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Modernist Cuisine, or the Art and Science of Cooking

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Earlier this year, Modernist Cuisine was published, much to the fanfare of those who love to cook (and design aficionados). With a list price of $625 (though you can buy it on Amazon for the bargain price of $450), this six-volume, 2,400 page set reveals the art and science of cooking.

Last month, one of the authors of the book, Nathan Myhrvold (CEO and a founder of Intellectual Ventures, a firm dedicated to creating and investing in inventions) sat down with Edge.org and explained the premise of the book, who would want to read it, and offered a few thoughts on the publishing industry.

Cooking obeys the laws of physics, in particular chemistry. Yet it is quite possible to cook without understanding it. You can cook better if you do understand what is going on, particularly if you want to deviate from the ways that people have cooked before. If you want to follow a recipe exactly, slavishly, what the hell, you can do it without understanding it. As a rote automaton, you can say, “yes, I mixed this, I cook at this temperature” and so forth. But if you want to do something really different, if you want to go color outside the lines, if you want to go outside of the recipe, it helps if you have some intuition as to how things work.

For this book, we set out to describe the science of cooking — and do so in a very visual way. Other people like Harold McGee, in 1984, wrote a book called On Food and Cooking, which is a seminal work that started a whole trend of people explaining the science of cooking to both average people and chefs. Therefore we were not the first, but we decided that we would have a more visual description. We would first explain how traditional cooking actually works and then use that as a springboard to talk about more modern cooking techniques and how you can use them.

Not only have we written a book, but we have written a paper-based book — we don’t have an electronic edition. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that every task should have the best appropriate technology deployed behind it. If you want to deploy large, beautiful, high-resolution pictures to people in the world of cooking, there is no better platform in 2011 than a paper book.

This is an interesting perspective on the book. The mindset for publishing this book is similar to Steve Jobs’s thought process behind his products (When asked how much market research Apple did for the iPad, Jobs boldly answered: “None. It’s not the customers’ jobs to know what they want.”). Anyway, Myhrvold explains:

I’m not sure actually who is going to buy and read the book. We’ve created this without focus groups. There are two fundamental approaches you can take to designing a book or any product for that matter. You can run all kinds of focus groups and do market research and ask yourself, “what do people want?” There are a lot of very successful products that are made that way. Or you can say, “I’m going to follow my own curiosity and vision and make the book that I would love to have and hope someone agrees.” That is the algorithm that we took for this book.

On the remarkable effort to get this book completed:

At peak we had 36 people full time working on the book. We had about 18 for a period of 3.5 years overall. Now, that is wonderful and it has some issues. The wonderful part is that you benefit from everybody’s knowledge and you get pushed in ways that you wouldn’t have gotten pushed otherwise. There are lot of things where I would have said, “oh, forget it, we don’t need to do that,” but somebody else got excited about it and by the time I realized it, we had already done it.

The bad part is you have to negotiate things. You have to make decisions as a team. Somebody has to be Solomon and cut the baby sometimes and say, yes, that is enough. You may think that we didn’t have very many “No” decisions given that we have 2,400 pages. But in fact there was a ton of stuff we left out because I didn’t want to have 24,000 pages. Running a book project as a team is unusual and of course, it’s unheard of for novels.

On comparing publishing to various restaurants:

Producing the book is different. The world of publishing has been so oriented around inexpensive books, which is wonderful in many ways. It’s great that the world is focused on cheap things that you can sell to lots of people. But image a world of restaurants where the only restaurants were chain restaurants that were in malls, where Ruth’s Chris was the most high-end restaurant in the country? Not that Ruth’s Chris is bad. I go there and it’s a great thing. But Ruth’s Chris and PF Chang’s are not the sum total of the restaurant world.

But publishing executives want their books to be at best Ruth’s Chris. In fact, they would really prefer the Cheesecake Factory. So cookbooks are all made to be the Cheesecake Factory of restaurants. The Cheesecake Factory is great, I am not denigrating it. But it is wonderful that there is an El Bulli, that there is a Per Se, there is a Le Bernardin, a Daniel, that there’s a Momofuku, that there’s a variety of restaurants that in their own way, some very high end, some not particular expensive or high end, but it’s that cultural richness that makes the world of food fantastic.

I haven’t bought the book (nor can I afford to), but I find the purpose behind this book fascinating. Do read the whole conversation at Edge.org.

Google X, a Top Secret Lab

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I’ve known that Google has a lot of secret projects up its sleeve, and this New York Times piece provides some further guidance:

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

The driverless cars are a number of years away from formal introduction into the marketplace…But until then, this sounds like a bad idea:

Google could sell navigation or information technology for the cars, and theoretically could show location-based ads to passengers as they zoom by local businesses while playing Angry Birds in the driver’s seat.

Apparently, Google X operates both at Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA and in an undisclosed top-secret location. Hmm.

So who’s involved with Google X?

A leader at Google X is Sebastian Thrun, one of the world’s top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, who teaches computer science at Stanford and invented the world’s first driverless car. Also at the lab is Andrew Ng, another Stanford professor, who specializes in applying neuroscience to artificial intelligence to teach robots and machines to operate like people.

I received an email from Thrun over the weekend, regarding my progress in the online Artificial Intelligence course. Unfortunately, I ended up pursuing other interests in the last couple of weeks and had to drop the course. It was excellent from the three weeks in which I actively participated in it, however.

Why Are American Universities Failing?

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There’s no easy answer. Unmotivated students. High student debt. Too much emphasis on athletics versus academics. Declining emphasis on teaching (versus doing research). And so on. In this post in New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton cites eight different sources (books and papers) and provides some clues:

Vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House(1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

This paragraph sounds more depressing than what my first year in college was actually like (there was no Facebook yet):

Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.

The summarizing piece is worth reading. I just wish the author made some effort to break down graduation rates, debt levels, etc. by public/private universities, household income, and race.

On Moral vs. Contractual Obligations

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From a very good personal story in The New York Times, about a financial planner who ended up losing his house:

Borrowing that much had seemed to make sense when the value of the home was still rising substantially every year, taking our net worth higher with it. But at that point, there was no way we could sell the home for anywhere near what we owed. Some of my friends were already doing short sales, where the bank agrees to let you sell the house for less than your loan balance. I was also aware you had to be three months behind in your payments before the bank would talk to you about the possibility.

At first, I dismissed the idea of a short sale. Late that summer, I sat down with a really close friend in Las Vegas, someone I looked up to. He cut to the heart of the matter right away: Why, he wanted to know, were we still making the payments?

Because I have a moral obligation, I said. You pay your debts.

He proceeded to explain that I didn’t have a moral obligation to the bank. I had a moral obligation to my family. I had a contractual obligation to the bank, along with a clear moral obligation to be honest in my dealings. What he was asking was this: Which is more important? Your contractual obligation to the bank or your obligation to your family to preserve your ability to make a living?

I had never thought of it that way. But it made sense. I summed it up to myself like this: I have a contractual obligation to the bank (as well as a moral obligation not to skirt the consequences of breaking it: losing my house and wrecking my credit score). But my moral obligation to my family trumps the contractual obligation to the bank.

I found this paragraph particularly enlightening. Do not be quick to judge others’ financial habits:

For one thing, I am less quick to judge other people’s financial behavior. I’m also more inclined to take into account personal factors that determine how people behave around money.

I have a friend who is going through a tough time financially. He has a high income, but is burdened by debt from a few real estate deals that went south. He continues to take fairly expensive ski trips. That would seem irresponsible in his situation, and maybe they are.

But I now realize that it is not that simple. Maybe those trips are keeping the guy alive, or saving his marriage or keeping him sane enough to work.

The author of the piece, Carl Richards, is coming out with a book The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things With Money early next year.

The Upside of Facebook Use

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How is being active on Facebook and other social media sites affecting your friendships in real life?

According to Matthew Brashears, a Cornell University sociologist who surveyed more than 2,000 adults from a national database and found that from 1985 to 2010, the number of truly close friends people cited has dropped (even if we’re more active in socialization than ever before). On average, participants listed 2.03 close friends in Brashears’ survey. That number was down from about three in a 1985 study.

Here’s the gist:

Does that mean we’re more isolated in these times when we seem to meet more people online than in person? (How many of your Facebook “friends” are really friends of yours?) Defying some of the stereotypes of the digital age, social scientists say Facebook may actually be healthy for us. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a report for the Pew Research Center in which he found that “Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people.”

“Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people,” wrote Hampton in a blog post. “And, it is not a trivial amount of support. Compared to other things that matter for support — like being married or living with a partner — it really matters. Frequent Facebook use is equivalent to about half the boost in support you get from being married.“

That last sentence is both encouraging and frightening at the same time.

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For one personal perspective on virtual friendships, please check out Cheri’s five-part series, beginning here. Then move on to Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V. Highly recommended reading.

Is Sitting in Traffic Killing You?

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A troubling piece in the Wall Street Journal, “The Hidden Toll of Traffic Jams,” explains the deleterious effects of sitting in traffic jams:

New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability.

and

Recent studies show that breathing street-level fumes for just 30 minutes can intensify electrical activity in brain regions responsible for behavior, personality and decision-making, changes that are suggestive of stress, scientists in the Netherlands recently discovered. Breathing normal city air with high levels of traffic exhaust for 90 days can change the way that genes turn on or off among the elderly; it can also leave a molecular mark on the genome of a newborn for life, separate research teams at Columbia University and Harvard University reported this year.

The evidence is still largely circumstantial, as the article notes, but it is worrisome. My daily commute is about twenty miles one way, and I sit in traffic for close to two hours daily. That’s one aspect of my life that I would like to change.

Why Wikipedia Is As Important as the Pyramids

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A rather interesting argument by Jonathon Keats, author of Virtual Words, in Wired:

But however much it may deserve designation, the truth is that Wikipedia doesn’t need the World Heritage List. The World Heritage List needs Wikipedia.

Unesco established the list in 1972 to help the UN foster “conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values.” (Sound like a certain online encyclopedia?) But rampant politicking has nudged a rapidly expanding assortment of water management systems and silver mines into the league of universally significant landmarks like Persepolis and the Taj Mahal.

However, Unesco is plagued by an even deeper problem. Since the World Heritage Convention was written in 1972, the delegates haven’t known quite how to handle “intangible cultural heritage” — the traditions and wisdom that are as significant to civilizations as their monuments. After spending 31 years sorting out the intellectual property rights of ethnic groups, the delegates decided to create a whole separate convention for abstract landmarks, a second, independent roster. You’ll find the historic center of Bruges, Belgium, on the World Heritage List, and Bruges’ annual Procession of the Holy Blood ceremony on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

That’s ludicrous. Intangible cultural context is the essence of heritage, making wood and stone worthy of our interest. To merit the name, World Heritage sites need to encompass the intangibles, to be virtual at least as much as they’re physical.

That’s why Wikipedia is an ideal candidate to set the World Heritage List right. The Wikipedia World Heritage site would be more than a plaque on a server farm in Tampa. It would be data. But not a particular data set, since the data is always changing, and that mutability is what makes it a wiki. As more of the world goes digital and grows more networked, world heritage will increasingly have this characteristic. The World Heritage Committee will have to adapt to it or become obsolete.

 

How to Buy a Used or New Car: Confessions of a Car Salesman

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How did the car business get so screwed up? There’s nothing else in our society that is sold with the consumer so conspicuously unprepared.

And it’s true. Car buying is one of the most stressful consumer experiences. But it doesn’t have to be this way. After reading this extensive piece on Edmunds.com, I learned more about the business than I’ve ever had before. The author of the piece was a writer for Edmunds who went working undercover at two dealerships: a high-volume, high-pressure dealership and a no-haggle dealership:

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn’t be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

What he learned over those three months is incredible:

So, you think I’m romanticizing car salesmen? Trying to clean them up and excuse their evil ways? And, you might ask, if the salesmen aren’t the bad guys, who is?

Having been a salesman myself, I began to view the managers and dealership owners as the real culprits. While salesmen play people games with the customer, the guys in the tower work the numbers with computers, their eyes fixed on the bottom line. They can see at a glance what kind of profit they are taking from the customer and they do it any way. Furthermore, they bully the sales staff, encouraging them to manipulate, control and intimidate customers while they take the lion’s share of the profit.

Sometimes, the profit a salesman generates is not even pocketed by them. One salesman told me the F&I people can work their magic to rob a salesman of his commission. They move front-end profit to the back end where it evaporates from the salesman’s voucher and returns, over the years, to the dealer in the form of high interest and steady payouts.

There’s so much gold in the piece, but I picked out the highlights below. The piece is broken into nine parts: 1) Going Undercover, 2) Getting Hired, 3) Meeting, Greeting and Dealing, 4) Life on the Lot, 5) A Tale of Two Deals 6) Learning from the Pros, 7) No-Haggle Selling, 8) Parting Shots, and 9) Lessons from the Lot. The whole piece reads like a mini-novel, but if you’re in a hurry, at least check out the last section, in which the author provides specific recommendations on what you can do to get the best deal on a used or new car:

Concept 3: Profit Equals Commission

I never really thought of this until I sold cars but… Car salespeople earn their living by inflating the price of the car you are buying. The more they inflate the price, the bigger their commission. This might seem very obvious, but we tend to lose sight of it when the smiling salesperson greets us on the car lot. They make us think they have our best interests in mind. The good salespeople do have our interests in mind. The unscrupulous salespeople are thinking how your purchase increases their commission. One of the dealerships I worked at had a sliding scale for commissions. The higher the profit, the higher the commission. Naturally, the salespeople tried to hit that point where the commission was bumped to the higher percentage. That might mean moving you into a higher level vehicle. It might mean increasing the profit by financing sleight of hand. In both cases, this smiling salesperson, with the personable air, didn’t have your best interests in mind. I believe in paying a dealer a profit for his car. I also believe in rewarding the salesperson for their expert help. But I don’t think this justifies making an unfair profit at my expense.

On humor being an effective way to get closer to the customer:

Many salespeople find that humor is a good way to overcome objections. If a customer says they’re “only looking,” the salesperson might answer, “Last time I was only looking I wound up married.” If a customer objects to being hurried into buying the car, the salesperson might say, “The only pressure on this lot is in the tires.” These prepackaged lines were exchanged between car salesmen in the slow times with the feeling that the right joke at the right moment could be the ticket to a sale.

The most interesting parts of the piece, to me, were the psychological lessons that they were taught as salespeople. For example:

At one point, during a sales seminar, I was actually taught how to shake hands. The instructor, a veteran car salesman said: “Thumb to thumb. Pump one, two, three, and out.” Another vet told me to combine the handshake with a slight pulling motion. This is the beginning of your control over the customer. This would prepare the “up” to be moved into the dealership where the negotiation would begin. The car lot handshake is sometimes combined with the confident demand, “Follow me!” If you employ this method you turn and begin walking into the dealership. Do not look back to see if they are following you. Most people feel the obligation to do what they are told and they will follow you, if only to plead, “But I’m only looking!”

The author made a strong point that the salesman wasn’t the customer’s enemy; rather, the enemy was the person who the customer doesn’t see (the manager). This is a key takeaway, I think:

What the customer didn’t realize was that the poor car salesman or woman was not really the enemy. The real enemy was the manager sitting in the sales tower cracking the whip. Suppose for a moment a customer told us they were “only looking,” and we said, “fine, take your time,” and went back into the sales tower. Now we find ourselves looking up into the steely eyes of the sales manager.

“That’s your customer out there,” the manager would say.

“But they said they’re only looking,” I would answer.

“Only looking? You’re going to take that for an answer?” Foam was beginning to form at the corners of the sales manager’s mouth. “What the hell kind of salesman are you? Of course they’re looking! They’re all only looking until they buy. You want them to go across the street and buy a car over there? Because they havereal salesmen over there. Now go back out there and sell those people a car. And don’t let them leave until they buy or until you turn them over to your closer.”

Again, this is a fascinating piece and well worth the read in its entirety. And while the piece is dated (circa 2001, when there weren’t as many people who realized that “The Internet is your friend”), there’s also an update for 2009.

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For the hat tip, I thank longform.org.

Questions for the reader: What has been your best/worst experience shopping for a used or new car? Feel free to share in the comments. Did you find any of the advice in the piece at Edmunds.com useful/interesting?

Are Southern Manners on the Decline?

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For those of you living in the South, would you agree that the Southern charm is fading? Today’s piece in The New York Times asserts so:

The Tavern at Phipps case, and a growing portfolio of examples of personal and political behavior that belies a traditional code of gentility, has scholars of Southern culture and Southerners themselves wondering if civility in the south is dead, or at least wounded.

But what is the reason for the decline in Southern manners?

Newcomers still get much of the blame. In the past decade the South has seen an unprecedented influx of immigrants from both other states and other countries. The population in the south grew by 14.3 percent from 2000 to 2010, making it the fastest growing region in the country.

But there is more behind the social shift, scholars say. Digital communication and globalization have conspired to make many parts of the South less insular. Couple that with a political climate as contentious as anyone can remember and a wave of economic insecurity rolling across the region, and you’ve got a situation where saying “thank you, ma’am” isn’t good enough anymore.

Anecdotally speaking, I would agree (living in Atlanta) that living in the South is less about “Yes, sir” and “Thank you, ma’am” than it used to be. However, since there is no stringent way to test this assertion, your experience will probably vary.

The Last Words of Steve Jobs: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW”

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On October 16, 2011, in a memorial service at Memorial Church of Stanford University, Mona Simpson, Steve Jobs’s sister, delivered the following eulogy. And it’s absolutely breathtaking. It’s far and away the best (and most human) thing I’ve read about Steve Jobs after his death.

Do read the whole thing. I will admit getting teary-eyed reading this eulogy.

On Steve’s capacity to work, even as his death was imminent:

None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing wood. His three daughters remain unmarried, his two youngest still girls, and he’d wanted to walk them down the aisle as he’d walked me the day of my wedding.

Imagine if Steve lived longer and was able to make a wider impact with his vision. While in hospital:

Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.

And this is my favourite line in the eulogy. It’s so beautiful. It reminds us of how there are beginnings and ends, but somewhere, sometime, it will happen in the middle of others’ stories:

We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

And what were the last words of Steve Jobs? Mona closes her eulogy with the following:

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.