Month: March 2014

Noah: a short review

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I commend director Darren Aronofsky (who co-wrote the screenplay) for seeing the cinematic potential of the story of Noah and the ark. I mean, who’d have thunk it, since the Noah story is such a short and minor feature of the book of Genesis. But all the ingredients are there for a blockbuster, in particular apocalypse and evil and the potential for great spectacle. I was eager to see it because it’s a new addition to the apocalyptic genre, so I went on opening weekend and saw it in Imax (recommended).

Normally I would not rush out to see a bible story, but “Noah” is pissing off so many religious fanatics that I figured Aronofsky must have done a pretty good job with the theology. Glenn Beck called the film “pro-animal” and “anti-human.” And apparently Fox News has been buzzing about how “unbiblical” the film is. Excellent.

“Noah,” in addition to being a highly entertaining movie, is an eloquent takedown of the dominionist school of religious weirdos, which includes a lot of evangelicals. These are the people whose political power (with corporate backing) is keeping us in the age of fossil fuel and blocking environmental progress and conservation. These religious types seem to be getting the message that their slash-and-burn religious views make them a lot like the wicked people who had to be destroyed by flood. Save the animals but destroy all the war-loving people in order to save the earth? That spooks them, because they believe that it’s the environmentalists, the tree-huggers, and the save-the-animals people who are of the devil. Recycling and solar energy threaten their rights and their way of life. Cheap gas forever! Down with Noah and the tree-huggers and endangered species! Oops.

The theme is the same, really, as the theme of my novel Fugue in Ursa Major: what if the only way to fix this planet’s problems is to have an apocalypse and start over from scratch with a little more respect for nature?

What’s blooming in this nasty weather

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Spring is late. And who knows if it’s here for good. Last year, the Carolina jasmine bloomed all winter. This year, it’s still dormant. The grass and clover keep trying to make a start, but a cold snap always seems to shut it down again.

But a couple of things are blooming — the old-faithful daffodils, and the peach trees. As for the dandelion greens, they’ll go into a salad.

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Macintosh memory management

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This is a nerd post. Sorry, non-nerds…

I have been using Macintoshes since the 1980s. The Macintosh operating system has gone through many changes in that time, and it’s one of the best computer operating systems in existence. Though my favorite all-time operating system was Solaris, the version of Unix produced by Sun Microsystems. A few months ago, Apple released version 10.9 of the Mac OS X operating system, also known as Mavericks. I like Mavericks (not least because it was free).

If you turn your computer on and off every day, memory management is of little concern to you. However, if you leave your computer running all the time, as I do, and especially if you have an older computer without the abundance of memory in newer computers, then memory management matters.

One of the wonderful things about the Macintosh OS X operating system is that it is extremely stable. A Mac can be left running for months without needing a reboot. I’ve seen Solaris computers run for more than a year without needing a reboot. But stability is one thing, and memory management is another.

The issue is probably a new concept for non-nerds: memory leaks. Applications frequently contain memory leaks. Memory leaks are generally caused by lazy programming. Programs request memory from the operating system for temporary use, and with many programming languages it is the responsibility of the programmer to release this memory when it is no longer needed. That often fails to happen. Memory leaks pile on top of memory leaks, and soon your computer starts to get low on RAM. When this happens on a Macintosh, you may see the spinning beach ball icon while the operating system comes up with the requested memory. When the computer’s physical memory (or RAM) is exhausted, the computer will resort to “swap” memory — using disk space (which is much slower than RAM) to temporarily store the contents of RAM to disk, then paging the contents back and forth from disk to RAM as needed by the running program. This ability to swap is a sophisticated function of good operating systems that has been around since at least the 1990s. It’s better than simply running out of RAM (which is what used to happen). But swapping is slow. You may have to wait, which is what the spinning beach ball is all about.

Apple’s OS X Mavericks made some significant changes in memory management. The concept is that unused RAM is wasted. So OS X uses almost all of the computer’s RAM all of the time. This can be misleading, because the computer may appear to be more memory-starved than it really is.

But here’s the problem. Applications leak memory, and that’s not the operating system’s fault. When an application leaks memory, the memory can be recovered only by stopping and restarting the application. Here’s a for-example.

For security reasons, to prevent tracking by snoopers like Facebook and Google, I always have two browsers running. In one browser (Safari), I run Facebook and Google applications such as Google analytics. In Safari, that’s ALL I do. It doesn’t matter if Facebook and Google track me, because I don’t go anywhere else in that browser. I do all my real browsing in Chrome, using multiple tabs in an Incognito window, which does not save cookies.

As Chrome and Safari continue to run, often for days, they leak memory. This may or may not be a problem caused by the browser itself. Most web pages these days use some sort of god-awful programming language such as Javascript, so the filthy rotten programming on the web pages hogs memory, then leaks it. So, if you leave a browser running for a long time, your computer’s memory gets leaked, or wasted, and the computer’s operating system must jump through hoops and bend over backwards to keep shoveling RAM to the browser. Facebook’s programming is a horrible memory leaker. I often leave Facebook running, but I close the Facebook page and reopen it occasionally to release the memory it’s wasting. (The people at Facebook are lousy programmers.)

So what’s the bottom line for Mac users, especially for you non-nerds? First, upgrade to Mavericks if you haven’t already. Second, if you see a spinning beach ball, consider quitting from open applications and restarting the applications you need. It’s not really necessary to reboot the computer.

For nerds, you can monitor your computer’s memory usage with Activity Monitor. It is possible to “clean” a Mac’s memory and force all the garbage out of RAM. You probably don’t want to, though, because in doing so you’ll also defeat some of the clever methods Mac OS X uses to optimize the use of available physical RAM. But if you know what you’re doing, a little app named Memory Clean will do this for you, while also continuously displaying in the menu bar the amount of free RAM available. You also can clear the Mac’s memory in a terminal window by typing “sudo purge.” The purge command, which comes with the Mac, will do the same thing. In Activity Monitor, watch the “memory pressure” window. If it’s anything but all green, consider taking action to get it back in the green by closing applications and reopening them as needed.

My iMac is now six years old. One of these years I’ll replace it. But for now I have to live with 4 gigabytes of RAM, which is the maximum my older iMac can take.

And if you see a spinning beach ball, it’s not your Mac’s fault. It’s just that your Mac is trying heroically to deal with the crimes of lousy programmers.

Banana-walnut broiler cakes

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The abbey is rich with eggs, so eggs are the default breakfast. But variation is needed. The French divide breakfasts into two broad categories — sweet breakfasts and salty breakfasts. Sweet breakfasts are awfully good sometimes, but it’s hard to keep sweet breakfasts from being cloying. Or they’re just too high carb, and one starts craving a high-carb lunch.

These banana-walnut broiler cakes are not exactly low carb, but they’re not as high carb as they look. Each cake contains only about 4 ounces of batter. The rest of it is banana and toasted walnuts.

Here’s a rough recipe.

1. Toast a generous quantity of walnuts in a skillet and set them aside.

2. Make a portion of your favorite pancake batter, but not too much. The cake in the photo was made with blue cornmeal batter.

3. Slice a banana into quarters and start browning the slices in a skillet. Use an interesting oil such as coconut oil.

4. When the bananas start to brown, throw on the toasted walnuts.

5. Pour on the batter.

6. When the bottom of the cake is nicely browned, pop the pan under the broiler.

7. Brown the top of the cake under the broiler. When it’s done, flip it onto a plate. The side that was browned in the skillet on the stovetop will be the prettiest side, so turn that up. The cake will fall apart, but that’s a feature, not a bug.

8. If you’re making more than one, keep them warm on the bottom rack of the oven, away from the broiler.

9. Serve ’em with butter and maple syrup.

These hotcakes are delicious, with a complex blend of flavors and textures. The toasted walnuts give it a roasted flavor. Browned bananas are divine. The coconut oil really brings out the walnut and banana flavors. And how can you go wrong with maple syrup?

By the way, Trader Joe’s has good bargains in Canadian maple syrup. I buy Grade B syrup. Grade B is not inferior. It’s just a little heavier and has a sassier taste than Grade A. And it’s cheaper.

Two new chickens

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They’re sleeping.

We picked up two new chickens today at the mill in Walnut Cove. They’re both Golden Comets.

Luckily, we’ve not lost any hens in the last year, so we figured that two new hens would suffice for 2014. Counting the two new girls, there are now eight chickens at the abbey. We got Golden Comets because of their sweet personalities and the fact that they’re efficient layers.

As usual, they will live in a big bird cage in the bay window until they’re old enough to go out to the chicken house and hold their own with the big chickens.

About those $10 eggs

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Last week, Ken told me that he saw eggs at Whole Foods that cost more than $10 a dozen. I just had to see that for myself, so today I looked for them in the egg section. The most expensive eggs I saw were $7.99 a dozen. But, luckily, Whole Foods’ egg guy was there refilling the shelves, and I got to ask him some questions.

Yes indeed, he said. Last week they had eggs that cost more than $10 a dozen. But they already had sold out! I asked him what it was about the eggs that justified the price. He called this the “resume” of the eggs. The $10 eggs, he said, were (if I and he understood correctly) from grass-fed hens. Both he and I found that a bit strange. Grass-fed cows are a good thing, because cows are ruminants, and grass is their natural food. It’s different with chickens, though. Chickens do love grass, but it’s not something that they want to live on exclusively. From my reading on chicken husbandry, I understand that chickens will happily derive about a third of their calories from grass. But they also want seeds and any tasty worms, grubs, or insects that they can find. Not to mention kitchen scraps. So I’m skeptical about the concept of grass-fed chickens.

Today, the most expensive eggs at Whole Foods were the $7.99 eggs, and I understood that the $7.99 eggs came from the same North Carolina farm (in Durham) that the $10 eggs came from.

But this is amazing. People will pay more than $10 a dozen for eggs! Ken and I really wanted to sample those eggs, because we both believe that they couldn’t possibly be superior to the eggs laid by Acorn Abbey’s happy pastured hens. But that test will have to wait. So far, the Whole Foods guy said, they have not been able to get more of the $10 eggs, though they’re trying.

Ken keeps a spreadsheet that he calls “Abbey economics,” and in the spreadsheet he tracks the cost of keeping our hens vs. the value of the eggs. One thing is for sure. The abbey’s economics look a whole lot better if you value our amazing eggs at $10 a dozen. At that price, we’re probably saving money by having our own hens.

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