Yet again, it is a soup that is perfect for the cold winter days (speaking of which, today it’s -15 C here).

The recipe makes for 6, and like the onion soup, is suitable for vegetarians too. Be sure to have big pot to avoid overflow errors (a 4 liter pot will be all right). Here’s what you need:

50 g butter
olive oil
1 large (yellow) onion, chopped
4 stalks celery, sliced
1 kg white potatoes, peeled and diced
1 small head of cauliflower, cut
400 g carrots, peeled and chopped
2 l vegetable stock
salt and pepper
400 g Gouda cheese, grated
6 slices country-style bread, baguette, or other white bread
2 tbsp chopped parsley

Like with the onion soup, the big idea is to make a soup, then place a toasted cheese-crusted piece of bread over the soup and serve. Unlike the onion soup, the soup itself does not need to go to the oven - however, you will need the oven to first roast the bread, and second to cover the bread in delicious molten cheese. Yum yum yum… Half of the cheese will be used for the soup, the other half for the bread pieces.

That said, let’s start. It’s good to prepare everything before starting to fry things.

You can start by preparing the stock first: add 2 l of water into a big pot, add appropriate amount of bouillon and heat the whole thing up with medium heat. Don’t boil it, and be sure to mix the thing every now and then. When there’s first big bubbles, turn off the heat and let the stock just sit there waiting for its turn. This is the same procedure as with the onion soup.

While the stock is heating up, peel and hack the onion. Place the hacked onion into a bowl.

Next, wash and slice up the celery. Place the sliced celery to the same bowl with the onion.

Next, peel and chop the carrots. Discard the ends of the carrots, they’re not good. Place the chopped carrots into a new bowl.

Trim the cauliflower by cutting out the green parts. Wash the whole thing. Next, cut out tiny trees from the vegetable. If you want them soft, then make them very very tiny; if you want them a bit crunchy, leave the pieces bigger. Put the chopped cauliflower to the same bowl as the carrots.

Peel the potatoes and place them into a new bowl. Note, the bowl is filled with water, otherwise the potatoes will turn dark after a while. You could also cut the potatoes now, but if you do, place them under water anyway.

Next, we have the most important ingredient, the cheese! Take out the Gouda, admire it for a while, remove the plastic wrapping (if any) and cut a 400 g chunk out of it.

Unless you like eating wax, it should be “obvious” to remove the yellow wax before grating the cheese… Just cut the wax away and discard.

Next, introduce the cheese to the cheese grater and turn the chunk of Gouda into a bowl of grated cheese.

If you didn’t already do so, cut the potatoes into small cubes and place it into the same bowl as the carrots and cauliflower.

Turn on the oven, 200 C.

Take out at least a 4 l pot and turn on the heat. Melt the butter with some olive oil in the pot until the mixture starts foaming. Add the onion and celery and fry it there for 5 minutes. The onions will turn a bit yellowish (depending on which onions you used).

Add the diced potatoes, cauliflower and carrots, and some more olive oil and mix well. Continue to fry for another 5 minutes.

Pour in the vegetable soup stock, mix well and bring it to boil. Let the whole thing boil for around 25 to 30 minutes until all vegetables have softened and the potatoes have boiled enough. Just have a taste every now and then, starting after 20 minutes or so.

If you’re drinking wine, now is a good time to open the bottle.

Also, while the soup is boiling, slice up some bread and put it into the oven to toast. It’ll take a few minutes, depending on the bread. When the bread is toasted, take it out but leave the oven on, you’ll need it soon again.

Once the vegetables are soft enough, add salt and pepper to taste.

Next, slowly start adding 200 g of the Gouda to the soup, mixing well all the time. Eventually the soup will look something like this:

Next, take the toasted bread and divide the rest of the Gouda (approximately 200 g) over the bread, and place back into the oven, until the cheese has melted.

Scoop the soup into bowls, place a toasted piece of bread with molten cheese on top of the soup bowl, and decorate with some parsley.

Well done! Now, serve the soup immediately while it’s very hot. Enjoy your meal!

Getting rich for its own sake will look as stupid as bodybuilding does at that point when the neck gets thicker than the head, and the thighs and biceps look like four plastic kit-bags full of tofu. And on the men it looks even worse.

Read “A prediction that’s a safe bet”, by Mr. Clive James.

“Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food.

And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well.

And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.”

(Mr. Blanc knows his way with food - he’s a chef who owns a restaurant with two Michelin stars.)

After reading that quote in the BBC News article, I said to myself: “A-ha, that’s exactly what it should be!”. There’s really very little point in hauling frozen vegetables from half way around the planet - cheaper though they might be, for whatever reason - as locally grown ones (given those are available) would be so much better, both nutrient-wise and taste-wise.

If you’re impatient and looking for a taster right now, visiting the local farmer’s market is surely worth a shot. You’ll be amazed at the number of offerings, and the quality is quite good. It’ll be fun to concentrate on this whole fundamental food rethink issue and the layout of your soon-to-be-garden over some fresh cold-smoked fish, a bit of mustard sauce and potatoes boiled with a few fresh twigs of dill.

Of course, not everything grows everywhere, so some things which cannot be grown locally must be imported. Exotic fruit like pineapple or mango, for example. Or, more importantly, wine - just try some nice chilled white wine with the aforementioned fish dish.

Even if you don’t have your own little piece of land to farm, it is not too difficult to grow some herbs and spices indoors. Things like parsley, basil, coriander, mint, and chili peppers can be grown with little effort. It’s both fun and tasty.

Recent advances in cooperative technology and classical communication are based entirely on the assumption that the Internet and active networks are not in conflict with object-oriented languages. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the visualization of DHTs that made refining and possibly simulating 8 bit architectures a reality, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be applied to the development of e-commerce.

Grammar check: OK, computing terminology: check, meaning: wait… it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It reads like a bunch of random sentences, which in isolation are all right, but when taken together just lose all meaning.

The quote is the abstract of a computer-generated paper called “Towards the Simulation of E-Commerce”, which got accepted into the IEEE 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE2008), to be held in Wuhan, China.

The fake author, one Dr. Herbert Schlangemann from Umeå University in Sweden, even got accepted into the session chair of Oral Session 5, “Distributed and Parallel Computing & Embedded Programming”!

I would like to know what is the benefit of traditional science publishing, conferences and traditional “peer-reviewed research” if the peers could just be replaced with a simple regular expression? What are the researchers, universities, foundations, companies and taxpayers really paying for?

Of course, the conference could be simply one of the bogus ones, which accept any paper whatsoever with the intention of leeching money off the researchers who want to present their papers. However, it seems not to be the case here - CSSE2008 looks legit.

So what is wrong? If it’s not a false conference, it means the reviewers let it slip. Don’t those people who review, actually, you know, review? If even I can spot that something is wrong in about 20 seconds while reading the abstract, shouldn’t the group of peer reviewers spot it too?

This was not the first time an SCIgen-generated paper got accepted as a real research publication. To me it seems that there just might be too much money involved in the scientific publishing/conference industry.

The very fact that it is an established industry contributes to these kind of episodes. Why? Because it means that science and progress - which should be number one goals! - take the second place, while money and profit-making take the first place. When in conflict, the second place loses to the first place, always. While good for business, this is not good for scientific progress as a whole.

It’s a Christmas-themed Flash game called Reindeer Rattle, where you control Santa Claus’ flying reindeer squadron to capture Christmas gift packets. Each gift gets more points and over time your reindeer posse grows longer and longer. It’s quite addictive - have a look!

I could imagine if a parent were to stick their kids in front of this game they could enjoy some good Yuletide and Christmas glögg in peace & harmony.

Even if there’s no One True Way, we can still have interesting interpretations. Artist Alex Dragulescu shows one way to visualize those nasty software in his Malwarez project.

Also, check out this BBC’s “In Pictures”-page for more pictures and some background on the viruses themselves.

Update: Don’t miss Mr. Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture!

Ablation cascade, an explosive destruction of a satellite in orbit creates debris, which destroys other satellites, causing an autocatalytic effect, eventually destroying all satellites in orbit.

Remember what Jeff Goldblum’s character said in ID4, something like “Communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion”? It could also mean an ablation cascade is in full effect.

Ternary Logic

Ordinary Boolean logic is crisp, black and white, one or zero, true of false, in other words 2-valued (or bivalent). There exists also ternary logic, in which there is not just true and false - but true, false and unknown.

With ternary logic you can for example build interesting computers or answer the question whether a dog has the Buddha nature.

Al-Khwarizmi

Working in the House of Wisdom during the Islamic Golden Age, Al-Khwarizmi was the 9th century Persian scientist who gave the name for the term “algorithm“.

Of all the ancient scientists, many people know Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei and Archimedes etc., but Al-Khwarizmi is not so well known. Nevertheless, he was a pretty smart guy - among other things, his writings laid the foundations for modern algebra.

If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity.

I couldn’t agree more. Bonus points to Mr. Taleb for using the word “serendipity“, which I think is damn cool, both in form and in content - have a look at the Wikipedia article for details.

I think it’s very unfortunate that the majority of the industries which claim to “thrive on innovation” is actually built up and set up in a way that is counter to the creation of the real innovations and inventions.

This means cubicles, strict timetables, no idle time, “deliver it yesterday”-mentality of ubiquitous sense of haste.

Innovations and inventions are born out of idle time, when there is ample time to play with new things and to explore them; from the passion to understand what makes things tick; from clever ways of looking at the mundane and arriving at the unexpected - just like Mr. Taleb said.

The recipe makes for 4 people and suits vegetarians too. Here’s what you need:

6-8 yellow onions
ca. 100 g butter
2 teaspoons sugar
2 dl dry white wine
1 l vegetable stock (use bouillon cubes unless you make your own)
2 dried bay leaves
ca. 1 teaspoon dried thyme
ca. 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
4-5 dl grated cheese (something semi-soft/firm and aromatic: Gruyère, Emmenthal, Edam, Gouda, etc.)
fresh white bread

The big idea is to make the basic soup, then scoop it to deep plates, put white bread slices over the plates and cover the whole thing with cheese. Then put the plates to oven for the cheese to melt. Consume with good red wine. It’s that simple!

If you know your way around the kitchen, you should be able to create some onion soup with these instructions.

For the rest, I’ve got more details and some pictures. Let’s start; first you need to peel and hack the onions.

Onion, meet knife. Knife, meet onion.

If you have some handy kitchen tools, now is the time to use them. I often use a mechanical vegetable chopper as my numero uno hacking tool while in the kitchen. It’s some kitchen apparatus from Tupperware.

In no time, you will have a lot of hacked onion.

Very good! At this point you can multi-task and start making the vegetable stock. The big idea is to crumble the bouillon to a suitable amount of water and heat it up. Read the package for more instructions. When the bouillon is ready, simply turn the heat off.

While the vegetable stock is heating up, you’ll start frying the onions with medium heat (for oven with knobs with 1..6, use 4; for oven with knobs with 1..12, use 8). Heat up the frying pan and melt the butter a bit. Pour in some hacked onion, add some sugar and fry it. Don’t let the onion burn! This means move it around every now and then.

It will take around 8 to 10 minutes until the onion is yellowish to golden brown.

Eventually the onion will look like yellowish, is a bit soft and tastes sort of sweet. When one batch is fried, pour it into a big pot. Do this until there’s no onion left.

At this point your vegetable stock is ready. Pour it into the big pot and mix well. Pour in the white wine also and mix well.

Next, add the spices: ground black pepper, thyme and bay leaves. Do not add salt yet.

Heat up the soup and let boil slowly for 15 minutes. Season with salt - taste it first.

Next, take some deep plates - these are the plates you will eat the onion soup out of. Make sure the plates can withstand heating in the oven!

Deal some onion soup into the plate. Place two slices of the white bread over the soup. Sprinkle with a lot of grated cheese until you don’t see the bread nor the soup.

Open up the red wine.

Place the plates into oven (275 degrees C) for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the cheese looks golden brown.

Make sure to have something under the plates when you place them to the table, as the plates are VERY hot. Don’t burn your finger, like I did…

That’s it, enjoy!