When You Go Korean Get The BBQ
Even the BBQ squid.
Korea Garden Restaurant
Details: Bulgogi - marinated rib eye bbq: $13.95
Bulgalbi - marinated boneless short ribs bbq: $14.95
Seafood combo - shrimp, scallop, and squid bbq: $14.95
Stir-fried squid: $10.95
Lunch special: $5.75
Where: 9501 Long Point, 713-468-2800.
Hours: daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Before the barbecue items arrive, we get the spread of treats. This miniature smorgasbord is one of the best things about eating in Korean restaurants. At Korea Garden, there are eight items, which alternate depending on what's going on in the kitchen. Tonight's complimentary sides are spicy kim chee, crunchy bread and butter pickles with garlic and chile, slices of dense dried tofu marinated in a spicy sauce, some little silver dollar-sized scallion pancakes, chewy seaweed salad, cold seafood omelet, cold grilled sweet potato slices and thin white shreds of pickled daikon. There is also a dish of garlic chile paste to use on the barbecue.
All three barbecue dishes arrive together. The raw red meat is marinated in a spicy sauce. I have a feeling that once we start cooking it, the fish will get neglected. So I throw all the marinated seafood on the hot grill right away. It sizzles and pops and smells like burning seaweed. The scallops are a real pain. They stick to the metal grill elements and end up coming apart in shreds. The shrimp are much easier to deal with. But the squid turns out to be everybody's favorite.
Squid is one of those barbecue meats that Thelma's, Drexler's and Goode Company all seem to have overlooked. Marinated as it is here at Korea Garden in lots of chiles and garlic, it develops a spicy coating in the grilling process. The tangy barbecue sauce along with the blackened edges gives the chewy cephalopod a surprising depth of flavor.
Not that the bulgogi and bulgalbi aren't big hits too. After grilling the thin boneless meat strips, we fold them up in big fresh Romaine leaves with chile garlic sauce and condiments. The lettuce and bulgogi wrap has much in common with a fajita taco, and it's better for the Atkins diet.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Perry, Texas - Texas Ghost Town
My Uncle George Lester has another short travelogue at the bottom of this page.
My Uncle George Lester has another short travelogue at the bottom of this page.
Lack Direction? Evaluate Your Brain's C.E.O.
You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards.
When those capacities are damaged or underdeveloped, even people with intelligence and talent may flounder. They are often misunderstood as being willfully disorganized or lazy, possessing a bad attitude or, from a parental viewpoint, "doing this on purpose to drive me crazy."
More and more, however, neuroscientists are saying such puzzling underachievers may suffer from neurological abnormalities affecting "the brain's C.E.O." This control center, really an array of "executive functions," orchestrates resources like memory, language and attention to achieve a goal, be it a fraction of a second or five years from now.
You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards.
When those capacities are damaged or underdeveloped, even people with intelligence and talent may flounder. They are often misunderstood as being willfully disorganized or lazy, possessing a bad attitude or, from a parental viewpoint, "doing this on purpose to drive me crazy."
More and more, however, neuroscientists are saying such puzzling underachievers may suffer from neurological abnormalities affecting "the brain's C.E.O." This control center, really an array of "executive functions," orchestrates resources like memory, language and attention to achieve a goal, be it a fraction of a second or five years from now.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Thursday night I am going to Inner Loop SF Book group meeting at U of H after eating at Jenni's Noodle House.
I need to go to my Dad's to see Mars through my telescope there.
Using neural-net programming to crack languages fast.
FROM UZBEK TO KLINGON, THE MACHINE CRACKS THE CODE
Statistical machine translation - in which computers essentially learn new languages on their own instead of being "taught" the languages by bilingual human programmers - has taken off. The new technology allows scientists to develop machine translation systems for a wide number of obscure languages at a pace that experts once thought impossible.
Dr. Knight and others said the progress and accuracy of statistical machine translation had recently surpassed that of the traditional machine translation programs used by Web sites like Yahoo and BabelFish. In the past, such programs were able to compile extensive databanks of foreign languages that allowed them to outperform statistics-based systems.
Traditional machine translation relies on painstaking efforts by bilingual programmers to enter the vast wealth of information on vocabulary and syntax that the computer needs to translate one language into another. But in the early 1990's, a team of researchers at I.B.M. devised another way to do things: feeding a computer an English text and its translation in a different language. The computer then uses statistical analysis to "learn" the second language.
The original NYTimes article looks pay only now.
~~~~
This is really neural-net learning. If I was still at Quest I might have had the opportunity to use neural-net software for marketuing research studies. Right now I use it in a game I am playing. The computer learns from previous moves what things are more likely to work in what circumstances. In fact, it is released with the code from analyzing 140 automated player's actions for 100 turns in 100 games. It was advised if possible to run the learning program on your machine but it would take weeks to complete and takes over the entire machine.
FROM UZBEK TO KLINGON, THE MACHINE CRACKS THE CODE
Statistical machine translation - in which computers essentially learn new languages on their own instead of being "taught" the languages by bilingual human programmers - has taken off. The new technology allows scientists to develop machine translation systems for a wide number of obscure languages at a pace that experts once thought impossible.
Dr. Knight and others said the progress and accuracy of statistical machine translation had recently surpassed that of the traditional machine translation programs used by Web sites like Yahoo and BabelFish. In the past, such programs were able to compile extensive databanks of foreign languages that allowed them to outperform statistics-based systems.
Traditional machine translation relies on painstaking efforts by bilingual programmers to enter the vast wealth of information on vocabulary and syntax that the computer needs to translate one language into another. But in the early 1990's, a team of researchers at I.B.M. devised another way to do things: feeding a computer an English text and its translation in a different language. The computer then uses statistical analysis to "learn" the second language.
The original NYTimes article looks pay only now.
~~~~
This is really neural-net learning. If I was still at Quest I might have had the opportunity to use neural-net software for marketuing research studies. Right now I use it in a game I am playing. The computer learns from previous moves what things are more likely to work in what circumstances. In fact, it is released with the code from analyzing 140 automated player's actions for 100 turns in 100 games. It was advised if possible to run the learning program on your machine but it would take weeks to complete and takes over the entire machine.
A chemical from red wine resveratrol - may help people live 10 - 50% longer.
So far, Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues have shown that resveratrol prolongs life span only in yeast, a fungus, by 70 percent. But a colleague, Dr. Mark Tatar of Brown University, has shown in a report yet to be published that the compound has similar effects in fruit flies. The National Institute of Aging, which sponsored Dr. Sinclair's research, plans to start a mouse study later in the year.
Despite the years of testing ahead to prove that resveratrol has any effect in people, many of the scientists involved in the research have already started drinking red wine.
"One glass of red wine a day is a good recommendation. That's what I do now," Dr. Sinclair said, adding he hoped the finding would not lead people to drink in excess. "One glass of wine is enough," he said. However, resveratrol is unstable on exposure to the air and "goes off within a day of popping the cork," he said.
Oh, so it's only fresh red wine. I'm gonna have to get smaller bottles!
So far, Dr. Sinclair and his colleagues have shown that resveratrol prolongs life span only in yeast, a fungus, by 70 percent. But a colleague, Dr. Mark Tatar of Brown University, has shown in a report yet to be published that the compound has similar effects in fruit flies. The National Institute of Aging, which sponsored Dr. Sinclair's research, plans to start a mouse study later in the year.
Despite the years of testing ahead to prove that resveratrol has any effect in people, many of the scientists involved in the research have already started drinking red wine.
"One glass of red wine a day is a good recommendation. That's what I do now," Dr. Sinclair said, adding he hoped the finding would not lead people to drink in excess. "One glass of wine is enough," he said. However, resveratrol is unstable on exposure to the air and "goes off within a day of popping the cork," he said.
Oh, so it's only fresh red wine. I'm gonna have to get smaller bottles!
Friday, August 22, 2003
Online Search Tips and Tricks
A good article at The New York Times.
All major search engines allow you to limit searches by ruling out pages that might contain specific words. To do so, put a minus sign directly in front of the word you do not want to see. A search for "chocolate fudge recipe -marshmallows" will enable you to dodge the Rocky Road.
If you want to widen your search instead, you have the OR command at your disposal. Be sure to type it in capital letters. A search for "fudgy (icing OR frosting)" on Google doubles the caloric options. You can also use the tilde shortcut that Google unveiled earlier this month. If you put the tilde symbol in front of your keyword (try "fudge ~ icing"), Google will search for icing and its common synonyms.
As popular as Google is, it does not measure up when it comes to two other strategies beloved by expert information retrievers. One is truncation - the ability to chop off a word and put an asterisk in place of whatever was chopped, thereby searching for all variations of that word with one search query.
To many experts, AltaVista wins at this game. Plug "fudg* brownie recipe" into the search box and you will find fudge brownies, fudgy brownies and fudge-nut brownie cake.
The other trick is called proximity searching, in which you can search for two words in close proximity, instead of simply on the same page or within the same phrase. AltaVista has this licked, using the NEAR command. Type in "substitution NEAR chocolate" or better yet, "substitut* NEAR chocolate" and you get advice on substituting bars of unsweetened chocolate with semi-sweet, or how to use chocolate substitutes like cocoa powder.
Most search engines give you a break when you cannot remember every single word in a phrase or name that you are seeking. They allow you to use a wild card, an asterisk in place of the word that escapes you. Type " Nestle * cookies" as a phrase and Tollhouse appears (along with Rolo, Quik and Raisinet goodies, too).
Sometimes it seems like overkill to search the entire Web when all you really want is an academic or noncommercial take on a topic. Say you only want results from the .edu domain. Try using the syntax tool called "site:" and restrict the results to those in the .edu domain. (This works with Google, AlltheWeb.com and Teoma, among other engines.)
When using a syntax like "site:" be sure that there is no space between the colon and the next word. If you accidentally put a space there, the search engines will think that "site:" is a word you're looking for.
If you are digging deeply into a topic, it may help to know which sites are linking to the page that you are reading. Knowing those connections can bring you a step closer to understanding the community that has coalesced around your subject.
For example, by typing "link:www .chocoholic.com" into Google's search box, you'll find other sites like the Chocolate Corner and a list of "Choco-Links."
At AlltheWeb, you do not need to remember to use "link:" syntax. Simply plug the URL into the search window and you will get a link to a list of the 391 pages that link to Chocoholics. But you will also be pointed to sites that contain the URL in their text, pages that are indexed under that URL, information on who owns the URL and an image of how the page used to look. That last option is a link that takes you straight to the WayBack Machine, a service of the Internet Archive, where you can view pages as they were rendered as far back as 1996.
AltaVista and Google News (news.google.com) offer the ability to search for news articles by time and date, whether your range is the past hour, the past day, the past week or the past month. Google News has more sources (4,000-plus), but while AltaVista has fewer (3,000-plus), its database is deeper, with more than a year's worth of material available. Other options are AlltheWeb, which carries multilingual newspapers; DayPop (www.daypop.com), which logs blogs; and NewsNow (www.newsnow.com), which offers a live feed - the closest thing to watching the wires free.
To find the number (or address) for a Bread & Chocolate bakery in Virginia, type "phonebook:bread & chocolate va" (note the lack of space between "phonebook" and "bread"). Remember to put a state abbreviation after the query; otherwise, Google will give up.
A good article at The New York Times.
All major search engines allow you to limit searches by ruling out pages that might contain specific words. To do so, put a minus sign directly in front of the word you do not want to see. A search for "chocolate fudge recipe -marshmallows" will enable you to dodge the Rocky Road.
If you want to widen your search instead, you have the OR command at your disposal. Be sure to type it in capital letters. A search for "fudgy (icing OR frosting)" on Google doubles the caloric options. You can also use the tilde shortcut that Google unveiled earlier this month. If you put the tilde symbol in front of your keyword (try "fudge ~ icing"), Google will search for icing and its common synonyms.
As popular as Google is, it does not measure up when it comes to two other strategies beloved by expert information retrievers. One is truncation - the ability to chop off a word and put an asterisk in place of whatever was chopped, thereby searching for all variations of that word with one search query.
To many experts, AltaVista wins at this game. Plug "fudg* brownie recipe" into the search box and you will find fudge brownies, fudgy brownies and fudge-nut brownie cake.
The other trick is called proximity searching, in which you can search for two words in close proximity, instead of simply on the same page or within the same phrase. AltaVista has this licked, using the NEAR command. Type in "substitution NEAR chocolate" or better yet, "substitut* NEAR chocolate" and you get advice on substituting bars of unsweetened chocolate with semi-sweet, or how to use chocolate substitutes like cocoa powder.
Most search engines give you a break when you cannot remember every single word in a phrase or name that you are seeking. They allow you to use a wild card, an asterisk in place of the word that escapes you. Type " Nestle * cookies" as a phrase and Tollhouse appears (along with Rolo, Quik and Raisinet goodies, too).
Sometimes it seems like overkill to search the entire Web when all you really want is an academic or noncommercial take on a topic. Say you only want results from the .edu domain. Try using the syntax tool called "site:" and restrict the results to those in the .edu domain. (This works with Google, AlltheWeb.com and Teoma, among other engines.)
When using a syntax like "site:" be sure that there is no space between the colon and the next word. If you accidentally put a space there, the search engines will think that "site:" is a word you're looking for.
If you are digging deeply into a topic, it may help to know which sites are linking to the page that you are reading. Knowing those connections can bring you a step closer to understanding the community that has coalesced around your subject.
For example, by typing "link:www .chocoholic.com" into Google's search box, you'll find other sites like the Chocolate Corner and a list of "Choco-Links."
At AlltheWeb, you do not need to remember to use "link:" syntax. Simply plug the URL into the search window and you will get a link to a list of the 391 pages that link to Chocoholics. But you will also be pointed to sites that contain the URL in their text, pages that are indexed under that URL, information on who owns the URL and an image of how the page used to look. That last option is a link that takes you straight to the WayBack Machine, a service of the Internet Archive, where you can view pages as they were rendered as far back as 1996.
AltaVista and Google News (news.google.com) offer the ability to search for news articles by time and date, whether your range is the past hour, the past day, the past week or the past month. Google News has more sources (4,000-plus), but while AltaVista has fewer (3,000-plus), its database is deeper, with more than a year's worth of material available. Other options are AlltheWeb, which carries multilingual newspapers; DayPop (www.daypop.com), which logs blogs; and NewsNow (www.newsnow.com), which offers a live feed - the closest thing to watching the wires free.
To find the number (or address) for a Bread & Chocolate bakery in Virginia, type "phonebook:bread & chocolate va" (note the lack of space between "phonebook" and "bread"). Remember to put a state abbreviation after the query; otherwise, Google will give up.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
A Veggie Restaurant Robb Walsh likes:
Bombay Sweets & Pure Vegetarian Restaurant
Details: Hours: Daily, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Bombay Sweets & Pure Vegetarian Restaurant Buffet: $4.50
Chaat: $2.50
Lassi: $1.99
Pound of mixed sweets: $5.49
Where: 5827 Hillcroft, 713-780-4453
After my meal, I usually get a mango lassi, and not because I'm still hungry. As a Pakistani cab driver once explained, you drink this whipped yogurt drink after eating spicy food on a hot summer day because it calms your stomach and prevents heartburn. And after considerable experimentation, I've concluded that he's right. A tall glass of lassi is more effective than Pepto-Bismol, and it tastes better, too.
Bombay Sweets & Pure Vegetarian Restaurant
Details: Hours: Daily, 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Bombay Sweets & Pure Vegetarian Restaurant Buffet: $4.50
Chaat: $2.50
Lassi: $1.99
Pound of mixed sweets: $5.49
Where: 5827 Hillcroft, 713-780-4453
After my meal, I usually get a mango lassi, and not because I'm still hungry. As a Pakistani cab driver once explained, you drink this whipped yogurt drink after eating spicy food on a hot summer day because it calms your stomach and prevents heartburn. And after considerable experimentation, I've concluded that he's right. A tall glass of lassi is more effective than Pepto-Bismol, and it tastes better, too.
Saturday, August 02, 2003
ROBB WALSH has a review more on vegetarians than the Vega-Nazi restaurant he goes to.
Soya Cafe
Details: Penne: $6.99
Soya pocket: $7.99
Soya yummy platter: $16.99
Soya hamburger: $6.29
Soya kabobs: $5.99
Where: 1304 Blalock, 713-464-2926. Hours: Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
We also get some deep-fried Soya nuggets, which taste like hush puppies stuffed with carpet padding -- but in a good way. Our efforts to get some other appetizers are denied by the Chinese woman who waits tables, does the cooking and generally runs the place.
"That's already enough food," she says, waving off our attempt to order more.
Soya Cafe
Details: Penne: $6.99
Soya pocket: $7.99
Soya yummy platter: $16.99
Soya hamburger: $6.29
Soya kabobs: $5.99
Where: 1304 Blalock, 713-464-2926. Hours: Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.
We also get some deep-fried Soya nuggets, which taste like hush puppies stuffed with carpet padding -- but in a good way. Our efforts to get some other appetizers are denied by the Chinese woman who waits tables, does the cooking and generally runs the place.
"That's already enough food," she says, waving off our attempt to order more.
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