Here’s something intriguing. The top three sites you get when you search for gay porn on google (as one does) are:

http://www.hornygreek.com/
http://www.hotgaylist.com/
http://www.onlydudes.com/

Can you think of anything else they have in common? No? They’re all on the list of sites censored for child pornography. These are, obviously, extremely mainstream gay porn sites and would probably not be interested in endangering their considerable incomes by hosting child porn. For me, as a Welho customer, they’re all blocked right now.

The picture is getting clearer…

edit: as you can see from browsing the list, having the word “teen” in the url seems to be grounds for censorship. Perhaps the police haven’t done all that much porn-browsing. Is that a good thing?

Also, je.org points out that the police is ignoring real child porn hosted in Finland. Like Jörn Donner having it off with a 15-year-old.

Suvi Lindén, minister for Transportation and Communication, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Nikki case. She says that using child pornography for “testing the limits of free speech” is unconscionable and makes the comparison that books “that have or that refer to child pornography” would be confiscated just like Nikki’s site was censored.

At first look it would appear that Lindén severely misunderstands the state of freedom of speech in this country (for example by the aforementioned standard a book that contains Lindén’s interview should be confiscated as it refers to child pornography), but I suspect that in reality her quote is the product of

a) the fact that she doesn’t understand what a link is, which is unfortunate for someone who “demands that Finland make greater strides towards an information society”

b) being too stupid to think before talking even when giving an interview as a minister

As it happens, Nikki has consistently removed sites from his censorship-list when he’s found evidence that they have child porn content. The vast majority of the sites on the list are porn sites in the EU or US that feature either young women or gay sex (it’s an interesting question why so much gay porn has groundlessly ended up on the list) – sites with child porn are, of course, illegal in both the EU and the US. So if the Finnish police believes it’s found child porn hosted in those places, why doesn’t it tip the local police off so they can shut these sites down?

In any case, discussion of censorship is precisely what the list is for. As I previously discussed, anyone could generate such a list by scanning the Internet with free programs. Nikki’s site itself doesn’t contain child porn, just the addresses of the sites that are being censored.

So what Lindén meant was, presumably, that Nikki’s site is some kind of portal for child porn, and that if a book were a portal to child porn (when she said “refers”, she meant “has printed links to”), it would be confiscated too. To say that Nikki’s site contains child porn is not only untrue – it’s libel. But the core thing here is her inability to comprehend the www.

The web is an extremely interconnected place, and basically everything connects to everything else “eventually”. She thinks Nikki’s site is immoral because you can get from it to sites on the censorship list via one “connection” (I’m not even talking about clickable links in this case – the distinction in any case is trivial). But Helsingin Sanomat, the newspaper that published her interview, has published the address of Nikki’s site, so you can get from hs.fi to censored sites through two connections. If you think that’s such a world of difference, what if Nikki’s site had a redirect directly to a random censored site? Then, from the point of view of Finns who are automatically going to turn into paedophiles if they venture within one link of censored sites, hs.fi becomes a danger zone.

Links don’t really mean anything when the entire Internet is one network, proxyable and searchable. Lindén doesn’t understand this, and is incompetent as a minister of Communication.

The Bad Astronomy blog writes that science isn’t faith-based:

Science is not faith-based, and here’s why. The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That’s it. […] A simple example: we see objects going around the Sun. […] [From observation] we can apply mathematical equations to describe those motions, and then use that math to predict where a given object will be at some future date. Guess what? It works. It works so well that we can shoot probes at objects billions of kilometers away and still nail the target to phenomenal accuracy. This supports our conclusion that the math is correct. This in turn strongly implies that the Universe is following its own rules, and that we can figure them out.

Why do we make the assumption that the Universe follows a set of rules if we think we can deduce that from what we observe? Is the writer confused here or am I?

I’ve often wondered what is the real assumption behind rational thinking, but this isn’t it – which goes to show that sincere and serious people can get it totally wrong. Any suggestions?

I was reading through the terms and conditions of a savings account I have, and in the part where the calculation of interest is explained it says “The interest on capital is computed daily, with the number 360 used as the denominator.” Huh? Denominator? And aren’t there 365 days a year? Does this mean I’m missing out on five days of interest a year? I needed to know! But perhaps not badly enough, because I forgot about it until yesterday evening when I was trying to get to sleep and the answer suddenly occurred to me.

Now, the interest of the account is given as an effective annual interest, meaning that it is computed in some way that gives the same result as a certain interest compunded once a year, assuming that the capital doesn’t change. Of course, the capital does sometimes change, so they’ve chosen to calculate a daily interest that matches the promised annual interest instead. If the interest is such that it multiplies the capital by x, after one year the capital has effectively become multiplied by

For that to be equivalent to some annual interest multiplier y, necessarily

So the desired daily interest is the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth root of the annual interest. Now, that’s not something you’d necessarily want to work out with a piece of paper, but a calculator can do it in an instant. For instance, the current annual interest of the account in question is 3.5% so to compound daily the multiplier would be

which corresponds to an interest of about 0.0094%. Okay, so that’s the correct way of finding an appropriate daily interest (in the sense that it’s equivalent to the definition). What could the bank possibly be doing with denominators and the number 360? Could 3.5% divided by 360 be approximately the 365th root of 1.035 minus one? Let’s see:

It is! So I’m guessing this is what the bank actually does. Notice that their method even produces a slightly higher result. Does this result in any actual difference over a year?

Yes! I’m up a tenth of a percentage point on this deal! Big money, here I come.

I can understand that in olden days it might have been a bit onerous to calculate 365th roots of ever-changing interests, so someone thought of this alternative method. For small interests it’s only off by a bit. But today, in the time of practically free computing power? Seems a bit odd.

edit: I just realised something: not all years have 365 days! Allowing for leap years, the average year has 365 + 97/400 = 365.2425 days, so I should really have been taking the 365.2425th root and also using that figure for finding the difference between the bank’s method and the correct method, but it doesn’t really change anything.

edit the second: now that I read over the details again, it seems to imply that the interest is calculated daily but not compounded to the capital. So they’re doing something else I don’t want to get into right now. Banking is complicated.

The Finnish authorities are escalating their frenzied, idiotic and menacing action over “child porn”. The story so far:

Last year the Ministry of Communication instructed the police to compile and maintain a list of web addresses containing child pornography to be given to Internet service providers to block. The Ministry assured the public that the list would not block entire domains or IPs, just single urls. The decision-making regarding what goes on the list was to be transparent. In particular, no Finnish sites would be censored, because in those cases the police can just use normal means to physically shut illegal sites down.

As censorship started appearing, Matti Nikki, who maintains a website critical of censorship, ran a computer program to scan the Internet for sites that were redirected to the police’s “this page is blocked” -notice. He posted the output of this program on his website. Most sites on the list appear to contain only legal porn. Some contain child porn.

Then, Nikki’s site itself goes on the censorship list. Soon sites that appear to have no connection whatever to porn of any kind are blocked. The police does not comment on any of this.

And now the real bullying starts: as criticism of the police’s behaviour has mounted, Nikki is requested to appear for interrogation at the Helsinki police’s violent crime unit (I think this is because they also deal with sex crimes). He has been informed that he will be questioned as a suspect in the crime of “accessory to the dissemination of an improper image”.

Note: his only possible crime here has been to inform the public about what is being censored. The police has indicated that posting even a single link to a page that is suspected to contain child porn is grounds for censorship, and now this apparently also justifies groundless threats (because that’s what they are!) from the police force. Emphasis: Nikki isn’t suspected of anything that I, for example, haven’t done. If they could be bothered, the Finnish police would feel themselves justified in censoring this blog. Nikki is suspected of being a criminal for posting the list of websites on the censorship list, one of which I posted earlier.

If you care about freedom, care about this. Become a member of Electronic Frontier Finland. If there’s a protest about this, go protest. Stay informed about this case, and about civil liberties and privacy on the Internet in general. It’s important, and it’ll be even more important in the future.

When I previously wrote about censoring the Internet in Finland I thought I might be overreacting to say that it was only the beginning and that soon other things would get censored. One site that’s now censored is lapsiporno.info which I linked to in my original post. It’s a site intended to present the arguments against the current system of censorship. It’s hosted in Finland, which fact alone disqualifies it from censorship as per the law in question. It contains no porn, child- or otherwise. Just unpopular opinions, and a list of the censored sites – and this last thing is apparently the excuse for censoring it.

This is totally unacceptable.

Usually when words mean two different things at the same time, I notice both meanings. But just now as I was listening to the sad/happy Smiths song I Don’t Owe You Anything I heard the lines

You should not go to them
let them come to you
just like I do

as “let them come to you, the way I always come to you”. I always used to hear it as “do like I do and let them come to you” – I don’t think I was even aware of this other meaning.

It’s like the song suddenly became twice as good.

When I’ve not been getting sleep I’ve been doing mainly two things:
1) learning about webservers, blogging software and the Internet – I’m planning to quit livejournal and have my own site on my own domain
2) reading through archives of apocalyptical financial and societal predictions from Generational Dynamics. The guy who writes it seems like a bit of a kook at first, but I think he’s on to something. At least as far as the US goes.

Sudden Debt is another fine resource, and its predictions keep coming true.

Fred Karlsson, head of the linguistics department at Helsinki, has on his web-page a generated list of word-forms for one Finnish word stem: kauppa (“shop”). It has 2253 forms. A random sampling:

kauppa-mme-kin-ko-han NOM SG PL1 KIN KO HAN
oh, our shops also [reference to earlier utterance]?
kauppo-j-e-si-kaan GEN PL SG2 KAAN
not even that/those of/from/belonging to your shops
kauppo-j-a-an-ko-s PTV PL SGPL3 KO S
oh, [absence-of-action-that-would-be-directed-towards] his/her shops [challenge/emphasis]?
kaupo-i-ksi-kin TRA PL KIN
[affirmative], to/into shops also

All perfectly parseable, at least to me. It rules to be a speaker of both a brutally synthetic language like Finnish and a strongly analytic language like English.

The Minister of Migration and European Affairs (I won’t even comment on that title) Astrid Thors is very understanding of Islamic culture. She’s not like those despicable racists who talk about things like crime and unemployment rates among immigrant populations from cultures that are totally incompatible with life in Finland. Now her understanding of Islamic culture has even reached the point where she can educate Muslims about their own religion. She comments on the recently founded Islamist party of Finland:

[The Islamist party] aims to incorporate Islamic Sharia law into Finnish legal practices, which is against Islam.

Oh really? Practically all Islamic countries have legislation either directly based on Sharia or strongly influenced by it. “Muslim leaders” frequently demand or praise the use of Sharia within Muslim communities. Parts of it are based on the Koran and the hadith, both holy texts of Islam. But no, we mustn’t let the Muslims themselves define Islam, because they usually want things no-one in their right mind would want, so it’s better to have Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila and Astrid Thors tell us want Islam is really like.

[Finnish law] does not require political parties to accept democratic principles or to respect human rights. [This] indicates a significant loophole in our legislation.

This is possibly even more stupid. It’s precisely what people who don’t understand the concept of democracy say every time they notice that some people want to radically change the rules: that the point of having a democracy is to abide by certain principles some very clever people from the United Nations made up. It isn’t! Having a democracy is the point of a democracy. Democracies actually produce terrible laws, start wars and break the UN-rules all the time, but we live with it because it’s democratic. There is no humanitarian God (not even Thors) to tell us what to do, there’s just people – nothing else. The same thing happened with the Dutch paedophile party a couple of years ago: perfectly normal people came out with things like “there are limits to democracy”. A fascist sentiment if I ever heard one.

If we don’t want an Islamic society, let’s not have an Islamic society. There’s no need to lie about what it would mean.

The Finnish parliament has been rocked by allegations that male members of parliament sexually harass women who work there, especially young female assistants of other MP’s. The allegations have been so vague that it’s impossible to comment on the situation, but the brouhaha has prompted some broader discussion that I find interesting.

I listened to a programme about the whole thing on the radio yesterday in the bus I was taking home (bus drivers almost always listen to Finnish iskelmä music, but this was a more academically inclined driver). The narrator said something like:

Sexual harassment is a controversial topic, but there are at least two things everyone can agree on. Sexual harassment exists in our society, and it must be removed from our society.

Not to sound like a sex offender, but that depends on what you mean by sexual harassment. No, really! For example, one of the cases of harassment referenced in the case of the Finnish Parliament, a middle-aged man was said to have placed his hand on the shoulder of a younger woman and said “Let’s take a look at these documents together.” Thus described, that situation could be anything: completely mundane or highly creepy. Obviously, some kind of metric is needed to assess when sexual harassment has happened.

And there’s the rub: people have wildly differing ideas on what constitutes unacceptable behaviour. I’ve understood that the minimum requirement from the legal standpoint is that it’s only harassment if it happens repeatedly, the harasser is asked to stop and it keeps going on after that. That seems reasonable, but I’ve heard considerably more fleeting situations being described as “harassment”. So what kind of behaviour counts? There are essentially two schools here: one is “it’s harassment if the harassee says it is” and the other is “it’s harassment if society at large says it is”.

The radio programme seemed to subscribe to the former view. It was a lot like the Wikipedia definition: “Sexual harassment is harassment or unwelcome attention of a sexual nature.” To rephrase what the radio said, our society should be such that unwelcome attention of a sexual nature doesn’t exist. Now, I don’t know about you, but every way I try to imagine such a society seems worse than the one we’re living in. It’s a bit like wanting to remove meanness, nastiness or gossiping – sounds kind of positive, but is actually completely impossible and even undesirable to achieve. If everyone has the right to be offended by anything and to have the authorities intervene on their behalf, life becomes impossible.

Of course, the situation in the Finnish Parliament is especially prone to the real problems of sexual harassment: power-mad older men, living away from their families, interacting with younger women who work in positions of far lower status and power. It’s really all about power: try to imagine a woman with a high-status job seeking protection from sexual harassment coming from men in low-status jobs. What we really want to stop is people abusing their power in social situations in the workplace. That includes low-status men being terrorized by their high-status male supervisors, something I’d bet happens more than sexual harassment. It’s also extremely difficult to define or punish; the culture accepts what the culture accepts. The real challenge is to change the culture. Which, by the way, is never going to happen – people are always going to be horrible to each other. All we can hope for is slow & slight improvement, and to be decent people ourselves.

Some time ago, when spending a lot of time talking about things like these appeared to be a reasonable thing to do, a friend of mine said that

It’s important to distinguish between different meanings of the word “exist”. I realised recently that in the sentence “the world exists” I use the word the same way I would use it in “all the possible chess games exist.”

At first I didn’t quite understand what that meant, so I instinctively thought it didn’t mean much of anything. Here’s how I later made sense of it:

1) “All the possible chess games” are in this case obviously considered to have existed before they were played (some games haven’t even been played yet). They kind of emerge out of the possibility of them being played, or the space for them is created by the rules of chess.

2) But of course the rules themselves are just arbitrary information, and as such they too existed before they were actually spoken or written down. This is also true of, say, mathematical proofs: a proof is correct even before someone discovers it and checks it for correctness.

3) So there is really no difference between information existing and not existing, some of it is just modelled in our biological brains and some of it isn’t. For example, our biological brains carry a model of what we consider to be the reality around us.

4) A clarifying example: a computer simulation is just a deterministic process starting with some arbitrary state of information and ending with another arbitrary state of information. So the simulated thing was really “being simulated” just as much without the computer, because the states of information are just states of information. So we could extend the science fiction concept of our reality just being a simulation to there being no simulation and that the mere fact of everything being “describable” inevitably causes the world to “exist”.

5) According to this line of thought, it’s impossible to distinguish between the world “really existing” and the world being “merely describable”. What does that mean? Well, that’s what they call an epistemological question, but I think it means that the two things are actually the same thing.

If it’s impossible to know which of two situations is true, the situations are identical.

I think this is a reasonable and practical way to think about reality.

This morning’s futile wrestling with a problem-set from a course I can only attend half the time due to overscheduling has produced a decision: I’m quitting the course. I have too much school as it is, and Algebra II is arguably the least urgent and definitely the most difficult course I’m taking, so it’s going to have to take one for the team. Maybe I’ll look into it this summer.

That means more time for:
-doing better at my other courses
-chess-playin’
-boozin’
-blogging!
It’s win-win. Or lose-win, but you know what I mean. I might even start running again – I think I’ve lost sufficient weight recently for my injury rate to be lower than it was last year.

Another person who’ll have more time on his hands is Jérôme Kerviel, the man who stands accused of losing five billion euros of his employer’s money in fraudulent trading. The moment I heard about it I thought there has to be something fishy about it, and of course there is. Every bank has sophisticated risk control and trade-approval mechanisms, ostensibly to prevent this sort of thing. Why didn’t they function here? Jean Veil, one of SocGen’s (Kerviel’s employer) attorneys in the case, says “Kerviel did not have the right to gamble […] a bank is not a casino.” Of course it’s a casino, that’s why they have “star” traders and risk control mechanisms in the first place. Had Kerviel’s trades turned in a huge profit, I don’t think SocGen would have minded.

The financial world has been behaving irresponsibly for five years straight and there’s every kind of unavoidable loss barreling down the road, as yet unannounced to the public. Quite possibly SocGen is surprised that Kerviel was so successful at doing what they basically wanted him to do anyway: piling on more irresponsible gambling to save them from the structural irresponsibility everyone’s been complicit in. They intentionally turned a blind eye and hoped that a roll of the dice would save their bonuses, urgently needed for this year’s payment on the yacht / villa / cocaine debt. They just didn’t realise they were gambling as much as they were.

Most things that get said a lot are true, but some aren’t. Example:

(1) Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence

That’s just patently false. In fact, the only way (that I know of) we can increase our confidence that something doesn’t exist is to try to look for it and not succeed. (1) Can be made true with two possible changes:

(2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence

which is true but probably isn’t what is meant with the original, or

(3) Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence

Of course, (3) is just a special case of an even more useful result,

(4) Nothing is proof of anything

Now, that actually isn’t something that gets said a lot, but perhaps one day it will be. I call it – Hardwick’s law.

Now, quick, is the following web-headline from a satire mag like The Onion or from a serious source of news and commentary?

It’s actually from Slate. How can one help loving these postmodern times?

I haven’t managed to post as often as I intend to. It’s mostly because of school: I have too much of it. Not so much that I wouldn’t actually have the time to write, but enough to keep my mind from wandering much. Math is hard! I should train my brain to accept a greater workload – at the moment I just zone out once I’ve done everything I absolutely need to do.

As an example of what serious business mathematics is: in a weekly session where students demonstrate their solutions to assigned problems a guy rather cocksurely asked at the beginning of the session to do problem number five (out of six). Our tutor agreed, the guy went up to the blackboard, said something about how this is actually a special case of something coming up later in the course (some people like to pretend they know the material before taking the course: why?) and… totally shut down. He drew a graph for illustration, started to explain his approach and realised he didn’t know how to make it work after all. His voice faltered, each word took about five seconds to come out. Eventually he just gave up and even left the room, presumably to commit suicide. The tutor was nonplussed, as they often are, and asked someone to come up to do the first problem.

But mathematics isn’t the only thing that’s serious business; I should make an effort to spend my down-time more productively.

Went to see Tuntematon Sotilas at the National Theatre. It was pretty much the way I’d imagined it from the reviews. Perhaps that’s not such a good thing: art with a Mission that can be reasonably dismissed with one word (here it might be “iconoclastic”) is too uncomplicated to my taste. Luckily it’s pretty entertaining just as a show, which is the way most art justifies its existence anyway. I don’t know why people try to analyse it so seriously – the play is a purely emotional reaction. There’s no final opinion-type message that I could find, except “this is what it feels like”, and the feeling the play transmits isn’t one I particularly get from Finland or life in general. Perhaps the final refrain of “Finland is dead” was intended as a sort of anti-message: the whole flag-shootin’, icon-destroyin’ thing was evidence to me that Finland is very much alive and a big deal to the people who made the play.

As a sidenote: a shocking amount of utter twaddle has been written about how people who haven’t seen the play (or any work of art) shouldn’t criticise it. The prime minister said he didn’t like the idea of pictures of politicians being symbolically shot at at the end, and didn’t even intend to see the play. Cue the huddled masses of art-understanding people accusing him of being a philistine (which he may well be, but that’s beside the point). Were they suggesting that Vanhanen shouldn’t believe the reviews telling him what happens at the end? Sure, there’s context, but it’s still possible to comment on the thing without the context. Perhaps someone should tell people who study ancient theatre to stop doing it because they can’t possibly understand plays they haven’t even seen.

If you disagree, pose yourself the following question as honestly as you can: have you ever felt that someone else’s opinion on a work of art that they have experienced and you haven’t is stupid? I expect this has happened to everyone. I’m so arrogant that I feel like that all the time, but everyone has at least heard about nazis condemning Jewish art as “degenerate” and internally disagreed.

And finally, here’s my new favourite Fischer picture.

Kt-R6ch is a commie move!

I’ve been neglecting my culinary side for ages and ages. Depending on what degree of seriousness counts as proper cooking, it’s probably been over a year of joyless eat-grinding at home. But, for whatever reason, tonight was the night for balls-out gourmandism – and here’s the fascinating story! Warning: this post contains over-analysis of one evening’s cooking and nothing else.

Planning
We’d received a luxury food voucher as a present some time ago and gotten two rather nice duck breasts out of it. They spent some months in the freezer before I found the courage (fear of failure) to do something with them. Or perhaps it was the gentle prodding from my domestic counterpart. Anyway, I knew I’d have to improvise a bit because I hadn’t cooked duck before and don’t enjoy following recipes (which all seem to be be for duck à l’orange anyway).

I had a bottle of red wine I wanted to use for a sauce and bought lots of shallots for frying in the lovely duck-fat. I then had the idea of using some dates I had at home. They’re extremely sweet (I only used two), but I figured that would balance the acidity of the wine and suit the duck quite well anyway. That decision made me feel just so CRAZY that I just knew I had to have some cocoa powder in there as well. Gameplan at this point was to brown the duck in a frying pan, get it in the oven, use the pan to make the shallot-wine-date-cocoa sauce.

I agonised over whether I needed something like roasted potatoes or rice to soak up the (delicious, as I thought at this point) sauce. For a while I thought a simple side of lentils would work, and it probably would have been better than the rather boring jasmine rice I ended up going for.

We were also making a salad (romaine lettuce, tomatoes, balsamic vinegar) but I still wanted something to make the whole thing a bit more interesting. Partly in the interest of cheapness, for this purpose I bought half a swede, two beetroots and some blue cheese.

Execution
I started with the root vegetables, slicing the swede, a beet and a carrot rather finely (nothing thicker than half a centimetre), putting those in the oven in an uncovered pan with a dash of salt. I wanted them to dry a bit and become as flavourful as possible. I worried a bit about whether I’d be able to soften them up enough this way, but they were fine.

I scored the duck rather deeply, perhaps half the way through. This was okay, but I only really needed to get through the fat layer. I got our big, heavy, cast-iron pan good and hot and plonked the duck on. I’d read that there’s a lot of fat on a duck and it’ll start rending onto the pan quite quickly, but I used a bit of vegetable oil anyway because I was afraid the skin (which I wanted to get nice and crispy) would burn and stick. The fat really does come off quickly – it would have been enough to just baste the skin with a bit of oil.

The pan was so hot I only kept the duck on for a total of 6-7 minutes, the first four or so being just for the skin side. The skin turned crispy without any sticking – in fact I had rather too much fat spitting out of the pan. I managed to splash some hot fat on myself and the floor as I turned the breasts over. I moved them into the oven, skin-side up (190 degrees or so) and got started on the sauce.

I spooned about half of the liquified fat out and put the cocoa powder (half a teaspoon or so), the finely chopped shallots (quite a lot, perhaps 2.5 decilitres) and dates in. Added some salt. After a couple of minutes I poured in a generous amount of wine and turned the heat down. About five minutes before serving I cut up some blue cheese and threw it over the root vegetables.

Evaluation
The sauce didn’t quite satisfy my expectations. There was a pronouncedly bitter aftertaste (the cocoa, I think, which spent a bit too long in the hot oil) and just not enough duckiness. The cocoa didn’t really add anything positive. The dates dissolved completely, I was happy about adding those. The duck fat had relatively little flavour, and to have left any more in would have made the sauce too oily. Perhaps I should have used stock of some kind – as it was, the rice-sauce -combination wasn’t as tasty as I’d hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the sauce was good – just not good enough.

The duck was a success, althogh the breasts were not very thick and I overdid them in the oven by about five minutes. They weren’t dry by any means, but there was no pinkness left either. The crispiness and flavour were very nice.

I was happiest of all with the vegetables. The blue cheese was a critical addition; that, the slightly dried beetroot and the sweetish sauce combined to make the best flavour of this dish. I could have easily left the rice out, it didn’t really bring anything but bulk to the mix.

Eating
Eating was fun, and you have to do it anyway in order not to die. I recommend eating.