A recent post at Signal vs. Noise asking about the merits of Rosetta Stone brought a number of entrepreneurs out of the woodwork to promote their own language learning tools.

Livemocha.com is a social network idea. The site provides free lessons, matches you up to chat with native speakers, and lets the community correct each other's writing and speaking samples. Available for 11 of the biggest languages.

Edufire is a marketplace for individual tutoring by live video chat. You select what you want to learn and then see a list of available tutors, with their hourly rate and amount of experience on the site.

Byki (Before You Know It) is software that appears superficially similar to Rosetta Stone, but they offer a free lite version, the full software for $50, and over 70 languages.

Universed collects resources for learning languages, organizing them by media type: bookmarks, videos, podcasts, and photos. I'm not sure precisely what the photos are supposed to do for you.

LingQ (pronounced "link") is a service with multiple price levels from free to $80/month, that also involves buying entire courses from personal tutors. It's based on the founder's own methods, which appear to involve things like marking the words you don't know in passages, getting back flash cards with those words, and then submitting writing samples to the tutor employing some of those words. Ten languages are offered, and there is supposed to be a community component as well.

Side note: It's problematic when a site has only a few public pages that seem totally disconnected from the real product, as if you are on the other side of the wall from the promised land. If you offer some level of service for free, there should be an easy way to try it out or demo it, without having to 'sign up.' Also, if you're claiming to have a community, you should offer some evidence of its actual existence, like Livemocha, which has random snapshots and user names on the front page.

Mango Languages offers Flash-based lessons in 10 languages. They have free and paid levels, and "Mango to go" for $150 which lets you download mp3s and PDFs. I'll bet they're working on an iPhone version, as the only portability the current product seems to buy you is not needing an internet connection.

Unilang is another community-based free site, similar to Livemocha, but with a wider variety of resources such as lessons, phrasebooks, videos, etc., in some cases created by users or adapted from other sources. With a quick look around I saw courses in Ainu, Catalan, Esperanto, and Mongolian, as well as more common choices.

Popling, for the ADD set, delivers pop-up vocabulary questions every so often, each of which you can choose to answer or ignore. Not a bad idea. There are seven languages plus chemistry and geography. You can pay $20/year for a few more features.

A lot of people also suggested Pimsleur audio courses, which I've never tried. Oh, and happy new year!

My idea for screenwriters: "The Wire" with pirates.

Exhibit A. Pirates are awesome.
Exhibit B. No onscreen depiction has done them justice, that I've seen.

Why can't we have a movie or a TV series about pirates that shows the same attention to detail and storytelling and realism as The Wire? (Maybe Deadwood is a closer analog, but I haven't watched it yet) Pirates have become too jolly and mischievous in our culture; I want to see something that makes me at least a little bit scared of them. Parellels abound: their specialized argot; the intricate connections to world commerce and politics; the way piracy became a whole shadow industry and how people were drawn into it. The tricks of their trade, and the endless chase by the authorities.

I thought of this after reading in Waterfront by Philip Lopate that there were quite a few pirates in New York in the late 1600s. He talks about William Kidd, who had a house on Pearl Street, was hired to catch pirates because of his experience as a privateer, then went back to being a pirate after sailing to Madagascar and not finding any to catch. (He claimed he was forced into it by his crew.) And several other nuggets that could be fodder: "There was such a thing as 'officially sanctioned piracy,' in which private merchants and governments subsidized buccaneering ventures." "The oyster cellars of old, where New Yorkers once guzzled oysters as their birthright." The rough democracy of pirate ships contrasted with abusive, authoritarian captains on legitimate ones. And the seedy waterfront areas.

Then you've got the modern relevance: pirates are somehow still confounding empires off the coast of Somalia. And it's a form of asymmetric warfare, like terrorism.

If someone doesn't write this, I will, and I don't think anyone wants that. Also, if anyone knows of a good pirate show or movie that I've missed, or books that would provide more in depth source material, please let me know.

If I were a Times reporter I would write an entire article just to get in a paragraph like this:

Since its inception, the [federal Railroad Retirement] board has been so riven with conflicts that it took a half century to update what were supposed to be temporary disability standards, leaving in place until 1998 archaic diagnostic terms like “cretinism,” “imbecility” and "middle-class moronism.” Simply having a “repugnant” scar could qualify someone as disabled.

NIKON COOLPIX S610 ($197). Small, light and inexpensive, nice brushed-metal case. 4x zoom. Active Child mode in this camera supposedly tracks your children even if they move briefly out of the frame.

From the Times' camera roundup.

Had a nice birthday dinner at Sushi Yasuda. This was the first time for me eating at a three-star restaurant. We ordered omakase, something I've always wanted to do, and got toro, hiramasa yellow tail, sea trout, white king salmon, Tazmanian trout, Spanish mackerel, orange clam, anago, and a toro roll. Then we asked for a few more pieces and got some different varieties, including a freshwater eel called shirayaki that was really delicious.

For me the interesting question was, how would this differ from the ubiquitous new york sushi restaurant? For one, there is the greater variety of fish. It's not so much that there are crazy creatures you've never heard of (or maybe those are left off the menu), just more types of the species you already know, such as five different types of salmon, five of yellow tail, blue fin or big eye tuna, and five types of eel. Secondly, the rice is wonderfully soft, fluffy and seasoned, justifying the quote from Yasuda that in nigiri sushi, the fish is just a garnish for the rice. Thirdly, where lesser establishments sometimes produce unpleasantly tough cuts of some fish, at Yasuda it's always very thin and soft, never an overwhelming amount.

Probably a more knowledgeable person could go on, but this is what I thought most apparent.

* * *

Maya gave me two recently released cookbooks as gifts, both of which I had requested, but only after looking at them side by side did I realize how diametrically opposed they were. One is Alinea by Grant Achatz, and the other is Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin. Both authors are well-known characters that have been profiled by The New Yorker, and both books contain essays as well as recipes. At least at first glance, the similarities end there. Alinea is a six-pound behemoth containing recipes, ingredients and techniques so abstruse and complex that I doubt I will ever be able to make even one of them as written (but please don't dare me to try). It contains a lot of closeup, backlit "food porn" style photographs of gelees, spheres and emulsions. Eat Me contains a lot of creative comfort food, and Shopsin espouses a philosophy of being happy with whatever you have around you. The photos are very straightforward and unembellished, with bright construction paper backgrounds. He is known for kicking at least one party a day out of his restaurant for breaking his rules and endangering the atmosphere he wants to maintain, something I doubt happens much at Alinea. Also, the introduction contains a photo of Shopsin's naked rear end.

But after reading a bit of each, I think there are actually some similarities lingering under the surface. Despite what he says, Shopsin is not innocent of special techniques, ingredients, or equipment. It's not his fault, it's just that any restaurant cook finds ways of getting efficient and predictable results that are not always readily translatable to the home kitchen. Furthermore, Shopsin believes you can make the most workaday dishes into something special by taking the trouble to elevate them just a bit. He orders Lefses, Norwegian potato crepes, from a guy in North Dakota. When making a cheese steak, he slices the meat semi-frozen on a deli slicer to get it as thin as possible. He has modified his griddle to get ridiculously hot, and says not having that will pose a challenge to making good pancakes. But both books have chosen to present the recipes verbatim so that the reader can at least make informed decisions about compromises and substitutions.

Both of these books also display a lot of creativity and innovation. It's perhaps more obvious at Alinea, where they combine flavors in unpredictable ways, manipulate the textures of common foods, and try to evoke memories with scents. But in the first half of Eat Me Shopsin has already dispensed some serious thought about a dozen different topics. A big one is his approach to soup: he completely rejects the near-universal method of slow-cooking all the ingredients together because he doesn't think each piece should taste the same no matter what it is. Instead he cooks the broth separately from the other ingredients, and adds them just before serving, so they retain their own taste and identity. The casual style of the book allows Shopsin to really get across these ideas, rather than relying on the reader to figure them out from the recipes alone.

If you need any more convincing, Shopsin actually describes his method as 'deconstruction.' He takes a dish that he's curious about and makes it a whole bunch of times until he starts noticing what it's really made of. Then he takes it apart and finds ways it might be made better or more efficient. He has a lot to say about burgers, eggs and other stuff in this regard (and he's not a fan of Shake Shack's burgers, although he did perhaps take some insight from their example).

I suspect that in the end I will use these books in similar ways, as jumping off points to try new things, and as a reference for techniques to achieve certain desirable effects.

I was just called by a Gallup pollster with a survey about drinking and driving habits from the DOT. Overall it seemed like a pretty well-designed survey, but one formulation struck me as odd. I was asked about several measures that could be taken to reduce DUI, and asked to rate them on a scale of effectiveness:

1. Very effective
2. Somewhat effective
3. Neither effective nor ineffective
4. Not very effective
5. Not at all effective

I don't know what it's called as a concept, but it seems logically impossible for something to be neither effective nor ineffective. If it has no effect, then it is ineffective. The only thing that might fit the definition is something that is not intended to have any effect, like say, the color blue, but that was not the case here.

If I had to resolve this contradiction, I would say that 3 seems the same in meaning as 5, which was clearly not the intent. Better perhaps would be to make the scale from very effective to very counterproductive, with ineffective in the middle. Maybe I think some of the measures would increase DUI!

The Atlas of True Names is a nice project to reveal the origins of place names, even if Language Log has to rain on their parade for etymological gullibility.

I got the impression at some point that a good portion of names for both places and peoples mean either some variant of "us, our people, our land" or "them, those people, their land." There are a few of these visible in the preview images, such as "Here are People!" for Nicaragua, "Land of Fellow Countrymen" somewhere in England, and "The People on the Other Side" for what appears to be the Appalachian mountains.

Tangentially related is the wide variety of names for Germany in different languages (Deutschland, Allemagne, etc.), stemming from the number of different tribes that have invaded or ruled it through the ages.

Smule develops iPhone apps. These include Ocarina, a virtual instrument that takes advantage of many of the device's input methods: the touch screen to cover virtual holes, the microphone as a breath controller, and the accelerometer to control timbre by tilting the phone. You can also hear what other people around the world are playing and rate it! And then, of course, there is "Zeldarian mode."

Not having an iPhone, I haven't had a chance to try this, and even the developers seem to acknowledge that it can be finicky, but then again, so can real instruments. Even so, it's pretty compelling that virtual instruments might be made so expressive. It's always been a peeve of mine that it's so laborious to put the same level of nuance into an electronically produced sound that would be natural if not effortless on a guitar or any physical instrument. One common but perhaps unfortunate solution to this is randomization, a.k.a humanization, a route taken by a few Audio Damage products.

I have to say though, I'm not sure what I will think the first time I go to a concert and see someone pull out their phone and start 'playing' it.

Smule is run by the creators of ChucK, a neat audio programming language that I have played with from time to time.

A nice analogy by Geoff Nunberg on Language Log:

...dirty words are magic spells that conjure up their references. We first learn about dirty words at an age when we still believe literally in magic, and I don't think anything we learn afterwards palliates their irrational power. That's why we behave as if we could render them inefficacious by the simple expedient of using asterisks in place of some of their letters — magical spells have no power unless you say them just so . And it's why they bleed through quotation marks and the other devices we use to hold content at arm's length: if the New York Times can't allow itself to print "Adam Clymer is an asshole" then it can't print "Bush called Adam Clymer an asshole," either (strong racial epithets have these properties, as well).

Last year I competed in a cookie bake-off at work, making chocolate raspberry french macaroons inspired by fading memories of tasting Pierre Hermé's creations in Paris in 2005.

Earlier this year I returned to Paris and partook of many more Hermé macarons that incorporated unusual flavors such as olive oil, white truffle, and grapefruit. I left newly inspired not only to make more of my own, but to strive for excellence and innovation in all my endeavors.

Only with the onset of cool weather and another impending bake-off have I gotten around to macarons again, but this time I intend to make a thorough study of these cookies and find out how far I can take them: I'm thinking of it as a meditation (rather than, say, an obsession, or a compulsion).

Although last year's results were tasty and good for a first try, there are several specific areas that had room for improvement:

• Shell Texture: my shells had the requisite "feet" and avoided some apparently common trouble spots such as cracking, but they were flatter than they should be. I also need to practice piping out a consistent size and shape.


• Shell Appearance: most cooks try to make their food look good by natural means, but when it comes to macaroons, the color and decoration are a big part of the experience. Hermé achieves intense colors and glittery effects on some flavors. Last year I put in some red coloring, but it pretty much disappeared when the shells were done baking.


• Filling: I made a dark chocolate ganache with strained raspberry juice, let it set in the refrigerator, and then spread it on with a knife. Hermé pipes it on, achieving a perfect fat cylinder shape. He also uses a lot; I don't think I had enough and the crumbling shell may have actually prevented enough of the filling from reaching the taste buds.

Last year I used a combination of elements from a recipe in The Sweet Life, a dessert cookbook, and this recipe from Epicurious. The first thing I've done this year is to research any other recipes out there for any differences in technique.

You can't accuse Pierre Hermé of being too secretive. He has several cookbooks, but the recipe for his most famous Ispahan macaroons is right there on the web from a restaurant industry magazine.

A few other resources: Foodbeam is written by a French woman who did a one week internship at Hermé. She doesn't give away many details, but does talk about the process of filling and closing, and has lots of photos and descriptions of different flavors.

Mad Baker is written by a woman in Singapore who makes all sorts of pastries, including macaroons, and sells them from her website. It's clear that she's done a lot of experimentation, both with techniques and flavors, and that she achieves brilliant results. She doesn't give much away either, but has made some helpful comments.

(To be continued)