omenti

energy and motion at our scale

The battery in Sukie's laptop has seen better days, so I started looking for a replacement.  It turns out to store 65 watt-hours of energy.  You buy energy delivered as electricity by the kilowatt-hour - usually for about fifteen cents a kWh.  The average home in the US uses about a kilowatt of this form of energy every hour, so 65 watt-hours is nothing - right?

 

After thinking about placing an order I decided it was time for my morning exercise session on the rowing machine.  I grabbed the iPod loaded with music and podcasts so I can keep my sanity for the eighty minute sessions and headed for the basement to begin the grind.  

 

I aim for about 150 watts delivered to the machines's flywheel.  Fifteen minutes into the workout my tshirt has to come off and thirty minutes in I'm covered with sweat and have to reach for the water bottle.

 

This is physically hard work!  At 80:06 I give up.  I've averaged 152.5 watts for the session - a bit over 200 watt hours.

 

Great - if I had the machine hooked up to a perfectly efficient generator I could keep a 100 watt bulb going for a couple of hours.  Suddenly 15 cents per kilowatt-hour looks really cheap and if I was providing light I'd be very interested in compact fluorescents or LEDs...

 

Cheap energy was the core product of the Industrial Revolution.  An adult male in good shape can provide about one kilowatt-hour of work a day.¹ All of a sudden people didn't have to spend the entire day working to produce enough food for their families use and we could work on larger projects.  We were tapping energy stored over many thousands, even millions, of years for millions of years, and were quickly using what we believed was an enormous supply.

 

Even Sukie's laptop uses more energy that I would like to supply - now if I could put a generator on my rowing machine I could use some of that work to change the battery - wait - I know someone who did that.

 

Some of you knew Lynn and Al.  A very clever couple who didn't allow television in their house.²  When the Olympics came in 1992 Lynn, who had been an alternate in the US kayak team a dozen years before, decided they might allow a screen in the house so the two kids could watch.  

 

Al had an idea

 

He found a generator and converted an old junker bike into a stationary exercise bicycle that put out 12V DC.  The kids were in their early teens and, with the inefficiency of the generator and mechanical assembly (my guess is it was about 70% efficient), a kid could provide enough power to run the small DC black and white television he found between commercials.

 

The kids alternated and, by the end of the games, had developed very healthy leg muscles and a fantastic sense of guessing how long the commercials would last.  Al didn't install a flywheel on purpose, so when they stopped pedaling the TV quit.³

 

I had been thinking about the Olympics anyway.  Last night was the opening ceremony and I was up at 4am to watch a beach volleyball match.  It reminded me of my friend Colleen who was a professional beach volleyball player.  She had dreamed of the Olympics, but her career timing and partner selection was not what was needed.  But she was an amazing example of energy conversion in a human - we "compete" with our training and I detail some of the energy involved in an earlier post.⁴ It is really impressive seeing someone who needs to eat at least 5,000 Calories a day work out.

 

It is fun to watch an athlete jump.  They leap into the air following a parabolic path.  In Colleen's case she would adjust the position of her body near the peak of the arc to give herself more "hang time" to be well positioned.  It was perhaps three tenths of a second, but it looks impressive.  You see basketball players do this when they dunk.

 

But this is a diversion - but a fascinating one.

 

Since the Olympics are on it makes sense to talk about sport and the physics of motion.  This is a wonderful way to talk about energy at a level we can appreciate - when you have a notion of what the physical effort might feel like in your own muscles, these things make much more sense.  Last night I mentioned to Om that I might veer off along this path for a few post and now it looks like I've committed myself.

 

Let's table the physics of hang time until a bit later and we can go into the high jump.  There are so many other great subjects.  If you have any specific sports you'd like to see covered, let me know and we can work out what is taking place (or not - there are some things that would require large amounts of effort - the physics of walking and running, for example, are not completely understood at a fundamental level).

 

But there is still Sukie's laptop to worry about.

 

Imagine an apple (the fruit, not the computer) sitting on a dining table.  It has the potential to fall to the floor.  If it falls this potential energy is converted into motion until it strikes the floor and something else happens.  It turns out an average sized apple on a table of average height has about a joule of potential energy.⁵ If the table was covered with apples and you arranged for one to fall every second the power involved would be a watt - a watt is just a joule per second.  The other apple - er Apple ..  Sukie's MacBook - requires about 20 watts.  So if I could arrange for 20 apples to fall every second and could convert all of that energy to electricity I could run it.⁶  The battery stores 65 watt-hours, so I would have to do this for about three hours.

 

Twenty apples a second for three hours - 

a boatload of apples!

 

I'll be looking for a Lithium-ion battery and using the house's electrical outlet rather than relying on gravitational energy conversion or rigging my rowing machine for powering the laptop.

 

Enjoy the Olympics and we'll take a deeper look at things like the motion and energy associated with jumping and perhaps explain how an athlete - or a dancer - creates measurable hang time. And then from there who knows!

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¹ Note that I use the term work here.  Energy is a deep and fundamental concept - deep enough that physicists, who deal with it constantly, don't understand exactly what it is fully.  It can't be created or destroyed, but can change forms.  Energy stored in the chemical bonds of molecules and changed into other forms by rearranging those bonds.  Combine oil and oxygen under the right conditions and you get some new compounds - notably carbon dioxide and water (lots of other stuff too, but ...).  You also get a lot of heat.  The energy stored in  the bonds becomes heat energy.  Now boil some water with this heat and you get steam.  The steam can be converted into a mechanical energy by a steam engine.  This engine can cause something to happen - like spinning a generator which converts the mechanical energy into electrical energy.  And so on...  

Anything that happens in the Universe is associated with energy changing from one form to another.  The process causes stuff to happen.  If something moves we usually say work has been done.  

Think of work as the application of a conversion of energy.  It is measured in the units of energy.  So when I row I'm converting chemical energy in my body into a mechanical energy in my muscles which is converted into another form of mechanical energy which spins the flywheel ... and so on..   I have done work on the flywheel.

Power is just the rate at which energy is converted...  I have learned that people do not have a natural feeling for energy, but they do for power.  

² One of the family activities was boat building. Every year they built a new boat for their place on Lake George.  This sometimes involved homemade steam engines.  Al was a lefty and even machined his own bolts - left handed bolts held his engines together.  Amazing people...

³ An important point.  Electrical energy has to be used as it is created.  Systems that have to keep running usually require some form of storage.

⁴ I add that we handicap my exercise compared to hers.  She is much stronger.

⁵ It just works out to that number.  The potential energy is just E = mgh, where mass is the mass of the apple, g is the acceleration of gravity and h is the distance the apple can fall.

⁶ There is this pesky issue of efficiently converting the energy of the falling apple into electrical energy.  I could probably build a contraption good for about 90%, so I'd had to drop 22 apples a second to get 20 watts of electricity out .. best case.

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Recipe corner - two quick ones  and a quick little experiment

Really good!  It is a bit thrown together, but use it as a guide and then barbecue some corn.  This should be enough for about a dozen ears of corn.

There are many techniques for barbecuing corn on the cob.  I like stripped the ears completely and just throwing them on the grill.  I tend to go until the kernels are nearly charred - it gives a very nutty taste.

 

Masala Dip for Barbecued Corn on the Cob 

Ingredients

° 3 tablespoons garam masala

° 5 tablespoons of a good extra virgin olive oil ( though you could use clarified  butter)

° 4 cloves of garlic

° 150 grams of cilantro (' kept the stems)

° Maldon salt (or any finishing salt)

° lime juice 

° honey

 

Technique

° mix the garam masala , olive oil, garlic and cilantro and the purée

° salt to taste and add a bit of lime juice to taste and bring up the sweetness a bit with honey

 

Roasted Tomato Salad

 

This is just a quick guide - be creative and do your own thing.  The trick is to take advantage of the great tomatoes that are currently in season.  Heirloom tomatoes almost went out of fashion as their yield is poor, but the taste is incredible.  You can only find great ones for about a month in most areas so don't worry about spending more for them.  They are a rare treat!   You could do this with chunks of fresh mozzarella - there are any number of other things you might do.

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 kg of a mixture of halved smallish heirloom and cherry tomatoes.  Find local produce to make sure they are fresh and perfectly ripe. 

° about 50 ml extra virgin olive oil - use a good one

° tablespoon maple syrup

° a bit of a good course finishing salt (Malden is what I use)

° 30-40 grams sliced or roughly chopped toasted pecans

° 2 tablespoons capers fried in a bit of olive oil

° a handful of torn lettuce leaves

° 15 ml lemon infused olive oil

° finely chopped chives

 

Technique

 

° gently toss half of the tomatoes with the olive oil, salt and maple syrup.  place on a rimmed baking sheet cut side up and roast in a 350°F oven for about an hour. They should have started to caramelize a bit.  Remove and cool

° Just before serving toss the roasted and remaining tomatoes, the lettuce, capers and most of the pecans with the lemon infused olive oil.

° serve topped with the remaining pecans and chives

Finally the experiment

When you have a hot grill try grilling a slice of eggplant with a smear of honey followed by some good goat cheese.  There are a thousand ways to take it.  

Have fun!

 

white spaces and learning how to move your focus

Recently I was asked to look at some new online education schemes - after all, large parts of education appear broken and too expensive, there is a disconnect between what is taught and skills requirements and there are probably many business opportunities.  Not much time was allotted, but I've been thinking about this sort of thing for a long time.  

 

I've written quite a bit on the subject in the blog - you can take a look at posts tagged with education.  Rather than my distilling and summarizing it probably makes more sense for someone to think for themselves and then the two of us can have a much deeper discussion and perhaps both of us will learn something.  A good starting point, if anyone is interested, is this short post that outlines some observations and questions I have about teaching and learning.  A regular Omenti reader got in touch and we had a great conversation that went on for more than a week.  Eventually I'd like to address some of those points, but I need to learn much more first.  

 

But I'm seeing some very rigid schemes emerge.  Everyone wants to teach to some curricula and make maximum use of a student's and teacher's time.  What bothers me is this is very different from the most valuable piece of my education.

 

The K-12 schools I went to were probably average.  There were a few inspired teachers and many others who, in retrospect, were probably marking time.  The work load wasn't terribly high and I didn't have any real organized extracurricular activities or the micro-scheduling that seems to be common today in homes that are trying to get their kids into the "best" colleges so they can get the "best" jobs and presumably make the most money and be "happiest"...

 

What was really important to me was the freedom my parents gave me (that is probably the single most important post I've penned).  I was, out of necessity, a free-range kid and I remember long periods of being really bored.  

 

With time I learned how to fill those white spaces in my day with activities that fueled my curiosity.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was learning how to learn

 

I also learned how to focus on something deeply - I've found, at least for me, that single-tasking for hours at at time is very important if you want to engage your mind.  You have to realize it can take hours, days, weeks and sometimes much longer to wrestle with a set of ideas until you get to the point where the solution arrives and seems, in retrospect, simple and trivial.  You have to learn how to pace yourself and to shift your focus to different tasks so you don't burn out on a specific problem.

 

When I talk to professor friends who teach physics, math, astrophysics, chemistry, biology and the like at the graduate level they note the successful students are those who have learned the trick of focus and single tasking.  Increasingly they note that multi-field synthesis is critical too.  It is useful to talk to others who are doing very different things.  That allows you to connect the dots and to form really simple questions that perhaps can be answered.

 

I spent a few decades working in the research arm of a R&D lab connected to a huge company.  It surprised me to see how many tasks peers in the business end were forced to juggle.  They were clearly doing a lot of work, but it was often without perspective and frequently without a lot of thought (there were exceptions).  I consider this a failure of the company to realize the ongoing education of many of its employees as they worked.  Ultimately the company failed and was purchased by another for its assets and name.  It isn't clear the new entity is much better - I don't see how they will learn and evolve in the long term, but we'll see.  But this is a diversion...

 

I think there is a lot of value to be found in focusing more on how to learn and how to focus deeply.  I worry the Internet gives "answers" too quickly - the act of puzzling over something is very important.  When I was being mentored the US postal service imposed a week long latency in getting answers which forced me to learn how to ask better questions that weren't as trivial.  Wikipedia would have probably been a disaster for me and I would have never reached a point where I could go on to physics.

 

Of course many items that are presently taught will be outmoded.  Memorization is far less important now and perhaps more effort can go into teaching reasoning.  I'd love to see logic and statistical thinking taught in 10^th or 11^th grade.  These are critical skills that most American citizens lack.

 

I also think it is critically important to teach the arts.  Not just an appreciation for them, but attempting to get basic skills across.  Much of my thinking is visual and even musical even though I'm not a good artist and even worse as a musician.  But I have enough that it helps me connect with people who are skilled either in person or studying what they've done and that has led to enough deep insights that all of my bumbling along has been worth the effort.¹  Teaching the arts takes a lot of time and a different approach than what currently exists.  Music composition or illustration is probably about as difficult as teaching basic literacy - figure at least eight or nine years before most people can do coherent work.  

 

The notion of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education is stale in my mind.  What some call STEAM (STEM plus the Arts) is much more relevant and one of the secret sauces at Apple and Pixar.  Fortunately some Universities have recognized this and are extending their focus, but we need it to happen earlier.

 

I've given too many links that I'd ask you to read and I'd love to hear your ideas.  In parting I mention that in the past few years I've learned that sport is also something important and, at least for me, combining sport and physics has led to some insight I wouldn't have found elsewhere.  Others have found deep and beautiful connections with many of the sciences and cooking.  Whatever your field, at some level there are probably seemingly poorly coupled connections that turn out to be deeply important.

 

Closing the circle I note that few, if any, of the new education schemes I've seen seem to have a lot of potential for addressing the fundamental issues head on...  The good news is we're entering a period of great experimentation and, if we're lucky, many or all of these will fade away and be replaced with new models from the learnings that result.  The ride should be fantastic!

 

But one last thought...

 

Americans place far too much weight on native talent.  What a foolish notion!  Hard work and curiosity are far more important. 

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¹ Every good natural scientist I know has at least one passion in the arts and more than a few had to make a choice.   In the US there is too much of an assumption that talent is central.  Of course that is a corrupt notion.  What is really important is curiosity and hard work.

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Another black bean veggie burger.

I've been playing with veggie burgers lately and here is the latest iteration.  It was excellent, but I'm sure could be improved.  Note the egg, so it isn't vegan.  The egg is there to hold it together.

 

Ingredients

° 4 tablespoons of barbecue sauce (I had a free sample of hickory bbq sauce)

° 1 tablespoon dark molasses

° 1 15 ounce can of black beans (drained)

° 2 cups of cooked brown rice (left over from another meal in my case, so I used a cup)

° 1 tablespoon of steel cut oats (for binder)

° 1/4 finely chopped red onion - probably about 2 tablespoons

° half a jalapeno pepper finely chopped

° about a teaspoon of chili powder

° some ground cumin

° uniodized salt and freshly ground pepper

° 1 egg white.  I probably could have used a bit more, so beware.  This is the binding agent

 

Technique

° Stir together barbecue sauce and molasses. 

° In a large bowl, mash beans and stir in 3 tablespoons of the barbecue mixture (keep the rest  for brushing) and remaining ingredients -- rice through egg white. Form into four 6 oz patties

° Cook in some olive oil in a non-stick skillet (that means seasoned cast iron for me) over medium. Cook burgers for 2 minutes on one side. Turn and brush with remaining barbecue/molasses mixture. Cook for another 2 minutes.  You could top with a cheese when you flip it.  Sadly it doesn't hold together well enough to really work on a barbecue grill, but if you get the binders better - perhaps

 

 

touching science

Several people forwarded this great clip from MSNBC.  I'm used to terrible science coverage in the mainstream news.  It tends to get completely lost and misses the point of the wonder and awe of the sport.  But this piece is different.  While there is little detail (and in 11 minutes it would be inappropriate to give detail), it does get at the "why" question.  Even the post interview session between Brian Williams and Harry Smith seem to touch on that.  This is so rare - I wish it happened more often. (sadly it is in Flash, so it won't work if your machine doesn't support that cumbersome and rapidly receding delivery system

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

Last night I sent a piece to several people that I'll reprint here - so those of you who saw this can move on to the recipe section if that is of interest. 

 

I've long been fascinated by what you can do experimentally for a very low budget with a bit of cleverness. There are a lot of people interested in science who might be able to participate ranging from kids to retired people.  Some will have a lot of scientific sophistication and others not so much - but everyone stands to learn a lot.  

In the 80s I worked on some amateur cosmic ray and radio telescopes and have continued with mostly instrumentation specific work to help people get started.  A few of these have made really nice projects with people I've mentored.   Often building this sort of thing focuses you on the important things - namely how do you ask questions, what are those questions and how do you sort out what you find …  are they rich enough to lead to deeper questions.

This works at the low end as a lot has never been studied - big science, even table top science in the Universities, tends to focus on hot areas.  There is nothing wrong with looking into things that may not be hot and perhaps something startling can happen.

I've wanted to orbit a satellite for a long time.  Not for the sake of flying a satellite, but for putting some instruments in orbit to make measurements I can't make on Earth.  Amateur radio satellites have been around for four decades and low end "Cubesats" for about ten years.  Amateur radio sats (Amsats or Hamsats) aren't terribly interesting as they are just communications relays.  Lots of fun radio work and engineering, I guess, but no science.   Cubesats are small cubes that tag along with "real" satellites.  The chassis and core electronics are very inexpensive - it is possible to put something crude together for about $15k and go to orbit.  The failure rate is pretty high due to the harsh environment, so you need some serious experience building them, but there are is potentially a lot of science that can be done.  Unfortunately I don't have a lot of money and it isn't possible for me to drop $15k on a project like that (realistically more like $30k to $40k with the engineering effort required).

But a Kickstarter project appeared that gives people bits of time and even the ability to design experiments sharing one of these.  I'm hoping it is the first of many.  



I ponied up $775 and the cc has been triggered - the project succeeded.  I have a student I've been mentoring and I've proposed we come up with something centrally interesting to him and his studies  (he is a junior in physics).  It may be a total failure for us - it may fail to orbit, our experiment may fail - there are so many potential failure modes…  But I'm getting my money's worth from the learning, he may get some good experience. (I'm going to leave most of the experimental prototyping and programming up to him - but I'm going to make sure that the experiment is sound enough and work with him on dealing with the information we get)

pretty exciting stuff!

I've been in contact with some people at Woods Hole about possible serious amateur science that could be attached to some of their vehicles - or what it might mean to see amateur unmanned craft - thermal gliders as well as shorter range craft that can go deeper .  The budgets for what they do are being hammered as the right wing hates any form of science that deals directly or indirectly with environmental issues.  James Cameron is doing some great work at the high end, but so much of the ocean is virgin (anything from 300 meters down to 100 meters above the floor is basically an unknown..)  

And little computers with net, gps, bluetooth 4, and cameras … iPhones and iPads for example … are potentially very powerful. There is an enormous opportunity opening up for amateurs as well as education.  There is also a fascinating possibility for very talented engineers and designers to make the kit - a very small, but talented cottage industry supports the Cubesat efforts of many.

What triggered me writing this was a call for skycube funding.  



Skycube is just a twitter transponder and a camera.  You can go out and watch it go overhead and send your message out through it and perhaps snap a photo.  At the end of its operational life a 10 foot reflective balloon will be deployed to increase the tiny drag in the extreme upper atmosphere enough to force a re-entry.  Not only does this keep low Earth orbit neat and tidy, but the craft will be highly visbile with the balloon out just after sunset and before sunrise when it is flying overhead. It would be a *wonderful* way to give kids a sense of awe and a bit of participatory ownership in something cool (even if it is very limited).  If it sparks a few dozen young minds, that's all that is important.

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a sort of recipe and a review

Gregg recently had a birthday and he confessed to loving pie, so here is my go-to apple pie and crust recipe.  Note that I am a vegetarian and don't use lard - many pie lovers scream.  

 

the dough is a bit odd, but the mix of butter and shortening work.  As a vegetarian I don't do lard.  This one really works well! Feel free to substitute your own, or buy a ready made crust if you are just learning (the filling part is easy)

 

Pie Dough for a Double Crust 9" Pie

Ingredients 

 

° 2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

° 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, cut into half inch cubes

° 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening, cold

° 3/4 teaspoon of kosher salt

° Yolk of 1 egg, beaten  

° 1 teaspoon cider vinegar

° 1/4 cup icy water, from 3/4 cup ice water.

 

Technique

° Using the pulse function of a food processor, blend together the flour, fats and salt until the mixture resembles a coarse meal. There should be pebbles of butter throughout the mixture.

° Combine egg yolk,vinegar and ¾ cup icy water. Drizzle about 4 tablespoons of this mixture over the dough and gently pulse to combine. Test it by gathering a golfball-size bit of dough and squeeze a bit. If it does not hold together, add a little more of the liquid and stir or pulse, then check again. Iterate.

° Plop the dough onto a lightly floured surface and form into a ball. Don't overwork the flour, but not too careful; the dough should hold together. Divide the ball in half with a knife or a pastry scraper, then divide each portion in half again, and again, to create eight portions. Using the heel of your hand, flatten each portion of dough once or twice to expand the pebbles of butter, then gather the dough together again in one ball. Divide this ball in half.

° Flatten each ball into a 5- or 6-inch disc and dust lightly with flour. Wrap the discs in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for at least 60 minutes.

 

Apple Pie 

Ingredients

 

° 2 tablespoons  (30g)unsalted butter

° ~1.25kg apples, peeled and cored, then cut into wedges (5 large honeycrisps will do it - but I like mixing honeycrisp, braeburn and gold delicious)

° 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

° 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

° 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

° 175g white sugar

° 2 tablespoons (15g) all-purpose flour

° 2 teaspoons  (8g) cornstarch

° 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

° 1 recipe of the pie dough 

° 1 large egg, lightly beaten.

 

Technique

°  Melt butter in a large sauté pan set over medium-high heat and add apples to the pan. Stir to coat fruit with butter and cook, stirring occasionally. Meanwhile, whisk together the spices, salt and 2/3 cup sugar, and sprinkle this over the pan, stirring to combine. Lower heat and cook until apples have started to soften, approximately 5 to 7 minutes. Sprinkle the flour and cornstarch over the apples and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, another 3 to 5 minutes. Remove pan from heat, add cider vinegar, stir and scrape fruit mixture into a bowl and allow to cool completely. (spread it out on a cooking sheet if you want to cool it rapidly)

° Position a large baking sheet on the middle rack of oven and preheat to 425°F. (have you calibrated your oven recently?) Remove a disc of dough from the 'fridge and, roll it out on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Fit this crust into a 9-inch pie plate, trimming it to leave a 1/2-inch overhang. Place this plate, with the dough, in the freezer.  If you are like me there is some pathwork to do.  Not to worry - it all tastes great:-)

° Roll out the remaining dough on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 10 or 11 inches in diameter.

° Remove pie crust from freezer and put the cooled pie filling into it. Cover with remaining dough. Press the edges together, trim the excess, then crimp the edges. With a sharp knife, cut three or four steam vents in the top of the crust. Lightly brush the top of the pie with egg wash and sprinkle with remaining tablespoon of sugar.  (makes it look cool:-)

° Place pie in oven and bake on hot baking sheet for 20 minutes, then reduce temperature to 375°. Continue to cook until the interior is bubbling and the crust is golden brown, about 30 to 40 minutes more. Remove and allow to cool on a pie rack, about two impossibly long hours. 

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 Since many of you are frequently in Manhattan a review of sorts. 

 

NYC Gelato Review -  L'Arte del Gelato in the West Village

 

There are people who will chase after foods in search of "the best" - at least to them - and I can understand that.  I'm interested in "the best" chocolate, ice cream, milk shake and gelato.  There are a few other things, but these are items I'll mentally catalog and celebrate when I find a new level.

About two weeks ago I had the best gelato of my life.

L'Arte del Gelato in Manhattan's West Village at 75^th and 7^th.   I've been twice and have tried five flavors (two of their way too small "medium" cups) and Sukie tried two along with one of their drinks.  I'm clearly going back for more, but can recommend:

Vaniglia del Madagascar

Stracciatella

Mokaccino

Cioccolato

Biscotti

The Madagascar Vanilla was particularly wonderful as was the Chocolate Mocha.  It isn't often that I can praise a vanilla, but this one is worthy.   I'm told their olive oil is excellent, but I didn't try. Sukie loved their Affogato all'Arancia, which is fresh squeezed orange juice with lemon sorbetto and a bit of Campari.

Very spendy but certainly worth it.  The next time I'm tempted to skip lunch and just order a pint, which is a comparative bargain at $10.  

Grom is also very good in my book, but I really need to check it out again  to see which is really the best, but so far I'm loving this one.

Highly recommended!!

Some things you have to take into your own hands...  for milkshakes the bsst I've had are those I make.  I'm not particularly gifted and I suspect most simple don't pay enough attention to detail.  

 

bandwidth caps

I spend a lot of time working on issues associated with energy and find most people have only hazy concepts of the basics - what is power and how does it differ from energy? or that electricity is not a form of energy storage, but is rather used for distribution.  People also only have a sketchy notion of how the Internet works (let alone the component networks) and a huge amount of disinformation exists.  Some carriers would have you think that bandwidth is a limited resource like a fuel, when that is far from the truth.

 

I'll keep this short to give you more time to watch a very useful and fairly non-technical video interview of four experts talking about wired broadband bandwidth caps.  When you study this and have access to information (sadly it is very difficult to come by the right kind of information), you quickly learn that bandwidth caps to not control problems associated with overloading, but that they are really part of a business model to extract as much profit as possible without having to invest in infrastructure.  

 

Dan Jasper, Christopher Mitchell, Reid Fishler and Benoit Felten are interviewed by TWiT (episode 133) ¹

It is long, but if you aren't an expert I recommend finding the time to watch it or listen like I did -  the audio version is here. (mp3)

 

We really need consumer choice and real competition in the US.  The FCC and Congress have failed the country.  Several on the panel point out that the decision makers don't seem to understand the tech or its implications - let alone how society interacts with it.  That was certainly true in the telco I once worked for.  When I had access to data it was clear that caps were effective in supporting an business model and protecting other parts of the business - but had nothing to do with serious network management or the costs of running the network.  Since then I've done some work for another carrier and saw the same thing.²

 

So an apology for the quick and dirty post - I'll return to the normal format next time, but I think the video or audio is worth it.

___________

¹ Disclaimer: Benoit is a friend.  Not only is he a good guy, but he also happens to be smart.

² I'm out of the four year NDA on the second and the first was about 11 years ago in a company that was purchased by another.  I can't really fault the companies - they are just maximizing shareholder value, but I do fault national policy which has allowed a non-competitive system that doesn't serve Americans very well to sustain itself.  This is really important and perhaps it is best to think of it as infrastructure that is centrally important to the economy rather than a service that is allowed to prop up old fashioned services at the cost of innovation.

__________

Recipe

Tonight I barbecued some veggie burgers - homemade blackbean-quinoa-pecan burgers on whole grain kamut wheat honey bread.   I threw on some roasted red peppers (you can never go wrong with roasted red peppers),  a homemade cherry catsup (at the bottom of this post), and some very fresh arugula.  It was most excellent.  I served it with barbecued sweet corn with homemade blueberry ice cream served with berries and nuts. 

mmmm

Here is what I did for the burgers:

 

Black Bean, Quinoa and Pecan Burgers

Ingredients

°  1 15 oz can of black beans rinsed and drained (you can also use dry beans - just soak em)

° 1/4 cup quinoa (I like Bob's Red Mill)

° 1/2 cup water

° 1/4 cup panko (you can use bread crumbs, but panko seems to work better as a "glue" with the egg)

° 1/4 cup finely chopped pecans

° 1/4 cup finely minced yellow or red bell pepper

° 2 tbl finely minced red onion

° 1 large clove garlic - finely minced

° 1-1/2 tsp ground cumin

° 1/2 tsp salt (non-iodized!)

° 1 tsp of a hot pepper sauce (any will do)

° 1 large egg

 

Technique

° Bring the quinoa and water to a boil in a pan.  Reduce heat to a simmer until the water has been absorbed - 12 to 15 minutes

° Mash the beans into a paste with a fork leaving some whole beans intact

° Mix everything together in a largish bowl using your hands until well mixed, but not over mixed.  I find it useful to put my hand into a "claw" shape for this task.

° Form them into patties - I turned it into a half dozen.

° Barbecue.  Slather the catsup (or bbq sauce if you must) on during the process.  Don't forget to bbq some red bell peppers and other veggies at the same time!

 

a birthday

The Omenti blog is a year old today.  When I started I gave it a year and decided to write about what seemed interesting at the time without editing for an hour or so perhaps once or twice a week.  The frequency turned out to be a bit higher - there were 125 posts.  

 

The one year mark came and it was time to decide if the effort was worthwhile.  It certainly isn't a popular place, but I'm not terribly interested in that.  It has started a few conversations - which was the original aim.  Not many, but I finally came to the conclusion there are enough to justify the time spent.  

 

A huge thank you to all who continued the discussions and who helped spark and fuel new ones and to those who had commens on both sides of the "should I continue the blog" question!   I wish I could offer something like a nice piece of cheesecake as part of a thank you celebration.

 

I don't know what I'll be writing about and suspect the path will wander as it has.  If you have ideas and comments, please let me know. And if you know of others who might enjoy the blog, feel free to point them at it.

 

Tonight I'll be in the city for a dinner with friends, but perhaps a celebration in the near future.  Perhaps something like a slice of pie, cheesecake or a good brownie from a great bakery - I'll let someone else do the baking this time. 

 

In the meantime a recipe:

___________

The format of this one is not standard, but rather from an email I sent to one of you a year ago. I won't translate as it seems better in the narrative form.  

This is the time of year that excellent tomatoes begin to appear.  If you find some with amazing flavor and want an equally amazing dinner the trick is to keep things simple.  This  is a tomato and pasta dish I dream about all Winter and Fall.  If the ingredients are great it can be spectacular and it also happens to be amazingly simple

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

Some time ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish.  The tomatoes were
in chucks and not really cooked.  It would only work if they were perfect so
I gave it a try.  Here is about what I did.  This would be enough for two
hungry people or four people if served as a side course.

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great
flavor.  I would go with an heirloom tomato as the new ones have so much
goodness bred out of them.  My guess is I had maybe about one and a half
pounds of tomato.  Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a
big enough bowl (how is that for precision?)  be sure and get some of the
juice that is sitting on the cutting board.

Pour some good extra virgin olive oil on them.  Maybe two glugs (another quality
measurement).  Put a good amount of a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper on them stirring to mix.  Let them sit.

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in.  Cheap salt
of course

Now chop a strong red onion or some scallions into slivers.  Maybe about a
quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula 

Cook about a half pound of pasta and try to stay away from the marinating
tomatoes

Place the onions on top of the tomatoes spreading them out, then make a layer
of arugula choppings

Now dump the pasta on top of the layered mixture in the bowl and leave it
for a two or three minutes.  To deal with the frustration grate some good
cheese for a topping and top it.  The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath, but just barely.

Now mix it all up and serve.

   

the art of really simple questions

Why?

 

In the last post we looked at the Higgs candidate announcement at CERN with a bit of the historical context.  Searches like this are expensive in time and money.  Why do we do them?

 

The motivation to the scientist is a fundamental curiosity and a need to expand the amount of communal ignorance in the field - to ask new and deeper questions.  Formulating and asking the right sort of questions is the trick and is how science progresses.  Fortunately there are side benefits that can drive technology and benefit humanity along the way.

 

 

One of the beauties of studying Nature is that it is comprehensible - at least so far.  The tactic is to formulate really good questions and the best tend to be clean and simple.  There is usually some technique involved and that can be extremely difficult, but the basic questions are simple.

 

People often give me strange looks when I tell them I love physics because it is the simplest of all of the sciences.  By that I mean that it tends to study the basics of matter, space and time.  Particle physics is particularly attractive as it studies the smallest bits of matter.  The problem is the Earth lacks the conditions to allow exotic forms of matter that existed when the Universe was very young, so the trick has been to slam them bits together hard - really hard. The energies involved are so high that temperatures of the very early Universe are created in tiny packets for very short amounts of time and, thanks to Einstein, the energy can convert into exotic short lived particles.  These particles decay into more stable particles that fly away from the collision site at very high speeds and by detecting these and their masses, charge, and their kinetic energy we can infer what was created in the flash.

 

Early particle accelerators could fit in a lab room, but higher energies required larger and larger accelerators.  The ISR at CERN has a design energy of 7 TeV.  This is about 7,500 times as much as the energy associated with the mass of a proton - its rest mass.  It effectively has 7,500 times as much energy as a resting proton.  This is about the energy of a flying mosquito.  There are a lot of protons in the storage ring.  If we add up all of the energy in the protons circulating the ring - all of those mosquito level energies - we get a big number as there are a lot of protons.  The total amount of kinetic energy of the protons in the ring is about the same as a battleship moving at several kph (left as an exercise for the reader).

 

The regions where the collisions take place are surrounded by onion like layers of detectors to sort out out all of the debris.  The two big ones at CERN are Atlas and CMS - for a sense of the scale of the machine, check out these images taken a few years ago during the construction phase.

 

But why do this?  Is it worthwhile?

 

I'm in the camp that the measured pursuit of fundamental science is a good thing.  In the process of getting there new ground in supporting fields is often broken and there are sometimes serendipitous discoveries that can change society.  I'll mention a couple of examples.

 

Recently Om asked about the data rate of the experiments at CERN.  That is a tricky number to get at as an enormous amount of information is rejected.   Each collision produces a large number of "tracks" - the paths of the product particles.  The data rate at the intersection points of the CMS detector are on the order of 40 terabytes per second in its current configuration - far too high for any current computation system to handle¹  The first set of triggers are fashioned from hardware logic and demand key pieces of important information be in place to be interesting.  These make their decision in about a millionth of a second.  The number of candidates that survive this step is reduced by a factor of about a thousand.

The next stage of the trigger logic is software - mostly C++ and some assembler.  This is powerful to reduce the number of interesting events by another factor of 1,000.  Now the data rate is manageable at about a millionth the original rate - about 40 billion bytes a second.  The rate is being increased as the capabilities of each detector is improved.  Atlas, the other big detector, has a three layer trigger that reduces events by a factor of about 200,000.  It produces about 320 Megabytes per second.  The total data coming from current detectors on the ISR is about 1 Gigabytes per second and rapidly increasing.²

 

Most of these events turn out to be uninteresting and it is necessary to quickly figure out what is boring and get rid of it.  This is done by using layers of hardware and software "triggers".

 

All of this data - this candidate information - needs to be shipped around the world to several thousand physicists and carefully processed.  The ISR supports something North of about a hundred investigations at any time - dozens within each major collaboration.  Some people work on a few investigations simultaneously and hundreds of Ph.D.s are one byproduct.³ High performance databases and networks are a byproduct.  A friend who happens to be one of the "gods" of computer science like to hang out with CERN and JPL types as their needs are often beyond what is available and they drive interesting areas of computer science.⁴

 

Another bit of serendipity begun at CERN impacted the Internet deeply.  Tim Breners-Lee created the world wide web to aid particle physics collaboration.  When I was a grad student collaborations usually involved at most perhaps a half dozen institutions and maybe two dozen people.  (Check out a few photos of my Ph.D. thesis experiment. ) A major apparatus might support a handful of investigations.  As energies increased detectors became much more complex and a great amount of sharing was necessary.  Now we have hundreds of institutions and thousands of people working at single shared detectors with hundreds of investigations underway.  Many of these are interconnected.  Effective mechanisms of communication were necessary and it isn't a big surprise that particle physics began to use precursors to the Internet in the late 70s with most institutions being users before the Internet became the real Internet.  

 

Physicists were too uninformed and dumb to know that hierarchical networked information schemes wouldn't work, so they ended up inventing a practical and nearly good enough framework out of necessity - the human part of networked collaboration badly needed common repositories that were easy to navigate.  Another physicist named Larry Smarr managed a group that, among other things, made Tim's WWW practical - Mosaic was the first effective browser.  The Internet was already rapidly growing at the time based on some policy moves by the US government in the late 1980s. The WWW, Mosaic and subsequent development created an explosion of use.  It is important to note the plodding phone companies had their own notion of what a massive data network should be and were in the process of working through an International standards body.  Up until about 1995 the plan of record at AT&T and probably many other firms, was very different and would have created something that would have been under much greater centralized control with a cost structure that would have been cost prohibitive to users like you, me and your elderly relatives.  A revolution would not have taken place.  The architecture and nature of a worldwide data network was was up for grabs early on.  The timing of the growth combined with the slow motion of the telcos gave the Internet a shot and it, quite simply and fortunately, won.⁵

 

I believe that serendipity like this as well as the creation of a deep technical talent pool is sufficient to justify the cost of the sport.  Unfortunately the level of commitment in the US has fallen and continues to fall and Europe is also faltering.  China, on the other hand, is rapidly becoming a major powerhouse and the next generation of accelerator may well be Chinese.  It is great there is still a strong curiosity as we are still at the beginning of the process and hopefully will go in much deeper.  And in the process new technologies and a stream of curious people who create them will continue to flow.

 

This give me great optimism for the future.

_________

¹ A generous estimate of all Internet traffic is about 30,000 PB a month - about 12 TB a second .. so this single detector at CERN is currently seeing "prompt" data  at about three times the rate the entire Internet generates.

² I'm comfortable with using the term "data" here as it means something to me in the context of experimental particle physics.  It is some carefully massaged information, but how it is massaged is carefully thought out and procedures exist to detect problems.

³ Most of these Ph.D.s will not work in particle physics past a postdoc or two, but often find work in industry.  Many of them do high performance and/or high efficiency software. Friends who manage software projects tell me these guys are often much better than regular computer science graduates in these specialized areas.  I find there is an enormous ability to be interested in multiple fields and connect the dots.  Physics may be terribly specialized at the discipline level, but turns out to be cover many fields in practice and experimental physicists are often powerful technical generalists.

An interesting artifact is C++ has some very efficient compilers and libraries for those who need the best performance they can get without resorting to using assemblers and having a deep understanding of their computational platforms.  

⁴ The JPL connection and the notion of super robust zero effective fault computing is also an interesting driver and worth writing about in a future post.  It turns out there is a connection with a boat on a goose pond.

⁵ A big disconnect between Bell Labs and AT&T proper was knowing about and betting on the Internet.  Few in Research had their doubts about the Internet, but the company was on a very different internal course through the ITU.  The company had to change all of a sudden and did that with a few clueful folks and a boatload of - well  - flashy ballast.  It couldn't keep up and ultimately failed, only to be acquired by one of the "Baby Bells" that had been created at divestiture.  Its name had branding value, so at least that piece continues.

I'm convinced that without the rapid expansion of the Internet fueled by the emergency of the Web it is likely the carriers and the ITU would have won and it is likely you would be using something closer to a commercial Minitel rather than what you have today - if you even had access.

_________

Recipe

A regular reader and good friend happens to be of Belarusian ancestry.  One of her aunts makes a great cake that uses egg whites.  I've been making many rich gelatos and ice creams lately and they tend to use a lot of yolks ...  I was looking for something to use the egg whites and this is just the ticket.

I'm not sure if it really is Belarusian or if someone from Belarus just uses it, but it is wonderful.  The recipe is somewhat modified with a bit less butter and adjusted to use cornflour rather than potato starch as Sukie is allergic to potatoes.  It is also terrific with about a tablespoon of lemon zest mixed in.

 

Belarusian Egg White Cake

 

 

Ingredients

 

 

° 6 large egg whites

 

° 250 g caster sugar

° 160 g plain/all-purpose flour

° 1 Tbsp cornflour

° 1 Tsp baking powder

° 100 g melted butter (just under a stick), slightly cooled

° 2 Tsp good quality vanilla extract

 

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 350° F with a rack in the center

 

° Whisk the egg whites with a bit (2 Tsp or so) of sugar until thick and pale and very foamy. Stir in the vanilla. Mix the rest of the sugar with flour, corn flower and baking powder, then sift into the egg mixture and fold in gently.

° Finally fold in cool melted butter.

° Pour the batter into a buttered or pam'ed bunt pan and bake  for 30-40 minutes. It is done when a wooden toothpick comes clean

° Cool slightly before turning out of the pan.

____

Many of the recent recipes have been desserts and not exactly healthy.  I tend to give most of them away.  Here is a salad under prep that shows I can make healthy food.  This is before a layer of arugula.  There are several types of green leafy vegetables, scallions, quinoa, pecans, local tomatoes, and grilled carrots and two grilled orange and red peppers.  With a balsamic vinegar and rosemary infused olive oil it is delicious and quiet healthy.  The next one will have a layer of roasted sweet potato.

You can't go wrong this time of year.  Just go out and do it! 

 

a nearly two hundred year conversation with nature about matter

By the early 1800s playing around with electricity and magnets was all the rage in Europe.  People knew lightning was something to be avoided approximately forever until stories of a curious American kite flier and a key began to circulate.  And nearly a millennium had passed since the Chinese first recognized that lodestone had a curious property that pointed to the pole and allowed them to build a device to aid navigation. Now an intellectual awakening had inspired many to play around a bit with nature and a few were beginning to systematically study and theorize.

 

In 1820 Han Christian Ørsted was giving a demonstration to his physics class at the University of Copenhagen.  Ørsted was an interesting fellow.  A good friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the Danish intelligencia, he had a doctorate in philosophy and was partial to Kant.  Academic fields weren't terribly specialized at the time and he managed to move to physics and spent most of his time studying electricity, magnetism and acoustics.

 

During this rather routine demonstration he noticed that when an electric current in a wire was switched on and off the needle on a nearby compass moved away from North.  Perhaps it was his background as a Kantian scholar that sensitized him to the notion of deep relationships between natural phenomena, but he was the first to publish findings that showed something deep was going on.  This observation managed to ignite an enormous amount of work eventually leading to Michael Faraday creating one of the first theory on the unification of electricity and magnetism.

 

Practical uses emerged with the telegraph probably being the first major invention based on the discovery.  Communications at the speed of light across long distances were now possible.  It was an invention that set the communications revolution in motion and may have had a role in the revolutions that spread through Europe in 1848.  It also naturally led to telephony and beyond, but for another day...

 

Scientists were trying to sort out just what was going one - just what was Nature doing?  Faraday's theory was cut but flawed.   Finally the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell cracked the problem when he published a set of equations that showed the fundamental between electricity and magnetism.¹ In a beautiful swoop he had created the first important unification - the electromagnetic force was now recognized as an underlying force of nature.  Electricity and magnetism were, by themselves, just aspects of it and it was impossible to understand Nature without this unification.  It is curious that this was published within about a decade of Darwin's work - two of the most important pieces of science in the 19^th century - two of the most important pieces of science ever.

 

It is impossible to understate how important this discovery was.  Physicists were realizing mathematics was the language of Nature - why is still a mystery - and Maxwell had produced a beautiful mathematical model that made possible much of modern technology.  It was the key to the second half of the Industrial Revolution.  It also started a search for other unifications in physics.  People attempted to bring in the force of gravity, but far too little was known at the time to allow any serious progress.  But asking questions is often fruitful and new unknowns - new bits of our collective ignorance - were illuminated and that is the goal of science.

 

Maxwell was a smart guy and had another important idea.  He defined an electromagnetic field.  In physics a field is some physical quantity attached to every point in space.  It might be simple numbers - you can think about temperatures in a room - 75° over here, 71.3° at that point near the air conditioner vent, 137.1° near the light bulb, and so on.  It can be more complex - a vector with a magnitude and direction like the wind for example.   It can get more complex - gravity comes to mind, but for now a field is something that just fills up space and has something associated with it.  Fields exist in the vacuum of space.  A nice way to think about is that a field creates a condition in space such that when a particle is placed there it feels a force.²

 

If you shake a charged particle like an electron,  it interacts with the field  You can pluck the field and create a disturbance - a disturbance that quickly moves away at the speed of light.  It turns out this disturbance is a particle.  In this case a massless elementary one called a photon.  It is what carries the force in electromagnetism - it is the fundamental quantum, or smallest piece, of electromagnetic radiation - visible light, radio waves, microwave oven radiation and so on...

 

Physics made huge progress over the next six decades. Nuclear radiation, quantum mechanics, a beginning of an understanding of what goes on in stars and so on.  Physicists were becoming adroit at asking Nature questions and sorting out the deeper structures and a new force that held the atomic nucleus had been discovered.  There was a real question about unifying this with the electromagnetic force and gravity.

 

The electromagnetic force is basically what makes chemistry possible and holds our atoms togethers.   Unfortunately, once you got beyond the simplest cases there was a bit problem - infinities began to appear.  Imagine trying to do your taxes or see what your stock portfolio is worth.  You work through the first step and get a meaningful result, but as you proceed beyond that every time you calculate you find you have an infinite amount of money even though the bank suggests otherwise.  Many models ranging from the sort of sensible to the bizarre were produced, but none of them were very "physical" - they only worked for special cases and were obviously contrived.

 

Experiments with radar that were driving wartime technologies gave a clearer picture - enough to give Hans Bethe enough intuition to make some real progress.  Rapidly Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga published the first realistic quantum electrodynamic field theories.  Feynman's formulation was particularly elegant and is still used.  They had come up with a mechanism for dispatching the infinities and perhaps the most predictive theory in all of science was created.  It is possible to predict what Nature is doing to better than one part in a trillion - about the same as measuring the distance from Los Angeles to New York to the precision of a tenth the width of a human hair. 

 

There is another force called the weak force that is important to a process that powers the stars.  More of those nasty infinities reared their ugly heads when folks tried to unify this force with electromagnetism.  It wasn't clear that this is how nature really behaved, but on a hunch people kept trying.  In 1971 Gerard ‘t Hooft showed that a particle could change its identity by emitting one of two very heavy short-lived particles known as Z and W bosons.³  If they existed some mathematical trickery could be made to work and a predictive theory would emerge.  Indeed they did and a good model for the real process was validated.  Unificated seemed to be how Nature works and several people were splashed with Swedish Holy Water in celebration.

 

Sweet - now we had a unified Electroweak Theory

 

The main force associated with the nucleus is the strong force - the force that binds the inner bits of an atom together.  More of those nasty infinities, but Peter Higgs and about a half dozen others proposed a solution.  Basically a field that permeates space like the electromagnetic and gravitational fields.  It turns out that when you shake this in the right way a disturbance is formed - a distrubance that happens to be a particle called the Higgs boson.  So the Higgs field is a clever construction - a model - to describe how Nature works.  The real quesion was "does she?"

 

The reason why I brought up fields is they are the more natural way to look at what Nature is up to here.  The particle is something that can be created under the right conditions if the field is present.  Detecting the particle is a proof the field exists.

 

So think about those early experimenters when they were playing with magnetism. Many items - like a person, a candle or a piece of paper don't respond to the magnetic field from a strong nearby magnet - from their point of view it is as if the field didn't exist.⁴ A chunk of iron, on the other hand, can feel a great amount of force when popped into this field.  Different materials may interact at differing levels of force.

 

Something similar is going on with the Higgs field.  Photons don't interact at all and just zip through at the speed of light.  Electrons interact a bit and the artifact of this interaction turns out to be manifest as their mass.  The photon has no mass, the electron a bit.  Protons and neutrons, the big particles that make up the nucleus of an atom, interact much more than the electron - nearly 2,000 times more and this translates to their much heavier mass.  Other fundamental particles - like the Z and W mentioned above, are even more massive.  The Higgs particle is really massive - a bit over 130 times more massive than the proton.

 

A model that unifies the electromagnetic and a couple of nuclear forces is known as the Standard Model.⁵  It has been remarkably success and predictive since the mid 1970s.  It has a nasty infinity that the Higgs field solves.  So it has been validated..  

 

Well, sort of...  There are still a number of important details about the Higgs particle.  Is it unique or does Nature have a variety? There are some subtle results discovered over the past two decades that seem to break the model just a bit.  And the model is really ugly  -  did Nature pick that form?  And of course it doesn't include the other major force gravity and now we have dark matter and dark energy to contend with. This is just the last of the twelve particles that make up the standard model and we'll go beyond that some day.

 

This is only a beginning

 

What has been learned is that Nature is pretty good about unifying these forces and that points to something much deeper and that something may be very beautiful.  I've run out of time and it is way beyond the scope of this sort of note, but I'll go into it just a bit.

 

At the time of the Big Bang there was an enormous concentration of energy.  The temperature was way beyond astronomical and there was a lot of energy available to allow many processes to take place.  As it cooled some of these processes became impossible.   Some of the fundamental structure of Nature disappeared. The only way we can see it is to get to a really high temperature in a laboratory - that is what a big particle accelerator is.  They create conditions like those last seen in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.  Very massive particles can be produced.⁶

 

As the Universe cooled new structures were formed that hide the fundamental structure.  Imagine a snowflake with its beautiful symmetry caused by how H₂O molecules arrange themselves under certain conditions as a solid. Melt the snowflake and you get liquid water.  As the Universe cooled bits of what we see as Nature froze out ...  We have to "melt" little bits of the current Universe to get back to the original structure so we can understand it.

 

So nearly 200 years ago a Kant-loving Danish philosopher turned physicist noticed a compass needle jump when some current flowed in a nearby wire.  He was curious enough to pursue the idea and others joined in on the process.  It is by no means finished, but we have just learned something much deeper about physics thanks to tens, then hundreds and now thousands of physicists.

 

I hope I haven't lost anyone - eye contact isn't exactly idea in this mode of communication.  There was a lot of handwaving and saying the Higgs imparts mass is very technical, so I just state it and give an analogy. And to the physicists out there - I have played a bit fast and lose so as to paint a high level picture, so forgive the rough bits.

 

To me the most beautiful thing I can imagine is that there are little bits of the Universe that have survived all of these processes and have evolved into something that can contemplate Nature.  We have an existence proof that the Universe is self-aware and is beginning to understand itself.

 

And against my better judgement - a soundtrack in honor of the big announcement  - music from the only particle physics group I know of Les Horribles Cernettes 

Daddy's Lab  

and 

Collider  

__________

¹ It is possible to write Maxwell's Equations in many forms.  In his original paper they are quite convoluted and somewhat ugly.  Others came up with equivalents that were mathematically elegant and I show one of those.  It is remarkable how much can be mined from them - the notion that radio is possible and that radio waves move at the speed of light for example.  I remember the feeling of utter delight when I was first playing with them and realized this before a professor could point it out.  

² I'm skipping over so much, but hopefully this is enough to give a rough idea!

³ I'm not going to fall into the trap of explaining bosons and fermions ..  I'm struggling to stay at a high level. For now just think of a massive boson as something like a really massive photon (photons have no mass)

⁴ Sigh - not strictly true, but play along with me here

⁵ Most of the explanations of the Higgs particle start by trying to explain the Standard Model - the twelve particles that make up the observable matter dominated Universe. I'm skipping that, but if you ever want to take a walk and talk about it I can ramble on.  My Ph.D. is in particle physics.

⁶ In a particle accelerator the energy of the particles you create, and their mass is related to their energy by Einstein's famous relation, is limited by the energy of the collision between two particles.  CERN finally has enough energy to allow a sufficient number of particles of the mass predicted for the Higgs, so people were excited that it was finally possible to make the discovery.

 

___________

Recipes

It turns out Sukie is allergic to chocolate.  Normally this is a feature as I get everything that comes across our doorway, but I've been meaning to experiment with carob to see if I can make chocolate like dishes for her.  I bought some toasted carob powder from Bob's Red Mill and the fun begins.  Last night was an attempt at a rich little cake. 

It came out wonderfully - a major win, although it probably needs a bit of tweaking.  If you are into cookie and cake experimentation on dishes that require eggs I recommend using pasteurized eggs so you can sample the batter and dough as you go along.  Weigh and keep track of everything  - this isn't the approach for cooking, but for baking it is critical if you want to make progress. Unless a recipe asks for a special temperature, let everything in the fridge come up to room temperate first. And finally use a non-iodized salt (like fine sea salt) when baking above about 275°F to prevent the formation of some nasty tasting compounds.  Oh yeah - and fresh everything.  It is amazing how quickly flour and sugar picks up off tastes.

The trick with carob - at least as a chocolate replacement - is to use enough fat.  For candies something like a food grade coconut oil and for baking either the coconut oil or butter.  For cakes butter seemed more appropriate. With that here is the 1.0 version of the cake based loosely on some carrot cake and chocolate brownie recipes.

It was pretty good and Sukie was very happy.  It would be great with some whipped cream or perhaps a bit of vanilla ice cream if the cake was served warm.  And it is even better chilled.  

 

Carob Coconut and Walnut Cake version 1.0

Ingredients

° 113g unsalted butter (a stick)

° 190g honey - honey is a deep subject so just use a personal favorite. I choose a delicious Tupelo honey (this place is great).

° 2 large eggs (pasteurized if you are experimenting)

° 1 large mashed banana (mine was 135g)

° 1 tbl vanilla extract

° 130g all purpose flour

° 42g toasted carob powder (I sourced from Bob's Red Mill)

° 1 tsp baking soda

° 1/2 tsp fine grained non-iodized salt

° 40g shredded coconut

° 60g coarsely chopped walnuts

° 180g water

Technique

° Preheat oven to 350°F

° Grease and flour an 8 inch square baking pan

° Sift together the flour, carob powder, salt and baking soda

° In a large bowl cream the honey and butter together until light and fluffy. beat in the eggs one at a time and stir in the banana and vanilla.  

° Beat in the dry mixture alternating with the water.  Stir in the coconut and walnuts.  Pour the batter into the cake pan and place on a rack in the middle of the oven.  Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes clean. (my oven is fairly well calibrated and required 40 minutes)

° Cool on a rack.

870g cooked weight, 340 Calories per 100g

 

trvling to the future

The mid 19^th century was a fascinating time with a lot of technological lessons for today.  As Andrew teaches us about railroad technologies that coupled with curious investments that led to bubbles more dramatic than what we see today, another emerging technology would lead to an Internet of sorts that predicted quite a bit about our current Internet.

 

A few weeks ago I was wandering around the MIT campus spending some time in their excellent naval museum.  Naval architecture was obsessed with the clipper ship - 3 or more huge main masts and a square rig coupled with a then-optimal very long and narrow hull design, these things became the fastest way to move atoms about over any intercontinental distance for about five decades.  Most of the exhibits illustrating that period were created with the perspective and insight of time and focused on novel propulsion systems and steel hulls.  Very nifty and a cool thing for engineers, but if you wanted to get something to China quickly in the day, you really wanted to use a clipper ship.

It wasn't that steam engines weren't recognized, but they weren't quite there yet for the large commercial companies.  Clever people were focused on squeezing out efficiency from those greyhounds of the sea (I wish I had come up with that line - it is from the exhibit) and say the steam engine as a sweet power source for the winches that were used on the huge and very heavy sails.  They could be great labor saving devices - a 20 hp steam winch could do the work of 100 men.

It made me think about publishing...

When you look at emagazines aimed at the iPad, it quickly becomes apparent that those from the big publishers are confused and don't really take advantage of the platform.  This is probably a combination of lack of insight on the part of the magazine - after all - they are experts focused on their existing world, and a poor tool choice. The current model mostly relies on a new spigot placed in the standard magazine pipeline to "streamline" the task.  Adding an emagazine means telling InDesign to produce a pdf at the appropriate point. Of course these magazines want to cut costs and sending content electronically to a remote screen that the user pays for seems to be just the ticket.  And Adobe has tweaked their toolset so you only have to add about one headcount to your workforce to accommodate this new world.

The problem is the experience for the enduser tends to be poor.  Reading pdfs is anything but good and the experience could be much better.  Furthermore the pricing structure most of these guys use just doesn't make sense as little real value, other than moving to a paperless world, is offered.

I'm becoming more aware of this as a few important print publications to me have e-versions..  The New Yorker, Science, Physics Today, Nature, and Sky & Telescope are the ones I have tried.  Most of these are "free with subscription", but are sufficiently painful to use that I only download them for travel and then find myself getting irritated when reading.

But there are a few guys out there who see the iPad and recognize a new type of transportation rather than a steam engine running a winch on a clipper ship …  for about six months I've been addicted to TRVL - a neat publication out of The Netherlands.  It is a mostly weekly travel and photography magazine that also happens to be free.  To get it into Apple's magazine app on the iPad they had to make a subscription and that meant offering a paid version.  They charge a buck, but donate the money to charity.  I don't know their business model other than they are very lean and have a couple of big sponsors that haven't really stepped forward yet - at least I haven't noticed them.

TRVL invites interaction with the page - there are maps on the pages, deep information about the beautiful photography, the flexibility for authors and editors of being able to ignore printing constraints and the obvious feature that old issues can always be relevant as it is free to constantly update them if necessary. 

Apple featured them as a great app at WWDC this year and that got me looking around a bit the other night to learn more about the company.  There are only six employees and a couple of programmers who roll their own publication tools - they have managed to steer clear of the Adobe Victorian model of what a print publication is and that has liberated them.¹  Again I don't know anything about their business model and how they will do financially, but they can turn out a great product (I spend about a half hour with each issue --  if you want to try it I recommend the piece on Amsterdam as a good starting point as I think many of you has some experience with the place as a reference - a few even live there:-) with a staff much smaller than any conventional travel/photography magazine I'm aware of.  This is a great publication for learning a bit about other cultures as well as seeing some of the nuts and bolts of photography.  If you have an iPad it is a steal for the price of $zero and even cheap at a buck.

I don't have a good clue on the direction digital publishing will take, but this gives a sense of at least one potential path that is quite different.  I can imagine some possibilities and undoubtedly other people are too.  I'd love to have a conversation with some of you to see what sort of wacky ideas are out there.  Certainly the notion of who creates content is up for grabs and so much more can be done than just adding audio and video.  Reader explorations may become interesting to other readers in their own right.  Why not invite interaction beyond the page and beyond the net?  I'm thinking about what synesthesia might mean as an example¹ ...  Business models also will need a lot of cleverness.

 

At the moment we're confined to a rather rigid and ancient definition of what we think a periodical is.  We can see the steam engines just under the deck, but the real trick - building a new hull, engine and propeller - is lurking and some people will go beyond that with airplanes and starships.  You get a bit of a shiver thinking about it.

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¹ I have a bit of experience here.  Some years ago I was the art editor for a very small black women's fashion magazine called FEVA (yeah - long story ...  ask sometime if we both have an hour).  This was something of a vacation from my research work and I learned a boatload about the fashion industry and magazine publishing.  Not enough to claim any expertise, but certainly enough to be dangerous and allow pathways for deeper looks later on.  One of the immediate learnings was how workflows worked.  At the time it was all Quark based at the layout and editing level - something that InDesign mostly took over, but both of these toolsets are highly constraining and force you to think of your work and projects a certain way.  While constraints can be important for some things, this was an enormous sap on creative ideas.  I'm really excited by the potential of breaking free of this print-imagined model.  

² I'm thinking about a conversation Juliette and I had on a Central Park walk two years ago that celebrated the midday between our (close) birthdays. We were talking about ways to not only make synesthesia real for those who don't have it, but to go beyond it and mix what sensors can detect in with another sense.  With practice you may begin to navigate that new space naturally.  Now an iPad has a camera and could easily BT to some other sensors and there is enough computation to do some clever stuff. What about extending visual (wavelength) range or perhaps adding some very fine gradations (what if you could "hear" very fine gradations of color for example?)  While a bit orthogonal to the concept of a magazine, it shows that you might ship interesting computation filters and apps as part of the magazine to make points and enhance experiences - and even to collect information and insight from others.

Recipe

Sweet Cherry Tart

I usually make tarts with pie cherries, but tried this with some amazing Rainier cherries a few years ago.  You can use of those premade pie tart shells, but it is far better to make your own, and it is very easy if you have the right pan.  As it is Summer,  quick and easy rules.

 

Ingredients

° 25g cornstarch (about 3 tablespoons)

° 170g white cane sugar

° 1 teaspoon fine sea salt

° 1 orange, juiced and zested

° 1 tablespoon butter

° 1 vanilla bean, cut and scraped

° 55g amaretto 

° 800 - 900g pitted, fresh cherries (about 2 pounds)  used Rainiers, but any "eating" cherry will work.  If you use black cherries you should increase the sugar a bit.  If you use pie cherries, a lot ...

° 1 prebaked tart shell 

Technique

° pit and halve the cherries, reserving them in the juice.  

° combine everything but the cherries in a pan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly

° Reduce heat to medium high and cook 'til a thick creamy paste forms.  

° remove from heat, strain, and immediately stir in the cherries.

° cool until just above room temperature, stirring occasionally.  

° fill the shell and bake at 450° F until the crust is baked through. 

° cool and serve. It is great a bit warm and also chilled.  A good vanilla ice cream can be served with it and chocoholics might appreciate a bit of shaved chocolate on top.

 

Prebased Shortbread Tart Shell 

 

Ingredients

° 130 grams all purpose flour

° 35 grams powdered sugar

°  a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 ° 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 Technique

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a central position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

 

 

a look back four years...

Now that we have passed the five year anniversary of the iPhone's introduction, many are offering comments.  I won't make any at this point, but someone suggested I repost my comments near the first anniversary on my middenheap blog tingilinde...

 

June 08, 2008

the phone in the iPhone is just an app...

The iPhone is nearly a year old now and mine no longer seems novel.  I'm sure a lot will be written in a few weeks, so I just want to make a few observations now.

° A lot of people have predicted the failure of the device, but it seems to be doing well and is growing beyond the fanboy base.  

° AT&T is a terrible provider where I live

° there are better phones on the market

° the iPhone is not a phone or even a smart phone.  A better way of looking at it is that it is a watershed portable computer that is cleverly disguised as a phone that you carry around wherever you go.  

The last point is most important.  A lot of people don't really see what it is and that it really is revolutionary.  For about five years my HCI Department at AT&T Research was partly focused on what happens when computing is ubiquitous - ubicomp.  We dreamt up, invented and prototyped services and devices and it was, quite frankly, the largest diamond covered technical beach I've encountered.  So much promise, but it needed to be populated with very small computers that happened to have an Internet connection and the knowledge of where they are.  The iPhone doesn't do real positioning well, but give it about a year.  The gps chip sets are almost ready.  Then we have a really remarkable device.  A pretty good UI, good UX, a connection to the Internet (that will improve over time - so called 3G networks are out there now and there are roadmaps to much better.  sadly telcos rules this sphere and they are both plodding and overpriced), a knowledge of position, a camera, and a power sipping computer with roughly the memory and power of something that was on your desktop 7 or 8 years ago.

Apple may be a bit caught by surprise.  At first the notion was to have a few Apple-built (or under partnership) apps on the device with developers encouraged to build webapps.  Gack that sucks for so many reasons from AT&T to inefficiency to glacial web standards.   They made a huge course chance a few months ago and now native apps are supported on the device.  A lot of people are carping, but the programmers out there are coding and there will be great things.  I guarantee that as I've walked on that diamond filled beach. 

Looking back about a year I can comfortably say

The iPhone isn't a phone or even a smartphone.  

 

It is a computing device with net and position awareness that lives with you... 

It reduces the phone to an app...

Looking ahead four years to the point Jobs predicted competitors would catch up I see some carnage.  Many of those who understand telephony may understand telephony, but that isn't the game anymore.  Many of them will go out of business.  New players will emerge from nowhere - folks with computational backgrounds.  Apple is pretty sharp.  My bet is they will still be a major player.  Maybe not the dominant player, but a major player.  I'm certainly not selling my AAPL stock.

This is really going to be huge.  In scale it is will be bigger than PCs as so many more will carry them everywhere and that wonderful only partly glimpsed beach of ubicomp is a fundamental change in how we deal with information.

strap in, the ride is just starting!

 

06:08 in General Commentary, society and technology | Permalink

 

 

nothing like having written your post over four years ago

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Recipe

Quinoa and Avocado Salad

Ingredients

° 2 cups quinoa

° 4 cups of water

° salt

° 2 cups diced tomato - try and find the real thing rather than the awful red objects in the markets

° 1 cup diced cucumber

° 1 ripe avocado peeled and diced

° 1/2 cup finely chopped red onion

° 1/2 cup fine chopped fresh cilantro

° 4 limes - juice (reserve the skins for zesting for something else - citrus zest rules!)

° 1 tablespoon high quality olive oil - possibly more depending on your taste

° pepper and sea salt

Technique

° Wash the quinoa (unless you use a prewashed like Bob's Red Mill quinoa).  Put water, salt and quinoa into a pot with the water and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer until the quinoa absorbs the water - about 15 minutes for me.

° While the quinoa cooks, mix the other ingredients in a bowl.  Test the seasoning.

° Toss the quinoa with the other ingredients and test the seasoning again.  Sometimes it needs a bit more olive oil.   Serve!

 

 

don't even bother trying to comb a hairy banana and a gathering of themes

Or a hairy ball for that matter.. at least not if you want to perfectly comb them so their hair lies perfectly flat everywhere on their surface.

 

Imagine you have an unruly donut hair covered donut and want to comb it flat (I can't imagine eating a hair covered donut).  It turns out to be an easy task.  Now think about the problem of combing a hair covered ball.  It turns out you can't do it perfectly - the best you can do is to make the fur like flat (locally tangent to it's surface) at every point but one where you are left with a cowlick. 

 

\ A banana is really the same thing as a sphere topologically.  Imagine the banana was incredibly pliable - really really ripe - and the skin just as flexible.  You could push in bits here and pull out others there and change its shape into a sphere.¹

 

The hairy ball theorem has been proven.² Math, unlike science,  is an areas where solid black and white proofs are possible.

 

It turns out there is always at least one point on the planet where there is no wind.  This point is the eye of a cyclone or anticyclone (wind spirals around it - air can't flow into or out of it as it is static).  So there is, and has been, at least one cyclone everywhere on Earth ever since there was an atmosphere.  You can say the same about any body in the Universe with an atmosphere.

 

so if you want to take bets ...

 

And if you wonder what brought this on, the banana I had for breakfast this morning was on the verge of being too ripe and looked like it might be growing hair one of these days.  I also have an unruly cowlick today - put this together and some math has to come out.  Math is neat stuff!

 

While I'm far from being fashionable, some of you play it well.  It is really fascinating to think about as there is an ephemeral nature and personal style can be very artistic.  In the US personal style for many has been replaced by inexpensive, ephemeral uniforms.  Getting something cheap that looks like something that a vetted style setter wears has become more important than finding a personal style.  In theory there is much more choice in stores, but in reality this translates into a very narrow "look".  

 

Jheri and I have been re-thinking our views on mass customization.  The genesis of this was marrying some work I did for the Defense Department with the need of Jheri and some others to find clothing that fits.  The notion was that mass customization was becoming easier and fit was the most important component.  While fit still is the most important component there are clearly other drivers as well as roadblocks.  Recently Jheri pointed to a new book on overly-cheap apparel (halfway into this post).  The book is mostly about the over consumption of very low quality fashion and the dramatic change that has swept the industry.  We are now wondering if some changes we're seeing among the 20 to 30 year old demographic may be important sources of kindling for the ignition of real mass customization - forget things like fancy printing technologies which are still a long way off from large scale viability ...

 

Apparel is still largely handmade at this point and the cost structure is going to keep it that way for at least another decade or two.  A pair of jeans may have a few hours of hand labor in them, but if you can do that for two dimes an hour, why change? Major designers are now working for the high volume firms, but the quality of material and construction is poor.  The middle tier of quality and manufacture has mostly disappeared.  A few speciality makes have appeared that exploit this need - Lululemon is a good example.³  Their quality matches their pricing, but this is fairly rare - to first order even $300 dresses are very poorly made.  Many consumers no longer have the ability to judge construction and material quality.

 

The signal we are seeing among at the edge - mostly in places like San Francisco, NYC (especially Brooklyn and lower Manhattan!), Seattle, Minneapolis and San Diego may be the rejection of overconsumption and more value placed on owning a smaller number of higher quality items that can last.  These are also areas that tend to support the notion of a strong sense of personal fashion.  There is more of the diversity you see in some European cities and mall uniforms are distinctly clueless.

 

New small business is emerging to fill these needs and some people are becoming craftsmen and artisans.  Clothing repair and re-tailoring shops are exist in greater number and I even saw a few new cobbler shops in Brooklyn last week.   While it isn't clear that this is a trend that will spread, it should be pointed out that the traditional apparel industry control on media is much weaker with forces like Pinterest exploding in popularity and Etsy creating a new channel for accessories.  

 

It is very curious to note that those who ply vintage stores note that items at least thirty years old are worthy of salvage and modification - newer items become progressively more poorly made to the point where anything made in the past decade is so poorly made that it isn't worth bothering with.

 

There are some great opportunities for design tools and even manufacture automation that may come to the small scale shops before the large manufacturers.  The big guys (like Levis) have tried what they thought was mass customization a decade ago and have mostly abandoned it.  I think this is like Microsoft's decade old notion of the tablet - they simply lacked the chops to dive in deep and re-imagine that was really needed. TRVL is another example of a publication more properly reimagined for the iPad world - and a need to break beyond conventional tools (like InDesign and pdfs used by the publishing industry) and thinking.  They were trying to hammer their square peg into a round hole and, guess what... it didn't work very well.  

 

It is likely this won't be very large at first - a ten percent shift in the market within this age segment would be big in my mind, but very indicative of a major trend.  We may see the re-emergence of the middle tier of apparel quality and manufacturing along with people taking a more focused interest in what fashion is - they may become their own artists rather than mere consumers.⁴  Remember - these are the guys who see iPads and creative tools.  My generation tends to see them (and very improperly!) as consumption devices.

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¹ Try a little experiment:  The famous example would be to change a donut into a coffee mug - cookie dough will show the way and had a big advantage over modeling clay in that it is edible. This can make for a sweet introduction to topology:-)

² There are many proofs. Most are pretty complex requiring some deep math - usually homology theory is involved.  I could follow some in the day, but now I'm more rusty - you have to keep at this to be in good form.  I did see an elegant and simple proof by John Milnor when I was a student and have it in my notes.  Since at least one of you is a mathematician and several are physicists and serious computer scientists it is reasonable to show it.  Normally it would take at least an hour to typeset it in LaTeX and arrange images to embed in html, but here is a nice reproduction in a math blog. The warning is this is probably greek if you haven't done an college level math - so please ignore it and accept this a proven result, but if you had an advanced calculus course, you have the tools you need and it is a sweet little proof.

³ I've visited their shops a few times.  Once with Jheri trying to learn a bit and then out of curiosity when I was in Manhattan.  Several of the customers told me construction and material quality is much more important than the very careful marketing - it represents good value and is what makes them repeat customers.  The chain has established itself as one of the few mid-quality outlets in existance.  Sort of a sad thing when mid quality is the highest level most of us have access to - and many of us can't even get that.  A real opportunity space...

⁴ Distributed design and IP ownership needs tools that are probably closely linked with social media.  Improved mathematical models to convolve design and fit patterns need to be made along with improvements in user/designer feedback.  Automated and semi-automatic manufacturing tools.  More uniform measurement tools, improvements in user and designer feedback, user and designer education tools ...  the list goes on and on and the surface has only been scratched.  But it is important to note that this is an enormous industry - something like a half trillion a year in the US.  Even niches can be non-trivially large.

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Before getting on with the recipe, I'd like to make a recommendation.  I'm afraid my education is very narrow.  High school was ok, but in college I focused and spend most of my time in the physical sciences and math - placing out of other subjects where possible.  A really big mistake in retrospect.  Then on to grad school with a much more intense specialization.    

 

I do read a lot and am reasonably curious, but there isn't a lot of structure to this approach.  Recently I've been taking a few courses on iTunes U (there are other flavors of this sort of online learning). I'm not diving in deeply and doing the homeworks and all of the readings at this point, but am enjoying those with great lectures.  It is an excellent way to pass time on long boring trips and during exercise sessions.  Over a three week period, for example, I listened to all of the lectures in David Blight's excellent History 119 course at Yale: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Since then I've read a few of the books on his reading list.  Great stuff and highly recommended!

 

All of the iTunes U online material is free and some of the classes are extremely interesting.  It isn't a substitute for deeply focusing and doing all of the coursework and interacting with the professor, but it is so much better than TV or movies.

 

Here is a guide I use to hunt courses.  I'm sure there are others - if you know of good ones, let me know.  And a recommendation for me - an excellent short introduction to Quantum Mechanics from Oxford by James Binney.  He does an excellent job.  The warning is you really need to work out the problems to gain any understanding of the subject.  The class notes, recommended books and problem sets are here.

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Recipe section

 

Yesterday saw 97°F here and the urge for a homemade milkshake was strong as recently I had a rather poor excuse from what had been described as the best ice cream parlor in the area.

 

Homemade tahitian vanilla bean ice cream, homemade chocolate sauce + broken bits of Lindt 72% (added after the blending).  I used my antique Hamilton Beach milkshake maker from the mid 1960s - a very high speed spindle and careful attention is the trick for velvety textured, very thick shakes.  This one was - well - perfect (sigh)……

 

I won't go through this one exactly, but rather give a cheater's version that may be just as good for you.

 

 

Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Milkshake

Ingredients (for one or two servings depending on how much you like milkshakes)

° a pint of super premium vanilla ice cream - I like Häagen-Dazs Five Vanilla Bean as it is reasonably well crafted, widely available and is very simple with only five ingredients. Depending on where you are you may be able to find better and a really excellent homemade can be far better.

° about 120g whole milk (a half cup)

° a good chocolate topping - I've been making my own and can't make a recommendation.  I've seen many in stores.

° 20-40g dark chocolate chopped into small bits - I used Lindt 72% 

 

Technique 

° For a thick and velvety shake you really need a high speed spindle.  I use an ancient Hamilton Beach single spindle unit from the 1960s.  It's shaft runs at 17,000 rpm and should be treated with care.  For a consistency like many current ice cream parlors use a blender, and for a very thick shake find a study container for the mixture and use a table knife and large, heavy spoon and a LOT of elbow grease.

° cool the milk to near freezing and let the ice cream sit on your countertop for about 3 or 4 minutes before starting to soften it.

° Mix the milk, ice cream and chocolate syrup and blend using one of the techniques above.  I start with eight parts of ice cream for every part of milk - if you like them to be drinkable use a four to one mixture.  If you are using a pint of ice cream, try about 2 table spoons of chocolate syrup for a very light chocolate and increase as desired.  I like the lighter version.

° After blending mix in the chocolate chunks with a table knife.

° Pour into a chilled glass and, if you like, top with a bit of whipped cream and/or shaved chocolate.  I couldn't take it anymore and just had it as is.