Buying LPG on the black market
It's surprisingly easy to buy LPG cylinders on the black market in Delhi.
It's surprisingly easy to buy LPG cylinders on the black market in Delhi.
Cucumbers contain a variable amount of a substance called cucurbitacin, which gives them the bitter taste. Legend has it that one can "take the bitterness out" of a cucumber by cutting off both its ends (or just one, depending on whom you ask), rubbing the cut surfaces together for a while, and washing away the thick white foam that is produced.
I've always been suspicious of this claim.
For one thing, if the bitter substance is evenly distributed throughout the cucumber, how could rubbing the cut ends remove it? (The suggestion that it "creates suction" seems patently absurd.) Or if the substance is concentrated at the ends, why is it not sufficient to just discard them? On the other hand, what is the white foam, which does sometimes (but not always) taste bitter? And why does everyone seem to believe in the efficacy of this method?
Speculation aside, I see no sensible way to test the proposition.
If you take a bite out of the middle of the cucumber and it turns out to be bitter, it's because you "didn't rub the ends"; but if you do rub the ends and it's still bitter, you "didn't rub the ends enough". If, on the other hand, it doesn't taste bitter, how can you tell whether it was sweet to begin with, or if the rubbing cured it? I can think of many strange kitchen rituals, but none with the strangely ambiguous, undecidable nature of the cucumber ritual.
The question remains unresolved, but until I learn the truth either way, I will continue to eat my cucumbers without any voodoo preparation.
My recent comment on names which mean the same thing in different languages reminded me of something slightly different: generic and specific names that mean the same thing; one in Greek, the other in Latin.
The Common Raven Corvus corax, revered in ancient cultures around the world, bears its own name in both languages, Corvus being the Latin name for the Raven, and corax likewise the name in Greek (even the name "Raven" comes from an ancient Proto-Germanic name applied to the bird). The related Carrion Crow Corvus corone and Hooded Crow Corvus cornix both take their specific names from Greek words for "crow". All three names were assigned by Linnaeus in 1758.
The Slender-Billed Scimitar Babbler Xiphirhynchus superciliaris has always felt somewhat mystical while flipping through the Babblers in any field guide. I've never seen one, but the photographs posted to the delhibirdpix list by Sujan Chatterjee in May 2008 and Ramki Sreenivasan a year later, both taken in Arunachal Pradesh, have stayed in my memory.
Unfortunately, I can find only one of these photographs on Google Groups now, and I can't figure out any sane way to link to that post here. But Google Images finds many photos of the species, including Sujan's photo.
Anyway, Xiphirhynchus superciliaris was somewhere at the back of my mind when I recently encountered a casual reference to the unrelated South American genus of Woodcreepers: Xiphorhynchus. These are essentially the same word, derived from the Greek xiph- (for "sword") and -rhynchus ("snout" or "nose", meaning beak)!
My long-suffering Nokia 6610i fell on its head a few days ago, and its screen died. My friend Arnt told me about the tiny Simvalley PICO RX-80 mobile phone, and was kind enough to send me one a few days later when I told him—sadly—that it wasn't available here.
There's surprisingly little information about this phone on the web. A bunch of blog posts copied almost verbatim from this one (they all have the same three or four photographs, and claim the phone has dimensions of "50x800x10mm"!), and this German video. Here are my brief but non-boilerplate initial impressions of the RX-80.
A patch to enable Net::XMPP to connect to Jabber virtual hosts.
Why do the Yellow-footed Green Pigeon and the genus of Flamingos share the name Phoenicopterus?
Here's how I set up two PPPoE modems under Linux so that my default route always pointed to a working link.
An HTTP protocol version parsing bugfix for HTTP::Parser 0.04
A program to display a weekend-aligned calendar for the current year.
