mutation so far as the brain was concerned, it’s possible to see that humans could have become progressively smarter simply if the natural variation in smartness among a population was selectively reinforced over generations, the same way we breed dogs. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can breed dogs to a human level of intelligence, there may well be certain required mutations, and these have to happen first. You can’t select for what doesn’t exist. But at a point where we don’t fully understand the nature of these key mutations, we can’t really talk about how essential they were. Perhaps they could happen in other species too. Perhaps there are a dozen different ways to get the same result, and if mutation “A” doesn’t happen, mutation “X” can provide the similar benefits. I’d rather not speculate about this until we have more information to speculate with.

So I think such articles (as the one referenced above, which talks about the relation of diet to human evolution) speculate about the remainder of the problem, the mutually reinforcing effect of the selection of traits which are part of the natural variability of a population, and the behavioral consequences of selecting such traits. You set a species on a certain path, on which a greater reliance on the brain cuts out some options while expanding others, and the options that are promoted require even greater brain power to work well. It’s interesting to speculate what put us on this path, why we seem to be the only species on it. What set of circumstances came together at the right time for this to happen. The drying climate and spread of grasslands, the change from an arboreal to a savannah type lifestyle, the appearance of bipedality at this critical juncture when these big new ecological niches suddenly opened up, the development of more and more hand flexibility with a greater range of movement in the opposable thumb (compared to other primates), the social interactions, etc. There were so many changes happening at roughly the same time to the same species, somewhere this set us off on a path to bigger brains.

The article that set me off on this line of thought, of course, talks about something narrower. It talks about the relationship of cooking to gender roles, the development of the male-female bond, which is marriage today. This seems less an evolutionary question than an anthropological one. The evolutionary part is the importance of cooked food in the development of our brains, which I have speculated about. The anthropology part is relating this importance to something else, namely male-female pairing. I am not qualified to speculate about the anecdotal evidence offered about some primitive societies where food is more important than marital fidelity. Nor do I have any evidence that women tended the home fires, though it seems likely if men were the hunters and spent less time at the home camp. This seems to be supported by fossil evidence, such as hunting related injuries, as well as by anthropological evidence. You can speculate that the importance of cooked food was critical enough to shape our behavior patterns in other ways, such as pair-bonding between males and females. But just because a theory seems to make sense doesn’t mean it’s true, so I guess we’ll need to see some more physical evidence before placing much value on it.

I remember watching the TV sci-fi series “Time Trax” when it was first aired in 1993. Back then, I thought it was great. It lasted for two seasons, about 40 episodes. The plot line involved a cop (played by Dale Midkiff) from the year 2193 who travels back in time, pursuing criminals from his own period who escaped into the past using a time machine built by an evil scientist. His job is to send them “back” to 2193.

Recently, I watched the series again, and was struck by how silly it was. I got to thinking about how attitudes change with time. Of course, I was much younger when I saw the original TV broadcasts. But I didn’t think my tastes had changed that much. I remain, as I was back in 1993, a great fan of science fiction.

Upon reflection, I can understand why I liked it so much back then. The theme, while not original, is still interesting — how someone from the future would live in and adapt to a world he only knows from history books. I’ve thought about this myself, because of my own fascination with history. Humans haven’t changed fundamentally in thousands of years; they still have the same desires and needs, feel the same emotions, and relate to each other in much the same ways. But social norms can change dramatically over time. If we try to put ourselves in the mindset of an age not so long ago when slavery was accepted, there was marked social stratification, and church doctrine dictated what was considered normal and acceptable, we feel a disconnect. Such a society would be at the same time familiar, and very unfamiliar.

So this was one of the things that appealed to me about the show, especially since the series didn’t get bogged down in the nitty-gritty sci-fi details of time travel or temporal paradoxes. Instead, it blithely ignored them and was mainly an entertainment vehicle, focusing on social issues and action. The other thing I really liked was the protagonist’s computer. This was a device that looked like a credit card, but was really an incredible AI with a very human personality. The computer could present itself as a person (a holographic projection, played by Elizabeth Alexander), and was a far more interesting personality than Dale Midkiff, the hero of the series.

Other than that, it was light hearted entertainment. Lots of action, chases, some romance as the hero flirts with various women he meets in different episodes (all very chaste and G-rated). Nothing special, but pretty good fun.

So I was surprised when I watched it again, 16 years later. The plot line is still interesting, though less novel for having been rehashed dozens of times over the years. The computer is still great. Dale Midkiff, on the other hand, stands the test of time very poorly. He now appears bumbling, inept, and somewhat stupid. He appears to get through each episode largely as a matter of luck. He talks too much, sometimes at inopportune moments, when he should really be shooting the villain rather than pausing to make a speech. His emotional self-control is about par with that of an adolescent. His arguments with Elizabeth Alexander (the computer) become too monotonous and repetitive (the same emotion versus logic stuff that was overdone by Kirk and Spock over dozens of episodes of Star Trek).

To be honest, he doesn’t start out that way. In the pilot and the first couple of episodes, he is much darker, sterner. However, as the series proceeds, his personality changes into basically an overly-politically-correct, cliché-mouthing, self-indulgent, relentlessly upbeat caricature of his early self. Sometimes you just have to look away from the screen for a moment, he is so annoying.

Some episodes were particularly enlightening. “Beautiful Songbird” was basically unwatchable for me. It’s about an up and coming country singer (played by Kassie Wesley/DePaiva, who is a soap actress these days), who is destined for greatness. She acquires an admirer from the future (who knows her future), one of the fugitives that Dale Midkiff must send back to the future to face his crimes. This was unwatchable for several reasons, but mostly because I am unable to tolerate country music anymore. The episode spends a lot of time just showing her singing. I had to mute those segments just to get by.

I didn’t know I hated country music that much. I mean, I can watch Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson at times. I don’t throw up; I actually enjoy some of their songs, though it’s probably partly because I only listen to them very infrequently. But aside from these very few and specific instances, I guess I have lost my tolerance for whiny, waily voices.

The special effects were about par with Star Trek, which was a good 20+ years earlier. Overall, it had the feel of a cheaply made TV show. In many ways, it lost the initial magic it had for me. But it brought home one point. Sci-Fi shouldn’t have to self-consciously focus on the sci-fi aspect of itself. Sometimes it’s best when the sci-fi parts are purely incidental, and the show is really about the characters. It reminds me of Firefly, another of my favorite sci-fi TV shows. Yes, there were spaceships, but for the most part, those guys still used 20^th century firearms, moved through recognizable landscapes rather than super-futuristic cities, and even rode horses and covered wagons. It was the actors that made the show, the focus on how people might relate among themselves, in societies with very different rules from those we are used to. Their society is kind of a fragmented anarchy, similar to the frontier in the old west. People migrating fast enough that you can’t impose any uniformity of law or culture on them, fragmenting according to their beliefs into very different and interesting societies.

Time Trax is nowhere near as complex or entertaining as Firefly, but it has some of the same attraction of seeing someone explore a place or time foreign to his own, discover new societies which may seem strange to him, some small sense of wonder at the diversity of it all.

Black beans, or turtle beans as they are sometimes called, are my favorite kind of beans. I was in Miami for a while, and ate a lot of Cuban black beans and rice, which is delicious. I like the beans + rice combination, since it’s a great protein source, and the beans and rice complement each other in terms of providing all the essential amino acids. Also, it makes a change from my usual high-meat diet. If you are vegetarian, this could be one of your main sources of protein.

Eventually, I learned to cook them at home. Since I like my food a lot spicier, I adapted the recipe to use a mix of Indian spices. This is a bit odd, because black beans are not common in India. But it’s very tasty.

Ingredients

• dry black beans: 0.5 pound
• chopped onions: 1 cup (you can increase this to 1.5 or 2 cups)
• garlic: 4-5 small cloves, crushed
• diced tomatoes: 0.5 cup (canned is fine)
• crushed, dried red pepper flakes: 1 tablespoon (or more, if you like)
• salt: to taste (I would add about 1.5 teaspoons)
• coriander powder: 1.5 teaspoons
• cumin powder: 1 teaspoon
• turmeric powder: 1 teaspoon
• asafoetida: a pinch (about 1/8 teaspoon or a bit less)
• dried green mango powder (amchoor): 1 teaspoon
• vegetable oil: about 1/3 cup (I use canola oil)
• chopped fresh cilantro leaves (optional)

Please note that “teaspoon” or “tablespoon” mean a level teaspoon or tablespoon. Don’t leave it partially empty and don’t heap it.

Method

Soak the beans overnight. This is very important, not optional. Use at least 8 cups of water for the half pound of dry beans in this recipe. Overnight means at least 8 hours, though 10-12 hours would be better. If your kitchen is very hot, you can put the soaking beans in the lowest compartment of your refrigerator to prevent fermentation. For average temperatures (around 75 F), this is not necessary, just cover it and leave it at room temperature overnight.

After they have soaked, wash the beans several times in cold water. You’ll notice that the water comes out black. This is stuff you want to wash away, so wash the beans in at least 5-6 changes of water to get rid of the black stuff. Or you can just pour them in a large sieve or colander and run fresh cold water through them for a few minutes, while stirring with a finger.

Put the beans together with half the chopped onions, salt, turmeric, dried green mango powder, garlic, diced tomatoes and 6 cups of fresh cold water in a pot. Cover the pot with a well-fitting lid, bring it to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for at least 2 – 2.5 hours, until the beans are thoroughly cooked.

When the beans are almost done, heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok – it doesn’t matter what sort of pan you use so long as it’s big enough to hold the cooked beans, which you will add later. Toss in a pinch of asfoetida and the remaining half of the chopped onion. Fry the onion until golden brown. Add the crushed red pepper, coriander and cumin, and continue to fry over medium heat for 1 minute longer. Pour the cooked beans (including all the cooking liquid in the pot) into the frying pan. Turn the heat to low, mix everything together thoroughly. At this point, you can add the chopped cilantro leaves if you’re using them. Some people hate cilantro, so it’s optional. Continue stirring for a minute or two, then cover the frying pan and turn off the heat. Let it sit for at least 5-10 minutes over the still-warm stove before serving.

Prepare the rice separately. I prefer Indian style Basmati rice. Here’s how to cook Basmati rice. Serve the beans over a bed of rice.

Notes

Most cookbooks say that you shouldn’t cook beans with salt or acids, because salt and acids increase the cooking time. This recipe calls for both (salt, acid in the diced tomatoes). I personally think that adding the salt and diced tomato at the beginning improves the flavor, and I don’t mind cooking the beans for 2.5 hours instead of 1 hour, to compensate. If you want, you can leave out the salt and diced tomatoes. Cook the beans until tender (will probably take 1 to 1.15 hours), then add the salt and diced tomatoes and cook for another 15 minutes to let the flavors mix in.

You can get all the spices used in this recipe at an Indian grocery. The “dried green mango powder” is known as “amchoor”. This is used for giving the food a slightly acidic taste. It’s not the same as adding lime juice: it’s a bit sweeter and has a richer flavor. You can use either amchoor or imli powder (imli is dried tamarind pods, also used for the same purpose as amchoor, and also found in Indian groceries). If there’s no Indian grocery handy, you can leave out the amchoor and asfoetida. The beans won’t taste exactly the same, but they will still be delicious. The rest of the spices are easily found at any grocery.

If you are in a hurry, you can also use canned black beans, or use the quick soak method. Canned beans do not require soaking: just drain the liquid, wash the beans thoroughly in cold water, then add the other ingredients and start cooking. You might want to reduce the amount of water from 6 cups to 5 cups. Other than that, recipe is the same. Canned beans are not as tasty as dry beans that have been soaked. For the quick soak method, take the dry beans and add 8 cups of cold water. Put it on the stove and bring to a boil. Let it boil for 2 minutes (don’t walk away at this point, you have to be near the stove to make sure you don’t boil for longer than 2 minutes). Then turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let it sit for 2 hours. Then you can wash the beans in cold water and proceed with the rest of the recipe unchanged.

Variations

For a change, you can add other ingredients to the black beans. Two things that go specially well with black beans are potatoes and spinach. This is how I would add them:

1. Potatoes: I use low-starch potatoes that hold their shape while cooking. This means any kind of white or red potatoes, or perhaps Yukon Golds. You can peel them if you want. I don’t usually peel them, but I scrub them well in running water. Then chop them up into small pieces, about quarter inch cubes. You can add them directly to the beans during the last 45 minutes of cooking. Just turn the stove back to high, while stirring, and wait for everything to come to a boil again after adding the potatoes. Then turn the heat back down to simmer and continue cooking. An alternative is to pat the cubed potatoes dry, put them on a plate and microwave on high for about 2 – 3 minutes before adding them to the beans. This ensures that they are hot (and partially cooked), so the beans continue to simmer even after addition of the potatoes. In this case, I’d add them a bit later, perhaps 30 minutes before the beans are done.

2. Spinach: I would use a pound of chopped spinach. If it’s frozen, turn up the heat on the beans when there are 45 minutes left on the cooking time, and add the frozen spinach. Bring it to a quick boil, turn the heat back down to simmer, and continue cooking for the remainder of the time.

There are probably other things you could also add in place of potatoes or spinach, though in my experience, those two are best. Avoid green peas or corn or carrots, or anything with a sweet taste — it doesn’t blend with the other flavors. Chopped zucchini is good, so are cauliflower florets. Just add them at the appropriate time to ensure that they are properly cooked, erring on the side of slightly overcooking. Indian style vegetables are not supposed to be crunchy. You sort of want them to hold shape and not fall apart, but otherwise they should be quite soft.