I used to think I didn’t like asparagus, but it turned out to be—as these aversions often are—a textural problem. Their stalks would remain fibrous and tough even as half the stalk and the tips turned to mush. My mind was changed a few years ago when some restaurant dish I ordered came with a salad of pleasantly al dente asparagus, the tips tender but not mushy.

At home, I tried blanching the stalks, grilling them, baking them, but nothing recreated that texture—until I learned of a combination boiling-steaming method involving a mason jar and very little kitchen skill. The technique came to my attention via Ari LeVaux’s cooking column in my local newspaper Missoulian. (Strange coincidence: When my boyfriend and I visited Missoula to decide whether we wanted to move here, we stayed in LeVaux’s AirBnb, not knowing we had the food-writing beat in common. He had a solid-looking backyard garden.)

Anyway, LeVaux recommends a method for cooking asparagus that he gleaned from the translation of an ancient Latin cookbook compiled in the first century A.D. Known as Apicius, it’s a tome that’s inspired cooks for centuries all the way until the present-day. But though it’s often called “the world’s oldest cookbook,” the Apicius collection is not really a cookbook in the modern sense. Its instructions are more guidelines than recipes, lacking precise measurements and of course, baffling modern readers with lost-in-translation Latin terms.

It’s a good thing LeVaux did the asparagus research for me, scrounging up a mid-1930s translation that helped illuminate this ancient cooking method. Basically, it recommends cooking the asparagus in boiling water “rursum,” which is translated to mean “backwards.” Apicius’ instructions call for a bunch of asparagus to be stood stalk-side down in boiling water that doesn’t reach all the way up the stalk. This way, the boiling water tenderizes the thicker stalks while steam merely tenderizes the tips. No mushy tips, no tough stalks.

To recreate this, I placed a bunch of asparagus—I cut about 1/4-inch off the bottom—in a dry pickle jar. (You could use a mason jar, but a pickle jar is slightly fatter.) I boiled a few inches of water in a large stock pot, then carefully placed the jar in the pot. The water bubbled about halfway up the jar while the steam swirled around the tips. After 25 minutes, I removed the jar. Now, I know what you’re thinking: 25 minutes?! For asparagus?! But it’s a passive 25 minutes—I started cooking something else while this was happening—and it’s worth it to nail the perfect texture for both tips and stems.

Success! The stalks were the same texture as the tips—tender but not mushy. Levaux added cream, butter, and garlic into his jar to infuse some flavor into the asparagus, but I left mine plain since they were destined for this sweet-tart balsamic, asparagus, and pecan salad.

Now that I know of the Apicius method for cooking asparagus, I’ll never go back to my failed grilling or blanching or sautéing. If someone could solve my next kitchen conundrum—how to devein shrimp in under two hours and without being bored to tears—I’m ready for it.

via Lifehacker
The best method for cooking asparagus is 2,000 years old

via The Truth About Guns
Seven Ways to Avoid New Concealed Carrier Mistakes

MSNBC host Joy Reid is making national news—not for revving up her fans in the anti-Trump Resistance, but for homophobic remarks that have surfaced from her now-defunct blog and years-old tweets.

If it feels like you’ve heard this one before, it’s because you have. The issue is bubbling up yet again—and this time, Reid’s excuse for the comments has taken a turn toward the truly bizarre.

First, some background: A full decade ago, when she was still a morning talk show host in south Florida, Reid edited a politics blog called The Reid Report. She used that blog to write, among other things, an ugly string of posts attempting to out then-Florida Governor Charlie Crist as gay, repeatedly referring to him as “Miss Charlie,” calling his marriage to a woman a fraud, and even speculating about their sex life and wondering if Crist’s wife had to cope with him “ogling the male waiters” on their honeymoon. She also suggested that if Crist somehow made his way onto John McCain’s 2008 ticket, he would be too preoccupied doing things like picking out “flamingo-shaped napkins” to get anything done in the White House.

A lefty Twitter user laid all these findings out in a November 2017 Twitter thread, with receipts from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

Days later, Reid, who was by then hosting her own weekend politics show on MSNBC, apologized for the posts, which she called “insensitive, tone deaf and dumb.” She also pointed to her friends in the LGBTQ community as evidence she’s not homophobic. Crist accepted her apology on Twitter, and everyone seemed to move on, satisfied that Reid—like many Democrats—had simply “evolved” on the issue of LGBTQ equality in the intervening years.

But on Monday, things got weird again. After the same Twitter user unearthed even more offensive content from Reid’s old blog using Wayback—which archives publicly available internet content even if it’s been removed or deleted by its author—Mediaite published an extensive story about the latest posts. Among the deeply offensive posts contained therein (and far from an exhaustive list):

• Reid defending the former NBA star Tim Hardaway saying that he hates “gay people,” by saying “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing…Does that make me homophobic? Probably.”
• In the same post, she went on to write that it’s “intrinsic” for heterosexual people to believe that “homosexual sex…is…well…gross.”
• A 2006 post counting down the “totally not gay celebrities of the year,” a list that included Clay Aiken, Tom Cruise, and Anderson Cooper at No. 1.
• Idly floating an “interesting question” about whether you could “manipulate the genes of your unborn child” to make sure they’re not gay.
• Promoting the insidious and deeply old stereotype that gay men are just predators and pedophiles seeking out “impressionable teens.”
• An obsession with the movie Brokeback Mountain (its premise of a love story between two men was “too out there” for her, and she said again that she just didn’t want to watch a sex scene between men).

When Mediaite reached out to Reid about those posts, things took a strange turn: Instead of just apologizing, as she’d already done once before, Reid insisted the blog posts published under her name were the work of “unknown, external” hackers:

In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.

I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.

Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.

So Reid is arguing that hackers wormed their way into the Wayback Machine to edit her archived posts to add more anti-LGBTQ content to smear her. Splinter has reached out to Reid and MSNBC for comment and will update this post if and when we hear back.

In response to Splinter reaching out for comment, an Internet Archive staffer pointed to a new blog post on their site repudiating Reid’s claims that malevolent forces manipulated her site (emphasis added):

When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.

We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives. We were clear that we would welcome and consider any further information that they could provide us to support their claims.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out at The Intercept, basically any security breach is theoretically possible, although Jeffrey Carr, the cybersecurity expert he spoke with, said: “I’ve never heard of that happening but it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen, I guess.”

It would also seem that—if hackers were routinely able to penetrate Wayback—it could carry serious implications for the integrity of the internet’s archives, which includes news stories. Reid’s blog is now deleted, and the site’s robots.txt—a file websites use to communicate with search engine web crawlers and other web robots—currently blocks the Wayback Machine from displaying its own copies of the site and from creating any new ones in the future. The Internet Archive has a long-standing policy of retroactively removing websites whose robots.txt files block its web crawler. 

(According to Reid’s site’s robots.txt history, Feb. 21, 2018 appears to be the first day the file was altered to exclude all crawlers, and it was edited again on March 5 to specifically target the Internet Archive. The robot.txt telling crawlers to ignore the site then proceeded to disappear and reappear numerous times between March and April, although it’s not clear exactly why.)

It’s a bizarre development given Reid’s past comments about the LGBTQ community, which she owned up to and apologized for. She’s also clearly been forgiven; she’s even slated to be honored by the LGBTQ rights organization PFLAG, which is giving her its Straight for Equality in Media award on May 9.

As harsh as the new crop of blogs are, they aren’t far off from homophobic messages that she’s tweeted from her verified account:

Reid also previously attacked Chelsea Manning in a transphobic Twitter thread, and framed Manning’s reports of torture as complaints about needing a “pillow.” All of this would seem to cast doubt on Reid evoking the “I’ve been hacked” excuse, which is such an old, widely-recognized dodge that it’s become a Twitter meme.

The MSNBC host is clearly trying a new tactic to face down embarrassing old comments coming back to haunt her this time around. Unless we’re presented with some concrete evidence that such an elaborate hack of Reid’s archives transpired, let’s hope she doesn’t get away with it quite so easily.

J.K. Trotter, a reporter with GMG’s Special Projects Desk, contributed reporting to this piece.

via Gizmodo
The Internet Archive Trashes Joy Reid’s Dubious Claim That Hackers Made Her Look Homophobic

macOS: It’s important to know how to fine-tune your wireless router, because not every router can just auto-adjust your wireless network’s settings to give you the highest quality connection. That, and a great wifi-analysis app can help you figure out the areas of your house or apartment that might need a little more wireless support—either by adding another access point or adjusting your existing configuration.

This App Is Worth It

Though it’s pricey, the $20 macOS app WiFi Explorer is worth the price of a few burritos. It does a perfect job of showing you every wireless network your laptop can find in a particular area. More importantly, it drops these all onto two handy graphs—one for the 2.4GHz band and one for the 5GHz band—to show you which channels might be saturated with competing networks.

Why is this important? Where possible, you want your wireless network to be on a channel that’s as free from interference from other wireless networks as possible. If you run your wifi network on a channel that’s packed with other wifi networks, your speeds can suffer. As MacWorld described in a 2013 article:

“To test this theory, I brought that same outdoor suburban distance test indoors to a long hallway in our seven-story office building in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. At my home, the MacBook detected 25 networks; at the office it saw 150.

At a distance of 6 feet from the Time Capsule, our average throughput was 489 mbps, 11 percent less than the suburban network speed. At 26 feet, the office speed dropped to 305 mbps, 33 percent less than the suburban test result from the same distance. At 54 feet, the indoor test was 44 percent slower than in my quiet neighborhood. And at 78 feet, the speeds in my office were down 51 percent from the speed I got in front of my house at the same distance.”

Choose Channels Manually

If your router can’t pick the best channel for you, or its selection is terrible, then you should manually adjust your wifi network’s settings within your router’s interface. Try sticking to channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4GHz—the three non-overlapping channels—and one of 5GHz’s 23 different non-overlapping channels. (You have a lot more flexibility there.)

If You Don’t Want to Pay

And if you truly don’t want to shell out $20 for a lovely app, you can sort-of accomplish the same channel scanning in macOS itself. In Spotlight, type in “wireless diagnostics” and load the app that pops up at the top of your results. Ignore its on-screen prompt; instead, click on Window, and then click on “Scan.”

While you won’t get any pretty graphs, you can sort all the found wireless networks by channel to get a sense of what’s crowded and what isn’t—remember, lower RSSI numbers indicate a weaker signal, so a channel with a lot of weak wireless networks might be a better choice for your wireless network than a channel with one or two strong, competing networks.

via Lifehacker
Get the Fastest Wifi on Your Wireless Network With Wifi Explorer for Mac

via All Outdoor
Watch: Can a Log Cabin Protect You From Old West Guns?

As promised, the following are links to slides from my talks during MySQL Day and FOSDEM @Brussels in Feb.2018 :

• MySQL Day : 8.0-dev Scalability & Benchmarks
• FOSDEM #18 : 8.0 InnoDB Re-Design

NOTE : for those who did not follow, CATS is not the only change in InnoDB ;-))

Rgds,
-Dimitri

via DimitriK’s (dim) Weblog
MySQL Performance : my slides from MySQL Day & FOSDEM Feb.2018

For as long as artificial sweeteners have existed, people have been warned about their supposed health risks such as cancer and multiple sclerosis. But while these claims are routinely debunked as nothing more than junk science, some research—including a new study presented this week at the annual Experimental Biology conference—is beginning to indicate that sweeteners could actually contribute to health problems like type 2 diabetes.

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Marquette University used rats vulnerable to developing diabetes for their experiments. For three weeks, different groups were fed high doses of two sugars, glucose and fructose, and two common artificial sweeteners, aspartame and acesulfame potassium. They then studied the rats’ blood using a large-scale technique that tracks minute metabolic changes, known as metabolomics.

“Just after three weeks of giving these sweeteners and sugars to our diabetes-susceptible rats, we saw biochemical changes in the blood that could potentially lead to alterations in fat and energy metabolism,” lead author Brian Hoffman, a biomedical engineer at both institutions, told Gizmodo.

Diabetes is what happens when our bodies become unable to maintain proper glucose levels in the body—a process that’s largely regulated by the hormone insulin. This breakdown causes people to either stop responding to insulin as easily as they once did, or to stop producing insulin altogether. Excessive sugar in our diets is thought to help cause diabetes by overtaxing the body’s insulin-producing machinery, since it’s used to bring high blood glucose levels back to normal.

Because of that, artificial sweeteners have long been advertised as a way for people to eat treats and soft drinks safely and lose weight, without raising the risk of diabetes. But rates of diabetes and obesity have continued to skyrocket regardless, even as sweetener-rich foods and drinks became widely available starting in the 1950s. (There are currently six FDA-approved artificial sweeteners.)

As a result, Hoffman and his team have not only tried to understand how sugar sparks the chain of events that leads to diabetes, but also tried to suss out whether sweeteners could do the same.

If sweeteners can raise our risk of diabetes, Hoffman says, they probably do it differently than sugar. Rather than overwhelming the body’s machinery, his and others’ research suggests, fake sugar wears it out. “Sweeteners kinda trick the body. And then when your body’s not getting the energy it needs—because it does need some sugar to function properly—it potentially finds that source elsewhere,” Hoffman said.

In the rats’ blood, his team found evidence of protein breakdown, likely meaning their bodies turned to burning away muscle as a source of energy. They also found higher levels of lipids and other fats, which over time could contribute to obesity and diabetes. Other research has suggested sweeteners alter the community of bacteria that call our guts home—the microbiome—in a way that could lead to harmful metabolic changes. And still more research has shown that diets high in artificial sweeteners are associated with a greater risk of diabetes and obesity.

Hoffman is well aware of past efforts to tie sweeteners to dire health risks, but he says things are different in this case.

“Most of these sweeteners were approved well before we had the technology to perform studies like my lab is doing. So they weren’t able to look as in-depth at some of the potential effects being caused,” he said. “By knowing what biochemical changes these are causing through these large-scale studies, we can take a unbiased approach and see what’s changing to give us a better direction.”

Hoffman’s team plans to submit their current findings for consideration in several peer-reviewed journals, but they’re already in the middle of studying their sweetener-fed rats for longer periods of time. Future studies are likely to involve taking a peek at the rats’ microbiomes too. Ultimately, he believes their study method could be relatively easy to use with people, since all that would be needed is a blood sample to study small metabolic changes.

In the meantime, though, he doesn’t necessarily want to scare anyone away from their diet drink habit.

“What I like to tell people is that most things in moderation are going to be fine. So if you enjoy your diet soda here and there, than have your diet soda here and there. If you like your normal soda here and there, have it here and there,” he said. “It’s when people start to chronically consume these—say, a person drinks two, three, four of [these drinks] everyday, that we should start to be concerned. Because you’re starting to introduce these biochemical changes and the body has no time to recover.”

via Gizmodo
Diet Soda Might Still Contribute to Diabetes, Rat Study Suggests

via Planet MySQL
Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) 1.10.0 Is Now Available

via The Truth About Guns
Gun Review: SIG Sauer P365 Micro-Compact 9mm Pistol

via Dilbert Daily Strip
Comic for April 20, 2018