Good morning.
It’s a windy day with a high-temperature of thirty-eight ahead for Whitewater, with similar conditions for both Madison and Milwaukee. Listing the weather that way leads with a tail wagging a dog: most would expect the bigger cities to appear first in the order. That’s something along the lines of the joke about a British weather forecast: “Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off.” No matter — it’s too late (and unnecessary) to fall into conventionality now, four-and-a half years on.
For those who’ve just come off a day of Thanksgiving cooking, with Christmas and New Year’s Day yet ahead, there’s good news: Cooking can be surprisingly forgiving. Rachel Ehrenberg writes that
If your pumpkin pie recipe calls for cinnamon but you’ve used the last of it, nutmeg, ginger or cardamom will do. Out of olive oil? Try applesauce. A new in-depth analysis of recipes, reviews and suggestions from an online foodie site reveals that many recipes are more flexible than standard cookbooks suggest.
Researchers mined more than 40,000 recipes and nearly two million reviews from the website Allrecipes.com, investigating various aspects of cooking and ingredient preferences. “We wondered if the analysis would let us see how flexible recipes are,” says coauthor Lada Adamic of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Her team discovered that there’s a lot of wiggle room. The analysis, reported online November 16 at arXiv.org, identified several clusters of ingredients that can be swapped for one another.
That’s clusters of ingredients, as some substitutions won’t work, no matter how inspired they might seem to the cook. Still, it’s a reassurance (and confirmation) for those who do cook that substitutions are certainly possible (and sometimes inspired).
Today’s Google puzzle comes from Fozzie Bear of the Muppets: “I knew I was a bear of many talents, but in one episode with the help of Rowlf and a big instrument, I found a talent I never knew I had. In what episode did I discover my new talent?”
Today’s the anniversary, from 1972, of the release of the arcade version of Pong, one of the first commercial, arcade video games. Nolan Bushnell’s description of his inspiration (created by engineer Allan Alcorn): “I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play, something so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.”
He found what he was looking for —