Author: Phil (Page 40 of 51)

Hello. I'm a retired electronic hardware, software & mechanical engineer. My hobby is making metal art. My interests range across writing, economics, politics, history, photography, fountain pens, languages, ham radio, and music. I've been writing software since 1968.

The Paradox of Tolerance: If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. --Karl Popper

Kriegskuchen (War Cake)

February 1, 2008 / Phil / 2 Comments

Back in 1963, my Aunt Annie, who was at that time 90 years old, gave me a recipe she had gotten from her mother for an unusual cake she learned to make as a child in Germany. She called it Kriegskuchen, which translates as “War Cake”. It was called this because it’s easy to make and does not require butter, or eggs, or oil, which are in short supply during a war. For those of you on a low-calorie or low-fat diet, or for those with an egg allergy, this is just what you were looking for.

My mother made this cake often during the year all through the 1960’s and 70’s, and especially around Christmas. The flavor of the standard recipe is Christmas-like, but the recipe is flexible. I’ve continued the tradition for many years, and experimented a lot with variations on the original recipe. Around Christmas I bake and ship these cakes in various flavors to my friends and kids. I thought I’d share it here.

All of these cakes are baked in a standard bread pan. The recipe I got from my aunt was in grams but my mother converted it all to more convenient units.

Original Recipe:

2 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa (Hersheys)
3/4 cup sugar
2-1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup raisins, currants, or diced dried apricots soaked in water for 12 to 24 hours until they swell up.
1-1/4 cup milk (measure precisely)

Whisk together all the dry ingredients. Then add the milk and mix with a spatula until everything is wetted. The batter is thick and pasty so it takes some effort to fold and mix. The moisture content of flour varies so sometimes you need to add a tiny bit more milk. There should be no dry flour or cocoa visible. Then scoop it all into a greased breadpan and bake at 350F for one hour. Remove from oven and allow to rest for five minutes. Turn out on a cake rack to cool off.

Next, we can get creative and have some fun with this cake. If you want a super chocolaty cake add one cup of chocolate chips to the original recipe, or add one cup of peanut butter chips, or 50/50. Adding a teaspoon of vanilla changes the taste. Omitting or reducing the cloves changes the taste.

Or, we can substitute other fruits for the currants/raisins. Elsewhere in my blog you will find a recipe for candied orange peel. Candied orange peel combined with the chocolate makes a heavenly flavor. If you really want to go crazy add candied orange peel and chocolate chips. Wow.

Or, we can omit the cocoa. For this variation, omit the cocoa, reduce the milk to one cup, and be sure to add one or one and a half teaspoons of vanilla. You can add just about any candied fruit you like. About one cup does the job. My son-in-law’s favorite is a version made with candied pineapple and no cocoa. For this, I purchase cans of small diced pineapple wedges and I candy them the same way as the orange peel recipe elsewhere in my blog.

Have fun with this low-cal, non-fat cake. Depending upon the ingredients, calorie count for the whole cake varies from 1,400 to 1,800 calories except for the super chocolaty chip version above that comes in around 2,900 calories.

Happy 60th Birthday to the Transistor !

January 13, 2008 / Phil / 3 Comments

In honor of the 60th birthday of the transistor, here are some photos:

The First Transistor

Replica of the First Transistor

Diagram of the First Transistor

The transistor was developed in 1947 at Bell Labs by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen. It was first demonstrated at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947. This transistor was made from germanium, not silicon like most transistors today. Germanium was used through the 50’s and into the 60’s before being completely replaced by silicon transistors. Those of you who are old like me will remember the first transistor radios in the 1950s. The transistor was the hot technology of the day. More and more products were “transistorized”. The term “solid-state” was not used in the early days.

Before long there was a competition over the number of transistors in the radio. Seven transistor radios, nine transistor radios–a big advertising deal was made over the number of transistors and the consumer was led to believe that more is better. Around the time I got into electronics, around 1959, 1960, I disassembled a 14 transistor radio and discovered that about half of the transistors were fake. (You don’t need 14 transistors to make a basic radio. Six to nine is adequate.) The extra transistors usually had their leads twisted together and soldered into a single hole. But if you open the radio and did a quick count of transistor cans, there were 14. So I learned a marketing lesson at an early age.

Throughout the 1950’s and into the 60’s, transistors were made and packaged one at a time, and then assembled into circuits that you could see without your eyeglasses. You could work on it with your hands and a soldering iron. Plenty of transistors are still used as individual devices today, especially in high-power or radio circuits, but in 1959 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments patented the first integrated circuit, where more than one transistor was fabricated simultaneously on the same substrate, along with components like resistors and capacitors to form a complete circuit that performed a function. The photolithography techniques used to “print” these circuits soon made it just as easy to make a miniature 20 transistor circuit as it was to make a single transistor. This was the way to the future.

In 1971, Intel introduced the first microprocessor, a slow little 4-bit micro containing about 2,500 transistors. By 1975, Popular Electronics published the famous article that launched the personal computer revolution. It was an article on how to build a computer using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. The 8080 contained about 4,000 transistors. By the 1990s, the microprocessor in your average personal computer contained about 500 million transistors. The latest multicore processors contain billions of transistors. The transistor has come a long way.

All Time Favorite Albums

January 9, 2008 / Phil / 0 Comments

I’m a big fan of classical but here is a list of my all time favorite non-classical albums, in approximate order, starting with my most favorites at the top:

Tarkus (ELP)
Trilogy (ELP)
Works Volume 1 (ELP)
Brain Salad Surgery (ELP)
ELP (ELP)
Close to the Edge (Yes)
Aqualung (Jethro Tull)
Aja (Steely Dan)
Electric Ladyland (Jimi Hendrix)
Fragile (Yes)
Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)
Abbey Road (The Beatles)
Blind Faith (Blind Faith)
Thick as a Brick (Jethro Tull)
Wishing You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
The Doors (The Doors)
John Barleycorn Must Die (Traffic)
Romantic Warrior (Return to Forever)
Chicago 9 (Chicago)
The White Album (The Beatles)
Blood Sweat & Tears (Blood Sweat & Tears)
Heavy Weather (Weather Report)
Elegant Gypsy (Al DiMeola)
Friday Night in San Franciso (Paco de Lucia, Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin)
Selling England by the Pound (Genesis)
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)
The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Rick Wakeman)
Machine Head (Deep Purple)