Posts by Bart Janssen
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I find it very hard to watch Mr Gower any more. He is consistently and very overtly biased in his political reporting. He may have inside knowledge that causes this bias but if he wants to grow up to be a journalist he needs to learn to set that aside when reporting.
I find it difficult to understand how a newsroom that contains John Campbell (who has become a very good journalist) and the team that supports him, can also contain Mr Gower. It strikes me as odd.
As for the polls, they are the news equivalent of reality TV, sometimes entertaining (Can't. Turn. Away.) but never a source of knowledge.
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This statistician's view on election polls is still highly relevant.
Apart from the obvious and very troubling bias in all the polls towards National there is a huge problem with the way the data is reported for any party that gets significantly less than 50% of the vote. By reporting the margin of error as plus or minus 3.5% or so the news agencies are happy to allow folks to believe that the 31% for Labour could be as low as 27% and that the 11% for The Greens could be as scary as 14%. None of those things is true. It is only plus or minus 3.5% IF you get 50%, if you get 25% it is plus or minus a different (smaller) number.
What is most troubling about the polls is with their bias and with the awful reporting of what the numbers mean, both statistically and politically, the media is actually affecting the result of the election ..."why bother voting if National is going to win anyway". In some cases I believe that is innocent ignorance, but sometimes I'm less charitable.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Emma Hart,
Did you notice how all the kids were shouting for LJ to ask a question. They knew how powerful she was.
I might have a small crush over her now :)
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Soon Lee,
Given that the ingredients that impart heat do so via different chemicals, it might be interesting to create an overload dish that contains all of them, chilli, pepper, Sichuan pepper, wasabi. And if you’re going to do that, might as well also throw in ginger & horseradish too. It would certainly add complexity…
uh huh ... so you'll be bringing that to the next wine and food match will you?
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to David Hood,
that her year (not just her) is vastly more politically aware than other years
Of course they are. they have a tool that allows them to read any and all political information. When I grew up it was the newspaper and TV. There was a generation that didn't even have functional newspapers or TV news. Now though, these kids have so much more information.
It's easy to dismiss them as just looking at Royals youtube videos or tweeting about whichever star's tits are on show this week. But they read more than that, much much more.
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I love the will to challenge the authority that these kids have still got. By the time we get all crusty and tired that will has been beaten down - we know there's no point. They don't.
They also look at things sideways - they suggest the obvious and then demand to know why we don't do it. One day (not too far away) I suspect this idea of a once in 3 years vote for a group of representatives will go the way of the dinosaur. At that time we may see an obvious way for their voices to contribute.
And as for those 10s of thousands of boat people Aussie (and NZ) are so scared of ... those people risked their lives to come to another country. They had the will and the courage to make a change in their lives that risked everything (unless you believe in an afterlife). If those people can't contribute to society positively then that's our failure not theirs.
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Well worth a subscription to me. And also worth a lump sum to help get you over the hump.
Sorry was a bit late to this but we had a holiday to Vietnam and Cambodia to execute first ... priorities. Now we have 2000 photos to sort through and some rather fine food experiences to exercise off.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ahem. Pepper.
Yup but hardly the same heat as chilli so yes they could make a hot dish but most were not hot as we think of them today. Instead they were "merely" complex mixtures of spices. I guess the point I was trying to make was that chilli and its heat are not required to make a true curry.
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And because I'm a geek I have to say something about the chilli. All the heat in a curry comes from chilli and all chillies come from South America. So hot curries never existed until the Portuguese and Spanish brought back chillies. It makes sense then that there are quite a few authentic curries that have no heat at all - they are "just" blends of spices.
And to extend the geekiness, the compound in chilli that gives the heat is capsaicin. There are a couple of cool things about capsaicin that are worth knowing. The first is that the receptor for capsaicin gets down-regulated when you eat capsaicin. So if you eat a bit of chilli you feel the heat/burn, but next time you will feel less burn, and the next time even less. You really do become acclimatised to curry heat. And if you don't eat chilli for a month or so you lose that acclimatisation. So those people who feel the burn once and never try it again will never get to enjoy a really yummy hot curry.
BTW that is exactly the same effect that allows chefs to handle hot pans, they really don't feel the pain.
The second thing is even cooler. It turns out that the receptor for capsaicin is exactly the same as the pain/burn receptor. So exposure to capsaicin can desensitize you to heat/pain - which sounds boring until you realise you can treat chronic pain with capsaicin. There is a medical application for this that does not belong on a food thread :).
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Whew just got back from holiday in time for this thread.
You can buy goat at the Aussie butcher opposite Mt Roskill Grammar, the section is bigger than the lamb section.
As for curries, I grew up eating my mother's version of the Indonesian foods she grew up on - none of them strictly curries but I got used to hot food. We love butter chicken, yes it is anything but authentic but it is possible to make a good one and it's a good measure of a curry house. If they take the time to make the butter chicken good then chances are their own house specialty curries will be good too.
We make our own version following Heston Blumenthal's "perfect chicken tikka" recipe. He went to India to figure how it should be made and yeah there isn't anything like it in India but it is based on some real themes. The recipe takes 3 full days of cooking and requires you to turn your BBQ into a tandoor-like oven. The chicken gets marinated twice before cooking in your "tandoor" followed by the assembling of the curry using spice mixes you grind and prepare yourself. The recipe usually requires a trip to Sandringham. The last batch we shared with friends but the ate so much of it we hardly had any to freeze away :(.
One thing cooking like that taught me is the value of time in curries. They always taste better the next day, the flavours just need time to meld together and nothing can replace that.