Ian Shaw singing his jazz version of "Alone Again, Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan

And here's Gilbert O'Sullivan himself:

Jeremiah Tower, father of California Cuisine, expounds on his six favorite chiles

Jeremiah Tower expounds on his six favorite chiles
Warning: No matter what I call these chiles, there are legions of you out there who know them by other names. Where you are and where you are from determine the nomenclature.

FRESH
POBLANO

• A triangular and tapered body up to six inches long, dark hunter green, and very shiny.
• Mild chile familiar in chiles rellenos with a rich, nutty flavor that can become a habit.
• Deeply satisfying when cooked with cream and corn, or when tossed with lime juice and mint to top sliced tomatoes. Also very fine combined with sour cream, cilantro, orange zest, and chipotle for fish, crab, and shrimp.

DRIED
ANCHO AND MULATO

• Slightly round, four inches long, usually very wrinkled, maroon to dark red brown, with a sweet, rich smell. The mulato is darker, fruitier, and more full-bodied and earthier than the ancho, and is as mild or a bit hotter.
• Both have earthy, brilliant flavors mixed with hints of dried fruit such as raisin. There's a reason these are on my list, whether powder or paste or whole: they're the most versatile, especially because they reveal all their haunting flavors with just the right amount of heat.
• Puree with garlic, lime juice, and onion to magically transform mayonnaise, sour cream, or butter-thickened stock-based sauces for grilled fish, eggs, or chicken salads.

MORITA

• Two to three inches long, half wrinkled, and garnet colored. Dried jalapeño, so medium heat to quite hot. Use with guajillo, which is a dried mirasol.
• Smells and tastes like an ancho or mulato but with a little bit of smoke and more sweetness.
• Brings heat and fruity sweetness to purees of ancho and mulato. Add to any type of mole—or ground dried chile paste—that's used for stews and soups. Amazing with avocado, and powdered and sprinkled on sliced oranges, mandarins, or raw carrots with fresh lime juice. Or stir into fresh lemonade.

FAMILY OF PASILLA DE OAXACA: CHIHUACLE NEGRO/OAXACAN/MEXICANA

• Six to nine inches long, maroon, mostly smooth, very fruity, and smoky aromatic chiles from Oaxaca that range from mild to very hot. Some use the word "tobacco" to describe their aroma, but you'd have to be puffing on a luxurious Russian Sobranie. The Oaxacan and the Mexicana are the mildest.
• This family of pasillas and chihuacles are the key to the whole family of mole dishes and sauces. Traditionally mixed with chocolate or cacao but amazingly complex by themselves.
• Quite wonderful when added to pork leg braises with sour orange; degrease the stock and thicken with a paste of the pasilla de Oaxaca, garlic, cilantro, and corn oil. Cut into slivers and heat in olive oil with chunks of garlic for shrimp, baby eels, or scrambled eggs. Chop with a vanilla pod and serve over fresh pineapple. Pair ice cream flavored with these chiles with tropical fruits such as mangoes.

DE ÁRBOL (OR GUAJILLO AND PULLA)

• Four to six inches long with a slender shape and pointed body. Retains its Chinese-brick red color when dried. Medium heat to very hot, with an almost citrus edge.
• Toast to black in a pan over a fire (traditionally done in the jungle, as the acrid smoke produced is toxic), and then soak and make into the coal-black paste chilmole, used in the outstanding Yucatecan dish relleno negro (black stuffing, usually served with turkey)—truly one of the great ethnic dishes of the world.
• Use the chilmole to make broth-based and butter- (or olive oil-) thickened sauces for poached red snapper and grouper, or ladle underneath a scooped out and sliced avocado covered with a julienne of fresh hibiscus flowers.

CHIPOTLE

• A dark chocolate brown and usually very wrinkled smoked/dried jalapeño that's very hot. It's the only chile I know that is acceptable from a can.
• The combination of its smoky, sweet-sour chocolate flavor and heat is irresistible. In small quantities it lends a very mysterious background and base flavor, on top of which citrus and fresh herb flavors sing.
• Puree and sieve: add to sour cream with mandarin orange zest and cilantro for grilled fish; add a pinch to a French lobster sauce for scallops; or mix with fresh Key lime juice for poultry broths.

*************
by Gail Monaghan, a New York City-based cookbook author and teacher

Jeremiah Tower, a close friend, is and has always been a huge poetic talent with a larger than life personal presence. In 2001 Wine Spectator, describing Jeremiah's stint as co-owner and first chef of the nascent Chez Panisse, called him "the father of California cuisine," in that he was largely responsible for the restaurant's early rise to fame, for its celebrated menu nights, and for initiating the practice of replacing fancy culinary and menu nomenclature with plain English. When he outgrew Berkeley (which he always referred to as "the Birkenstock Republic") and moved to San Francisco, Jeremiah appeared in one of the first Dewar's ads, opened the legendary Star's in 1984 and then its satellites, started the Peak Café in Hong Kong, won a James Beard Award for his 1986 cookbook, New American Classics, and then in 1996 another James Beard Award for Farberware Millenium Outstanding Chef of the Year. He then took Stars to Manila before moving to New York City to write California Dish—his page-turner of a memoir—and other books and PBS projects. Over the years, Jeremiah has often been featured in Food Arts and in 1994 was the winner of a Silver Spoon award. In 2006 when David Kamp came out with United States of Arugula, the Chez Panisse chapter was almost entirely devoted to Jeremiah, and it was then excerpted in Vanity Fair with a photo spread of Jeremiah sitting by his pool in Mérida, the capital of the Yucatán.


I was surprised when soon after 9/11 and without much warning, Jeremiah upped and moved from New York City to the Yucatán, wanting to rest up a bit from his amazing lives (like a cat, at least nine) and to explore his passion for architecture (he has both undergraduate and architecture degrees from Harvard) while buying, renovating, and then selling beautiful old courtyard-style Mérida houses. The idyllic Mexican setting and lifestyle affords him the time he's always craved (but never had) to cook and experiment with local ingredients—the Mexican ones are many, varied, and fabulous—without the pressures of a restaurant existence.

What are the tools needed for a complete electronics workbench?

DIY Essentials

Does your do-it-yourself workbench have everything you need?

By James Turner  /  August 2011

All Photos: Randi Silberman Klett

Click on image for enlargement.

 

What are the tools every hands-on projecteer needs? To answer that question, we went right to DIYers themselves, specifically the exhibitors at last fall's World Maker Faire NY event.

One tool everyone agreed on is a Multimeter. It's surprising how much information you can glean from a simple resistance reading or by checking out the voltage drop across a series of LEDs. Basic analog meters start at around US $15, but consider getting one with a digital display and an audible continuity tester. When you're up to your arms inside a chassis probing a pair of contacts, you don't want to keep looking away just to see if you have continuity between two points. You'll also want a variety of ends for the probes, such as alligator clips and PC board lead hooks.

Next you'll want a Soldering Iron. Some of the Maker Faire geeks didn't look for much more than the simple ones that cost less than $10, but others wanted the flexibility that a digitally controlled soldering station brings ($80; more for a name brand such as Weller). With advanced projects, you may need to vary the iron temperature depending on your components.

Sometimes, though, you just need a lot of heat, especially when soldering a large component or a thick wire. A conventional iron can't heat a large mass of metal quickly enough. Casey Haskell of Sparkfun Electronics likes to have a propane-powered pen iron for its portability, while others prefer a high-watt soldering gun.

Some of the Makers have moved beyond "through-hole" PC boards and now like to work with surface-mount devices. The "right" way to reflow solder for SMDs is using a purpose-made oven, but many a brave adventurer has gotten by with a toaster oven and some TLC. You can also use a hot-air gun or a hot-air pencil, which lets you do SMD one component at a time. Justin Huynh, who hacks remote-controlled cars with Arduinos, the popular DIY microcontrollers, uses this technique as well as a variable-temperature Weller. "I've always used the Wellers," he says. "My friends who are engineers use them. They just work really well."

Along with an iron, you'll want to have a way to desolder, for those inevitable missteps. Some people like to use desoldering braid; others like Desoldering Irons with suction bulbs. I've used both, and I find the irons do a better job with less heating of the components.

Most of us start out using batteries or cannibalizing power adapters, but a good bench Power Supply lets you control voltages precisely as well as measure and limit the amperage flowing through the circuit. You can get a reasonable single-voltage supply for $120 or so, such as the 18-volt, 3-ampere supply made by Extech Instruments. More advanced ones will offer multiple controllable voltages, useful when projects have more than one input voltage.

A bench supply goes well with a large Protoboard, one that supports multiple supply voltages and has lots of real estate to lay out chips. If you do a quick proof of concept on a protoboard first, you can save yourself a lot of grief when you try to set out a permanent version (or send it out to a printed-circuit-board fab).

Haskell notes that no good workbench should be without a few nonelectrical items as well, such as Calipers. "I use them constantly," he says. They're especially critical when you start to lay out circuits in close quarters, such as inside an enclosure. Another go-to item is a good hot Glue Gun. This is not to be confused with a craft glue gun, which uses low-temperature glue sticks. An industrial gun melts at a much higher temperature, and the material is nearly as hard as plastic when it cools. Haskell has another nontraditional tool in his bag of tricks. "A bag of LEDs is really helpful," he says. "It's a good way to see if something is getting power."

So far, we've been talking about items that you can get for around $100. Of the Makers I spoke to who could afford one, the next tool they went for was an Oscilloscope. A good one, such as a 40-megahertz Tektronix, can cost $950, and the prices rise quickly from there. Huynh says that his group had to pool their money to afford even a used one, a common strategy for hobbyists.

There's one other big-ticket item most makers yearn for. "We'd love to have a Logic Analyzer for working with chips," says Huynh, "but it's kind of pricey." A good one (better than the portable unit shown here) is invaluable, especially if you need to look at several seconds of history.

Haskell says that if money were no option, his next purchase would be either a desktop computer numerical control machine or a 3-D Printer. As it turns out, desktop CNC machines are coming down in price quickly; there are designs available for under $500 at this point. And 3-D printers are selling for less as well, some piggybacking on top of the new CNC platforms.

The nice thing about getting a workbench together is that you can do it gradually. That's why it's often worth spending a bit more to get the item you really want. There's nothing worse than having to buy something better six months down the road. Shop with care, consider used equipment, and before you know it, you'll be ready to tackle just about any project you can imagine.

About the Author

James Turner is a contributing editor for O’Reilly Media, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Next month he’ll describe how to build a high-quality, low-cost oscilloscope using an iPad.

To Probe Further

For the back story about IEEE Spectrum photo editor Randi Silberman Klett being scanned in 3-D, see the sidebar, "A 3-D Me."

What are people running away from? Scenes from "Revolutionary Road"

Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Vivaldi's The Four Seasons - Winter 1st Movement

Alice Sara Ott playing Liszt's "Grandes études de Paganini No. 3" nicknamed "La Campanella"

Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for? An excerpt from The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

Excerpt: 'The Sense of an Ending'

I remember, in no particular order:

– a shiny inner wrist;

– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;

– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;

– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;

– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;

– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

We live in time — it holds us and moulds us — but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing — until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

* * *

I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage.

There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn't expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.

The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he'd previously been taught, and if he might prove 'scholarship material'. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.

'Now, you'll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.' Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the ques­tion wouldn't be flicked, like an angler's fly, to land on one of our heads. 'Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?' He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. 'Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII's reign?'

Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.

'There was unrest, sir.'

An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.

'Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?'

Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. 'I'd say there was great unrest, sir.'

'Finn, then. Are you up in this period?'

The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall's idiocies.

'Not really, sir, I'm afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event — even the outbreak of the First World War, for example — is that "something happened".'

'Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn't it?' After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher.

At the next break, I sought out Finn.'I'm Tony Webster.' He looked at me warily. 'Great line to Hunt.' He seemed not to know what I was referring to. 'About something happening.'

'Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn't take it up.'

That wasn't what he was supposed to say.

Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn't.

Later that day — or perhaps another day — we had a double English period with Phil Dixon, a young master just down from Cambridge. He liked to use contemporary texts, and would throw out sudden challenges.'"Birth, and Copulation, and Death" — that's what T. S. Eliot says it's all about. Any comments?' He once compared a Shakespearean hero to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. And I remember how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes's poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured,'Of course, we're all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.' Sometimes, he addressed us as 'Gentlemen'. Naturally, we adored him.

That afternoon, he handed out a poem with no title, date or author's name, gave us ten minutes to study it, then asked for our responses.

'Shall we start with you, Finn? Put simply, what would you say this poem is about?'

Adrian looked up from his desk. 'Eros and Thanatos, sir.'

'Hmm. Go on.'

'Sex and death,' Finn continued, as if it might not just be the thickies in the back row who didn't understand Greek. 'Or love and death, if you prefer.The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict. Sir.'

I was probably looking more impressed than Dixon thought healthy.

'Webster, enlighten us further.'

'I just thought it was a poem about a barn owl, sir.'

This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.

Adrian allowed himself to be absorbed into our group, without acknowledging that it was something he sought. Perhaps he didn't. Nor did he alter his views to accord with ours. At morning prayers he could be heard joining in the responses while Alex and I merely mimed the words, and Colin preferred the satirical ploy of the pseudo-zealot's enthusiastic bellow.The three of us considered school sports a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive; Adrian joined the fencing club and did the high jump. We were belligerently tone-deaf; he came to school with his clarinet. When Colin denounced the family, I mocked the political system, and Alex made philosophical objections to the perceived nature of reality, Adrian kept his counsel — at first, anyway. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too — it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.

The school was in central London, and each day we travelled up to it from our separate boroughs, passing from one system of control to another. Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

'Fucking bastards, parents,' Colin complained one Monday lunchtime. 'You think they're OK when you're little, then you realise they're just like . . .'

'Henry VIII, Col?' Adrian suggested.We were beginning to get used to his sense of irony; also to the fact that it might be turned against us as well.When teasing, or calling us to seriousness, he would address me as Anthony; Alex would become Alexander, and the unlengthenable Colin shortened to Col.

'Wouldn't mind if my dad had half a dozen wives.'

'And was incredibly rich.'

'And painted by Holbein.'

'And told the Pope to sod off.'

'Any particular reason why they're FBs?' Alex asked Colin.

'I wanted us to go to the funfair. They said they had to spend the weekedn gardening.'

Right: fucking bastards. Except to Adrian, who listened to our denunciations, but rarely joined in. And yet, it seemed to us, he had more cause than most. His mother had walked out years before, leaving his dad to cope with Adrian and his sister. This was long before the term 'single­parent family' came into use; back then it was 'a broken home', and Adrian was the only person we knew who came from one. This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't; he said he loved his mother and respected his father. Privately, the three of us examined his case and came up with a theory: that the key to a happy family life was for there not to be a family — or at least, not one living together. Having made this analysis, we envied Adrian the more.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to he released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives — and time itself — would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

In the meantime, we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos. Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion that principles should guide actions. Previously, Alex had been regarded as the philosopher among us. He had read stuff the other two hadn't, and might, for instance, suddenly declare, 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent.' Colin and I would consider this idea in silence for a while, then grin and carry on talking. But now Adrian's arrival dislodged Alex from his position — or rather, gave us another choice of philosopher. If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.

Yes, of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for? We used terms like 'Weltanschauung' and 'Sturm und Drang', enjoyed saying 'That's philosophically self-evident', and assured one another that the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive. Our parents saw things differently, picturing their children as innocents suddenly exposed to noxious influence. So Colin's mother referred to me as his 'dark angel'; my father blamed Alex when he found me reading The Communist Manifesto; Colin was fingered by Alex's parents when they caught him with a hard-boiled American crime novel. And so on. It was the same with sex. Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

One afternoon Old Joe Hunt, as if picking up Adrian's earlier challenge, asked us to debate the origins of the First World War: specifically, the responsibility of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassin for starting the whole thing off. Back then, we were most of us absolutists. We liked Yes v No, Praise v Blame, Guilt v Innocence — or, in Marshall's case, Unrest v Great Unrest. We liked a game that ended in a win and loss, not a draw. And so for some, the Serbian gunman, whose name is long gone from my memory, had one hundred per cent individual responsibility: take him out of the equation, and the war would never have happened. Others preferred the one hundred per cent responsibility of historical forces, which had placed the antagonistic nations on an inevitable collision course: 'Europe was a powder keg waiting to blow', and so on. The more anarchic, like Colin, argued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.

Hunt gave a brief nod to Colin's attempt to undermine everything, as if morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence, something to be grown out of. Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life — and truth, and morality, and art — far more clearly than our compromised elders.

'Finn, you've been quiet. You started this ball rolling. You are, as it were our Serbian gunman.' Hunt paused to let the allusion take effect. 'Would you care to give us the benefit of your thoughts?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'What don't you know?'

'Well, in one sense. I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.' He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us.'Indeed, isn't the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is — was — a chain of individual respon­sibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened.That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.'

There was a silence. And no, he wasn't taking the piss, not in the slightest.

Old Joe Hunt looked at his watch and smiled. 'Finn, I retire in five years. And I shall be happy to give you a reference if you care to take over.' And he wasn't taking the piss either.

From The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Copyright 2011 by Julian Barnes. Excerpted by permission of Knopf.