Hat tip to Kanani Fong of Kitchen Dispatch
At the Siskel Center, 164 N State St, Chicago. IL. 60601
(312) 846-2600
Month: February 2013
Rye Bread Bleg
When my grandmother died several years ago one of the things I wanted most when we cleaned out her house was the giant box of hand written recipes. I got it.
Many of these go back to when she was a poor child back in the early twentieth century in Munich.
I was running through them the other day and found one for rye bread.
I have never made bread in my life, but I think this could be fun. No bread machine here, we are going to do it the old fashioned way.
The directions look pretty straightforward. But I have one question that maybe the ChicagoBoyz mind hive can help me with.
The first step is to start the yeast. The card says to dissolve the yeast in warm water. The ingredient list says to use one cup of water with “1 yeast”.
I am guessing that one yeast means one packet of yeast? Any help or advice you can provide is appreciated – below the fold are photos of the recipe card. You can click on them for larger versions.
“No, Obama Is Not My Daddy – He’s My Employee”
The grotesque spectacle of the State of the Union address, with its lengthy receiving line of adoring sycophants, demonstrates why the President is operating under the delusion that he is more than just our President. Like him, many people seem to fundamentally misunderstand his role. He’s not our “leader,” or our “ruler,” or our national “daddy,” no matter what his adoring fan, comic Chris Rock, thinks.
Let’s clarify things for those folks with the unseemly desire to offer up their personal sovereignty to some government hack. Unlike Hollywood geniuses better known for exposing their breasts than exposing their brains, I’ll never pledge to be a servant of any politician.
I’m an American citizen. As such, no mortal man may presume to lead or rule me.
High Ground Movie Tix
From Twitter:
@HighGroundMovie: @chicagoboyzblog Chicago: 7 free tix to veterans’ documentary HIGH GROUND 2/21 or 23 at the Siskel. Limit 2 http://owl.li/hQO51
Sort-of-a-Rerun: The Power of Metaphor and Analogy
(This is a combination of two posts from 2005)
Verbal imagery can affect decision-making. For example, Columbia professor Michael Morris has found that when stock price movements are described in terms of “agent metaphors,” people tend to believe that the trend will continue more than they do when the same stock price movements are described in terms of “object metaphors.”
For example, “Caterpillar jumped up by 5% today” will be interpreted differently from “The price of Caterpillar increased by 5% today,” even though the two statements are semantically identical.
Moreover, Morris found that people–including financial journalists–tend to use agent metaphors more often when prices go up, and object metaphors more often when they go down. Why? “Think about if you’re hiking, and you see something on the trail. It’s either a rock or a toad. If it starts moving up, it’s a toad. If it moves down, it’s probably a rock. Evolution built into our brains that things that move up are alive. Things moving down don’t provide that cue.”
Morris goes on to say that “For the naive investor who’s trying to make sense of the newspaper, the mental concepts that get triggered by agentic descriptions of uptrends may lead them to think that an uptrend is a meaningful signal for tomorrow, while the downtrend isn’t a meaningful signal about tomorrow.”
See article at The Economist: Mind Your Language
A very interesting example of the power of metaphor and analogy can be found in the writings of General Edward Spears. During the opening campaigns of WWI, in 1914, the British Commander-in-Chief (Sir John French) was tempted to withdraw his army into the fortress of Maubeuge. Spears, who in 1914 was a liason officer between the British and French armies, describes the C-in-C’s thought processes: