Kerstboom

The needles of the christmas tree do prick indeed. 

The family

My grandmother told me that this is what can happen in 50 years ....

 

Kaboutertjes

This is in the forrest behind my parents house. 

Kasper

 

Horstmans Dorst

 

Horstmans Honger, part 1

 

Zus

Sneeuw!

Heather

This picture is of the tafelberg heide, 10 minutes away from my folks' home. I snowed a bit last night and we might go for a 'slee ritje' in the afternoon.

Petting zoo

Yesterday we went for a walk in the fortress city of Naarden and had a good time there.
There was a petting zoo (kinderboederij) as well.

Vakantie

Finally made it to Huizen. here are some pictures.

Java vs python?

Check this

lazy me

If you don't want to grind rice when preparing dili, you can do this.

Introducing commands in cctbx: Reminder

1. in xxxx.xxxx.command_line add script
2. libtbx.refresh
3. rehash

Tamil slang

Check out this article on Madras Bashai.

Who came up with these things??

- Bazarla oozara illana nizara kalatidu vaanga.

- Un moonchile en peechang kaiye vaikka.

Featuring: Shakthi

I was cooking and found Shakthi playing with the computer. This here is after shopping. We bought a pair of sunglasses as Shakthi kept on pulling my glasses.
Tandem

Sura fryum

1. Boil half a pound of shark in some water with mangel podi and little salt. When boiled, smash it finely.
2. Cut 1 onion in very small pieces
3. Cut 8 to 15 garlic cloves in thin strips and half an inch of ginger in very small pieces
4. Cut approximately 4 green chillies in small pieces.
5. Heat oil, add mustard seeds and urid dahl.
6. When mustard seeds are done pooping, add onion, garlic, ginger and green chillies.
7. When onion and garlic are done, add the smashes sharp and fry a bit.
8. Add salt and freshly cut coriander leaves

Serve with white rice

Sunday Samayal

Goat-parupe-kootuh

1. heat pan, add no oil
2. when hot, add 2 pound goat, and some mangel podi and salt to taste
3. add 1/2 onion cut to small pieces
4. add a cup of water (things should be half under water) and let it boil

In a separate pan, bring 2 cups of water to a boil, and add 1 (small) cup of channa dahl. Let it boil until done.

Grind the following spices

1. 6 red (cherry shaped) chilies
2. 2 soup spoon of coriander seeds
3. half an inch or ginger slices
4. some geera (1 soup spoon)
5. black pepper corns (1 soup spoon)
6. two hands of ground coconut
7. 6 garlic cloves
8. 1 cinnamon stick and 4 cloves

Make it into a nice paste. in the mean time, the goat should be cooked a bit. Take out the goat onion mixture and heat up some oil. Fry some geera seeds and 1 1/2 onion cut in small pieces. Also fry the masala paste, as the spices were not toasted. Add the goat mixture and fry a bit. Add boiled, and drained channa dahl and mix well.

Garnish with coriander, serve with white rice.

Stamps, part 2

I guess I will make some seasonal stamps (thanks to Shakthi) for my christmass cards and most likely will use one of these pictures.

I should put the recipe for the egg kozhambu as wel as for the Pakora Kurma we had last couple of days. Especially the egg kozhambu came really good. Maybe i'll find time this evening....

Stamps

Thisd is a very nice service of the dutch postal service: a personalised stamp, whith any picture you like. Too bad that is not available in the USA.

Ven-Pongal

This makes a good breakfast.

Ingredients

1. 2 cups of rice (soonamasoori or ponni)
2. 2 hands of paasi parepu (moong dahl)
3. 5 cups of water
4. half an inch of ginger, cut to small threads
5. 1 tea spoon of black pepper corns
6. 1 tea spoon of geera (cumin) seeds
7. 5 to 10 curry leaves
8. a handfull of cashew nuts
9. salt to taste
10. oil

Boil the rice and dahl until done. It should be boiled properly, the rice should be smashy.

In a pan, heat some oil and fry the ginger, pepper corns, geera seeds, curry leaves and cashew nuts. Add the rice/dahl mixture.

While preparing this dish, it is essential to shout 'Pongalo Pongal' as loud as possible, for at least 10 times.

Serve with chutney, or with some sambhar, as shown below.

Hallo!

Pulli-Kozhi-Kozhambu

This is a recipe I picked up from sunday-samayil's dhool-paati, paravai muniyamma:

Spices:

1. 4 or 5 red, dried chillies
2. 2 teaspoons of dhania (Koriander) seeds
3. 2 teaspoons of geera (cumin) seeds
4. 2 teaspoons of sombu (anisseed) seeds
5. optionally: 1 soupspoon of pop seeds

Dry roast/toast these spices and grind them very finely.

Other ingredients:

1. 1.5 or 2 pounds of chicken cut in pieces
2. 1 onion
3. 6 garlic cloves, cut in lengthy pieces
4. 3 pieces of tamarin
5. Salt
6. 1 treaspoon of sumbu (anisseed) seeds
7. 6 curry leaves
8. Fresh coriander
9. optional: Ground coconut (without is better)

Heat a pan and add the chicken and salt. No need to add any water of oil, the chicken has enough juice to cook properly. Let it stand in medium heat for about 10 minutes. Optionally, you can add some bayleaves.

In the meantime, soak the tamarin in hot water. When the flesh of of the tamarin is dissolved in the water, take out the remaining pieces and mix the ground spices in the tamarin-water.

Add the tamarin-spices mix to the chicken, as well as the ground coconut. let it boild until the raw chicken and spices smell is gone. The chicken should be in a thick-ish gravy now.

Take the chicken out of the pan, and set aside. Heat a bit of oil and fry the anisseeds. Add the garlic, and let it fry until it is brownish. Add the curry leaves and fresh coriander. Add the onions and fry them thoroughly. When the rawness of the onions is gone, add the chicken. If desired, add a wee bit of water and let the mixture boil a bit.

Serve with chapathi, dosa, idli, white or curd rice.

brilliant

Abramovitz and Stegun

Egg dosa

For dosa batter:

1. 3 small cups of idli/ponni/soona masoori rice
2. 1 small cups of urid dahl
3. a hand full of channa dahl and a table spoon of methi (fenugreek) seeds
4. Salt to taste

Soak in water for a day or so and (stone)grind to smooth batter. Add water in order to get the proper dosa consistency: not too thick, but not too watery either. If things go wrong, you might add some rice flower. Make sure the batter has fermented a bit. There should be some bubbles and a smeel of fermented dosa or idli batter (sorry, no way to explain this better). Add salt to taste.

Heat the pan/tava to it is very hot, and sprinkle some drops of water on it that should quicky evaporate again (no clue why this is done though). Put one spoon of batter on the tava and spread the batter out in a circulair motion.

Drip some oils on the sides of the dosa.

When the dosa is half done, break an egg on top of it. Ater a couple of minutes turn the dosa and bake it for approximately 2 to 3 minutes more.

Eat the dosa with your left over curry or simply with some idli podhi.

exponential integral

Derived an interesting distribution today that might be usefull as a prior in FA estimation. Needed to implement the exponential integral.
Again grateful to people that make my life easy and had a moment of silence to honor the time someone wasted on obtaining accurate rational approximations for E1(z) (AMS 55 5.1.53) as instructed by former college.

Chicken?

> gini said...
> Wanna try Indian? Try butter chicken?Hmm....chilli chicken works too!

Thanx for suggestion Gini, butter chicken or even your Jalfreezi seems like a good idea. I'll let you know what it will be, I will make an effort tomorrow night. I might even opt for a rogan josh or so, have to get some goat/lamb though.

Just had a brilliant diner: egg dosa

Staart en pop

Goats toes

Hi Shakthi,

Yes, my daughter is using both Tamizh, Dutch and English and I wondeer how this is going to work out in the end. I guess hsould work out fine. I have friends whose kids are tri-lingual (dutch , french and english) and I do not forsee any major problems.

VKN,

I posted my goat dish here. I saw a picture of your son with dates ;-)
If I have toime over the weekend, I'll put another goat dish, for now, I have to decide what to make for the annual pre-thanksgiving potluck at work. I wil try some chicken curry which is not to spicy and does not look like the standard chicken tikka masala you find in every indian restaurant here. I am open for suggestions.

Kovaka Fryum

I have absolutely no clue what this vegetable is called in english, but it looks like a small unpickeled gurkin. My wife calls it Kovaka.
It is cut in elongated pieces and then fried, together with litte onion, red chillies and garlic. Add malagha podhi/curry powder, salt and dhania/gheera powder and its done.

A nice side dish with takali rice.

Fish Kozhambu

I found some other recipes I once wrote up:

Fish Kozhambu
Ingredients

• About 500 grams of fish (any, red snapper or tilapia is nice actually)
• half an onion
• half a tomatoe
• 6 cloves of garlic
• curry leaves
• ABouit 4 or 5 pieces of tamarin, soaked in water
• Salt
• little bit of Fenugreek seeds
• little bit of Mustard seeds
• half a spoon of curry powder
• Fresh coriander
• Paste (see below)

Ingredients for Paste

• Pepper, 1 teaspoon / to taste
• Red Chillies, 2 pieces
• Fenugreek (Meethi) seeds, 1 teaspoon
• Geera (Cumin) seeds, 1 teaspoon
• Mustard seeds, 1 teaspoon
• Thoor dhal, 1 teaspoon
• Coriander seeds, 1 teaspoon

Preparation

1. First fry all the ingredients for the paste in little oil and grind it to a very fine paste. Keep this aside.
2. Cut the fish in medium pieces.
3. Cut the onion and tomatoe very small
4. Grind the raw garlic, onion and curry leaves.
5. Soak the tamarin in 2 cups of water. Grind the tomatoe and add it.
6. Heat 2~3 spoons of oil, fry mustard seeds and fenugreek. After "popping" add no. 4. Let the raw smell go (approx 2 minutes) and add no.1. Fry a bit. Add no 5. Add half a spoon of curry powder. Let it boil for approximately 15 to 20 minutes in order to obtain a medium thick consistancy.Add salt to taste.
7. Add the fish. Let it simmer for 5 minutes.
8. Add fresh coriander just before serving.
9. Serve with white or curd rice

Approximately 4 servings

Variation tip: replace fish with shrimp and potato or with lady fingers.

Goat thokku

Ingredients:

• Goat, cut in small pieces, approximately 2 pounds
• 2 onions, cut in small pieces
• 1 large tomato, cut in small pieces
• Peeled potato, cut in cubes of approx. 2*2*2 cm
• Garlic-Ginger paste, obtained by grinding approximately 5 garlic cloves and half a thumb of ginger; add a wee bit of white ginger (galanga) if available
• Malagha podhi / Curry Powder, 2 table spoons spoons
• Ground geera (cumin) / dhania (coriander seeds) (50/50); 2 table spoons
• Anis seeds, 2 tea spoons
• Thurmeric, 2 tea spoons
• 8 curry leaves
• 1 teaspoon mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon urid dhal
• a bit of oil
• salt
• black pepper

Take a pressure pan, add a bit of oil and heat it. When oil is hot, add the mustard seeds. When the seeds are done popping, add the anis seeds and urid dahl and fry it until urid is golden brown. Add the onion and fry. Add the ginger-garlic paste and fry lightly. Add the goat and tomatoes and slightly fry. Add the malagha podhi and geera-dhania powder. Add water so that all ingredients are just under water. Add salt and curry leaves. Place lid and let it cook for about 3 to 4 sounds.

Heat a frying pan, and add the soup like cooked goat miture. This mixture wil now be reduced in volume by further cooking the mixture. At this point, add the potatoes. Reduce the volume of the curry to such a levekl that it is not a liquid anymore: it should be a paste with chunks of goat and potato. The goat meat should be very soft and start falling apart. Add salt and black pepper to taste. Garnish with fresh coriander leaves.

IK WIL NIET NAAR BED

Halve liter Heineken

So, I basically messed up with shopping today. Ate some chinese bun with some non-kosher summat in side that is making my bowels feel like they have been processed with a paper shredder. The medicine is waiting though (see heading). The second thing was that I brought home twice the amount of carrots that fit in my carrot box in the fridge. This proved to be an exellent carrot reduction technique: Carrot Halwa (look left).

It tastes very good, better than I ever had in any restaurant and tomorrow it will even be better.



What is this CSI crap about anyway, you can't see xrays.... L&O is much better ...

My daughter and I were reading some books today. I showed her pictures of Sinterklaas, but she did not quite understand. She was much more interested in some pictures of Indonesie with tigers (POES!) or olifanten. The snap on the right is after diner, about to go to bed.

I think I figured out how the user interface for the deltaF or Fa estimation jiffy should work.
I'll tackle SAD, SIR first and then extend to SIRAS, RIP, RIPAS and MAD.

Vluchten kan niet meer, de remix.

Redesigning the scaling interface, accomodating anomalous local scaling as well.
When this is done, I have to start thinking on how to quickly get a dirty Fa estimate.
Hendrickson's estimates are an option of course, but the CNS way is also pretty
straightforward.

Gave up on the SPA bootstrap, it involves too much hassle for not much gain (i guess) , the classic non-parametric bootstrap should be good enough for most simulations I intend to do.

Allmost weekend. Waiting for Giel op 3FM. Now 3voor12 XL, not to bad either.

eskimos

Bootsrapping, part 4

I am playing a bit with Saddlepoint approximations on the basis of empirical cumulant generation functions. The minimizers in the cctbx are very nice in this respect ...

Reference Librarian

This was early this morning, before taking bath and breakfast. About 10 minutes after waking up, she was allready asking for her books.

Bootstrapping, part 3

Read this : A nice intro in crystallography and direct methods by Hauptman. You might need a subscription though

This might also be usefully: Uses of saddlepoint approximation in bootstrap techniques. This paper is also useful in this context.

Bootstrapping, part 2

I still do not really know how to decide on the width of the kernel for the smooth bootstrap,
and have to find some accesible literature. The the paper I browsed through did give a suggestion, but I am not sure if I am happy with it.

Anyway, the multi-dimensional non parametric resampling scheme has been implemented as well, including a line fitting example. The non parametric bootstrap is used to estimate standard deviations of the refined parameters:

-------------------------------------------
True and fitted coeffcients
-------------------------------------------
a 1.0 1.9029
b 2.0 1.9270
c 3.0 3.005
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Bootstrapped mean and standard deviations
-------------------------------------------------------------------
a 1.9173 0.22509
b 1.9259 0.05107
c 3.005 0.00292

Compare this with the output of GNUPLOT fitting:

a = 1.90288 +/- 0.2356
b = 1.92697 +/- 0.05748
c = 3.00469 +/- 0.002921

The estimated standard deviation via the bootstrap and full matrix inversion matches nicely.


The computational statistics book seems to be a nice, basic and readable introduction and set of references for areas such MCMC, EM, Simulation and Bootstrapping. They don't mention the smooth bootstrap however.

Bootstrapping

Added some bootstrap functionality in the CCTBX. Currently it is located in scitbx.math, but might move tomorrow. I have implemented the classic non-parametric boot strap as well as a smoothed bootstrap with gaussian kernel. I might be tempted to add some parametric bootstraps as well. Some facilities for bootknife are available as well, although not sure what to use that for as yet. A book at the library is waiting for me.


Shakthi was in a good mood this evening and we enjoyed some Jip en Janneke before she went to bed.

Worms

The lecture notes from the computing school in Sienna have come online and has some usefull info,
mainly in the form of lecture notes/PDF-a-fied PPT presentations.

Found bug. Forgot a map_to_asu() somewhere.

Nice set of lecture notes on computational statistics
This one is nice as well.

Kokosnoot

This is what happens when you keep postponing braking and grating a coconut.

Radio

Prairie home companion








This american life

Sound portraits

Shakthi

My daughter has been sleeping for the most of the afternoon, which probably means that she will be active until late night. This is her:

Chicken Sukka

It became Chicken Sukka as that recipy looked a bit more interesting.
The recipy as writtern is okai, take however care to mix the spices for the powder first without ginger and garlic, and add the thurmeric powder only when marinating the meat.
The result is shown on the right hand side.
I guess the tamarin might be replacable with tomatoes, something I might try next time.

Chicken

Found an very anoying bug in local scaling routines. No clue as yet where it lies as yet though, but should be something relatively trivial though.

Some chicken is awaiting to be prepared. Found some interesting recipes. I am doubting between Mangalore chicken or Chikken Sukka.

Anomalous signal vs Noise

Reading Wanatabe et al. (as promised) , Figure 1 struck my eye, especially in comparison to figure 4 of Zwart, Acta D61, 1437-1448. Note also the dip the Bijvoet amplitude ratio at about 4 Angstrom, where the Wilson plot has a local maximum. It is nice to see that classic phase relations used in OASIS do help ....

I did glance over Soares & Vekther as well. Triplet phases are wicked, not sure this would work out for 'real world' problems though. Besides that, I wonder how the triplet measurements can be used more directly in density modification schemes: they should influence the phase probability distributions significantly (and clearly things are not independent).

Acta D November

Interesting Acta D papers I read recently:

Acta Cryst. (2005). D61, 1465-1475
A modified ACORN to solve protein structures at resolutions of 1.7 Å or better
J. Jia-xing, M. M. Woolfson, K. S. Wilson and E. J. Dodson

The authors develop an extrapolation method to extend the resolution to a limit that exeeds the experimental resolution limit. I think I have seen something similar
(besides the recent Giacovazzo paper and old Hauptman/Karle work) by some powder people who use the relations such as triplets and so on to predict missing intensities:
J. Appl. Cryst. (1992). 25, 237-243
On the determination of accurate intensities from powder diffraction data. II. Estimation of intensities of overlapping reflections
Jansen, Peschar & Schenk


Also enjoyable:

Acta Cryst. (2005). D61, 1514-1520
FINDMOL: automated identification of macromolecules in electron-density maps
McKee et al.

Still to read:

Soares & Vekther: Experimental methods for measuring accurate high-amplitude phases and their importance in isomorphous replacement experiments

Wanatabe et al.: Comparison of phasing methods for sulfur-SAD using in-house chromium radiation: case studies for standard proteins and a 69 kDa protein