What are you reading?

[Pachyderm]

The making of the British Army, by Allan Mallinson

[Swatopluk]

I bought Unseen Academicals yesterday but will probably not have time to read it before the weekend.

[Darlica]

Instructions about how to do my new job.

[Swatopluk]

I should read the book on pollution control laws in front of me but I do not feel much inclination to do that at the moment

[beagle]

Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian

Josh Smith, Sacha Barber -  Various MSDN and CodeProject articles on MVVM

Various recipe books. I need one that breaks me of using hundreds of pans and utensils (it's a mistake to get into cooking via qualitative/quantitative chemistry).

[Swatopluk]

Rare is the chemist that is also a good cook. How many mg exactly are a pinch of salt and what degree of purity must the salt have? 

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Cooking is about patience and creativity, although according to one Dr. House M.D. biochemistry is a plus.

[Swatopluk]

Ha, biochemists! A whiff of chlorine and they run away scared!

[Aggie]

Rare is the chemist that is also a good cook. How many mg exactly are a pinch of salt and what degree of purity must the salt have? 

Exactly why I was a passible organic chemist but a terrible analytical chemist - I hate following recipes.  For uni-level organic labs one can get by with a couple of scoops of reagents, a dash of ether, a pinch of catalyst, simmer for 40 minutes.... 

OTOH, a cook that only follows recipes precisely will be limited by the quality of the recipe, and trying to back-engineer a successful cooking session would be nigh-impossible, unless one started with precisely measured quantities of all ingredients and measured the remainder to calculate the difference (i.e what ended up in the recipe).

As a cook, I have started following recipes for Middle Eastern/South Asian/African spice blends (many, many more reagents than any reasonable synthesis rxn) but experimenting heavily with uncharted cooking techniques to draw deeper flavours out of relatively simple ingredients, playing around with temperatures, solvents*, heat sources, rxn times and rxn vessels.

_{*regrettably limited with cooking (water, various oils and ethanol); anyone know a good edible solvent with a low boiling point that's not miscible with water?}

Reading OWA policy documents.

[Griffin NoName]

"Happiness" is not enough
Samuel Brittan: Templeton Lecture Inst. of Economic Affairs 22/11/01

[Swatopluk]

Agujim, the only edible sovents I could come up with on the spot would be some special fats. For a low boiling point they'd have to be extremly unsaturated and short-chained. But I don't know, whether those would boil without decomposing.

---

A book on the physics in James Bond movies.
Remarkably many stunts are actually technically possible, although often only barely or only with technology not available at the time the movies were made.

[Jayna]

My housemate is a chemistry PhD student, and an excellent cook. She does, however, often cook using recipes from old German cookbooks, which tend to lack precise measurements.

I just started an anthology of failed relationship stories called "Love is a Four-Letter Word".

[Swatopluk]

Finished Patchett's Unseen Academicals during the weekend.

[Sibling Qwertyuiopasd]

I finished Heart of Darkness this morning. Will be re-reading and adding to my annotations this week.

Also, watching Apocalypse Now alter this week.

[Swatopluk]

A book on the ships of the Hanse