Tag: Learning

After the food contamination incidents over the past couple of years, the Congress has put forth a revamp of food safety law in the United States.  This bill bass the House back in 2009 and was tied up in the Senate until last week.  The Senate passed its version (with amendments) and so it has gone back to the House for either passage of the Senate version or to head for a conference committee for resolution.

This act (S. 510) has created an outcry from both the extreme right and some “back to nature” types on the left.  Herein we shall examine some of the key provisions of the proposed law and make some judgments.  My personal feeling is that it will die before the Congress completes action on other, critical legislation like the tax issue, unemployment benefits, the federal debt ceiling, and funding the government, but who knows?

I have done quite a bit of research on this legislation and find it, for the most part, a pretty good thing.  It is designed to be proactive in that it stresses prevention of the production and distribution of contaminated or adulterated food rather than just merely reacting to an event after it occurs.  Certainly, there are reactive provisions as well, but prevention is the primary focus.

The legislation specifically applies to the following operations (from the summary posted http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill… (This is from Title I [Improving Capacity to Prevent Food Safety Problems] of the bill):

…each person (excluding farms and restaurants) who manufactures, processes, packs, distributes, receives, holds, or imports an article of food permit inspection of his or her records if the Secretary believes that there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to such food will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.

Note that farms and restaurants are specifically exempted.  This becomes important later.  There is also a part that delays implementation for small businesses until a later date, the specifics of which I have not been able to find.  It is a long bill.  Each operation specified above has to pay a $500 annual registration fee and comply with the recordkeeping requirements.  The thrust of the bill is to require such establishments to conduct proper hazards analyses and implement controls to reduce the probability that contamination or adulteration will occur.

Many of you who read my posts on a regular basis know that I was born and raised in Hackett, Arkansas.  Hackett is about nine miles south of Fort Smith, and just about a mile from the Oklahoma border.  Many people are of the mistaken opinion that the hill country of Arkansas are all Ozarks, but that is not right.

There are actually two major hill ranges in Arkansas, the Ozarks and the Ouachita (pronounced wash’-a-tah) Mountains.  These two ranges are quite different both in geology and in the old language.  The Arkansas River is roughly the dividing feature betwixt the two ranges.  You might know the Ouachitas because of the excellent natural sharpening stones that are quarried there.

In the kitchen, oftentimes we desire to thicken a sauce or a broth without significantly changing its flavor.  There are several ways to do this, and the physicochemical principles behind them are quite different in many cases.  One way of thickening things is just to reduce them (i.e., boil them down), but that often involves chemical changes that alter flavor.

Other ways of thickening things including adding small amounts of rather bland ingredients that cause the sauce or other material to become thicker without extreme heating, or to create a complex emulsion that thickens materials due to physical rather than chemical changes.  We shall examine some of both this evening.

Most everyone who is aware of The Who as a major British band realize that the three instrumentalists were very good at their crafts, and some say that Keith Moon may have been the best rock and roll drummer who ever lived.  However, the bass player, John Entwistle, did much more than play bass.

John Alec Enwistle, born 19441009 and died 20029627, was one of the original members of the band.  He and Pete Townshend formed a band in the late 1950s, and he left to join Roger Daltrey’s band in the early 1906s.  He convinced Daltrey to have Townshend join, and with the admission of Keith Moon The Who were formed.

Posted at DKos as “Just Looking.”

I have a few pleasant photography stories to tell from a week ago. Between the autumn color and the desperation of one last warm weather week, it was a good week for a photo buff. Now don’t go busting my bubble by just looking at the photos because you can learn a lot from a photographer. We see things.

Below you will find a Third Rock from the Sun brief encounter during an evening walk in the Village. I have several memories from a lecture I attended on photojournalism. There is a pleasant Veterans Day walk under the George Washington Bridge on the New Jersey side followed by a sunset from the New York side. Then a Friday afternoon walk in Central Park with some music videos I made and all day Saturday there too. There is even a little taste of Florence, Italy.

The concept of “small business” being damaged by increasing the progressive tax rates on what is purported to be them has not been presented correctly.  Keith Olbermann did a pretty good job a couple of weeks ago, but since his show is necessarily fast paced, the point did not make its mark as well as it might have done so.

That is no criticism towards him, because he is one of the “good guys”, but on a TeeVee show there is just not time enough to examine all of the documents that need some detailed explanation.  It he were to go into the detail that we are about to find, his show would be canceled for being extremely boring.

That is the one advantage that I have.  I can show exactly where the fallacies lie, without the restriction of a three minute treatment.  I will admit that he does indeed have a face for TeeVee, and I have one for blogs or radio.

I have been threatening to write this for some time and finally got around to it.  The hard core conservative pundits have no compunction about calling their political opponents different names (“Rahm, Rahmbo, Dead Fish”, for example) and sometime the progressive pundits do the same.

However, the more progressive pundits have better manners than the conservative ones.  Since I have no manners at all, I have no compunction for making up names.  Ed Schultz does quite a few, like Slant Head and The Drugster, but I find them sort of weak.  Olbermann did better with Lonesome Rhodes, but that still does not have as much punch as I would like.

To make this more fun, I shall list some names and give sort of riddle as a hint, and then ask readers to guess the identity of the person in a comment.  If you have better ones, or if I leave out a favorite target of yours, please comment as well.

First, please do not get me wrong.  I am a strong supporter of solar power, either to charge your car battery or to run cities.  Before we start, get the idea that I am opposed to solar power out our your mind.  But solar power has it limitations.

Lately, the SOBber on the Fox “News” network (soon to have to be distinguished from The SOBber of the House of Representatives) has been adding solar generators to gold and food stashes as a way to survive the coming apocalypse in his repertoire of advertisers.  I shall not use the name nor the website for the particular backyard solar firm to which his adverts refer, but will start by stating that the claims are, to say the least, overblown.

Before we start, very happy birthday wishes to the former Mrs. Translator!

Most of us think of nickel as the well-known United States five cent piece.  Actually, this coin is really 75% copper and only 25% nickel.  This alloy is ideal for coinage, since it is essentially noncorrosive and hard enough to resist wear in handling.  But that is only a minor use for this remarkable metal.  By the way, the U.S. five cent piece is not the first U.S. coin to be called that.  More on that later.

You handle nickel every day much more than you know.  It is present in many things that we use all of time, but it is rarely recognized.  Please come with me on an examination of a truly wonderful and useful material.

One of the more influential bands to form in the late 1960s in the United Kingdom was King Crimson.  Unlike The Who, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, all of which formed in the early 1960s, King Crimson did not really form until 1968, about the same time that Deep Purple Mark I formed.

Also unlike the bands just mentioned, King Crimson pretty much was “owned” by Robert Fripp, contrary to disclaimers made by him from time to time, especially after their first record.  As a matter of fact, except for Deep Purple, the other bands mentioned had a remarkably stable lineup for years, only death or dissolution of the bands changing things very much.