My massaman curry recipe (by request)

This is a non-spicy recipe, since I'm a wimp. If you aren't one, add some Sriracha (or something similar) at the same time you add the potatoes and coconut milk, or, if you have a normal people/wimp mix, just serve it at the table.

Massaman Curry

1/4 cup peanut (or vegetable) oil 

1/2 cup Massaman curry paste (there are a lot of curry pastes, and they probably all taste good, but I use this and I really like it)

2 Tbs fresh minced ginger

1 Tbs fresh minced garlic

1 chopped onion (optional)

2-1/2 pounds chicken breast - cubed

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup fish sauce

1/3 cup tamarind paste

1/3 cup peanut butter

6 cups cubed potatoes

2 (13.5 oz) cans coconut milk

1/3 cup fresh lime juice (about 2 limes worth)

1/2 cup unsalted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Directions:

Heat oil over medium heat in a pot big enough to hold everything. Stir in curry paste and minced ginger - cook and stir for 5 minutes or so. Stir in the chicken, and cook, stirring the pieces around for about 8 - 10 minutes until they start to turn white.

Stir in brown sugar, fish sauce, tamarind paste, peanut butter, potatoes, and coconut milk. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat as low as it will go, cover, and simmer for at least 30 minutes - the longer the better. I frequently start this at night and leave it in either a very low oven (~220 degrees) or dump it into the crockpot overnight. There's an additional advantage to this - I don't have to try to find/create  refrigerator space.  Add the lime juice and cook for an additional 5 minutes before serving. 

I think this is usually served with white rice, although I use brown rice for everything: you can also just eat it as is. Serve with chopped (or unchopped) peanuts and hot sauce. It's better the next day.

HBO Documentaries Fall For Serial Nobel Prize Hoaxer Michael Mann

Read the whole thing at Breitbart - excerpts below. Mark Steyn is, IMHO, the world expert on all things regarding Mann' BS claims - Steyn's archive of related posts is here.

Serial Nobel Peace Prize hoaxer Michael Mann is maintaining his fake claim to have won the prestigious award in a new HBO documentary — four years after he was exposed for lying to a Washington, D.C. court.

Mann has had to withdraw this inaccurate claim on numerous occasions since 2007 — most dramatically, in 2012, he was forced to admit that a sworn affidavit he submitted to a D.C. court contained the lie about being a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Four years later, the claim is again repeated in the HBO documentary which has just had a theatrical release in New York.

Mann’s repeated exaggeration of his qualifications is significant: He stands accused of exaggerating and manipulating data in his academic work. Mann was the author of the famous “hockey stick” graph which purported to show that world temperatures had been stable and flat until a violent upswing caused by industrialization.

In a sworn affidavit, Mann described himself as a Nobel Prize Winner, and said the fact that he was the recipient of such a prestigious prize compounded the libel.

“It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient,” the affidavit stated.

However, the Nobel Prize committee said that Mann was not a winner of the prize, and that working part-time for the IPCC which won the prize does not entitle people to claim they are a winner. In a statement to National Review, a committee spokesperson stated emphatically: “Mann has never won the Nobel Prize.”

Mann was forced to resubmit his sworn statement removing the Peace Prize claim, and he had to scrub the claim from numerous university and professional websites. The re-occurrence of his fake claim to be a Nobel laureate is likely to weaken his legal case against the CEI and Steyn given that they are basing their defense on allegations that he has fabricated scientific findings and statistics.

Via American Thinker:

The hockeystick graph [bottom graph below] claims that the 20th century showed unusually rapid warming -- and thus suggests a strong human influence.  The graph also does away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, which were shown in earlier IPCC reports [see top graph below].

It was soon found that the Hockeystick graph was in error and did not deserve continued reliance. 

Canadian statisticians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated errors in Mann's statistical analysis and in the use of certain tree-ring data for calibration.  In fact, they showed that Mann's algorithm would generate a Hockeystick graph -- even if the input data was pure noise.  

It is worth noting that the IPCC no longer uses the Hockeystick to support human-caused warming.

MIT Technology Review - Global Warming Bombshell:

A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago–just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. When they fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. 

Read the whole thing.

More:

HBO Documentaries Fall For Serial Nobel Prize Hoaxer Michael Mann

IPCC 's Bogus Evidence for Global Warming

MIT Technology Review - Global Warming Bombshell

The rise and fall of the Hockey Stick

Friday links

April 22 is Earth Day: here's the co-founder who killed then composted his girlfriend.

The Origins of 12 Horse-Related Sayings.

Could a bird deliver a standard 20" New York-style cheese pizza in a box? And if so, what kind of bird would it take?

Construction workers from competing companies get into bulldozer fight in the street.

Lenin is About to Turn 146, but He Still Looks 53 - and Russia will spend $200K this year to keep it that way.

Teddy Roosevelt's Epic Hunt for a White Rhino.

ICYMI, Monday's links are here, and include the eighteenth of April in seventy-five (the midnight ride of William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, and Paul Revere), opening a hotel safe with a magnet and a sock, ice cream truck history, and the anniversary of the earthquake and fire that destroyed 80% of San Francisco (including video of a trip down Market Street, before and after the earthquake).

Construction workers from competing companies get into bulldozer fight in the street

An argument between construction workers escalated into a demolition derby-style clash of heavy machinery that left at least two bulldozers flipped over in a street, say police in northern China. In a video taken on Saturday, several bulldozers are seen ramming each other while passenger cars speed away from the cloud of dust. 

The construction workers were from two companies competing for business.

The video shows one driver running unhurt out of his toppled bulldozer, a fast-moving type of vehicle also known as a wheel loader, while another bulldozer tries to lift it back up.

More here: Bulldozers battle it out on Chinese street as rival firms clash

Scientists Stream Netflix Through Pork Loin

A group of researchers at the University of Illinois demonstrated that they could transmit a wireless signal described as strong enough to “stream Netflix” through two types of meat, pork tenderloin and beef liver. However, the project – nicknamed “meat-comms” – isn’t intended to bring actual TV shows to your TV dinners. Instead, the scientists are looking for a better way to communicate with medical devices implanted in the human body.

Existing implants, such as pacemakers, use radio to communicate with the outside world. But radio waves do not travel well through the soft tissue in our bodies. Ramping up the power to improve the signal can be dangerous, as it heats up the tissue it passes through.

These limitations have stopped us developing medical implants that can send and receive useful amounts of wireless data, says Andrew Singer, at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. So his team turned to ultrasound instead.

Singer has spent years building ultrasonic systems for the navy and suspected that a similar approach would work well in the body. “You’re a big bag of salt water, with some bones and some other tissues,” he says. “Communicating in the ocean and communicating in your body are very similar.”

To test the idea, Singer and his colleagues first submerged their transmitter and receiver in a tank of water and tried sending data through meat. They suspended the pieces of meat in the water tank and found that the ultrasonic signal passed through both types of meat at speeds of up to 30 megabits a second (from an original signal of 120 megabits a second). That's 1000 times faster than existing implants using radio signals.

The meat-comms team is planning to test the approach with real medical implants or living tissue, but the initial results already suggest some exciting future possibilities, says Singer. Software updates could potentially be beamed directly to medical implants without the need to remove them surgically.

More at New Scientist, h/t Food and Wine.

How Rubber Gloves Are Made

via Science Channel (caution - autoplay)

Monday links

T'was the eighteenth of April in seventy-five: The midnight ride of William Dawes and Samuel Prescott (and Paul Revere).

A hotel safe can be opened using a neodynium magnet and a sock.

The History of the Ice Cream Truck.

April 18, 1906 - the earthquake and fire that destroyed 80% of San Francisco: documentary and footage, plus video of of trip down Market Street in San Francisco in 1906, before and after the earthquake.

Two-Headed Dogs and Human Head Transplants.

The Historical Reenactor Accuracy Wars.

ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include lots of tax day stuff, sci-fi tax revolts, why yo-yos keep spinning, and Leonardo da Vinci’s handwritten resume from 1482.