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I’d like to start by saying that I am a great fan of Indian food, specially north Indian styles, such as Mughlai, Awadhi, Kashmiri, etc. I am lucky enough to live in a city which has lots of Indian restaurants, so it’s not hard to get Indian food. But since I also enjoy cooking, I don’t eat out that often, and prefer to make the same things at home.

North Indian rice is my favorite kind of rice – very long grains, not sticky or mushy, with a slightly nutty flavor. It goes well with almost any Indian curry, dals (lentils), or in rice dishes like biryani or pilaf. And it is so easy to make, but I see a lot of people mess it up for some reason, and end up with a mushy goo that looks and tastes horrible.

There is no single “right” way to cook north Indian style rice. Some people pre-soak, some don’t. Some add the rice to boiling water, some add cold water to the rice and let it all heat up together. Some people parboil the rice instead. Some start it off on the stovetop and finish it in the oven. All of these methods can produce excellent cooked rice, if done properly.

However, most of the time I use the method described below, because in my opinion it’s the easiest and it’s very hard to make mistakes when you use it. So here, without further ado, is how to cook north Indian rice.

Step One – Get the Right Kind of Indian Rice

There are dozens of varieties of rice eaten in India. For north Indian style cooking, you need to get Basmati rice, nothing else will do. You can apply these methods to other kinds of rice, as I mention later, but for now please forget that and just get Basmati rice.

Basmati is an extra-long grain fragrant rice with a slight nutty aroma, that comes from India. The best Basmati is from the foothills of the Himalayas (such as rice from Dehradun). Punjabi Basmati is also good. If you can, try to avoid American Basmati (Texmati), at least until you have tried Indian Basmati and can tell the difference in flavors.

Basmati comes in white grains (white Basmati) or golden – brownish grains (golden Basmati). White Basmati has more of the hull removed, and cooks faster. Again, if you’re new to cooking rice, stick to white Basmati, until you know how to cook it properly. Brown basmati is the same, except it takes longer to cook. I prefer white Basmati.

The better kinds of Basmati are aged. Aging decreases the moisture content of the grain, and improves the taste. Aging 1 – 2 years is typical for Basmati. This cooking method works for both aged and un-aged Basmati, with a slight difference which I’ll mention below.

Step Two – Pre Soak the Rice

This is a controversial topic. Some cookbooks recommend soaking, others don’t. It’s possible to cook good rice either way, but for this method, soaking is a must. If you don’t pre-soak and follow the rest of the recipe, you’ll end up with bad rice, because the rest of the recipe assumes the rice was pre-soaked.

Put the dry rice in a large pot, add cold water (about 3-4 times the volume of the rice) and let it sit at room temperature. I typically let it sit for 30 minutes to 1 hour, undisturbed. If you are using aged Basmati, you can soak for a bit less, but I’d still soak for about 20 – 30 minutes.

Step Three – Wash the Rice

You can wash the rice before or after the soaking. I do it after. When the rice has finished soaking, drain out the water. You can use a sieve or cheesecloth to drain if you want. I just tilt the pot and let the water drain out, using a cupped hand to prevent any rice from escaping. You don’t need to drain every last drop of water, just most of it.

Now add lots of cold water, stir the rice a couple times with your finger, and drain it again. Repeat this 3 – 4 times. Washing the rice in this way gets rid of loose starch around the rice grains, which will cause the grains to stick together unless it’s removed. Again, if you’re using aged Basmati, you can wash it fewer times, or even dispense with the washing. I’d wash it at least once anyway, it doesn’t hurt the rice.

Step Four – Cook the Rice

After the final wash, drain all the water. It doesn’t matter if a few drops remain, just not too much. Now add cold water for cooking. The general rule I follow is that I add 1.0 – 1.3 times the volume of water as the initial volume of dry rice. So for 1 cup of rice (measured when the rice was dry, before soaking), I would add 1 to 1.3 cups of water, depending on a few factors:

• If I drained it really well after the last wash (used a sieve or cheesecloth or colander), I would add more water, like 1.25 – 1.3 cups water per cup of dry rice. If I didn’t drain it so well, I’d adjust for that accordingly, by adding slightly less water.
• If you like you rice slightly chewy, add less water (1.0 -1.1 cups per cup of dry rice). If you like it softer and moister, add a bit more (1.2 – 1.3 cups per cup of dry rice).
• If the rice is aged 1+ years, add a bit less water. Just a tiny bit less.

Turn the stove to high heat and put the pot with the rice and water on it. Add some unsalted butter (about a tablespoon). Do not add salt or anything else. Bring it to a vigorous boil, stirring once or twice with a spoon to make sure the rice isn’t sticking to the bottom. Turn the heat down to simmer, put the lid on the pot, and let it simmer for about 25 minutes. Don’t open the pot during this time, don’t fuss with it at all. Just let it be.

After 25 minutes you can open the pot and test the rice. I usually pick off a couple grains of rice from the top with a fork, and taste them. If they’re done, remove the pot from the heat. If not, give it another few minutes. It can take 20 – 35 minutes to cook the rice, depending on the rice and your definition of “simmer”.

Step Five – Serve

After the rice has cooked, remove it from the stove, put the lid back on, and let it sit for at least 5 minutes. Then you can serve it. I take a fork and (gently!) scrape the top of the rice to loosen the grains, and then pour from the pot directly into a plate. Just keep scraping more of the rice loose with a fork and pouring until you’re done.

Some Extra Notes

Never, ever add more cold water to cooking rice, even if the rice appears dry. If you followed the recipe above, and check after say 20 minutes, you may find the rice not thoroughly cooked and the water all gone. Don’t worry, just put the lid back on and give it more time. If the heat is down to simmer, you can leave it for quite a while and it won’t burn. Check back at 35 minutes or so, and the rice should be done.

“Simmer” really means “simmer” – very low heat. Since stoves are different, you have to find out what the simmer setting is on your stove. Think of it this way: if you take a pot of plain tap water (with nothing added to it) and bring it to a rolling boil, then simmer would be the setting to which you could set your stove so that the surface of the water continues to gently steam, but isn’t bubbling. If you cook the rice at higher heat, you can turn it to mush. Or you can burn it at the bottom, making a mess of the pot. At “simmer” the rice is safe for a long time. I’ve accidentally cooked rice for as long as an hour, and it’s still quite edible. It gives you a wide safety range and allows you to stop cooking when the rice tastes right to you.

You can use the same method, with the exact same quantities of water for ordinary long grain rice, not just Basmati. Even the cheapo Riceland Extra Long Grain rice sold at most grocery stores (which isn’t Basmati, or even extra long grained – it’s just milled to make each grain thinner and look “long grained”) works well with this recipe. Each grain will be fluffy and separate. Of course, it won’t taste or smell the same as Basmati.

I saw a Pew survey today, comparing the views of scientists to the general public on a number of issues, including public policies, the role of government, current issues such as global warming and stem cell research and science funding.

A summary of the findings can be found here, and the full report can be downloaded (in PDF format) here. Many of the findings were expected:

• that scientists in general are more concerned about problems such as global warming and stem cell research;
• that scientists are more concerned than the general public about issues such as misinformation spread by activists against the use of vaccines, or the challenges to the teaching of evolution in classrooms by ideologically motivated agendas like creationism or intelligent design.

On the matter of politics, it didn’t surprise me that more scientists identify themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans, and that they do this in proportions more favorable to the Democrats than the general public. But the extent of this difference was a bit of a surprise, though it was borne out by more direct questions on the poll related to political ideology.

This interests me because I am a scientist, and I have somewhat libertarian beliefs. I am liberal on social issues, and more conservative on economic ones. Anecdotally, I know a fair number of other scientists who are also libertarian, though I know even more who are liberal. I just hadn’t realized how large this difference was until I saw this poll, and now I am trying to interpret the data to make some sense of the reasons.

First, here’s the self-reported party identification for scientists and the public at large, as well as their self-reported ideological identification. Note that in all graphs, scientists are represented by the red bars and the general public by blue bars. The y-axis is always the percentage.

As we can see, being a Republican isn’t popular these days, for both scientists and the general public alike. Being Republican is even more unpopular among scientists. Since the percentage of Independents is about the same for both scientists and non-scientists, it seems that the Democrat vs. Republican categories parasitize on each other. The same seems to be true for ideological identification – if we assume that the “moderates” are largely the people who identify as “Independent” politically, their proportions remain roughly the same for scientists and general public alike, while liberals are inversely proportional to conservatives.

So it’s in the “extreme” or partisan portion that the differences lie – more people who identify with a political party identify themselves with the Democratic party in general, and among those, scientists do so with even greater frequency.

My natural conclusion was to assume that this difference is most likely due to the social agenda – conservatives often make issues over things such as abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, etc. Scientists, in general, are much more likely to not see these things as absolute wrongs. Since strong views on abortion and gay marriage are often linked to religion, this would imply that fewer scientists have deeply fundamentalist beliefs. This has been shown by many previous polls, and in fact is also seen in this poll:

Over 50% of the US public self-identifies as “Protestant”, but only 20% of scientists do. Among the Protestants, about 19% of the US public identifies as “White Evangelical Protestant”, but only 3% of scientists do. Since these are the people most likely to have fundamentalist religious beliefs, weeding them out from the ranks of scientists naturally makes the scientist group less fundamentalist, and therefore more inclined to be liberal on social issues, if other factors are the same. The same is true for Catholics (who are also opposed to abortion) – 24% of the general public is Catholic, but only 10% of scientists are.

As expected, atheists and agnostics are well represented among scientists. The greatest difference between the public and the scientists appears to be in the “atheist” group, where only 2% of the public self-identifies as atheists, while 17% (more than 8 times as many) scientists do.

Some of the other groups are more confusing. The “not affiliated” group presumably consists of people who identify themselves as religious, but are not affiliated with any religious group. In terms of numbers, this is actually the largest single group of atheists. It is difficult to say what their beliefs are, and they probably vary considerably within the group. However, it seems fair to say that they are probably more laid back on religious issues, and more comfortable with their own concept of God rather than some doctrinal view emanating from an organized religious group.

The last group “no particular beliefs” is also hard to categorize. Since “no particular beliefs” in the context of the survey question means “no particular religious belief”, I tend to think of them as broadly fitting one of two categories:

• People with a new-age type religion, such as Wicca or mother nature or something similar, so they may believe in some “higher power”, which might be even be reconciled with some Eastern religions, such as Buddhism or some forms of Hinduism, but not with the Abrahamic concept of God.
• People who really don’t think about religion, it is meaningless to them. I would classify such people as atheists or agnostics, but not everyone is comfortable with self-identifying as such, and calling yourself an “atheist” or “agnostic” requires that you should have given this subject some thought. These people might not have.

At any rate, there is a clear difference between scientists and the general public in the frequency of religious beliefs, and it seems clear that scientists are under-represented among the most fundamentalist religious groups, and over-represented among atheists and agnostics. So there is some reason to believe that differences in party affiliation may be representative of religious differences, at least in part.

However, it is not clear that this is solely a religious issue.  Some of the questions on the poll were more specific, referring directly to the role of government in public policy. These are not just social issues, but also economic ones. For example, consider these questions:

The first question “are programs run by the government inefficient and wasteful” shows opposing opinions for the public and the scientists. The general public is more likely to say yes, while the scientists are more likely to say no. Conversely, more of the general public is likely to assume that business “strikes a fair balance between profits and public interests” than the scientists, though both groups have fewer people who believe that.

This approaches the heart of the matter that interests me from a libertarian perspective – do scientists honestly trust the government more than business, what exactly is it that they trust, what are their reasons?

Before I proceed, let me mention a few other questions in the poll that I think directly relate to this. It’s a known fact that government is by far the largest source of funding for science research in this country, and nearly all scientists in academia are well used to receiving money from the NIH, NSF, DoE, NASA, NOAA, etc. Obviously, a situation exists where a lot of science is done simply because the government pays for it. One may ask what would happen if government didn’t pay for it – would research simply decrease, would private industry pick up the slack, is private funding held back simply because everyone knows the government is going to fund it anyway, would certain types of research (such as basic research) suffer disproportionately, etc.

These are all valid questions, and since my purpose right now isn’t to defend my libertarian ideology, but rather to understand why scientists believe what they do, I will acknowledge that these are serious concerns, and will matter most to people whose career and livelihood depend upon government funding. Furthermore, one can point to the results of the research – the technologies invented, the lives saved, the knowledge expanded, and call these things good. And when you do, there is some acknowledgment in the back of your mind that government made this possible, therefore government isn’t bad, government spending isn’t bad, government can produce worthwhile results.

This question was asked repeatedly in the poll in great detail – the source of the funding, how much was government related, the breakdown by different government agencies, etc. There was little doubt that it’s a tremendous amount of funding, and that most people agree that it does good. Scientists more so than the general public, but even the general public overwhelmingly approves of it (except conservative Republicans, who are evenly split on the issue).

My question remains though: is government more inefficient and wasteful of resources than private industry? I can think of several reasons why it isn’t:

• The politicization of goals: pressure to do what is popular rather than what is right and efficient. This can cause distractions, spending time and money on achieving a consensus rather than in effecting the goal.
• Bureaucrats justifying their salaries, creating inefficiencies to give themselves more control over the process.
• Politically motivated appointments of officials, supervisors and workers, who may not be the most qualified and hard working.
• A focus on justifying that the money was properly spent, that the rules were followed, the paperwork was well-maintained, rather than on getting the job done.
• A more inflated chain of command with many more middle-level managers.
• An aversion to taking risks, since it is less clear that the reward will be proportional to the risk. Business is more focused on the bottom line, and rewards achievements more readily.

Note that I am not saying that all these problems are part of all government projects, nor am I saying that private business is immune to them. But I think anyone who has worked with government and with private business would not consider it controversial to say that these problems appear more in government than in business, because government is by nature more political, and its taxation powers give it more immunity from the consequences of its actions, such as bankruptcy.

Scientists are not dumb, and I am sure most of them do recognize these problems. This was sort of touched upon in the poll, with a question on the politicization of science. The question was asked if people were aware how the government scientists were not allowed to report claims that conflicted with ideological positions of the politicians in charge:

The public seems largely unaware of these issues, but scientists most certainly were not. A large majority of scientists acknowledged that they had heard these claims, and an overwhelming majority said that the claims were true. Since the majority of scientists polled were not government employees, this understanding does not necessarily come from having one’s own research trashed by government, but rather through the personal experience of “how the system works”. We all know, as scientists, that politicians often set the agenda for “what’s hot” and what’s not, and when they do, certain programs get funded and we all scramble for our share of the cash. Conversely, some programs don’t get funded, and if we are wise and don’t have tenure, we adjust our research interests accordingly.

Some administrations are worse than others, as the follow-up to this question showed:

“Did these shenanigans happen more often during the Bush administration?” – to which the answer from scientists was a resounding “yes”. This may be one reason why in the current political climate, there are so few Republican scientists.

However, getting back to the question – scientists are certainly aware on some general level of the inefficiencies of government, and on a more particular level of the gross politicization of research which happens so easily since the government holds the purse strings. Why then, do they more consistently insist that government is not more wasteful and inefficient than business?

I can’t answer this, since my information only extends to this poll, plus what I have gathered through observation and anecdotally through my own career as a scientist. But I offer a couple of theories:

The question “does business strike a fair balance between profits and public interest” is very relevant to this. Most scientists said no. That opens up several new questions. “Fair” is in itself a very subjective word to most people, and what might be fair to a scientist with little vested interest in the profits of a certain business might be very unfair to the businessman, whose livelihood depends upon it. In general though, most of us would admit that the prime purpose of business is to generate a profit for the owners, not to “serve the public interest”. Can the public interest be served as a side effect of ethically pursuing profits is another question, which again becomes difficult due to the fuzziness of the meaning of “ethical”.  Many people have strong beliefs about what “fair” or “ethical” ought to mean, but it’s important to realize that their views are not universal, and others might completely disagree.

So it seems to me that the belief here is that a profit motive in today’s world sometimes works against the public interest, and often times there is no cash reward in the pursuing the public interest anyway. Therefore, the government needs to get involved and do the things that private business can’t, or won’t. I will leave aside the question of whether this viewpoint is right or wrong, other than to say that I definitely disagree with it.

My second theory is that scientists, more than the general public, see things in terms of “ought” rather than “is”. Just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean it has to be so. Just because the government implemented some plan badly doesn’t mean it has to do so again. And again. And again.

Scientists are used to thinking in terms of a right way and a wrong way to do things. They are used to reducing large amounts of data into a few coherent themes, picking ideas that “best” suit the data, picking methodologies that best suit the goal of the task. We do this all the time. It is not hard to project from this: when government is given a task, there must be some rigorous approach to determining the “best” way to achieve an end, it may not be my place to say what that is, but someone must have the expertise. If only the government could find it and implement it, it doesn’t have to be inefficient.

The problem is that in many cases, there is no best way. The system is inherently chaotic, and the outcome cannot be predicted. The market is one such example. People try to make limited predictions from fundamentals. Government does the same,  operating on broad principles, such as “lowering interest rates will increase borrowing and generate more economic activity”. But these are very short range things, and no one can predict the long term consequences. This is no longer science, or at least, it is not science that anyone has a grasp of at this time. In such cases, many people oppose the idea of government (or any agency) trying to influence the market, because no agency has the power to direct it, no agency can even know what the full consequences of its actions will be.

Finally, there is a moral argument that they make. Even if government is inefficient, even if it can’t foresee the consequences of its actions, it ought still to do certain things because it is morally wrong not to do so. This sort of defense is often brought out when supporting things like universal health care, the eradication of poverty, etc. – things that scientists favor more than the general public does, according to the poll. This may have to do with the higher proportion of atheists and agnostics among the audience, many of whom are secular humanists in their philosophy. Secular humanism has replaced the idea of God with broader concepts like “the well being of society”, which mesh well with such agendas. These are agendas that are concerned with effects rather than causes. The effects they desire are things like “health care for all” or “food for everyone”, and they tend to take the most direct path to them, which is usually taxation followed by handouts. There is less focus on whether all paths are equally effective, whether some are even effective at all, whether they are moral. It is the end that justifies the means to them.

I’m getting tired of antivirus programs using the kitchen sink approach. I’ve gone through half a dozen different antivirus/firewall software in the past few years, and none of them seem to be able to be able to offer a clean, simple, lightweight program that just does what I need and nothing more.

Right now, I have two antivirus packages available for “free” – Norton (through my university), and McAfee (through my cable provider). Since Norton is well-known to be bloatware of the first order, I decided to go with McAfee this time.

All I wanted was an antivirus and software firewall (yes, I know, hardware firewalls are best, but I don’t have one right now). The program gave me no choice to selectively install certain components. As a result, I now have a program that contains features that obviously have nothing to do with antivirus and firewall functions (such as a disk backup utility, a “quickclean” utility, parental controls for blocking dirty websites), as well as other features that are only marginally useful to me (such as Privacy Guard for protecting personal information, email and instant messenger protection).

So when I run McAfee, I have 7 different McAfee-related processes running, using up a total of 172 MB of memory. All the time my computer is on. 172 MB lost to me forever. Here’s the proof:

172 MB of memory, just for a firewall and antivirus. Not the best one around either, at least not according to web reviews I’ve read. A poorly updated program at that, with one of the lowest frequencies of virus-definition updates. What were these people thinking?

I can understand that part of the problem is just the business model. Both Norton and McAfee have been around for a very long time, both are among the earliest vendors of antivirus products. Over the years, the desire to go one better than the competition can lead to a sort of arms race, where feature sets keep expanding, more to give reviewers something to talk about than for any actual benefit they provide to the end user. But the software industry is no longer new. People are less easily impressed by vast feature sets and more easily upset by bloat. Look at the success of Google, with its minimalistic interface. So even if this sort of arms race was justification once upon a time, it certainly isn’t now.

I wonder what holds them back from simply offering two separate versions of their software. A lean, stripped down version with just the anti-virus / anti-spyware / firewall features, and another with all the bells and whistles. Perhaps they are afraid that the lean version will cut into the sales of the bigger version, and they won’t be able to justify the higher price?

Alternatively, what about just selling the more expensive version with all the extras, but allowing the user at install time to selectively install only the feature set he needs? I know plenty of people (including myself) who would pay extra to buy a basic antivirus from McAfee rather than some unknown company. Not that this proves that the McAfee product is better, it’s just name recognition. Based on the vague idea that a well-established company with good cash flow ought to be better able to hire a staff that can keep the virus definitions updated.

At this point, I have decided to switch to either BitDefender or Kaspersky. I haven’t used either of those programs before, but they seem to have consistently good reviews from the press.

The antivirus / computer security market might be up for a shakeup soon. Microsoft announced that they will discontinue their Live OneCare service (their current antivirus / firewall offering) and instead offer a free security service to all Windows users. This will be based on the same Morro engine that’s currently used in OneCare, which has already passed all major security certifications. It will be part of a new design philosophy of keeping the antivirus engine lean and efficient. According to their press release:

Windows Live OneCare, one of the first all-in-one suites to be launched in the consumer market, includes a number of non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tune-up. By shifting to focus on the core anti-malware features that most consumers still don’t keep up to date, “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats.

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for non-bloat software, but if this is true, it sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for. Supposedly, this new service will go live in the second half of this year, and will be available free to all users of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

I wonder how this will affect the “security suite” market. Microsoft certainly has the muscle to make its presence felt, and there are few more powerful selling points to the consumers’ mind than “free”. It should certainly make other manufacturers refocus their efforts. I can’t imagine McAfee getting very far if they say “buy our software, we throw in a disk backup utility!” People would then wonder if they really need a backup utility, whether they want it running all the time as part of their antivirus program. And since they can get the antivirus and firewall free from Microsoft anyway, they are really looking at McAfee’s $39.95 offering as what they pay for a backup utility. The competition then, for McAfee, would not simply be antivirus vendors, but rather disk utilities vendors as well. I have the feeling that this is not a winning strategy, and such extras will fall by the wayside.

I think the focus instead will be something like “we offer more complete protection”. This will be a hard thing to prove, unless Microsoft does an uncommonly poor job with Morro. A-V tests are a dime a dozen, and many of them mean little, being biased by the source of the sponsoring cash and the personal feelings of the tester. Perhaps this will encourage more scientific testing of antivirus software. But I can already imagine that the bigger selling point that many vendors will automatically jump to is bigger and better “extras” – things like privacy guard, spam filters, cookie management tools, anti-porno filters for people with kids, etc. This is what manufacturers will use to justify why people ought to give them money instead of just downloading the free software from Microsoft.

I am still hoping that a niche remains for antivirus vendors who provide lean and efficient security software that does exactly what you expect from security software and nothing more, and that uses minimal memory and CPU resources.