Dave's Data

Boeuf bourguignon - or its chickenly near-equivalent coq au vin - is one of those rub-your-tummy satisfying dishes that offers a lovely combination of heartiness and deep, rich flavors.  We decided to host a real dinner party the other day for the first time since turning our lives a little upside down by having a child, and this seemed like a good way to go.  Except, well, for that beef/chicken thing.  Which brought me to the question:  Is it possible to create a vegan version of the dish that's the equal of the original? Nearly.  It lacks just a little of the mouthfeel imparted by the gelatin in an amazing beef stock, but the rest of the flavors are there.  This is one of my favorite dishes I've made recently, and I love the way it came out.  This isn't my usual type of content for this blog, but I was happy enough with it that I wanted to write down the recipe somewhere. I started from a recipe I found on Treehugger recently ;  but, after trying it earlier in the

Last Spring, I had the opportunity to teach a "special topics" course. I use that as shorthand for "Dave wants to learn about X, so I'll inflict my learning process upon some willing victims and collaborators called students."  I roped in Michael Kaminsky to co-teach a course on "memory and resource efficient big data computing," which we pretty much defined as we went along.  In fact, one of the first assignments for the students was to help come up with topics to discuss.  CMU students are an awesome resource that way. There's been a lot of exciting progress in memory-efficient data structures from the theory side of things in the last decade or so.  Not all of it is usable yet, but some of it has that "this is almost there" feel to it that gets me salivating for the chance to refactor how I think about some aspects of system design.  There are two themes that I think are particularly worth considering: The ideas behind succinct d