Food author Michael Ruhlman on the three biggest differences between home cooking and restaurant cooking:

Amazon.com: Aside from a heavy hand with butter, what are the top three things that set restaurant cooking apart from home cooking?

Ruhlman: Proper use of salt throughout the cooking process and fresh stock are THE main differences. Neither are difficult to do or to learn. I’d say the next one is getting your pan to the right temperature.

I actually have a whole theory on this subject that I don’t have time to type up right now, relating to which types of dishes you probably ought to order out and which types you are best to make at home. Ruhlman’s answer seems to pertain more to basic skills that many home chefs lack.

There’s been a lot coverage of the total cost of the war in Iraq this week, mainly due to the $1.6 trillion estimate of the war’s costs through next year, released by Congressional researchers. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has written a piece on the subject that gets beyond crude dollar amounts. Here are some costs he lists:

1. The human toll of the war is dreadful: more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers dead and more than 28,000 wounded, plus more than 1,000 private contractors killed and many more injured. It’s harder to know how many Iraqis have died; some estimates claim that the war has caused a million or more Iraqi deaths, and even if that’s an overstatement, the toll is still very high. But it’s not just the lives that are gone; we’ve also lost the contributions that these people would have made to their families and to humanity at large.

2. Don’t forget the small statistics, which are often the most striking. According to John Pike, the head of the research group GlobalSecurity.org, an estimated 250,000 bullets have been fired for every insurgent killed in Iraq. That’s not just a waste of ammunition; it’s also a reflection of how badly the country has been damaged and how indiscriminate some of the fighting has been. Or take another straw in the wind: The cost of a coffin in Baghdad has risen to $50-75, up from just $5-10 before the war, according to the Nation magazine.

3. Above all, governing Iraq has, so far, been a fruitless investment. According to 2006 figures, U.S. war spending came out to $3,749 per Iraqi — almost as much as the per capita income of Egypt. That staggering sum hasn’t bought a lot of leadership from Iraq, or much of a democratic model for its Arab neighbors.

It just so happens that this week, both Robert Scoble and I had problems with our Macs. I’m not sure what was wrong with his Mac, but in my case, I tried to install the OS X 10.4.11 update on my MacBook, and it didn’t take. When the installer was done, the Software Update application showed a little red X instead of a little green check, and then bad things started happening. Not knowing what to do, I restarted the Mac and found that it wouldn’t boot. Some Googling revealed that holding down Command-V while the machine rebooted would turn on the Unix boot console. I did that, and found that there was some kind of problem with “launchd.” A bit more Googling revealed that my machine was basically hosed. I could either try to manually apply the software update or I could reinstall OS X.

I went home, rummaged around until I found the DVDs that came with my computer, and then booted up from the Install DVD. I told it to reinstall using the “Archive and Install” option and to keep my user account and all of my settings. I’d never done any of this before. The install took a couple of hours, but once it was done, everything just worked. The only thing I’ve had to do to get my machine back to the state it was in before the operating system was hosed was reinstall Growl.

One thing I know for sure is that had one of my Windows machines gotten similarly corrupted, I would have been in real trouble. I would have wound up copying all of the personal data off of my hard drive and reinstalling Windows from scratch. I’d still be tweaking my machine to get it back into a usable state right now.

I don’t want to pick on Robert, but I guess I don’t get the angst over something going wrong with your computer. The fact that the install blew up (I still have no idea why) sucked, but Apple made it relatively easy to recover and start working again. I didn’t feel stupid because my computer broke, and I didn’t feel stupid because I had to use Google to figure out how to get it to work again.

My computer is a tool. It broke, I fixed it, and the only thing I lost is a few hours that I would have preferred to spend writing some code that I really need to finish up.

Robert says this is why some Silicon Valley movers and shakers he was having dinner with wouldn’t go on the record with problems they’ve had with their Macs:

It was because they all blamed themselves for the problems of their Macs and I think they also bought into the “Apple cult” which says that if you use a Mac you must be cool.

If that’s really true, it’s amazing that anything gets done at all out there. I don’t care whose software you’re using, if you believe that it will never break unless you do something wrong, you are a practitioner of faith-based computing.

The New York Time technology blog, Bits, has an update on the Netflix prize. No team has made the Netflix recommendations engine 10% more accurate, which is the number required to claim the million dollar prize. However, Netflix has awarded $50,000 to the team that has made the most progress. The group that won the prize has spent around 2000 hours on the project so far, and is made up of researches from AT&T Labs. There’s no word on whether the team worked on the prize during work hours or in their off time. Either way, their compensation comes down to about $25 per hour, which may be a lot to pay for lawn care but is an incredible deal for the services of ordinarily well-compensated computer scientists. All of the other teams that submitted entries weren’t compensated at all.

It looks to me like prizes can be a great way of funding research and development so long as the problem to be solved is interesting to geeks. I suspect that this is something Google already knows.

So here’s what Rackspace says happened yesterday:

In the second incident at approximately 6:30 PM CST Monday, a vehicle struck and brought down the transformer feeding power to the DFW data center. It immediately disrupted power to the entire data center and our emergency generators kicked in and operated as intended. When we transferred power to our secondary utility power system, the data center’s chilling units were cycled back up. At this time, however, the utility provider shut down power in order to allow emergency rescue teams safe access to the accident victim. This repeated cycling of the chillers resulted in increasing temperatures within the data center. As a precautionary measure we decided to take some customers’ servers offline. These servers are now back up, as are the chillers.

By “took some customers’ servers offline,” what they mean is that they just cut the power to those servers. If this were a controlled situation, don’t you think that Rackspace would have logged into those servers (they have the root passwords) and halted them? I’m kind of hoping they’re lying, because if they had the opportunity to halt those servers and they chose not to do so, they inflicted a lot of late nights on people unnecessarily.

The WGA strike has really captivated me, for some reason. Here are a bunch of links to interesting strike-related material.

Lost creator Damon Lindelof writes about the strike on the New York Times op-ed page:

The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.

My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.

Here’s Lindelof the implications of the strike dragging on:

If this strike lasts longer than three months, an entire season of television will end this December. No dramas. No comedies. No “Daily Show.” The strike will also prevent any pilots from being shot in the spring, so even if the strike is settled by then, you won’t see any new shows until the following January. As in 2009. Both the guild and the studios we are negotiating with do agree on one thing: this situation would be brutal.

From the other side, here’s former studio head Michael Eisner explaining why the strike is a bad idea:

No. They’re way early. This is a very foolish strike. The amount of economic upside over the length of the contract coming up is not worth giving up the present benefit of producing even the 20-plus shows that are on, say, ABC. It’s shortsighted; it’s not there yet. People like myself are trying to figure it out and, basically, create an industry. The only people that are playing in this are the established media companies that feel they have to, cause they don’t want to be left behind; the young, up-and-coming entrepreneurs who are doing it because this is their way in; and then, people who can afford to dabble in it because it’s “interesting.” It’s a completely misguided strike. And I’m pushing way up ahead. I did “Prom Queen,” I’m doing one called “The All-for-Nots” [a documentary-styled comedy that follows indie- rock bands on tour]. I’m shooting a third one that we’re selling the rights in Japan and dubbing it for France. But you know, at the end of the day, the amount of economic profit that we could all make together could maybe get us through a day at Starbucks. It’s just not worth it.

Marc Andreessen suggests that the strike could hasten the remaking of Hollywood in the Silicon Valley’s image, where shows are produced not by studios but by startups owned and run by the talent, rather than by the corporation that control the distribution.

Alex Tabarrok explains why Hollywood unions are powerful. They’re powerful because studios want to work with stars, and the stars are willing to strike. Tabarrok seems to hate that, but I think it’s pretty amazing. The big names in Hollywood could easily cut great deals from themselves without the support of their union. They don’t need to fight for residuals or other compensation. The fact that they are willing to work with their union to get a better deal for everyone really is pretty remarkable, and quite noble, I think.

Oh, and if you’re wondering when your favorite show is going to run out of new episodes, Watchers Watch has a helpful table.

Google’s SDK for the Android mobile platform is now available for download. I’m eager to read what people have to say once they start digging in.

Update: I’ve installed the Eclipse plugin and I’m downloading the SDK (which is required in order to play with the Eclipse plugin). I’m a bit surprised that the Android SDK is Java, but I’m not sure why. I had a pretty good idea that would be the case when Bob Lee twittered that he’s on the Android team. He’s the creator of Google’s Guice dependency injection framework.

It looks like there’s a big problem with the combination of OS X, Eclipse, and the Android Eclipse plugin. That’ll put a crimp in my exploration of Android.

Just a few links for Armistice Day, or Veterans’ Day if you prefer:

• Every year, Teresa Nielsen Hayden writes an Armistice Day post. Don’t miss it.
• The New York Times ran an op-ed about Frank Buckles, the last living US veteran of World War I. Henry Allingham is the oldest World War I survivor in the UK. The last Anzac died in 2002. World War I in the News keeps track of the surviving World War I veterans.
• If you want to read one book about World War I, I’d suggest starting with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

World War I seems like it’s part of the distant past, but it’s worth studying it is the classic example of events taking on a life of their own. That should serve as a warning to us today. As threats are made, plans are laid, and pieces are put into place in our ongoing spat with Iran, war becomes more likely. Eventually, if we’re not careful, that war will begin because one side or the other goes one step too far, and events dictate a response that ends in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths. It hardly matters whether most people on both sides don’t even want a war. We’ve seen it happen before, and it can easily happen again.

Tyler Cowen points out a paper examining the link between right-wing terrorism and the study of engineering. I think that Rands’ essay on living with nerds may shed some light on this topic as well, although terrorism and religion were not among the subjects covered.

I’m kind of obsessed with the WGA strike. The best site for strike news I’ve seen a pointer to so far has been Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily. It’s a general Hollywood business news blog, but obviously right now the writers’ strike is dominating the show business news.

The WGA is also posting videos on YouTube. Turns out TV writers really are funny.