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Friday, April 24, 2009

April 24, 2009

Why pizza is still our favourite food

From its humble origins in Naples to the new Pizza Express version with a hole in the middle, the history of pizza

Margherita Pizza

Pizza is now the most globalised food of all. Last month, Kim Jong Il authorised the opening of the first pizza restaurant in Pyongyang, North Korea; Pizza Hut franchises flourish as far afield as Somalia and Cambodia; there are 6,000 pizzerias in São Paolo, Brazil.

But it was only quite recently that the whole world started snacking on wedges: until the 1960s, even Italians thought that the dish wasn't really digestible outside its home, Naples. In the 19th century, pizza was denounced as disgusting and unhealthy, fit only for the poorest people in Italy's poorest city.

“Do you want to know what pizza is?” asked Carlo Collodi, the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio and a Florentine, after a visit to Naples in the 1880s. “It is a focaccia made from leavened bread dough which is toasted in the oven. On top of it they put a sauce with a little bit of everything. When its colours are combined they make pizza look like a patchwork of greasy filth that harmonises perfectly with the appearance of the person selling it.”

Pizza still fires passions. This month Simone Falco, the manager of the London pizzeria chain Rossopomodoro, is running a “pizza amnesty”: anyone who brings in a travesty of a pizza from a supermarket will be given a free, authentic one. More than 100 people have come, bearing perversions that Falco has found hurtful to gastronomic decency: fish and chips pizza, baked beans pizza, “BBQ chicken pizza - barbecue sauce topped with bacon, roast chicken, onions and green peppers”.

I found these mild as sins against traditional pizza go: over the years I've encountered - though not necessarily tasted - Balti pizza (in Birmingham), chocolate Smarties pizza and “sushi pizza” in a branch of Pizza Hut (in Bangkok).

Next week Pizza Express - the chain that introduced pizza to the British in 1965 - will launch another innovation: pizza with a hole in it. The Leggera (light, in Italian) is a ring of pizza dough filled with salad. It will cost a wince-inducing £8; a proper Margherita pizza in a traditional pizzeria in Naples can still cost as little as €3.

But is it really so important what you put on a pizza? It is just toasted flatbread with a topping - as with a sandwich, the embellishment is your business.

The Italian Government would not agree, however. As far as it is concerned there are only two official Neapolitan pizzas: marinara, which is tomato, garlic, olive oil and oregano; and Margherita, which is tomato, basil, olive oil and mozzarella. That is named after Queen Margherita of Italy, who bravely requested a slice during a visit to cholera-stricken Naples in 1889. This was a moment that John Dickie, in his history of Italian food, Delizia!, compares with Diana, Princess of Wales's embracing of an Aids patient in 1987: it was the beginning of pizza's rise to respectability.

Now, of course, pizza has been deracinated and homogenised, it is a convenience food that sits alongside its brothers the burger and the chilled sushi roll in the 21st-century fast-food arcade. Pizza's genius has been in fitting into new cultures: deep-pan Chicago pizza was invented there by Italian exiles during the 1940s for the bigger American appetite. Hawaiian pizza (ham and pineapple) is apparently one of the most popular varieties globally, despite being an offence in Signor Falco's eyes. And there is the Pizza Hut “Cheesy Bites” pizza, the outer crust of which includes “28 cheesy heads with beautiful toupees of garlic butter”. It looks like a skin disease and has been denounced by health campaigners, who claim that the extra-large version contains a whopping 3,000 calories.

But I suspect that the real offence to pizza's integrity is not in the topping, but the cooking. Pizza should be cooked fast and very, very hot: ideally in a wood-fired, clay-walled oven at over 400C, so that the disc of gluten-laden dough comes out that particular combination of chewy and crisp. Domestic electric and gas ovens don't generally come hotter that 220C and, it should go without saying, you cannot make pizza in a microwave. Some things are just better not homemade.

Mary Contini may be the exception, however. A member of one of the southern Italian clans that settled in Scotland 100 years ago, transforming catering (and ice cream) in the country's cities, and the author of several cooking and history books, Contini admits to cooking pizza at home.

“We exiles had to do it - because you couldn't get pizza, and we missed it too much. The first pizzeria didn't open in Edinburgh until 1969. But it's possible at home, if you make the dough well. If you have an Aga you can get the oven pretty hot.” You could try putting a flat stone on the floor of the oven to cook the pizza on - or even build your own wood-fired oven. Orchard Ovens in Lancashire sell an Italian-made kit for this, but the prices start at £1,800 (see orchardovens.co.uk).

I had my first pizza in 1978, in the Notting Hill branch of Pizza Express. It was one of the most exciting moments of my teenage years - the jazzy orange and red interior of the restaurant, and the romantic, exotic snack filled my heart with dreams of Italy. Now I seem to spend most weekends in Pizza Express, grumpily ordering my son's favourite: a Margherita without tomato sauce but with pepperoni (this does not make it cheaper).

The chain still provides the country's most reliably good pizza, but it does tend to annoy its patrons. Since Pizza Express was taken over by a private equity firm three years ago, its staff seem to have shrunk in number and efficiency. “Can't you see that we're busy?” one of them snarled at my children recently, as they asked to see how the pizza is made. I had a moan and was given the mobile number of the regional manager to talk to. I urge you all to try this - she sent me £40 in vouchers.

Pizza Express's dough and the tomato sauce are now made centrally, at the HQ outside London. Can that really be called fresh? And any regular you ask insists that, over the years, the pizzas have got smaller. Is this true? “No,” a spokeswoman told me. “But the plates have got bigger.”

Two nights ago I got a takeaway from my favourite pizza joint, La Favorita in Edinburgh, a traditional place with a proper Scots-Italian manager, Sante Esperamo. I ordered a Primavera (tomato, parma ham, rocket and fior di latte mozzarella) and a di Leone (bresaola cured beef with radicchio paste, lemon, radicchio leaves and mozzarella). While I waited for the oven to do its bit - in four minutes - I asked Sante what he thought of the produce of chain pizza restaurants. “Pah!” he snorted, adding: “It's cooking by numbers. All across the country, the same. A pizza must have individuality, it must have character.”

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Have you ever stun- Why women cry easily?!

Warning !
!
 
Before going on your read with this BLOG, I may suggesting you one thing - be sure and don't even try to make any women cry because of you..!! deal?! :-))

So here we go:

One day, a young boy asked his mom.

"Why are you crying?"

"Because I'm a woman" she told him.

"I don't understand," he said.

His Mom just hugged him and said, "And you never will, but that's okay."

Later the little boy asked his father, "Why does mom seem to cry for no reason?"

"All women cry for no reason" was all his dad could say.

The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why women cry !!

Finally, he put in a call to God.

When God got back to him, he asked, "God, why do women cry so easily?''

God answered, "When I made women, I decided she had to be special.

I made her shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world, yet her arms gentle enough to give comfort.

I gave her the inner strength to endure childbirth and the rejection that many times will come, even from her own children.

I gave her a hardness that allows her to keep going and take care of her family and friends, even when everyone else gives up, through sickness and fatigue, without complaining.

I gave her sensitivity to love her children under any and all circumstances even when her child has hurt her badly. She has the very special power to make a child's boo-boo feel better and to quell a teenager's anxieties and fears.

I gave her strength to care for her husband, despite faults, and I fashioned her from his rib to protect his heart.

I gave her wisdom to know that a good husband never hurts his wife but some times tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.

And i have built the most precious heaven just beneath of her feet..!!

For all of this hard work, I also gave her a tear to shed, It is her's to use whenever needed and is her only weakness.

"So, When you see her cry, tell her how much u love her..!! and it's not happens to just a Mom but i sure, to the most entirely women on earth..!!"

"So please take good care of her by understand her or at least you will have made her heart feel good at last. and that's what i've suggested you from the beginning "

And be seeing her as a Special always!

Goodluck,

Cambodia Looks to Kuwait for Oil Exploration Experience?

Cambodia Looks to Kuwait for Oil Exploration Experience

Thursday, April 02, 2009

-------------------------------------

UPDATE: BG Group: To Buy Rio Tinto's Thai Oil & Gas Blocks
Dow Jones

(Adds a Rio Tinto official's comment that the deal has been completed, a comment on the purpose of the sale and the latest development in the ThailandCambodia offshore border dispute.)

BANGKOK -(Dow Jones)- BG Group PLC (BG.LN) confirmed Wednesday it has agreed to buy all the shares of a unit of Rio Tinto Ltd. (RTP), paving the way for the U.K.-listed company to increase its holdings in oil and gas blocks in the Gulf of Thailand and theThailand-Cambodia offshore border area.

The company will acquire all the shares of Petroleum Resources (Thailand), an Australian company 100% owned by Rio Tinto, BG Group said in an email responding to Dow Jones Newswires' queries.

Petroleum Resources holds Rio Tinto's 16.67% stake in the Blocks B7, B8 & B9 concession and a 16.67% interest in an Overriding Royalty Agreement covering production from Block 9A in the Gulf of Thailand, it said.

The terms of the deal between BG Group and Rio are confidential, it said.

Prior to this deal, BG Group held a 50% interest in Blocks B7, B8 & B9 and in the Overriding Royalty Agreement. Chevron Corp. (CVX) owns a 33.3% stake in both the B7, B8 & B9 concession and the agreement, BG Group said.

A Rio Tinto official said the sale of the Australian unit was completed earlier Wednesday but declined to give further details. Macquarie Group, which is the financial adviser to Rio Tinto, also declined to comment.

The purpose of the divestment is to streamline Rio Tinto's business portfolio, which is focused on the mining and processing of mineral resources, a person involved in the industry said.

The B7, B8 and B9 concession, covering a total area of 10,420 square kilometers, was awarded to the group in 1972 but has been inactive since 1975 due to the overlapping claims in the area of Cambodia andThailand, according to Thailand's Department of Mineral Fuels.

The department said in February that it is ready to resume talks with the Cambodian government on the overlapping offshore claims so that the potentially resource-rich area of 26,000 square kilometers can be developed.

-By Supunnabul Suwannakij, Dow Jones Newswires; 66 2266 0744; tu.suwannakij@ dowjones.com

(Alex Wilson in Australia contributed to the article.)

  (END) Dow Jones Newswires   04-01-09 0548ET   Copyright (c) 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200904010548DOWJONESDJONLINE000436_FORTUNE5.htm


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Cambodia Looks to Kuwait for Oil Exploration Experience

Thursday, April 02, 2009


The Cambodian National Assembly (NA) has just approved a draft agreement with Kuwait, which can facilitate the kingdom to draw oil-exploring experience from this Arabic country, national media said on Thursday. 

By approving the draft version of the Cambodian-Kuwaiti Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement, NA allows the Cambodian government to have one more partner to participate in the exploration and development of the oil and natural gas resources of the kingdom, Chinese-language daily newspaper the Commercial News quoted parliamentarian Cheam Yeap as telling reporters at NA here on Wednesday. 

"This is the goal that the government has pursued for years," he said. 

Cambodia can copy and fully tap the experience of Kuwait, who, as one of the oil-producing giants in the world, has a long and successful history in the field of petroleum and natural gas exploration, management and development, he said. 

"It will hugely benefit our future work in this sector," he added. 

Details of the draft agreement have not been disclosed. 

The off-coast area at the southwestern tip of Cambodia is believed to be rich in oil and natural gas. 

Over 10 foreign developers have been exploring the resources there, but none of them has started up production yet.
 

http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=74636
Copyright 2009 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

black hole

black hole
A stellar black hole is seen against the backdrop of the galactic disk in this artist's impression

A brief history of black holes 

A black hole is an object or region of space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from it, i.e. the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. The term was coined in 1968 by the physicist John Wheeler. However, the possibility that a lump of matter could be compressed to the point at which its surface gravity would prevent even the escape of light was first suggested in the late 18th century by the English physicist John Michell(c.1724-1793), and then by Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827). 

Black holes began to take on their modern form in 1916 when the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) used Einstein's general theory of relativity to find out what would happen if all the mass of an object were squeezed down to a dimensionless point – a singularity. He discovered that around the infinitely compressed matter would appear a spherical region of space out of which nothing could return to the normal universe. This boundary is known as the event horizon since no event that occurs inside it can ever be observed from the outside. Although Schwarzschild's calculations caused little stir at the time, interest was rekindled in them when, in 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer, of atomic bomb fame, and Hartland Snyder, a graduate student, described a mechanism by which black holes might actually be created in the real universe. A star that has exhausted all its useful nuclear fuel, they found, can no longer support itself against the inward pull of its own gravity. The stellar remains begin to shrink rapidly. If the collapsing star manages to hold on to a critical amount of mass, no force in the Universe can halt its contraction and, in a fraction of a second, the material of the star is squeezed down into the singularity of a black hole. 


Stellar black holes 

Cygnus X-1
Artist's impression of Cygnus X-1
In theory, any mass if sufficiently compressed would become a black hole. The Sun would suffer this fate if it were shrunk down to a ball about 2.5 km in diameter. In practice, a stellar black hole is only likely to result from a heavyweight star whose remnant core exceeds theOppenheimer-Volkoff limit following a supernova explosion.

More than two dozen stellar black holes have been tentatively identified in the Milky Way, all of them part of binary systems in which the other component is a visible star. A handful of stellar black holes have also been discovered in neighboring galaxies. Observations of highly variable X-ray emission from the accretion disk surrounding the dark companion together with a mass determined from observations of the visible star, enable a black hole characterization to be made. 

Among the best stellar black hole candidates are Cygnus X-1V404 Cygni, and several microquasars. The two heaviest known stellar black holes lie in galaxies outside our own. One of these black hole heavyweights, called M33 X-7, is in the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), 3 million light-years from the Milky Way, and has a mass of 15.7 times that of the Sun. Another, whose discovery was announced in October 2007, just a few weeks after that of M33 X-7, is called IC 10 X-1, and lies in the nearby dwarf galaxy, IC 10, 1.8 million light-years away. IC 10 X-1 shattered the record for a stellar black hole with its mass of 24 to 33 times that of the Sun. Given that massive stars lose a significant fraction of their content through violent stellar winds toward the end of their lives, and that interaction between the members of a binary system can further increase the mass loss of the heavier star, it is a challenge to theorists to explain how any star could retain enough matter to form a black hole as heavy as that of IC 10 X-1. 

The microquasar V4641 Sagittarii contains the closest known black hole to Earth, with a distance of about 1,500 light-years. 


Supermassive, intermediate-mass and mini black holes 

Supermassive black holes are known almost certainly to exist at the center of many large galaxies, and to be the ultimate source of energy behind the phenomenon of the active galactic nucleus. At the other end of the scale, it has been hypothesized that countless numbers of mini black holes may populate the universe, having been formed in the early stages of the Big Bang; however, there is yet no observational evidence for them.

In 2002, astronomers found a missing link between stellar-mass black holes and the supermassive variety in the form of middleweight black holes at the center of some largeglobular clusters. The giant G1 cluster in the Andromeda Galaxy appears to contain a black hole of some 20,000 solar masses. Another globular cluster, 32,000 light-years away within our own Milky Way, apparently harbors a similar object weighing 4,000 solar masses. Interestingly, the ratio of the black hole's mass to the total mass of the host cluster appears constant, at about 0.5%. This proportion matches that of a typical supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center, compared to the total galactic mass. If this result turns out to be true for many more cluster black holes, it will suggest some profound link between the way the two types of black hole form. It is possible that supermassive black holes form when clusters deposit their middleweight black hole cargoes in the galactic centers, and they merge together. 


Inside a black hole 

According to the general theory of relativity, the material inside a black hole is squashed inside an infinitely dense point, known as a singularity. This is surrounded by the event horizonat which the escape velocity equals the speed of light and that thus marks the outer boundary of a black hole. Nothing from within the event horizon can travel back into the outside universe; on the other hand, matter and energy can pass through this surface-of-no-return from outside and travel deeper into the black hole. 

For a non-rotating black hole, the event horizon is a spherical surface, with a radius equal to the Schwarzschild radius, centered on the singularity at the black hole's heart. For a spinning black hole (a much more likely contingency in reality), the event horizon is distorted – in effect, caused to bulge at the equator by the rotation. Within the event horizon, objects and information can only move inward, quickly reaching the singularity. A technical exception isHawking radiation, a quantum mechanical process that is unimaginably weak for massive black holes but that would tend to cause the mini variety to explode. 

Three distinct types of black hole are recognized:The equations of general relativity also allow for the possibility of spacetime tunnels, or wormholes, connected to the mouths of black holes. These could act as shortcuts linking remote points of the universe. Unfortunately, they appear to be useless for travel or even for sending messages since any matter or energy attempting to pass through them would immediately cause their gravitational collapse. Yet not all is lost. Wormholes, leading to remote regions in space, might be traversable if some means can be found to hold them open long enough for a signal, or a spacecraft, to pass through. 


What would it look like to fall into a black hole?

Falling into a black hole might not be good for your health, but at least the view would be fine. A new simulation shows what you might see on your way towards the black hole's crushing central singularity. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole.

Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time.

They follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy.

As you approach, a dark circle is bitten out of the galaxy containing the black hole, marking the event horizon – the point beyond which nothing can escape the black hole's grip. Light from stars directly behind the hole is swallowed by the horizon, while light from other stars is merely bent by the black hole's gravity, forming a warped image around the hole.

Horizontal ring

To distant observers, the horizon has a size of one Schwartzschild radius – about 15 million kilometres for this hole – but as you approach, it recedes from you. Even after you cross this radius, there is still a point in front of you where all light is swallowed, so from your point of view, you never reach the horizon.

Hamilton and Polhemus have painted a red grid on the horizon to help visualise it (as the horizon is spherical, the two circles on the grid represent the north and south "poles" of its central black hole). And as you pass one Schwartzschild radius, another artificial visual aid pops up. The white grid that loops around you marks where distant observers would place the horizon – this is where you'd see other people falling in if they followed you through the horizon.

The strangest sight is reserved for your last moments. So close to the centre of the black hole, you feel powerful tidal forces. If you're falling in feet first, gravity at your head is much weaker than at your feet. That would pull a real observer apart, and it also affects the light falling in around you - light from above your head is stretched out and shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Eventually it gets red-shifted into nothingness, so your whole view will be squeezed into a horizontal ring.

Information paradox

This process might shed some light on a black hole puzzle. Quantum calculations seem to show that there is too much complexity within a black hole - in earlier work, the researchers calculated that it should be possible to create much more entropy (a measure of disorder) inside the black hole than is measured by outside observers.

This is like a supercharged version of the old black hole information paradox, which pits the apparent destruction of objects - and information - that falls into a black hole against quantum mechanics, which states that quantum information can never be lost.

The problem may be that we have a naive view of space, which breaks down inside the black hole. To calculate total entropy, Hamilton and Polhemus assumed that you add up all the possible states that matter and energy could take at different points in space. But along with other theorists, they suspect that this usual assumption, called locality, doesn't work inside a black hole. Somehow, different points in space seem to share the same states - but it's not clear how.

That's where visualisations like this might just help. "Close to the singularity, it appears that the entire three-dimensional universe is being crushed into a two-dimensional surface," says Hamilton (see Our world may be a giant hologram). But whether it hints that a 2D view is more fundamental is not yet clear. "Does it have any profound significance? I don't know," says Hamilton.

See also: Three eyes needed to 'see' inside a black hole

Related entry 

   • white hole 


Related categories 

   • GRAVITATIONAL PHYSICS 
   • SPACE AND TIME 
   • TYPES OF STAR 
   • STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS 


Archived news
Black hole defends its heavyweight title (Feb 22, 2008) 
'Periodic table' organises zoo of black hole orbits (Feb 14, 2008) 
Blast hints at black hole birth (May 11, 2005) 
Lab fireball 'may be black hole' (Mar 17, 2005) 
Black holes 'do not exist' (Apr 4, 2005) 
Black holes bend light the 'wrong way' (Feb 17, 2005) 
Runaway stars may solve black hole riddle (Apr 15, 2004) 



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