King's Inn Tartar Sauce

I'm not a big fan of tartar sauce. When it comes to seafood, especially fried shrimp, I just prefer a quick squeeze of lemon or lime. A few days ago, my dad sent me this recipe and I started thinking about tartar sauce, which is really just a mixture of mayonnaise with herbs and spices, vegetables, and what-have-you.

This recipe is supposedly from from King's Inn, a restaurant that opened in 1945 on Baffin Bay south of Kingville. It is seriously out of the way, and it's a bit of a South Texas icon now.

Online sources suggest that, "King’s Inn invented [a] really good tartar sauce and Mr. Ware is the only one who knows the recipe." I'm not sure who Mr. Ware is - I guess the owner, and if this is really his recipe, well then the secret is out!

But the recipe is actually pretty vague, which can be a good thing - there is plenty of room for innovation. For example: what kind of salad dressing; what kind of crackers? For a really quality hand-made tartar sauce I'd probably make my own mayo for this too:

King's Inn Tartar Sauce

1-1/2 cups salad dressing
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Minced jalepeño, minced to taste.
4 boiled eggs, shredded
Some pimentos
1/4 of 1 stack of crackers, crushed
2 ounces bell pepper, shredded
2 stalks celery, shredded
2 ounces garlic, minced
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Mix all ingredients and chill. Great with fried fish or shrimp. A South Texas favorite.

Boeing 787 and the iPhone 3GS

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner is a superefficient airplane with new passenger-pleasing features. It will bring the economics of large jet transports to the middle of the market, using 20 percent less fuel than any other airplane of its size. The specs for the lower deck of the 787 suggest a capacity of 4400 cubic feet. The iPhone 3GS has a volume of 5.184 cubic inches and a weight of 4.8 ounces (i.e., 27.778 iPhones/cubic foot), thus it is possible for the 787 to carry as many as 122,000 iPhones. Interestingly, the iPhone is less dense than freshly fallen snow, which weighs in at 10 lbs per cubic foot.

Tour de France - Predictions After the First Rest Day

General Classification
1st - Alberto Contador
2nd - Lance Armstrong
3rd - Andy Schleck

King of the Mountains
1st - Egoi Martinez
2nd - Franco Pellizotti
3rd - David Moncoutie

Points Classification
1st - Thor Hushovd
2nd - Mark Cavendish
3rd - Oscar Friere

Evacuation Patterns - Hurricane Katrina

I'm helping colleagues on a project that surveyed residents about their evacuation plans in the face of another large hurricane. Using a combination of PHP and Google Maps, I was able to plot the locations of survey respondents and one of the hypothetical tracks used in the survey. The underlying data is being used to analyze factors that might affect evacuation patterns. One of those factors is a distance-based measure: the distance from landfall, and the distance from the track itself. Preliminary analysis suggests that distance to landfall is a significant factor, yet distance to track is not.

Ten Commandments of the Paceline

Riding in a group is a lot of fun, and working together any group can ride consistently faster than a single rider on their own simply because it is more efficient. But only if the riders stays together - and that is why it is called a group ride. IT IS NOT A RACE. Riding in a group as if it were a race is NOT SAFE.

Because of the mixed abilities of riders it is not always possible to keep a group together. Yet, it is a simple courtesy to re-group at appropriate points during the ride, and for stronger riders to pull off and drop back to help gapped riders bridge up on long stretches.

There are many rules of the road that will take time for new riders (whether strong or not) to learn, but the following "10 Commandments of the Paceline" are generally agreed as the basics for proper paceline etiquette:

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TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THE PACELINE:


Thou shalt MAKE NO SUDDEN MOVES, neither by SURGING AHEAD, nor by BRAKING, yea neither left nor right.

Thou shalt LEAD with STEADY TEMPO, neither slowing before nor whilst pulling off, nor ever soft pedaling downhill.

Thou shalt EVER HAVE an ESCAPE route.

Thou shalt WATCH MORE than the wheel in front of thou.

Thou shalt WARN thy FOLLOWERS of UNEXPECTED DANGER.

Thou shalt PULL THROUGH, if second wheel.

Thou shalt NEVER USE AEROBARS.

Thou shalt CONTROL thy EGO.

Thou shalt strive to PULL OFF INTO THE WIND and DRIFT BACK TO THE END of the line.

Thou shalt strive to keep thy followers out of the gutter.

Wonderful Rub for Aches & Pains

Someone on my father's side of the family wrote this down. It is a recipe for a home remedy for "aches and pains", most likely for rheumatism, since almost any list of home remedies for rheumatism contains alcohol mixed with mint oils, chloroform, etc. I don't know if this works, but whoever wrote this thought it was a "wonderful rub", and so it must have been:

1 pint of rubbing alcohol
4 ounces wintergreen mint oil
30 Bayer aspirin

There's Not Enough iPhones to Circle the Earth

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Piper Jaffray's senior analyst Gene Munster thinks it's going to be a good weekend for Apple as companies in 8 countries roll out the iPhone 3G S today. Yet will it be good enough?

Analysts expect half a million units will be sold today. That's a fine mess of finger-sliding real estate (actually about half an acre of touch screen mess-ness), but hardly enough to have any kind of global impact - at least not in a strictly geospatial sense. How many iPhones has Apple sold? How many iPhones would it take to circle the earth? Clearly these are VERY IMPORTANT questions! Well not really...but wouldn't you like to know?

The first iPhones were sold on June 29, 2007, and 3G sales started a year later on July 11, 2008. Today you can buy a 3G S. According to Aayush Arya (macworld.co.uk, 03/24/2009), Apple sold 13.7 million units in 2008, for a total of 17 million iPhones. Using data from Wikipedia by March 30, 2009 Apple had sold 21.17 million iPhones.



The iPhone measures 4.5 inches in height by 2.4 inches in width and by 0.48 inches thick, so 21.17 million iPhones, laid end-to-end would measure about 95 million inches, which works out to be 1503 miles. This figure depicts the range, or how far out from Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California you could go by laying all these iPhones end-to-end. It's a long way, but it won't reach around the world.



The trend for iPhone sales is positive, so using the data I wanted to find out when there would be enough iPhones to reach all the way around the world. With ZunZun, an online curve fitting resource, I was able to fit this data with a second order polynomial with good results (the model estimated that Apple would have sold a total of 2.7 million iPhones by March 30, compared to 2.2 million that were actually sold). Here's what the fitted curve looks like:



Along the X-axis are the number of days since the the iPhone was launched, and the Y-axis represents the total number of iPhones sold. Here are the estimated parameters for the 2nd order polynomial trend line:



With this information you can work out the estimated total number of iPhones sold at any given time. For example, by June 30, 2009 (the 732nd day since the iPhone launched) the model estimates that Apple will have sold a total of 2.76 million units. My guess is the number will be a little higher because of the hype associated with the 3G-S. Even so, consider that the Earth has a circumference of about 24,902 miles. So we're going to need 350,620,160 iPhones laid end-on-end just to get close. That's a lot of iPhones, right?

The model predicts that by the end of 2019 Apple will have sold more than 342 million iPhones, and the big day comes just a few weeks later. On January 16th, 2019, on the day that Ernest Shackleton discovered the magnetic South Pole, Apple will have sold enough iPhones to circumscribe the globe. In the meantime we'll just have to cool our jets, playing flightcontrol and waiting for the next update.