Yesterday, I told you about a variation on a recipe I found somewhere on cooks.com. Seeing as normally my roommates and I don’t find ourselves cooking cooperatively all that often, I was surprised to find not two, but all three of us at it again in the kitchen tonight. Let me reassure you, I have no intention of talking about every dish we make–usually it’s not that exciting. We each of us have our safe staple foods that we’re comfortable making.

Then comes a night like tonight, when our needing to make creative use of odds and ends leads to some culinary mad science. Recent impulse buys, combined with our absence over the weekend and generally light use of the kitchen of late, left us with sweet peppers, Jalapeños, carrots and scallions all needing to be used. I looked at what we had; looked at what needed to go soonest; and started chopping. Pretty soon there were:

• 2 largish carrots, cut long
• 2 red bell peppers, cut into short strips
• 5-6 sliced scallions
• 3 sliced Jalapeños
• 2 or 3 tablespoons each of chopped almonds and cashews
• 2 cans of kidney beans (1 dark, 1 light), drained and rinsed

I sauteed these in a roughly 2:1 mixture of olive and sesame oil, starting with the carrots and bell peppers, then the scallions, then the Jalapeños and finally the beans. Meanwhile Jon, whose instinct for flavor combinations exceeds my own, was improvising the sauce. We may never remember the exact proportions, but it was something like:

• 1/3 cup sesame oil
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/3 cup honey
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1/4 cup lemonade (a substitution for orange juice, which we lacked)
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• syrup? (can’t recall amount)

When that was ready, we tossed it in with everything else and let it simmer. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t wait for the brown rice Seth was making to go with it. Notwithstanding, the flavor was pretty damn complex. I’m certainly a fan. Its ethnicity is pretty much null, but it does remind me vaguely of Tex/Mex and a little of Vietnamese vegetables. The spice from the peppers diffuses right out into the sauce, where it’s obvious but balanced by the sweetness of the brown sugar and citrus. The carrot and pepper make it a little bit firm, the nuts add crunch, and the beans tie it all together.

Though we all agreed we’re not going to be able to reproduce it exactly, I suspect I’ll try at some point. Jon suggested next time we add salt and garlic to round it out. Eaten with the rice, it makes something like 4 or 5 servings.

If the earlier discussion interested you, you might also want to check out this post by one Tim McCormack. Tim and his anonymously quoted source, both of whom are apparently a bit closer to the situation than I, offer all the clarity and fairness I’d have expected to see in at least some of the “+5 insightful” responses on Slashdot, and none of the unnecessary spleen and leaping to conclusions that has thus far characterized the discussion in so many places.

Key points:

1. Why do so many smart Americans trust the media?
2. Is social awkwardness suspicious behavior? Are we okay with that?
3. Can and should the law require us to consider lowest-common-denominator reactions to everything we do?
4. What kind of a name are we making for ourselves?
5. Why are events like this considered to excuse openly mean-spirited talk? Do people really still find it necessary to trash-talk nerds?

Errata: kudos to Mel. The correct spelling is gnocchi. Why can’t Italian words be spelled sensibly? (says the man in the glass house)

For dinner tonight, Seth and I made gnocci (Italian potato dumplings, pronounced “nYOCK-ee”) in vodka cream sauce using an online recipe for which I (astonishingly) had almost all the ingredients on hand. It turned out great, and was quite filling, so I thought I’d share:

Gnocci in vodka cream sauce

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1 pat butter
• 3-4 garlic cloves, diced (the original called for 2 but I wanted to actually taste the garlic)
• half an onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup parsley, coursely chopped (just put it on the board and thwack it a few times with a chopping knife to break it up)
• chopped almonds (my addition)
• 1 can whole peeled tomatoes (I used stewed tomatoes)
• 1 pint cream (calls for heavy, I used light and let it cook down a little)
• 1/2 cup vodka (any old vodka)
• raw gnocci (got it at Trader Joe’s last week, comes in ~2 serving packages. The recipe makes enough sauce for 4 servings)
• chicken sausage (my addition), 1 or 2 links per serving depending on taste

Once you’ve got all the ingredients in front of you it’s a cinch to make. Saute the oil, butter, garlic and onion. Start boiling water for the gnocci. When the onion looks done, toss in the parsley, tomatoes, nuts and vodka. Gradually add the cream. Start cooking the pasta and/or meat.

The vodka, in addition to lending its own flavor, helps dissolve the compounds that flavor the tomato. Then it evaporates, leaving a rich, creamy orange-colored sauce. Tomatoey goodness ensues.

Stuff’s been circulating the lists for a while, but I wanted to take a moment to address these news stories collectively, both for the edification of those not up on techie news and for the benefit of those missing certain key vocabulary items. First, a press clipping:

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force.”

First definition: protocol (n).

1. A set of uniform rules for data exchange between computers or between computer processes
2. A set of mutually understood rules governing human interactions (emphasis mine)

Next: “In this day and age, the threat continues to be there,” said Pare. “She certainly jeopardized her own safety by bringing this to the airport, as well as the safety of everybody around her.”

Threat (n):

1. Police officers carrying MP5s, telling unsuspecting kids to “freeze”, or they’ll open fire in a crowded airport with an assault weapon, sacrificing anyone in the line of fire to protect a hundred square feet of virgin concrete from a bomb that isn’t there.
2. What everyone sees when you tell them to be on the lookout for a vaguely defined enemy trying to kill us all by unknown means.
3. Actual terrorists, as opposed to Bostonites bearing *gasp* electronic devices
4. “Hey kid, shut up or I’ll tase you” or maybe someday soon, “shut up or I’ll use my pain gun“.

Is this really what we’ve come to? Blaming the victims of our own idiocy and paranoia as we trample them into submission? Every one of these scenarios could have been walked off by all participants, perhaps leaving the ignorant a bit bewildered until such time as they were able to better comprehend their neighbors (yes, the circuit-board geeks live right here in Cambridge, folks, and they’re not leaving any time soon).

And yet, every one of these situations was escalated to mythic proportions by law enforcement officers supposedly carrying out protocols. The victims were arrested, and the government came out in support of the officers whose “protocols” had made them as dangerously unintelligent and indiscriminate as the weapons they carried. In the case of Boston, a prominent hub of the tech sector, I think we can now safely say that “vigilance” has turned to blind panic, with the PD & mayor’s office meting out bomb hoax charges and covering their own asses rather than learning from mistakes and updating procedures to match the times.

Most appalling to me is that, based on the girl’s description, it may as well have been Mel or any one of us coming within a hair’s breadth of getting our brains splattered all over the Logan parking garage. The hacker may yet turn into an endangered species, in the very city where its name was coined.

But alas, this is Yom Kippur. I’m obliged to judge my fair city with compassion, and to not give up hope for justice. So I will look very, very hard in the coming weeks for a sign that the lights are, in fact, on upstairs at city hall.

As for George W and the others who started this mess, forgiveness or no they will still be receiving coal for Hanukkah. No wait, scratch that. They might get too much pleasure from burning it. I’ll have to send them cartons of bio-diesel instead…

Update: I’m slightly disappointed to find that unlike the Mooninites scare, this incident has spawned only one Facebook group thus far–and it’s composed of hardass neocons who want Star Simpson to do jail time for being her awesome, albeit careless, sparkie self. In the irrefutable words of Bruce Schneier, refuse to be terrorized, people! At any rate, services were good today (even if they did seem to drag on forever). L’shanah tovah, everybody.

Update: having read further into the (depressingly circular) debates on Slashdot, I must append to my definitions list. I’d like to ask everyone to make sure they are familiar with the terms mission creep and moral panic. They, along with what I now take for deliberate disinformation of the public by prosecutors and airport staff, are responsible for much of the tone of the evolving debate over who, precisely, is to blame for this fiasco.

Mission creep occurs when, in state and military affairs, the original and primary objective of a campaign is lost from sight, leaving the means as an end in itself or–even worse–allowing people to evolve a completely different mission objective and act accordingly. In homeland security, our stated objective after 9/11 was to keep America safe while not allowing ourselves to be cowed by fear, or prevented from going about our daily lives.

Everyone’s familiar now with the cliche formulation, “if we can’t do X, then the terrorists have already won.” This makes for great jokes, but it’s also the point being driven home by Schneier as quoted, and by The Economist in a recent set of refreshing editorials on the war on terror. And it’s true. The nation’s economy reeled when people lost confidence in air travel to and from the country. This is made worse by the extremity of inconvenience to which we are now subjected at security checkpoints. Maybe some of that we can’t fix right now (Schneier would disagree here). Even so, it is a Sin to accept our tragic circumstances as the new world order, and take it out on fellow Americans who are trying to live their lives. Our mission is not to be a big strong paranoid country where people’s freedom has less meaning. That’s not even the right way to win.

As for the moral panic, this comes in when we try to answer not whether police were right to detain Star Simpson at gunpoint, but whether they were right to treat her as a criminal afterwards. We are a people perverted by the fear of terrorism, but we’d never admit this. We can avoid doing so by finding scapegoats, and in the world of DIY electronics there’s plenty of opportunity to play off people’s fear of what they don’t understand.

I see warning signs in the city of Boston’s continued insistence that electrical systems are somehow more of a terrorist threat when coupled to LED displays. Also in the naive reactions of city employees, and the prosecutor’s insistence on throwing the book at the victim.  They want to make an example of Star Simpson. Worst of all, they blindly inflate the situation in an effort to improve their odds of winning the case.

Exhibit A: look very closely at the news photos of the infamous “fake bomb” shirt–from the decals it seems to have been displayed inside-out. This is in fact exactly what we’ve heard via the Olin-MIT grapevine; it has been repeatedly mentioned in the Slashdot discussion, but most everyone in the discussion ignored it. Because every news report echoes the prosecutor’s statement that it was worn with the bizarre innards face-out, rather than the innocuous blinking star that is the output of the circuit and the intended focus of attention. They’re going to be calling it “fake bomb” for a long time to come, I’m sure of that.

The grape-vine also claims there was no silly putty, just paint stains; and while I have no way of knowing for certain, I’d trust an MIT robotics student not to do something quite as non-sequitur as walking around with play-dough for no reason, before I would trust the word of a city trying like hell to cover its ass.

This is the commute I was supposed to make to join the MATLAB Interface team outing this morning at Long Wharf.

And this is my approximation of what actually happened (I’m omitting at least one instance of me going in circles). Good God.

Lesson learned: just because you think you remember how to get to Atlantic Avenue doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check three times like a paranoid person. Boston really is that bad.