Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

October 1, 2006

Vegetarian gumbo

Filed under: Personal — cec @ 10:16 pm

My father once told me about a military training exercise that took place for a month in Egypt. The only available food was early generation MREs. Everyone lost weight except for the cajuns – who all put on 10-15 pounds. Their secret was combining their MREs into a communal pot, add the seasonings they brought from home and produce something that you wanted to eat. Since MREs have 4000-6000 calories, eating the whole thing could easily make you gain weight.

I’m always reminded of this story when I make gumbo which I learned from my mother-in-law, one of the best gumbo cooks I’ve known. My family was transplanted to Louisiana and so we don’t have a traditional gumbo recipe, but my mother-in-laws works pretty well. Unfortunately, when K and I first started leaning vegetarian, gumbo got harder to make. At first, we would still eat chicken and turkey, so a chicken and turkey-sausage gumbo was okay. Unfortunately, turkey sausage is pretty bland. When we stopped eating chicken, it looked like our gumbo days were over (K doesn’t like seafood gumbo).

Two (relatively) new meatless products saved the gumbo. “Quorn” is a very passable chicken substitute made from mycoprotein (fungus) and Boca now has a meatless Italian sausage that works very well. With those two meat substitutes we made a very nice vegetarian gumbo tonight, that may have been close to healthy.

If folks want the recipe (meatless or with meat), just let me know.

workplace culture

Filed under: Random — cec @ 9:51 pm

Caveat lector – this is not a fully formed thought, I’m just trying to get some ideas down.

I worked with a guy (not a friend) who was obsessed by workplace culture. As near as I could tell, he came from an environment with an entirely different culture and didn’t care for the one we had. At one point, he and another person (a friend) gave a talk on culture. They described different aspects of culture, including appearance and behavior.

Workplace culture is important. Studies have shown that companies with a “positive” culture are more productive. What I don’t have a good sense of is whether the culture causes productivity, productivity causes positive culture or if the two are correlated but not causally determined.

I tend to think that workplace culture is an evolved group response to circumstances. Changing the external manifestations of culture, without changing the circumstances that the culture evolved in response to, is pointless. Cultures (workplace and other) seem to be “evolutionarily stable strategies” (ESS). In evolutionary biology, an ESS is a strategy that *if* adopted by all members of the population can not be beaten by adopting another strategy. Essentially, deviations from the norm are penalized, driving the population back to the norm.

I suspect that what makes cultures so difficult to change is that they are ESSs. Trying to change culture by changing specific behaviors or by bringing in a new employee exhibiting the desire behavior, is destined to fail, because success within the culture depends on behaving with the cultural norms. I think that the only way to change cultures is to identify the underlying issues that caused the culture to evolve and to address those issues.

For example, I know of people that would like to see their work environment be more innovative – like (they perceive) Apple’s or Google’s. To get there, they try to encourage people to be more creative in their jobs or they propose that we all dress in a cool, hip way, like the Apple “geniuses” (seriously, I’m not making this up). The problem is that if you perceive that the culture is not creative, it is likely the case that the work place does not reward creativity. For example, as I understand it, Google allows employees to spend up to one day a week working on a personally chosen, pie-in-the-sky project. But to do that, they’ve had to overstaff. If they didn’t overstaff, then people spending time on random projects would cause other things to break.

So, if you want your culture to be more like Google’s, then you may have to consider overstaffing in order to get there. You can’t just expect that encouraging people to change their behavior and to be innovative will work

for the record, Kip Hawley is an idiot

Filed under: Security — cec @ 2:05 pm

I missed this when it came out last week, but apparently, a gentleman named Ryan Bird was detained at the airport last week for writing “Kip Hawley is an idiot” on his plastic baggie filled with toiletries. Apparently, the security trolls highly educated and diligent TSA employees took the statement to be a threat or at least behavior that they didn’t approve of and detained Mr. Bird – while telling him that he didn’t have 1st Amendment Rights at the TSA checkpoint.

Kip Hawley is the current director of the TSA and, yes, he is an idiot. This is the guy whose organization seems to watch more bad action movies than they read real risk assessments.  If you recall, a month or so ago we had a complete ban on liquids in planes due to the fear of binary explosives the ban was later lightened to allow small amounts of toiletries on the plane *if* they were put into clear baggies so that they could be viewed. The problem with this is that it was not based on any science or chemical engineering knowledge. The feared binary explosives are notoriously difficult to produce, would require hours of work and produce noxious smells which would (one hopes) be noticed.

Unfortunately, this is characteristic of the way we are handling transportation security these days. Rather than assessing the risks and taking reasonable actions based on the assessments, we are running around trying to look like we’re doing something. This goes for removing shoes to limiting liquids to arming pilots – none if it makes sense in a security context.

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