Mark Bernstein
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CarbonFin and Tinderbox 
Jon Leavitt explores the iPhone outliner CarbonFin as an adjunct to Tinderbox. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Jon Leavitt explores the iPhone outliner CarbonFin as an adjunct to Tinderbox. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
A Good Morning
Krugman blogs that “a funny thing happened to me this morning.” (He received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Congrats!) Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Krugman blogs that “a funny thing happened to me this morning.” (He received the Nobel Prize in Economics. Congrats!) Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Selling the Deckel
Savenor’s had a lesson on good marketing yesterday. They had a two big hunks of brisket in the chiller. One had a hand-written label: “The Amazing Deckel!” It was ten bucks. I had a nice chat with the butcher, asking “what is a deckel anyway?” I figured that we needed to eat something this week, after all. Why not? So I brought it home. Seasoned it heavily all over. Put it on a low fire on the covered grill, with some hickory chunks, for a couple of hours. And then I braised it for an hour with some onions and carrots from our farm share, some rosemary and garlic paste, and a bottle of Amstel. Seriously good! And, when you come right down to it, it only happened because of that little hand-written label, which was extolling a cut of meat that’s basically unpopular and hard to sell, but which also has some advantages. There's an important marketing lesson here. (There was another hand-written note it in the case, on a pork shoulder. “Local, farm-raised suckling pig.” I’m still far from confident with pork, but I’ll tell you how it turns out.) Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Savenor’s had a lesson on good marketing yesterday. They had a two big hunks of brisket in the chiller. One had a hand-written label: “The Amazing Deckel!” It was ten bucks. I had a nice chat with the butcher, asking “what is a deckel anyway?” I figured that we needed to eat something this week, after all. Why not? So I brought it home. Seasoned it heavily all over. Put it on a low fire on the covered grill, with some hickory chunks, for a couple of hours. And then I braised it for an hour with some onions and carrots from our farm share, some rosemary and garlic paste, and a bottle of Amstel. Seriously good! And, when you come right down to it, it only happened because of that little hand-written label, which was extolling a cut of meat that’s basically unpopular and hard to sell, but which also has some advantages. There's an important marketing lesson here. (There was another hand-written note it in the case, on a pork shoulder. “Local, farm-raised suckling pig.” I’m still far from confident with pork, but I’ll tell you how it turns out.) Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Cooking the Deckel
The smoked-and-braised Deckel was good right away, and even better the next night. (I served it with greens — kale from the farm share, stewed with a slice of chopped bacon, an onion, a carrot, and then with 1/4c of creme fraiche added at the end — and with some boiled new potatoes. But Greg Ibendahl points out the error in my ways: I realize you are from the northeast and you Northerners make your brisket into weird things like pastrami ;) but the brisket is not an unpopular and throwaway cut. You just need to get to the South more to see how real cooking is done. In Texas, especially, brisket is BBQ. Here's how to cook it. I have a similar brand smoker and it is just amazing for cooking things like brisket (a whole turkey is especially good). The key to cooking brisket though is to cook it to a much higher temperature than normal meat (190 degrees). Normally a temp this high would make a cut of meat really dry and tough as all the fat would be cooked away. With brisket though you have all this connective tissue that does not start to break down until 180 to 185 degrees. This connective tissue is what makes brisket so good. If you don't cook it to a high enough temp, the brisket will be tough and chewy. Cook it high enough and it just melts in your mouth. I've smoked 8 to 10 briskets and it is definitely a hard skill to master. I have to fight my normal urge to take the brisket out at a temperature that I normally would use for beef. If fact my best brisket resulted from a malfunctioning thermometer that had me keeping the meat in longer than I probably would have otherwise. I didn’t mean that brisket was unpopular, but that this piece of the brisket — the point, rather than the flat — is much less popular. And it’s often sold “deckel off”. So, the grocer had a fairly challenging piece of meat to sell, and they made the sale not on price but rather on features. On further reflection, my combination of smoking and braising has some real advantages. The hazard, when smoking on a grill, is that you go too far (and wind up with charred meat) or not far enough (and wind up with tough meat). The risk all comes toward the end. With the braise method, at the end your meat is sitting in a 350° oven bathed in tasty 190° broth -- because, with the lid off, your pot is only going to manage about 190°. So you can’t overcook the meat. You loose some crispness, but crispiness isn't really a virtue in brisket. And there's plenty of smokiness left to go around. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
The smoked-and-braised Deckel was good right away, and even better the next night. (I served it with greens — kale from the farm share, stewed with a slice of chopped bacon, an onion, a carrot, and then with 1/4c of creme fraiche added at the end — and with some boiled new potatoes. But Greg Ibendahl points out the error in my ways: I realize you are from the northeast and you Northerners make your brisket into weird things like pastrami ;) but the brisket is not an unpopular and throwaway cut. You just need to get to the South more to see how real cooking is done. In Texas, especially, brisket is BBQ. Here's how to cook it. I have a similar brand smoker and it is just amazing for cooking things like brisket (a whole turkey is especially good). The key to cooking brisket though is to cook it to a much higher temperature than normal meat (190 degrees). Normally a temp this high would make a cut of meat really dry and tough as all the fat would be cooked away. With brisket though you have all this connective tissue that does not start to break down until 180 to 185 degrees. This connective tissue is what makes brisket so good. If you don't cook it to a high enough temp, the brisket will be tough and chewy. Cook it high enough and it just melts in your mouth. I've smoked 8 to 10 briskets and it is definitely a hard skill to master. I have to fight my normal urge to take the brisket out at a temperature that I normally would use for beef. If fact my best brisket resulted from a malfunctioning thermometer that had me keeping the meat in longer than I probably would have otherwise. I didn’t mean that brisket was unpopular, but that this piece of the brisket — the point, rather than the flat — is much less popular. And it’s often sold “deckel off”. So, the grocer had a fairly challenging piece of meat to sell, and they made the sale not on price but rather on features. On further reflection, my combination of smoking and braising has some real advantages. The hazard, when smoking on a grill, is that you go too far (and wind up with charred meat) or not far enough (and wind up with tough meat). The risk all comes toward the end. With the braise method, at the end your meat is sitting in a 350° oven bathed in tasty 190° broth -- because, with the lid off, your pot is only going to manage about 190°. So you can’t overcook the meat. You loose some crispness, but crispiness isn't really a virtue in brisket. And there's plenty of smokiness left to go around. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
The Education of Henry Adams
The Boy was, I am sure, a ton of fun and a terrific companion when the grandfather John Quincy walked him to school. A few years later, The Boy became The Private Secretary and he helped save the Union no end of trouble, and his father no end of bother, in England during the War of the Rebellion. The Old Man can still see the Boy clearly, which is remarkable, and he is still seeking an Education. And he still knows what the Boy knew: he's no good at his math lessons. This, it seems to me, is the tragedy of The Education; Adams was seeking a mathematical or physical model of psychology and, indeed, of history — and he is trying to do this without actually learning mathematics or physics. I don’t think this can be done, and I’m not sure it should be attempted. Adams, I think, intuitively sensed that there were good ideas in calculus and (perhaps) in linear algebra, and so he’s constantly looking for physical anthologies — manifestations of force, expressions of work (or energy, or momentum: it seems any will do pretty much interchangeably ) — in the affairs of men. He was wrong, just as he was wrong when as a youth he mistook the real positions of Russell, Palmerston and Gladstone. He was always happy, it seems, to realize that he had got everything wrong and that he should need to start his education afresh. Perhaps not entirely happy; Adams does return often to the contrast of his 18th-century temperament and 20th-century circumstances. And, if he expected the end of history to occur around 1950, what is 39 years in the sweep of annals? Most of all, Adams was likable, and that fine sociability survives in his prose. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
The Boy was, I am sure, a ton of fun and a terrific companion when the grandfather John Quincy walked him to school. A few years later, The Boy became The Private Secretary and he helped save the Union no end of trouble, and his father no end of bother, in England during the War of the Rebellion. The Old Man can still see the Boy clearly, which is remarkable, and he is still seeking an Education. And he still knows what the Boy knew: he's no good at his math lessons. This, it seems to me, is the tragedy of The Education; Adams was seeking a mathematical or physical model of psychology and, indeed, of history — and he is trying to do this without actually learning mathematics or physics. I don’t think this can be done, and I’m not sure it should be attempted. Adams, I think, intuitively sensed that there were good ideas in calculus and (perhaps) in linear algebra, and so he’s constantly looking for physical anthologies — manifestations of force, expressions of work (or energy, or momentum: it seems any will do pretty much interchangeably ) — in the affairs of men. He was wrong, just as he was wrong when as a youth he mistook the real positions of Russell, Palmerston and Gladstone. He was always happy, it seems, to realize that he had got everything wrong and that he should need to start his education afresh. Perhaps not entirely happy; Adams does return often to the contrast of his 18th-century temperament and 20th-century circumstances. And, if he expected the end of history to occur around 1950, what is 39 years in the sweep of annals? Most of all, Adams was likable, and that fine sociability survives in his prose. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Coover Links
Though we’ve been writing for the Web for ages — and some of us were reading and writing hypertext before the Web existed — there’s still a lot we don’t know. Consider Coover Links — links in which the start of a sentence lies in one side of the link while the end of the sentence lies at the other. Coover links are named for Robert Coover, the author of a short hypertext “Heart Suit” (McSweeney’s 16, 2005) written entirely in this fashion. Coover himself uses Coover links in a shuffled-deck hypertext — see its name was Penelope and Forward Anywhere for other shuffled decks. In node/link hypertexts, they seem most natural when moving from the end of one page to the start of another. Stretchtext hypertexts can embed Coover links at any point. Coover links present lots of interesting questions that have not been explored much (or at all), either in art or criticism or theory. Some that spring to mind include: How do Coover links interact with rules of grammar? For example, it's probably easier to write multiple destinations if the opening fragment is a prepositional phrase, as above, than if it contains a subject and verb. Are Coover links difficult to translate into some languages? I imagine sensitivity to word order would make some Coover links extraordinarily difficult to translate from English to French, or from German to English. (But what fun you could have with German verbs!) A writer, revising a hypertext story, decides to begin Q in mid-sentence. Two nodes, O and P, link to Q, and so she revises these nodes to end in mid-sentence (see above). But O and P link to other nodes besides Q, and now these need to be revised as well. But, not every node needs a Coover link just because Q has one. Use graph theory to characterize the set of hypertext nodes the author needs to revise. Write a hypertext (or hypertext fragment) in which some nodes end with the first line of a couplet, and the destinations begin with the concluding line (or, perhaps, with the last three lines of an ABBA quatrain). Proceed, with variations. This is by no means exhaustive. And while I think all these problems are things that an undergraduate could easily tackle — yes, I’m talking to you — these are all at the frontier of knowledge. And they could have real impact: how many thousands of web pages, from Twitter digests to the New York Times, end with clumsy "next" links? Can Coover links replace “there’s more…” in weblogs? A paper on any of these topics would be well received at Hypertext 2009, coming next June 29-July 1st in Torino, Italy. The market is collapsing, we’re all staring at a new Depression, and I’m talking about going to Europe now? Am I crazy? But, yes, this is what you should be thinking about now. We may all end up with fruit carts. But it’s a lot better to have a good cart on a good corner; conference publications and contacts are good for you. Berenice Abbott, Hot Dog Stand, West St. and North Moore, Manhattan,1936. NYPL 1219152 Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
Though we’ve been writing for the Web for ages — and some of us were reading and writing hypertext before the Web existed — there’s still a lot we don’t know. Consider Coover Links — links in which the start of a sentence lies in one side of the link while the end of the sentence lies at the other. Coover links are named for Robert Coover, the author of a short hypertext “Heart Suit” (McSweeney’s 16, 2005) written entirely in this fashion. Coover himself uses Coover links in a shuffled-deck hypertext — see its name was Penelope and Forward Anywhere for other shuffled decks. In node/link hypertexts, they seem most natural when moving from the end of one page to the start of another. Stretchtext hypertexts can embed Coover links at any point. Coover links present lots of interesting questions that have not been explored much (or at all), either in art or criticism or theory. Some that spring to mind include: How do Coover links interact with rules of grammar? For example, it's probably easier to write multiple destinations if the opening fragment is a prepositional phrase, as above, than if it contains a subject and verb. Are Coover links difficult to translate into some languages? I imagine sensitivity to word order would make some Coover links extraordinarily difficult to translate from English to French, or from German to English. (But what fun you could have with German verbs!) A writer, revising a hypertext story, decides to begin Q in mid-sentence. Two nodes, O and P, link to Q, and so she revises these nodes to end in mid-sentence (see above). But O and P link to other nodes besides Q, and now these need to be revised as well. But, not every node needs a Coover link just because Q has one. Use graph theory to characterize the set of hypertext nodes the author needs to revise. Write a hypertext (or hypertext fragment) in which some nodes end with the first line of a couplet, and the destinations begin with the concluding line (or, perhaps, with the last three lines of an ABBA quatrain). Proceed, with variations. This is by no means exhaustive. And while I think all these problems are things that an undergraduate could easily tackle — yes, I’m talking to you — these are all at the frontier of knowledge. And they could have real impact: how many thousands of web pages, from Twitter digests to the New York Times, end with clumsy "next" links? Can Coover links replace “there’s more…” in weblogs? A paper on any of these topics would be well received at Hypertext 2009, coming next June 29-July 1st in Torino, Italy. The market is collapsing, we’re all staring at a new Depression, and I’m talking about going to Europe now? Am I crazy? But, yes, this is what you should be thinking about now. We may all end up with fruit carts. But it’s a lot better to have a good cart on a good corner; conference publications and contacts are good for you. Berenice Abbott, Hot Dog Stand, West St. and North Moore, Manhattan,1936. NYPL 1219152 Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-20 03:41:16
What's Going On
What’s happening? The newspapers say it’s all about mortgages. But that’s not right — or at least not complete — because it doesn’t make sense. A fancy house in San Diego is still a fancy house after someone misses a mortgage payment; even if the price falls a little bit, it’s still a fancy house. Getting from some bad mortgages to what we’re seeing now, with trillions of losses and with banks and brokers collapsing everywhere Paul Krugman takes a shot at explaining what’s going on in the markets. Charts and equations, but nothing you can’t handle. It’s nice to see someone have a little respect of the reader. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
What’s happening? The newspapers say it’s all about mortgages. But that’s not right — or at least not complete — because it doesn’t make sense. A fancy house in San Diego is still a fancy house after someone misses a mortgage payment; even if the price falls a little bit, it’s still a fancy house. Getting from some bad mortgages to what we’re seeing now, with trillions of losses and with banks and brokers collapsing everywhere Paul Krugman takes a shot at explaining what’s going on in the markets. Charts and equations, but nothing you can’t handle. It’s nice to see someone have a little respect of the reader. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Smile When You?re Lying
Thompson, an old hand at the travel-writing racket and also a former travel editor, sets out to explain why travel writing is so bad. The answer, of course, is that the purpose of contemporary travel writing is simply to sell stuff, to provide a frame for advertisements and to reinforce their message. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again covered this territory with plenty of style and with, on the whole, more generosity of spirit, though without claiming to cover the whole of the travel and hospitality press. A good deal of this book concerns sex tourism, either explicitly (in chaste stories of bargirls in Thailand and the Phillipines) or obliquely (in sneers about Americans in Mexican border towns, cruise-ship shore parties, and rural Japanese English-teaching, and in a range of metaphor inspired by Hunter Thompson). You’d think that our author simply disapproves of sex — at least when you're a tourist or a traveller — except that his list of travel tips asserts that the best way to learn a language is in bed. We’re left to wonder if the writer is a hypocrite, or his editor a prude, or whether he’s a sinner who has climbed upon the wagon. Since Thompson is otherwise intelligent and insightful on the economics of tourism — arguing, for example, that his own distaste for the Caribbean is rooted in his discomfort at the contrast of extreme luxury and poverty, and that this has the effect of punishing Caribbeans for being so poor that it makes him uncomfortable — his weird delicacy on sex tourism (which he talks about at length but about which he doesn’t like to think) is a missed opportunity. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Thompson, an old hand at the travel-writing racket and also a former travel editor, sets out to explain why travel writing is so bad. The answer, of course, is that the purpose of contemporary travel writing is simply to sell stuff, to provide a frame for advertisements and to reinforce their message. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again covered this territory with plenty of style and with, on the whole, more generosity of spirit, though without claiming to cover the whole of the travel and hospitality press. A good deal of this book concerns sex tourism, either explicitly (in chaste stories of bargirls in Thailand and the Phillipines) or obliquely (in sneers about Americans in Mexican border towns, cruise-ship shore parties, and rural Japanese English-teaching, and in a range of metaphor inspired by Hunter Thompson). You’d think that our author simply disapproves of sex — at least when you're a tourist or a traveller — except that his list of travel tips asserts that the best way to learn a language is in bed. We’re left to wonder if the writer is a hypocrite, or his editor a prude, or whether he’s a sinner who has climbed upon the wagon. Since Thompson is otherwise intelligent and insightful on the economics of tourism — arguing, for example, that his own distaste for the Caribbean is rooted in his discomfort at the contrast of extreme luxury and poverty, and that this has the effect of punishing Caribbeans for being so poor that it makes him uncomfortable — his weird delicacy on sex tourism (which he talks about at length but about which he doesn’t like to think) is a missed opportunity. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Half A Crown
Jo Walton’s third book about an England that capitulated to Germany in 1940, this fascinating book is even better than Farthing and Ha'penny. It's 1960, and our time is divided between Jack Carmichael, the reluctant commander of the British Gestapo (and leader of the Underground), and his ward, Elvira Royston, who is preparing to be presented to the young Queen. This world is a wonderfully-refracted mirror of what came to pass, in which Londoners still go to work every day and are only mildly disturbed by the construction of concentration camps for British Jews but deplore modern pop music (It's a long way to Hitlerhavn!). Two atom bombs were dropped (on Moscow and Miami), and now the world is conclusively at peace. Society and class have retreated to the Edwardian era, Churchill is a forgotten back-bencher. But London is beginning to swing, there are gay pubs now, and in one of them we meet a Foreign Office man named Guy who is soldiering on, years after his masters in Moscow became radioactive dust. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Jo Walton’s third book about an England that capitulated to Germany in 1940, this fascinating book is even better than Farthing and Ha'penny. It's 1960, and our time is divided between Jack Carmichael, the reluctant commander of the British Gestapo (and leader of the Underground), and his ward, Elvira Royston, who is preparing to be presented to the young Queen. This world is a wonderfully-refracted mirror of what came to pass, in which Londoners still go to work every day and are only mildly disturbed by the construction of concentration camps for British Jews but deplore modern pop music (It's a long way to Hitlerhavn!). Two atom bombs were dropped (on Moscow and Miami), and now the world is conclusively at peace. Society and class have retreated to the Edwardian era, Churchill is a forgotten back-bencher. But London is beginning to swing, there are gay pubs now, and in one of them we meet a Foreign Office man named Guy who is soldiering on, years after his masters in Moscow became radioactive dust. Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Visions and Revsisions
Roger Ebert skewers the new US postage stamp of Bette Davis, in which the artist has used a famous pose but removed the iconic cigarette. The great Chicago photographer Victor Skrebneski took one of the most famous portraits of Davis. I showed him the stamp. His response: "I have been with Bette for years and I have never seen her without a cigarette! No cigarette! Who is this impostor?" I imagine Davis might not object to a portrait of her without a cigarette, because she posed for many. But to have a cigarette removed from one of her most famous poses! What she did to Joan Crawford in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" wouldn't even compare to what ever would have happened to the artist Michael Deas. This launches a wonderful discussion of the cigarette in movies. Two of the most wonderful props in film noir were cigarettes and hats. They added interest to a close up or a two-shot. "Casablanca" without cigarettes would seem to be standing around looking for something to do. These days men don't smoke and don't wear hats. When they lower their heads, their eyes aren't shaded. Cinematographers have lost invaluable compositional tools. The coil of smoke rising around the face of a beautiful women added allure and mystery. Remember Marlene Dietrich. She was smoking when she said, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58
Roger Ebert skewers the new US postage stamp of Bette Davis, in which the artist has used a famous pose but removed the iconic cigarette. The great Chicago photographer Victor Skrebneski took one of the most famous portraits of Davis. I showed him the stamp. His response: "I have been with Bette for years and I have never seen her without a cigarette! No cigarette! Who is this impostor?" I imagine Davis might not object to a portrait of her without a cigarette, because she posed for many. But to have a cigarette removed from one of her most famous poses! What she did to Joan Crawford in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" wouldn't even compare to what ever would have happened to the artist Michael Deas. This launches a wonderful discussion of the cigarette in movies. Two of the most wonderful props in film noir were cigarettes and hats. They added interest to a close up or a two-shot. "Casablanca" without cigarettes would seem to be standing around looking for something to do. These days men don't smoke and don't wear hats. When they lower their heads, their eyes aren't shaded. Cinematographers have lost invaluable compositional tools. The coil of smoke rising around the face of a beautiful women added allure and mystery. Remember Marlene Dietrich. She was smoking when she said, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." Mark Bernstein, 2008-10-13 03:38:58