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The amount of water you use to boil pasta disgusts me

Harold McGee (think “Alton Brown before there was Alton Brown”) writes what would seem a blasphemous article about cooking pasta using less water, a change which he estimates would result in “saving 250,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil.”

I’ve chided relations on occassion for not using enough cooking water for pasta, without ever really knowing why (other than I tend to be a somewhat bossy and annoying backseat cook). But I have always wondered what would happen if you used less water or started with cold. 

That’s the difference between me and these other guys: I just wondered. McGee actually tried it!

(via Rebecca Blood)

Keys to the Kingdom

My Kindle arrived yesterday. First impressions were not quite up to the technolust I feel when opening a box “Designed by Apple in California,” but pretty darned good. Amazon has done a nice job with the packaging and merchandising here. I particularly appreciate that the Kindle arrives already linked to my Amazon account. It literally works right out of the box. This also makes it painfully easy to immediately start buying content. After all, I want to read more than just the user’s guide on this thing!

I can tell I’m really going to like the ability to download free samples/trials of books. This may be my saving grace in terms of how easy the Kindle makes dropping money on books (the process is seamless and there’s no physical consequence, like buying music on iTunes). If I can discipline myself to always only download the sample on impulse, my kids may still go to college.

Foundation

I downloaded several sample chapters of books, but ultimately made a sentimental choice for first Kindle reading experience: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (I fell in love with reading science fiction reading the Foundation books, immersing myself in the story of Hari Seldon).

In short, the Kindle passed the test. I was able to read quite comfortably for about half an hour before sleep overtook me. In fact, I found reading in bed with the Kindle to be superior in some ways; the device is so lightweight that holding it for an extended period of time is inconsequential. I found myself using the left-hand page button more frequently than the right, and quickly got used to the keypress/read, keypress/read rhythm. Reading off of Kindle’s grayscale screen, and the notorious flash while the screen refreshes takes some getting used to, but didn’t seem to impose any additional eye strain.

So far it has been a little bit hard to get past the “dude, I’m reading this on a Kindle” effect, but if the writing is high quality I no longer have any doubt that the experience will be just as immersive as paper.

One interesting effect I’ve noticed is that I seem to read faster on the Kindle; indeed, on more than one occassion I’ve had to force myself to slow down to really absorb the text.

My initial theory on this is that my brain is trained to quickly skim on-screen text, and has not yet found the distinction between skimming Twitter or feeds on my monitor or iPhone and close reading or its equivalent on the Kindle. There seems to be a kind of built-in impatience with large blocks of screen type. We’ll see if that changes as I spend more time with it.

Whispernet, as in “barely there”

So far, I’ve found the Whispernet (Amazon’s brand for the slice of Sprint’s 3G network) to be remarkably spotty and slow. Several times in the first 24 hours, it has dropped off completely, even in areas where I get quite strong AT&T 3G speeds on the iPhone. I never thought 3G would feel quite so snappy on my iPhone until I started playing with the Basic Web browser on the Kindle.

Speed issues aside, it is nice to have a (pretty vanilla) web browser on this thing. First thing I did web-wise was to load up my Instapaper account — now I can literally access my to-read pile of web articles from any device. Snazzy. And I’m not sure why I should pay Amazon to deliver blogs to me when Reader appears to work serviceablely well.

A Start

I’m sure there will be more thoughts to come, but I didn’t want to let the first 24 hours of this new adventure go by without some initial thoughts. I’m excited, and am even more convinced that the Kindle is paving the leading edge of how reading will increasingly happen.

Cooking: humanity’s ‘killer app'”?

As reported in The Economist, Harvard’s Richard Wrangham has a theory that “cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s ‘killer app'”:

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.

(Hat tip to Alisa for the link on FB)

Magazines

When you consider that a fairly hefty slice of the success of my company still depends on the health of print media, it’s a little alarming to note that I’m actually surprised by just how many print magazines we still receive here in the Morrow household.

Magazines have been an easy place to cut spending iver the past year, but we still get a bunch.

Do we read them? Do you read all your magazines? Us neither.

Here’s a rundown of mags you’ll find around here:

Currently Receive

Let Them Expire in the Last Year

Ones I May Subscribe to (Again) Soon

(inspired by the Plinky prompt for 2/14/09)

Hey—what do you read? What am I missing out on?

There’s a Kindle a-coming

I ordered one of them fancypants ee-lectronic book readers from The Amazon, and if their delivery status is correct it will arrive two short weeks.

Last May, I wrote the following about my desire (and hesitations) about the Kindle:

As someone who always has at least two books on his person at almost all times and who agonizes about which books to bring along on a trip, I really like the idea of a smallish device with an entire library on-board, ready for any reading whim that may strike. I love the idea of decreasing the amount of physical clutter in our home that my book addiction creates (and I know my wife will appreciate this too!). I even like the idea that reading a book on-screen may even be helpful to the environment. I like the idea of searchable, easily retrievable notes and annotations, and the promise of instant, wireless delivery of a passing fancy.

And:

So could I be afraid that I’ll like an e-book reader too much? I think that may be closer to the truth. As a bibliophile, what does it mean if I prefer this new experience to the more tactile act of reading a paper book?

Once it shows up, I’ll keep you posted on the experience.

In the meantime, do you have any suggestions for my first Kindle reading experience?