Sesame Chipotle Salmon

Inspired by Jamie Oliver, I've been baking vegetables and fish this way for the past few years. It takes about 5 minutes of prep, is the antithesis of fussy, and the results are always delicious. Huzzah!

Ludie's Pecan Pie

I think my favorite pie is a pecan pie.

When I was a kid there was pecan pie tree in the backyard and we could simply walk outside on a crisp Fall day and pick pecan pies right up off the ground. Most every place I've lived since then has had a tree in the yard. When I moved to Mississippi I bought a pecan pie tree. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a house and a yard came with my tree.

It is about 35 feet high and provides a lot shade in the Summer. I have lived next to my tree for about 6 years, but it has not given me one pecan pie. I am nonplussed. There is such potential - they start out green but then the squirrels chew them up, and they spit them out. Across the street there is a funny little church with about seven acres of pecan pie trees. I am exaggerating, but I would bet you two doughnut holes to a dollar beer prize that there is at least an acre (about 0.4 hectares) of pecan pie trees across the street.

Both of my grandmothers made a terrific pecan pie. Sometimes they would pick them right off the ground and serve them with ice cream (and sometimes with beer when we were older). I like pecan pies served as I like my cheesecakes served; even though cheesecakes do not grow on trees I like them both served plain. If they are naturally warm then I like them like that, but I would probably not put one of them in a microwave, or both of them if there were two plates of pie, or cake, or a combination thereof. If you have a pecan pie tree then you probably know what I mean.

Economic Impact Analysis

Economic impact analysis measures the cumulative effects of how the economy responds to an initial impact, such as a capital-intensive project or a natural disaster. Economic impact analysis is also useful for identifying the contributions of existing economic sectors, such as healthcare or agriculture, to the rest of the economy. Impacts are measured in terms of gross spending, employment and income for a study area, such as an individual county, or a group of counties, or the entire state. Public policy analysts, elected-officials, and regional decision makers often use this information to assess the priority of new projects, to measure the extent of adverse natural and human-induced impacts, and to identify the direction and level of public funding.

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.