Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
My grandmother, who came from Poland but was raised in Mexico, used to make chopped egg salad and chopped seasoned avocados as table starters for special occasions. Then one day she decided to mix up the two, altered the spices a bit, and created a family hit. I have adapted her recipe by adding the Dijon and dill, and scooping a ton of it into a sandwich. The cheese is a caprice that I couldn't help adding, and I love how it tastes, but feel free to try it without it.
Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
Enlarge Patricia Jinich for NPR
Chopped Egg And Avocado Sandwich
Patricia Jinich for NPR
Makes 3 to 4 hearty sandwiches
3 large hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
3 tablespoons chopped white onion
2 tablespoons chopped parsley leaves
1 teaspoon chopped fresh dill, or 1/4 teaspoon dry dill
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons mayonnaise
1 large ripe Hass avocado (about 3/4 pound), halved, seeded, meat scooped out and diced
1/4 teaspoon kosher or sea salt, more or less to taste
Black pepper, ground, to taste
6 to 8 slices brioche or challah, or any bread of your choice, lightly toasted
4 slices Muenster, Mexican manchego or chihuahua or Monterey Jack cheese (optional)
In a bowl, mix the eggs, onion, parsley, dill, Dijon and mayonnaise together. Toss in the avocado, sprinkle with salt and pepper and gently mix well.
Lightly toast the bread slices. Scoop a generous amount of the chopped egg and avocado on a slice of bread, add a slice of cheese and top with another slice of bread.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Poor Appalachia
credits to: NPR
A team of scientists says the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia is so widespread, the mining technique should be stopped.
The scientific review of research on the effects of the practice, which dumps coarse rock down the mountainsides into nearby valleys, states that harmful chemicals such as sulfate and selenium are pervasive in streams below.
Photo Gallery: Removing Mountains
In the summer of 2007, photographer Daniel Shea set out to cover the coal industry of Appalachia. These are his photos, from NPR's Picture Show blog.
Mountaintop removal is a pretty efficient and cheap way to mine coal. But when the rock or "overburden" above coal seams is blasted away and pushed over the side of the mountain, says Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "you expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites."
Cleanup Laws May Not Be Working
Federal and state laws require mining companies to clean up and restore mined areas. But Palmer and 11 other scientists who published their review in the journal Science say that's not working. "Even after a site has been reclaimed and attempts have been made to re-vegetate it," says Palmer, a biologist, "the streams that remain below that, that weren't filled, have high levels of all sorts of nasty things."
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Enlarge Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Things, she says, like selenium, which in high amounts can harm fish and other aquatic life; and sulfates, which alter the water chemistry. Palmer and her colleagues say many animals in these valley streams — from algae to fish and birds — could be seriously harmed.
So, they say, mountaintop mining should be stopped.
EPA Already Delaying Permits
In fact, the EPA has been holding up almost 80 permits for new mines to give them extra environmental scrutiny. And at a Senate hearing last year, EPA water expert John Randy Pomponio said the agency doesn't really know how bad the stream damage is.
"These little streams are like capillaries in your blood system," Pomponio said. "They're what travel through the landscape and capture the pollutants, clean those pollutants. And we frankly don't know where the tipping point is in losing one stream, five streams, or 18 streams in a particular watershed."
Pomponio told the Senate that mines in some valleys are so large now, their footprint covers as much as one-third of the watershed (a watershed is the whole area from which water flows into a valley). He also said the EPA has not done a good job of assessing the cumulative effect of all this mining.
While the EPA reviews the science, the mining industry in West Virginia is growing unhappy with the go-slow approach. Randy Huffman is secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Of the EPA, he says, "They just shut everything down, basically, and it kind of turned industry on its head."
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home.
Courtesy of Vivian Stockman
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home on the Mud River in Lincoln County, W.Va. The mine site is part of the Hobet 21 mine.
Watch Video Of Mountaintop Mining On The Sierra Club's Web Site
An Unfair Look At Pollutants?
Huffman says new requests for mining permits in West Virginia are getting closer inspection from his department, and some should go ahead while regulators are looking for solutions.
As for the pollutants the scientists listed, he says they've created a worst-case scenario.
"If you wanted to look at 30 years of coal mining in Appalachia and pick out the worst of everything that's ever happened and put it on two pages you can do that," says Huffman, "and it looks like that's what's been done."
Environmental and citizens groups in Appalachia have been suing for years to stop mountaintop mining, with mixed success. But Huffman says even if mountaintop mining were outlawed, that wouldn't keep other sources of mine waste out of valleys and streams. "We have valley fills associated with every type of mining, including underground mining," he says.
But according to the scientists who have studied the region's streams, mountaintop mining is responsible for the most of the damage.
A team of scientists says the environmental damage from mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia is so widespread, the mining technique should be stopped.
The scientific review of research on the effects of the practice, which dumps coarse rock down the mountainsides into nearby valleys, states that harmful chemicals such as sulfate and selenium are pervasive in streams below.
Photo Gallery: Removing Mountains
In the summer of 2007, photographer Daniel Shea set out to cover the coal industry of Appalachia. These are his photos, from NPR's Picture Show blog.
Mountaintop removal is a pretty efficient and cheap way to mine coal. But when the rock or "overburden" above coal seams is blasted away and pushed over the side of the mountain, says Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "you expose material that, when it rains and water percolates through that, it dissolves a lot of chemicals, and those are very persistent in the streams below valley fill sites."
Cleanup Laws May Not Be Working
Federal and state laws require mining companies to clean up and restore mined areas. But Palmer and 11 other scientists who published their review in the journal Science say that's not working. "Even after a site has been reclaimed and attempts have been made to re-vegetate it," says Palmer, a biologist, "the streams that remain below that, that weren't filled, have high levels of all sorts of nasty things."
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Enlarge Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Deformed fish larvae from West Virginia
Courtesy A.D. Lemley
Deformed fish larvae from mountaintop mining-impacted streams in Lincoln County, W.Va. The fish on top has two eyes on one side of its head. The lower fish has a deformed spine.
Things, she says, like selenium, which in high amounts can harm fish and other aquatic life; and sulfates, which alter the water chemistry. Palmer and her colleagues say many animals in these valley streams — from algae to fish and birds — could be seriously harmed.
So, they say, mountaintop mining should be stopped.
EPA Already Delaying Permits
In fact, the EPA has been holding up almost 80 permits for new mines to give them extra environmental scrutiny. And at a Senate hearing last year, EPA water expert John Randy Pomponio said the agency doesn't really know how bad the stream damage is.
"These little streams are like capillaries in your blood system," Pomponio said. "They're what travel through the landscape and capture the pollutants, clean those pollutants. And we frankly don't know where the tipping point is in losing one stream, five streams, or 18 streams in a particular watershed."
Pomponio told the Senate that mines in some valleys are so large now, their footprint covers as much as one-third of the watershed (a watershed is the whole area from which water flows into a valley). He also said the EPA has not done a good job of assessing the cumulative effect of all this mining.
While the EPA reviews the science, the mining industry in West Virginia is growing unhappy with the go-slow approach. Randy Huffman is secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Of the EPA, he says, "They just shut everything down, basically, and it kind of turned industry on its head."
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home.
Courtesy of Vivian Stockman
Mountaintop removal coal mining approaches a home on the Mud River in Lincoln County, W.Va. The mine site is part of the Hobet 21 mine.
Watch Video Of Mountaintop Mining On The Sierra Club's Web Site
An Unfair Look At Pollutants?
Huffman says new requests for mining permits in West Virginia are getting closer inspection from his department, and some should go ahead while regulators are looking for solutions.
As for the pollutants the scientists listed, he says they've created a worst-case scenario.
"If you wanted to look at 30 years of coal mining in Appalachia and pick out the worst of everything that's ever happened and put it on two pages you can do that," says Huffman, "and it looks like that's what's been done."
Environmental and citizens groups in Appalachia have been suing for years to stop mountaintop mining, with mixed success. But Huffman says even if mountaintop mining were outlawed, that wouldn't keep other sources of mine waste out of valleys and streams. "We have valley fills associated with every type of mining, including underground mining," he says.
But according to the scientists who have studied the region's streams, mountaintop mining is responsible for the most of the damage.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Bamboo Bike
Credits for this article: NPR
The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.
Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it's not too soft: "If the bamboo's too watery, it's not as dense and it's not as strong," Aguinaldo explains.
Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.
Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand.
"There's a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors," Murray says.
The two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to their bike studio in Brooklyn.
Close up of bike joint
Enlarge Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
Close up of bike joint
Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
'My Bike Is My Favorite Object Now'
Back at the bike studio, the bamboo's outer skin is treated with a torch, and the stems are baked in a homemade oven. The brown stems are then fastened into frames by connecting them with a sawdust and resin mixture. The joints are wrapped with a thin, ribbon-like carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy. After the epoxy dries, the bike's joints look like they've been wrapped with black electrical tape.
On a recent weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described "tinkerer" — spent close to $1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the assembly process.
Harris is an information architect who was overdue for a bike upgrade — she'd had her old bike for more than 20 years. Harris designs interfaces for mobile phone apps — but she admits she's a little less savvy with bike maintenance ("I can change a tire and that's it," she says.) Learning the mechanics and components of her bike really appealed to Harris, and she says she now plans to do her own tuneups.
Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris' work. Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road that were built in his Brooklyn studio.
"Everyone who leaves the studio says, 'Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.' " Odlin says. "They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with."
Building a bike
Enlarge Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
Building a bike
Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
'Something With More Enduring Value'
The Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa, and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came and made bikes.
Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.
"The ride itself is really smooth," Mills says. "It eats up a lot of the vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too mushy, but it's not. It's really nice to ride."
Interest in bamboo bikes is growing. A company in Colorado says it will start shipping bamboo bikes in the spring that cost as much as $1,300. But Marty Odlin says the bamboo bike makers here in Brooklyn believe in doing things a different way.
"There is a concern that bamboo bikes become this fad," he explains. "And we could sell a whole bunch of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies out. We feel like we're building something with more enduring value than that."
The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on their bamboo frames. And whether it's a fad or not, the bamboo bike-making classes are filled until April.
The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.
Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it's not too soft: "If the bamboo's too watery, it's not as dense and it's not as strong," Aguinaldo explains.
Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.
Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand.
"There's a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors," Murray says.
The two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to their bike studio in Brooklyn.
Close up of bike joint
Enlarge Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
Close up of bike joint
Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
The bike's joints — which are wrapped in a carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy — look like they're held together with black electrical tape.
'My Bike Is My Favorite Object Now'
Back at the bike studio, the bamboo's outer skin is treated with a torch, and the stems are baked in a homemade oven. The brown stems are then fastened into frames by connecting them with a sawdust and resin mixture. The joints are wrapped with a thin, ribbon-like carbon fabric that soaks up epoxy. After the epoxy dries, the bike's joints look like they've been wrapped with black electrical tape.
On a recent weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described "tinkerer" — spent close to $1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the assembly process.
Harris is an information architect who was overdue for a bike upgrade — she'd had her old bike for more than 20 years. Harris designs interfaces for mobile phone apps — but she admits she's a little less savvy with bike maintenance ("I can change a tire and that's it," she says.) Learning the mechanics and components of her bike really appealed to Harris, and she says she now plans to do her own tuneups.
Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris' work. Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road that were built in his Brooklyn studio.
"Everyone who leaves the studio says, 'Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.' " Odlin says. "They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with."
Building a bike
Enlarge Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
Building a bike
Jesse Huffman
Marty Odlin says people form a special bond with a bike they've built by hand. "They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with," he says.
'Something With More Enduring Value'
The Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa, and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came and made bikes.
Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.
"The ride itself is really smooth," Mills says. "It eats up a lot of the vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too mushy, but it's not. It's really nice to ride."
Interest in bamboo bikes is growing. A company in Colorado says it will start shipping bamboo bikes in the spring that cost as much as $1,300. But Marty Odlin says the bamboo bike makers here in Brooklyn believe in doing things a different way.
"There is a concern that bamboo bikes become this fad," he explains. "And we could sell a whole bunch of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies out. We feel like we're building something with more enduring value than that."
The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on their bamboo frames. And whether it's a fad or not, the bamboo bike-making classes are filled until April.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The Price of Information
Credits to BoingBoing
Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.
"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."
This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."
Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!
In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on.
But there's one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It's easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google. In this case, Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either: he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.
"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."
This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."
Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!
In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on.
But there's one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It's easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google. In this case, Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either: he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.
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