The True King of Rock and Roll

Why oh why don't we get performances like this on TV anymore? Little Richard, self-professed King of Rock and Roll, covers the Killer and, well, kills it. I can't believe he has enough energy to get through this song, let alone a concert full of woos and yeahs.

Wild Cultures

Since learning to bake bread 5 or 6 years ago I've always held sourdough to be the ultimate achievement in bread baking. In that time I perfected my pizza dough recipe (using instant yeast), and could use the same dough to make a pretty good loaf of white bread. While the exploits of Adam-real-last-name-unknown in Tony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential might have been exaggerated, it at least went along with what I had read about the use of pre-ferments (poolish, biga) to improve the taste and texture of bread. My preferred method is to mix the dough and leave it for a long, long proof in a cold fridge. Fermenting dough before baking, however, is really just an attempt to partake of a bit of the sourdough process without adopting it completely.

Part of the problem with the whole topic of sourdough is the name. The bread baked from a "sourdough" starter doesn't have to be sour. Peter Reinhart prefers to call it "wild yeast" to be more exact. For thousands of years bakers had to rely on the single-celled fungi that are in the air, in the flour, even on our skin, to leaven dough. But this process was (and remains) as much an art as a science. Some bakers learned how to cut corners by borrowing the foam from beer brewers for its yeast. In the 1860s the Fleischmanns figured out how to cultivate and dry "brewers yeast" and revolutionized the baking industry.

But, convenient as commercial yeast makes baking, it's not the same animal (ok, plant) as wild yeast, and there are purists out there who claim this shift was the beginning of the decline of bread. There are studies to suggest that they have a point: one indicates people with Celiac disease can safely eat wild-yeast bread, and another suggests that because of the increase of lactic acid and the reduction of simple carbohydrates produced by the sourdough process,wild-yeast bread could be of benefit to diabetics. Accomplished bakers like Ed Wood, a scientist living in Idaho, recommend using wild yeast exclusively and avoiding "contaminating" your bread with commercial yeast. Dr. Wood worked with National Geographic on a project concerning a bakery on the building site of the pyramids in Egypt. He successfully captured the still-abundant yeasts from the site, and they are among the international cultures you can buy from his company, Sourdoughs International. His book, Classic Sourdoughs, is a classic of its own for its straightforward and sensible approach to this seemingly complicated field.

A few weeks ago I was bitten by the sourdough bug again, and borrowed every book available through my library system on the topic. There's plenty of contradictory advice from writers on just about every step in the process, from starting the culture and keeping it active, to making the dough. Everybody has their own opinion concerning the proper method of capturing wild yeast for your own culture, with some authors complicating the process with grapes or pineapple juice. I don't doubt these procedures work, but I followed the method that had worked for me before. I simply combined a little flour and water into a ball of dough the size of a golf ball, put it into a jar, covered it with plastic wrap and left it on my counter for a few days. After "feeding" it with a little more flour and water and leaving it for a few more days I could tell from the air bubbles that my yeast colony was active. 

From there I had to find out how much starter I needed to have in order to make a loaf of bread. Some bakers use only a tablespoon or two and build it up from there, others use as much as two cups. Again, I don't doubt this or that recipe, but I just needed an easy template to work from. Classic Sourdoughs seemed to have the easiest: every recipe starts off with wild-yeast culture in liquid or sponge form (thinner or thicker consistency, respectively), to which you add a little flour and water and let it proof for 12 hours. You "build" it up again with more flour and water, and let it proof for 8 more hours. Then you add the rest of the ingredients (salt, other flours, sometimes oil or eggs), form your loaves and let them rise for another 1 - 4 hours until fully proofed. Bake, cool and eat. There is nothing difficult about any step in the process, but it takes a bit of planning ahead.

With small alterations, this is the formula for everything from San Francisco sourdough and rye bread to sourdough pancakes and cinnamon rolls. I've made the San Francisco recipe (great, but not sour), pizza dough (the crust came out nice and soft, but my wife thought it was bland compared to my usual recipe), and Middle Eastern pitas (I used whole wheat flour - delicious with a little tang). Wood's method doesn't require thrice-daily feedings like some authors, making me think some people don't trust their starters to get the job done. I would only add to his method what I learned from Peter Reinhart: the finished dough can be put in the refrigerator to build more flavor or simply to wait until you're ready to bake it! I did this with the wild-yeast pizza dough and it worked fine. Now I'm looking forward to trying his rye bread and pancake recipes, too. 

Imaginary Numbers

When you're a rich successful math tutor like me, you're forever the target of con artists and scammers. Just post an ad to "lessons" on Craigslist.org and you'll get a bunch of scam emails like this one from "Mr. Jones Tammy," subject line "Inquiry In Your Lesson:"

Good Day Glad to tell you that,my son will be coming to the United State for holiday.Will be more than glad if you can have private lessons with him everyday from 2pm-3pm or your suitable time(1 hour per day from Monday-Friday for two weeks making a total of ten lessons.If you can make it,kindly get back to me with the cost of your teaching for two weeks in the dates of 15thFeb-29th Feb .He will be coming to your house for 1 hour each day for two weeks.I have someone that will always drive him down to your house His name Jackson, he is 15 years old I will want you to calculate 1 hour per day from Monday-Friday for the whole 2 weeks and get back to me.Looking forward to read from you.
Best Regards
Mr Jones Tammy

Yes, it was all formatted as above. I decided to mess with Mr. Jones Tammy and wrote him back saying simply, "$600." I received a reply saying he has an acquaintance in the US who owes him money, so this acquaintance will send me a check for $3,400! I'm supposed to immediately rush to Western Union and send the balance (taking out my 6 bills and an extra hundred bucks 'cause he's very generous and it's imaginary money anyway) to the person taking care of "Jackson" in the US. I honestly can't believe anybody ever falls for this, and when I meet Jackson I'm going to tell him that.

The Pale White Queen of Chess

Perpetuating the myth that all women chess players are hot is the new Women's Chess Champion, 24-year-old Alexandra Kosteniuk from Russia. Who knew they played chess over there? She was a grandmaster at the age of 14 and last year she beat China's Hou Yifan in Nalchik, somewhere in Russia, to become the first Russian to hold the women's championship title since the fall of the Soviet Union. Because of some of her "fashion" modeling portfolio, Kosteniuk has been compared to Anna Kournikova, but she points out that she has in fact won individual events, a feat that has eluded Kournikova. Her rating is 2516, making her the 690th best player in the world, well behind former women's champ Judit Polgar at #36. Kosteniuk hosts a charming chess instruction video webcast at chesskillertips.com. [Insert "positions worth analyzing" joke here.]

The Number Devil in All of Us

When I was a math teacher, one day I was helping my students check a column of numbers of the form n² - 1 to see if any were prime. I impressed them by quickly factoring the whole list: I rattled off some big ones like, "Nope, 18² - 1 is 17 x 19, 19² - 1 is 18 x 20," and so on, and most of the students caught on to the pattern: n² - 1 = (n - 1)(n+ 1). It's a specific case of the formula which should be known to anybody taking the SATs: (a + b)(a - b) = a² - b².

I knew the formula could be used for multiplying two numbers conveniently placed on either side of a nice round number, like 88 x 92 = (90 - 2)(90 + 2) = 90² - 2² = 8,100 - 4 = 8,096. What I didn't know until recently was it could be used for squaring big numbers:

Start with the formula
a² - b² = (a + b)(a - b)

Add b² to both sides and you get
a² = (a + b)(a - b) + b²

Now instead of squaring a number like 27 by multiplying it by itself, you can use a nice round number, in this case 3o, which is 27 + 3. Use this to solve 27².

27² = (27 + 3)(27 - 3) + 3² = 30 x 24 + 9 = 720 + 9 = 729.

The way I would have done this previously is to use the formula
(a - b)² = a² - 2ab + b²
27² = (30 - 3)² = 30² - 2(30)(3) + 3² = 900 - 180 + 9 = 720 + 9 = 729.

What Arthur Benjamin uses in the video below to solve 57,683² is the related formula
(a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b²
(57,000 + 683)² = 57,000² + 2(57,0000)(683) + 683²
Which one could argue is simplifying the job a bit, but each term of the above expression still makes me reach for my calculator.

Some folks get really good at using these binomial expansions to square big numbers. I was impressed by the job Art does in this video introducing his calculating tricks.



He made a couple of mistakes (the square of 722 is actually 521,284) but his performance is a great bit of publicity for his terrific book Secrets of Mental Math. Learning a few "tricks" can certainly serve to lessen math anxiety, so try it out!