And some linkies
Jan. 29th, 2009 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
An article about the nutritional value of modern vegetables
A recipe for Jelly Doughnut Pudding
Jelly Doughnut Pudding
By Alex Witchel
Time: About 2 1/2 hours
3 1/2 cups heavy cream, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups whole milk, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons sugar
8 large eggs
4 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
14 jelly doughnuts, preferably filled with raspberry jam
Butter, for greasing pan.
1. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Fill a kettle with water and place over high heat to bring to a boil. In a large mixing bowl, combine cream, milk, 1 1/2 cups sugar, eggs, egg yolks and vanilla. Whisk to blend.
2. Using a serrated knife, gently slice doughnuts from top to bottom in 1/4-inch slices. Butter a 9-by-12-inch baking pan and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar. Pour about 1/2 inch of the cream mixture into pan. Arrange a layer of sliced doughnuts in pan, overlapping them slightly. Top with another layer, pressing them down slightly to moisten them. Top with a small amount of cream mixture.
3. Arrange 2 more layers of sliced doughnuts, and pour remaining liquid evenly over top. Press down gently to moisten. Sprinkle with remaining 1 tablespoon sugar. Cover pan tightly with foil, and place in a larger pan. Fill larger pan with boiling water until three-quarters up the side of pudding pan.
4. Bake for 1 hour 50 minutes. Remove foil and continue to bake until top is golden brown, about 15 minutes. Turn off oven, open door slightly, and leave in oven for an additional 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
One for cookies
An article about how teen sexuality is *not* increasing
The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Have American teenagers gone wild?
Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome.
It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.
And that is not the only alarm being sounded. The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.
The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.
Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.
The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.
“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”
One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.
In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).
The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.
“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”
As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven’t yet had intercourse. Researchers say children’s more relaxed attitude about oral sex probably reflects a similar change among adults since the 1950s. In addition, some teenagers may view oral sex as “safer,” since unplanned pregnancy is not an issue.
Health researchers say parents who fret about teenage sex often fail to focus on the important lessons they can learn from the kids who aren’t having sex. Teenagers with more parental supervision, who come from two-parent households and who are doing well in school are more likely to delay sex until their late teens or beyond.
“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.
“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”
Although the data is clear, health researchers say it is often hard to convince adults that most teenagers have healthy attitudes about sex.
“I give presentations nationwide where I’m showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse,” Dr. Bogle said. “But so many people think we’re morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It’s very difficult to convince people otherwise.”
One, which I won't copy paste, about how the new 1 station at South Ferry isn't opening. CURSES!
One, which I'm sure I've posted before, about Yiddish in court decisions
One about the New York that Henry Hudson may have seen
Henry Hudson’s View of New York: When Trees Tipped the Sky
By SAM ROBERTS
What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that greeted Henry Hudson 400 years ago has been reimagined by a senior ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Drawing on 18th-century British military maps, the ecologist, Eric W. Sanderson, has painstakingly recreated Manhattan’s rolling landscape — Mannahatta in an American Indian dialect meant “island of many hills,” many of which were all but leveled when the street grid was imposed in the 19th century — that Hudson encountered.
In his coming book, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” Mr. Sanderson evocatively describes “the old-growth forests, stately wetlands, glittering streams, teeming waters, rolling hills, abundant wildlife and mysterious people.” All in all, a scene hard to reconcile with the contemporary landscape dominated by glass, concrete and asphalt.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is to join Mayor Job Cohen of Amsterdam and other Dutch officials this week in heralding the quadricentennial of Hudson’s voyage of discovery up his eponymous river.
It was 400 years ago this month that Hudson and Dutch merchants negotiated a contract that, it could be argued, would change the face of New York and point America toward the ethnic and racial diversity now personified by President Obama.
On Jan. 8, 1609, the Dutch merchants enlisted Hudson, an English navigator, to find a western sea route to the Far East. Had Hudson sailed on behalf of England, the nation and New York might look very different today.
Unlike other Europeans who were fleeing religious persecution or were intent on imposing — through violence when necessary — their own beliefs, the Dutch came to America to make money. Those who enlisted in that endeavor and did not disturb the peace of New Amsterdam, the name the Dutch gave their colony, were welcome.
Whether the motivation was tolerance or indifference, it largely worked, which is why New York developed so differently from most of the other American colonies.
Hudson’s contract with the Dutch East India Company provided for a payment of 800 guilders (or a guarantee to his wife of 200 guilders if he failed to return to the Old World from his voyage). Since Hudson apparently never returned to Holland, it is unclear whether he ever collected. As a result, the contract may have been an even better bargain for the Dutch than the totemic 60 guilders paid for Manhattan 17 years later.
Charles T. Gehring, director of New York State’s New Netherland Project (started by the New York State Library and the Holland Society, which researches early Dutch settlements), calls 800 guilders a sizable amount of money.
“A laborer earned about one guilder a day,” Mr. Gehring said. “A cow cost about 40 guilders, a horse — like owning a Buick — about 150 guilders.”
The Mannahatta that Hudson encountered in 1609 evokes a lost world, a mirror image of Alan Weisman’s vision of nature’s resurgence after humans vanish in his 2007 book, “The World Without Us.” Per acre, Mr. Sanderson writes, Mannahatta had more ecological diversity than Yellowstone, more native plant species than Yosemite, more species of birds than the Great Smoky Mountains.
“If Mannahatta existed today as it did then, it would be a national park,” Mr. Sanderson writes. “It would be the crowning glory of American national parks.”
Mr. Sanderson not only reimagines Manhattan, he also offers a vision of what New York may look like 400 years from now.
“New Yorkers in 2409 will still be loud, direct and pushy,” he predicts, but also “warm and generous and involved in what happens in the world.” He envisions a city where fossil fuels will have long since been exhausted and where humans and nature coexist.
Mr. Sanderson’s book is being published this spring. A companion exhibit will open at the Museum of the City of New York in May.
New York was built on what Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University historian, calls Hudson’s “river of empire.” On its banks, the global financial capital was eventually transplanted from 17th-century Amsterdam, according to a new booklet, “1609: The Forgotten History of Hudson, Amsterdam and New York,” by the journalists Geert Mak and Russell Shorto.
“That is what began in 1609,” they write, “with the unlikely, brooding, mist-shrouded figure of Henry Hudson, and the development shortly after he passed from the scene of a brashly multiethnic and free-trading city on a blank slate of an island.”
A recipe for Jelly Doughnut Pudding
Jelly Doughnut Pudding
By Alex Witchel
Time: About 2 1/2 hours
3 1/2 cups heavy cream, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups whole milk, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons sugar
8 large eggs
4 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
14 jelly doughnuts, preferably filled with raspberry jam
Butter, for greasing pan.
1. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Fill a kettle with water and place over high heat to bring to a boil. In a large mixing bowl, combine cream, milk, 1 1/2 cups sugar, eggs, egg yolks and vanilla. Whisk to blend.
2. Using a serrated knife, gently slice doughnuts from top to bottom in 1/4-inch slices. Butter a 9-by-12-inch baking pan and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar. Pour about 1/2 inch of the cream mixture into pan. Arrange a layer of sliced doughnuts in pan, overlapping them slightly. Top with another layer, pressing them down slightly to moisten them. Top with a small amount of cream mixture.
3. Arrange 2 more layers of sliced doughnuts, and pour remaining liquid evenly over top. Press down gently to moisten. Sprinkle with remaining 1 tablespoon sugar. Cover pan tightly with foil, and place in a larger pan. Fill larger pan with boiling water until three-quarters up the side of pudding pan.
4. Bake for 1 hour 50 minutes. Remove foil and continue to bake until top is golden brown, about 15 minutes. Turn off oven, open door slightly, and leave in oven for an additional 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings.
One for cookies
An article about how teen sexuality is *not* increasing
The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Have American teenagers gone wild?
Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people, and the latest news seems particularly worrisome.
It came from the National Center for Health Statistics, which reported this month that births to 15- to 19-year-olds had risen for the first time in more than a decade.
And that is not the only alarm being sounded. The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.
The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.
Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.
The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.
“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”
One reason people misconstrue teenage sexual behavior is that the system of dating and relationships has changed significantly. In the first half of the 20th century, dating was planned and structured — and a date might or might not lead to a physical relationship. In recent decades, that pattern has largely been replaced by casual gatherings of teenagers.
In that setting, teenagers often say they “fool around,” and in a reversal of the old pattern, such an encounter may or may not lead to regular dating. The shift began around the late 1960s, said Dr. Bogle, who explored the trend in her book “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (N.Y.U. Press, 2008).
The latest rise in teenage pregnancy rates is cause for concern. But it very likely reflects changing patterns in contraceptive use rather than a major change in sexual behavior. The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.
“There is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said Maria Kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” (University of California Press, 2005). “This creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”
As for that supposed epidemic of oral sex, especially among younger teenagers: national statistics on the behavior have only recently been collected, and they are not as alarming as some reports would have you believe. About 16 percent of teenagers say they have had oral sex but haven’t yet had intercourse. Researchers say children’s more relaxed attitude about oral sex probably reflects a similar change among adults since the 1950s. In addition, some teenagers may view oral sex as “safer,” since unplanned pregnancy is not an issue.
Health researchers say parents who fret about teenage sex often fail to focus on the important lessons they can learn from the kids who aren’t having sex. Teenagers with more parental supervision, who come from two-parent households and who are doing well in school are more likely to delay sex until their late teens or beyond.
“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” Dr. Kefalas said. “What’s really important for us to pay attention to, as researchers and as parents, are the characteristics of the kids who become pregnant and those who get sexually transmitted diseases.
“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”
Although the data is clear, health researchers say it is often hard to convince adults that most teenagers have healthy attitudes about sex.
“I give presentations nationwide where I’m showing people that the virginity rate in college is higher than you think and the number of partners is lower than you think and hooking up more often than not does not mean intercourse,” Dr. Bogle said. “But so many people think we’re morally in trouble, in a downward spiral and teens are out of control. It’s very difficult to convince people otherwise.”
One, which I won't copy paste, about how the new 1 station at South Ferry isn't opening. CURSES!
One, which I'm sure I've posted before, about Yiddish in court decisions
One about the New York that Henry Hudson may have seen
Henry Hudson’s View of New York: When Trees Tipped the Sky
By SAM ROBERTS
What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that greeted Henry Hudson 400 years ago has been reimagined by a senior ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Drawing on 18th-century British military maps, the ecologist, Eric W. Sanderson, has painstakingly recreated Manhattan’s rolling landscape — Mannahatta in an American Indian dialect meant “island of many hills,” many of which were all but leveled when the street grid was imposed in the 19th century — that Hudson encountered.
In his coming book, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” Mr. Sanderson evocatively describes “the old-growth forests, stately wetlands, glittering streams, teeming waters, rolling hills, abundant wildlife and mysterious people.” All in all, a scene hard to reconcile with the contemporary landscape dominated by glass, concrete and asphalt.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is to join Mayor Job Cohen of Amsterdam and other Dutch officials this week in heralding the quadricentennial of Hudson’s voyage of discovery up his eponymous river.
It was 400 years ago this month that Hudson and Dutch merchants negotiated a contract that, it could be argued, would change the face of New York and point America toward the ethnic and racial diversity now personified by President Obama.
On Jan. 8, 1609, the Dutch merchants enlisted Hudson, an English navigator, to find a western sea route to the Far East. Had Hudson sailed on behalf of England, the nation and New York might look very different today.
Unlike other Europeans who were fleeing religious persecution or were intent on imposing — through violence when necessary — their own beliefs, the Dutch came to America to make money. Those who enlisted in that endeavor and did not disturb the peace of New Amsterdam, the name the Dutch gave their colony, were welcome.
Whether the motivation was tolerance or indifference, it largely worked, which is why New York developed so differently from most of the other American colonies.
Hudson’s contract with the Dutch East India Company provided for a payment of 800 guilders (or a guarantee to his wife of 200 guilders if he failed to return to the Old World from his voyage). Since Hudson apparently never returned to Holland, it is unclear whether he ever collected. As a result, the contract may have been an even better bargain for the Dutch than the totemic 60 guilders paid for Manhattan 17 years later.
Charles T. Gehring, director of New York State’s New Netherland Project (started by the New York State Library and the Holland Society, which researches early Dutch settlements), calls 800 guilders a sizable amount of money.
“A laborer earned about one guilder a day,” Mr. Gehring said. “A cow cost about 40 guilders, a horse — like owning a Buick — about 150 guilders.”
The Mannahatta that Hudson encountered in 1609 evokes a lost world, a mirror image of Alan Weisman’s vision of nature’s resurgence after humans vanish in his 2007 book, “The World Without Us.” Per acre, Mr. Sanderson writes, Mannahatta had more ecological diversity than Yellowstone, more native plant species than Yosemite, more species of birds than the Great Smoky Mountains.
“If Mannahatta existed today as it did then, it would be a national park,” Mr. Sanderson writes. “It would be the crowning glory of American national parks.”
Mr. Sanderson not only reimagines Manhattan, he also offers a vision of what New York may look like 400 years from now.
“New Yorkers in 2409 will still be loud, direct and pushy,” he predicts, but also “warm and generous and involved in what happens in the world.” He envisions a city where fossil fuels will have long since been exhausted and where humans and nature coexist.
Mr. Sanderson’s book is being published this spring. A companion exhibit will open at the Museum of the City of New York in May.
New York was built on what Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University historian, calls Hudson’s “river of empire.” On its banks, the global financial capital was eventually transplanted from 17th-century Amsterdam, according to a new booklet, “1609: The Forgotten History of Hudson, Amsterdam and New York,” by the journalists Geert Mak and Russell Shorto.
“That is what began in 1609,” they write, “with the unlikely, brooding, mist-shrouded figure of Henry Hudson, and the development shortly after he passed from the scene of a brashly multiethnic and free-trading city on a blank slate of an island.”
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:40 pm (UTC)I'd be more inclined to make french toast of it, myself.
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Date: 2009-01-29 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 07:40 pm (UTC)I'd be more inclined to make french toast of it, myself.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-29 05:32 pm (UTC)