Want to know more before you buy? Here's a primer.
Steel: The steel alloys used in Japanese knives range from VG10 (a high carbon "super steel" that's less brittle than many); powder steel or high speed steel (extremely hard, used for dentist drills, needs to be "babied"); carbon steel (easy to sharpen but turns black over time and will rust); blue steel or Ao-ko (carbon steel combined with chromium and tungsten), rust resistant and #2 blue steel is most durable.
Rockwell Hardness Scale: This is the scale used to determine the hardness of steel. A good European knife blade has a hardness of about 56-57, while Japanese blades range from 62-65. Blades at the high end hold an edge longer but are harder to sharpen and more fragile.
Japanese knife styles: The Santoku is the all-purpose Japanese chef's knife. The Guyoto ("cow sword") is a longer, slicing knife. Small knives are called petty/utility or paring knives. The Nakiri is a large, square-bladed knife for chopping vegetables/onions. The traditional Japanese blades (bevelled on one side only) include Usuba (flat like Nakiri for vegetables); Yanagiba (long, narrow slicer for sashimi); Kaisaiki (a shorter Yanagiba); and Deba ("short, fat tooth" shape for fish filleting and cutting meat).
Japanese Knive Makers: Kevin Kent imports knives from 25 Japanese knife makers. He recommends the surgically-sharp Artisan to chefs, but he's also keen on the hand-forged and hammered super hard (63:65) knives from Takeda Shosui-san and the Moritaka knives, made by the same family for 31 generations, since 1293. A collectible knife in his shop is a numbered edition from master Keijiro Doi, a 300 mm Yanagiba Suisin Hayate with ebony and water buffalo horn handle ($912).
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The skin-and-bone business - The Economist
AFTER silencing all-too-appropriate shouts of “butcher!” from the courtroom gallery, a federal judge in North Carolina earlier this month sentenced a man with the rather grisly job title of “human tissue broker” to eight years in prison for selling medically unsuitable bone, tendons and skin for transplant. The case has raised concerns about the safety of the American tissue donation industry, worth about $1 billion a year.
Philip Guyett, 42, pleaded guilty last March to falsifying records so he could sell tissue from corpses that were, according to court documents, riddled with cancer or showed signs of intravenous drug use. He was, apparently, desperate for cash to save his struggling business.
Corpses are big business. Tissues from a single body can fetch as much as $10,000 in America, where every year more than 1.3 million procedures using donated tissue are performed. The most common are knee reconstructions, spinal surgeries, hip replacements and dental work. Distinct from solid organs like hearts, lungs and kidneys, harvested tissues also include cartilage, ocular material, arteries and veins.
The recovery and transplantation of organs tends to be highly controlled because organs, unlike tissue, have to be a perfect physical match, in good shape and handled with extreme care to have any hope of functioning in the recipient’s body. By contrast, bone can be stored for ages, ground into a paste and successfully used in a range of procedures on various people without regard to say, blood type. Federal law prohibits the selling of organs but not of human tissue.
Although Mr Guyett got his bodies from funeral homes (he paid the directors to alert him of new arrivals), more reputable tissue businesses get their bodies from hospitals, which tend to keep better records and have better preservation facilities. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the country’s 2,000 human tissue harvesters but its resources permit only a few hundred inspections per year. Only a dozen states have their own rules regulating the business.
The case is unpleasantly similar to one two years ago involving another tissue broker, this one from New Jersey, who also sold ineligibly old or diseased tissue including bone from the cancer-ravaged, 95-year-old corpse of the British radio journalist Sir Alistair Cooke. Cindy Gordon, a spokesman for the non-profit Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, fears that disgusting cases like these two could put people off donating.
Philip Guyett, 42, pleaded guilty last March to falsifying records so he could sell tissue from corpses that were, according to court documents, riddled with cancer or showed signs of intravenous drug use. He was, apparently, desperate for cash to save his struggling business.
Corpses are big business. Tissues from a single body can fetch as much as $10,000 in America, where every year more than 1.3 million procedures using donated tissue are performed. The most common are knee reconstructions, spinal surgeries, hip replacements and dental work. Distinct from solid organs like hearts, lungs and kidneys, harvested tissues also include cartilage, ocular material, arteries and veins.
The recovery and transplantation of organs tends to be highly controlled because organs, unlike tissue, have to be a perfect physical match, in good shape and handled with extreme care to have any hope of functioning in the recipient’s body. By contrast, bone can be stored for ages, ground into a paste and successfully used in a range of procedures on various people without regard to say, blood type. Federal law prohibits the selling of organs but not of human tissue.
Although Mr Guyett got his bodies from funeral homes (he paid the directors to alert him of new arrivals), more reputable tissue businesses get their bodies from hospitals, which tend to keep better records and have better preservation facilities. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the country’s 2,000 human tissue harvesters but its resources permit only a few hundred inspections per year. Only a dozen states have their own rules regulating the business.
The case is unpleasantly similar to one two years ago involving another tissue broker, this one from New Jersey, who also sold ineligibly old or diseased tissue including bone from the cancer-ravaged, 95-year-old corpse of the British radio journalist Sir Alistair Cooke. Cindy Gordon, a spokesman for the non-profit Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, fears that disgusting cases like these two could put people off donating.
Happy Arabs, outraged Israelis - The Economist
BAD vibrations between Turkey and Israel have been worsened by a series on one of Turkey’s state-run television channels showing Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian babies in a place that looks like Gaza. Yet anti-Jewish propaganda has long been a staple of a popular series called “Valley of the Wolves”. In a recent episode two Turkish scientists on the verge of building weapons that Turkey usually buys from Israel get bumped off by Kurds on Israel’s payroll.
But it is unfettered romance rather than Jew-bashing that is catching the imagination of millions of Arab viewers. Particularly alluring is a soap opera called “Noor” that has been dubbed in Arabic and was broadcast last year by a pan-Arab, Saudi-owned satellite network, MBC. Starring an emancipated woman and a blue-eyed blonde former male model, “Noor” has been credited with a recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey. Many head straight for a Bosporus villa (now rented by tour operators) where the drama was filmed.
Yet the marital bliss portrayed in “Noor” is said to have prompted a rash of divorces in the Arab world, as female viewers compare their own husbands to the hero, Muhannad, who washes up the dishes. In Jordan a man is said to have dumped his wife after he caught her with Muhannad’s picture on her mobile phone. In Syria another did the same when his wife apparently said, “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.”
All of this has prompted Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti to call for a boycott of the Turkish series, which he called “evil”. But MBC is unfazed. It has snapped up the rights to a score of other Turkish television dramas.
But it is unfettered romance rather than Jew-bashing that is catching the imagination of millions of Arab viewers. Particularly alluring is a soap opera called “Noor” that has been dubbed in Arabic and was broadcast last year by a pan-Arab, Saudi-owned satellite network, MBC. Starring an emancipated woman and a blue-eyed blonde former male model, “Noor” has been credited with a recent surge in Arab tourists to Turkey. Many head straight for a Bosporus villa (now rented by tour operators) where the drama was filmed.
Yet the marital bliss portrayed in “Noor” is said to have prompted a rash of divorces in the Arab world, as female viewers compare their own husbands to the hero, Muhannad, who washes up the dishes. In Jordan a man is said to have dumped his wife after he caught her with Muhannad’s picture on her mobile phone. In Syria another did the same when his wife apparently said, “I want to sleep with Muhannad for just one night and then die.”
All of this has prompted Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti to call for a boycott of the Turkish series, which he called “evil”. But MBC is unfazed. It has snapped up the rights to a score of other Turkish television dramas.
Drugs and violence in Rio - The Economist
Why a tight market for drugs may be contributing to recent violence
ALL of Brazil’s big cities have a vigorous market in illegal drugs. If surveys of drug use are to be believed, consumption of cocaine, crack and cannabis per head in Rio de Janeiro is near the median when compared with other state capitals. So why is the city that has just won the 2016 Olympics so prone to paroxysms of drug violence, as seen on the weekend of October 17th-18th, in which about 25 people were killed (including three policemen), ten buses were set on fire and a police helicopter was shot down?
The city is pockmarked by a history of bad government. Past mistakes include making accommodations with drug-dealing factions in the hope of keeping them peaceful. Rio’s police force is also part of the problem. Some of the weapons used by drug dealers are sold to them by the police, and officers still execute too many people on the spot rather than bother with prosecuting suspects, making favela-dwellers regard them as no more a source of justice than the drugs gangs.
A further reason for Rio’s spectacular violence is that it has three large, competing drug factions, whereas in other big cities (including the largest, São Paulo) one gang is dominant. A recent study from Rio de Janeiro state’s government on the economics of the local drug business suggests that, because of this competition, far from living like characters in an MTV hip-hop video, Rio’s dealers are operating at “close to break-even”.
Using a conservative estimate for total annual drugs sales in the city, of R$316m ($182m), the study reckons that after buying the product from wholesalers, employing a sales force and investing in capital (guns, mainly), Rio’s dealers make combined annual profits of R$27m ($15m). The wage structure within the factions appears to be surprisingly flat, far more so than in the American gang analysed in 2000 by two academics, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh. Rio’s dealers seem to be an exception to Brazil’s national picture of unequal income distribution.
Before the recent violence, some analysts had suggested that stretched finances were leading drug gangs to co-operate in some operations. But the more standard response to this situation is to invade a neighbour’s turf. This is what happened on October 17th, when members of the Comando Vermelho poured into an area controlled by the Amigos dos Amigos, and the shooting started.
With drug-peddling margins so tight, the gangs are looking to other revenue sources. Both they and the city’s illegal militias, which control other areas of Rio, are involved in the illicit provision of electricity and other utilities and also, increasingly, in politics. Around a dozen members of the city council appear to have been elected with the help of blocks of votes delivered by local strongmen. One councillor says it is not uncommon to see people walking around the council chamber with guns. The metal detector at its entrance was unplugged when your correspondent passed through it on October 20th.
ALL of Brazil’s big cities have a vigorous market in illegal drugs. If surveys of drug use are to be believed, consumption of cocaine, crack and cannabis per head in Rio de Janeiro is near the median when compared with other state capitals. So why is the city that has just won the 2016 Olympics so prone to paroxysms of drug violence, as seen on the weekend of October 17th-18th, in which about 25 people were killed (including three policemen), ten buses were set on fire and a police helicopter was shot down?
The city is pockmarked by a history of bad government. Past mistakes include making accommodations with drug-dealing factions in the hope of keeping them peaceful. Rio’s police force is also part of the problem. Some of the weapons used by drug dealers are sold to them by the police, and officers still execute too many people on the spot rather than bother with prosecuting suspects, making favela-dwellers regard them as no more a source of justice than the drugs gangs.
A further reason for Rio’s spectacular violence is that it has three large, competing drug factions, whereas in other big cities (including the largest, São Paulo) one gang is dominant. A recent study from Rio de Janeiro state’s government on the economics of the local drug business suggests that, because of this competition, far from living like characters in an MTV hip-hop video, Rio’s dealers are operating at “close to break-even”.
Using a conservative estimate for total annual drugs sales in the city, of R$316m ($182m), the study reckons that after buying the product from wholesalers, employing a sales force and investing in capital (guns, mainly), Rio’s dealers make combined annual profits of R$27m ($15m). The wage structure within the factions appears to be surprisingly flat, far more so than in the American gang analysed in 2000 by two academics, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh. Rio’s dealers seem to be an exception to Brazil’s national picture of unequal income distribution.
Before the recent violence, some analysts had suggested that stretched finances were leading drug gangs to co-operate in some operations. But the more standard response to this situation is to invade a neighbour’s turf. This is what happened on October 17th, when members of the Comando Vermelho poured into an area controlled by the Amigos dos Amigos, and the shooting started.
With drug-peddling margins so tight, the gangs are looking to other revenue sources. Both they and the city’s illegal militias, which control other areas of Rio, are involved in the illicit provision of electricity and other utilities and also, increasingly, in politics. Around a dozen members of the city council appear to have been elected with the help of blocks of votes delivered by local strongmen. One councillor says it is not uncommon to see people walking around the council chamber with guns. The metal detector at its entrance was unplugged when your correspondent passed through it on October 20th.
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