Cooking for Engineers

gbjbaanb writes "It's not often I post about a website, but this one is different. It is Cooking For Engineers. No big deal, you'd think - a web site about recipes and cooking. But go look at how he's presented it. Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world. These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us. Oh yes, although he's been affected by firefox, he blames Microsoft. :)"

Comments

XML

[TedTschopp]

How about creating an XML namespace for this format...

That could be fun....

Ted Tschopp

Chart Idea Awesome

[MagicDude]

That's a great way of presenting all the steps in the process. Whenever I cook, I always assume that the long step is always the last one (Bake for 90 minutes, simmer for 30 minutes, etc). I've had to order out for chineese many times when trying new receipies because step 4 of 12 is something like "Marinate for 29 hours", and you know, I didn't really bother to read past the list of ingredients. I just figure that if I don't have to shop for it, I can cook it that day.

Perhaps a better approach

[lakeland]

I found the layout of the recipe very nice, but it just doesn't scale if the steps are particularly complex -- look at how creme brulee was described if you don't believe me. However, something very similar that does scale is the latex style cooking by Axel Reichert (CTAN link: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/cooking/)

The essential difference is that instead of nesting columns, Axel's style uses only two columns which enables the second column to be very large if necessary. Though I've got to admit that for simple recipies, the cooking for engineer's site looks very good.

PS: Cooking is a great way to unwind after spending all day coding, especially if you don't mind the meal taking a few hours (and glasses of wine) to prepare...

Re:My favorite engineer recipe.

[kfg]

3. Do whatever she says.

Mine always says, "Feed me."

I'm a much better cook than she is. That's ok, she's a much better welder. These are modern times. I make the Pad Thai, she makes the locomotives. It works for us.

I read recipies, but I don't "follow" them. I read them to get ideas, just as I use engineering manuals to get ideas, not find solutions. The books never have the questions I'm working on in them. When we ride on trains she'd be happier knowing I had designed it, I'd be happier knowing she'd built it. We don't ride trains much. We know too much.

The trick is to learn your ingredients and processes, then whatever you happen to have in the house (and/or lawn. Dandelions, purslane, violets, clover, day lilies, chicory, all wonderful foodstuffs) becomes your "recipie."

Recipies are great for the beginner or casual cook, but the idea really is to go beyond them, to use them as lab practicums to understand what you're doing and why.

Recipies are rarely presented this way though. Read James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. It's full of recipies, but they're all there to illustrate a point, much as a good engineering manual.

KFG

Re:Charts

[AchilleTalon]

Seriously, cooking has become really a scientific field studied at some universities. The reason I didn't mentionned it at start is I just don't remember the details. But I think a chemist at La Sorbonne a few others around the world, including one in Montreal (but may be it's a physicist) started studying and teaching cooking from the scientific point of view. Apparently, some well know Chef's are seriously consulting them. Among other astonished accomplishements, they found the exact ideal temperature and humidity to cook an egg. That's not a joke! The egg white is not liquid, nor solid. Something like this strange mix called liquid-solid.

All this to say this engineering book about cooking is just a cook book about cooking and not real science.

Re:Poor guy...

[dschl]

Generally, the people you reference who care deeply about statistics are not too worried about their bandwidth costs. I presume you recall how this thread started: the guy who runs the site is being crushed by the bandwidth demands, and a slashdotting was the last thing he wanted or needed.

A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.

Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.

Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.

You are truly paranoid, though. Coral is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.