omenti

placetime

trees are the poems nature writes to the heavens

 

I need to find a suitable tree in the woods.  Sandy caused so much damage as did Irene and the pre-Halloween snowstorm.  Finding the right tree has not been easy this time.

 

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

When I was an undergrad I read Polya and decided to write down some steps on problem solving.  This is not meant to be specific to a field and it tries to be serious even though some of the steps may seem trivial.  It isn't a checklist - just a rough structure for approaching a problem.  I wrote these on a sheet and keep it above my desk.  

there are many techniques. Not every problem would have all of these steps and some would have new ones.  I've added a bit of annotation (in blue) to the original for clarity, but feel free to skip down.  The point is I wanted to impose some structure to make progress.

1. Understand the problem

 

- do you understand all of the words and equations in the problem?

- can you restate the problem in your own words?

- can you think of a picture or diagram to help understand the problem?

- what do you want to find or show?

- what level of accuracy do you need?

- is there enough information to find a solution?

- is the problem a relevant problem or is it gibberish?

- what is the scale of the problem?  can you do it in an hour or will it require unobtainium?

2. Devise a plan

 

- guess and check

- consider special cases.  what are the boundary conditions?

- select your tools

- do you fully understand your tools?

- draw a picture

- solve a simpler version first

- create a model

- use approximations - but understand their impact

- work backwards

- be ingenious …  this comes with experience and often with re-thinking the problem in a different context.  

This and the next step - connecting the dots are the non-trivial piece!!  Remember:

play and your ability to fail with grace are essential

curiosity is your driver - remember informed ignorance rules in science and math! never lose fact that your final job is to expand your ignorance - results are a by-product!!

- connect the dots - this is a subset of being ingenious

serendipity is another driver.  remember that serendipity is making discoveries by accident, but you must have enough sagacity to note what holds potential.  

dot connecting is best done using averted attention.  Don't tool constantly on your problem.  Focus hard, but pivot off to equally long period of something completely different. This may even fool others into thinking you have a life. 

3. Carry out your plan

 

- find a quiet place with no interruptions.  nature is your friend

- use some care and be a craftsman

- if you get stuck, take some time off and try to forget about what you are doing

- if you fail, use another approach

- know when you have failed

- if you are working with others know where the strengths are and divide appropriately

4. Check with reality

- does your answer make sense?

- can your solution make testable predications?

- ask an expert in your field to examine your work for flaws

- reflect on what you have done and examine what worked and what didn't

 

 

This approach helped with physics and math problems, but needed modifications for doing real science - something that I began to taste in grad school.  Observation and experiment have their own techniques and learning that answers may not be what you are looking for requires adjustment.¹

 

There are many places to jump from here.  Several have been mentioned in earlier posts, but I want to concentrate on how this fits with place and time.

 

Finding a bit of nature has been important for me - even in city environments.  As an undergrad I would spend time in the library listening to music for awhile and then going to "my rock" - a large rock just inside a small wooded area that no one seemed to walk through.  Being able to lay on my back and look up through the trees seemed to clear my mind and it was easy to tune out other noises.  

 

You can always build a simple tree platform or even a tree house.  These don't have to be elaborate, but they have the feature of purposefully removing you from some of the world.  Of course it is important to not have electricity and you need to leave your mobile phone behind, or at least turn it off.   

 

Working mostly out of my home these days I'm finding the woods to be an extremely important place and tool.  In addition to spending time working there I take a daily walk around lunch that allows one to mentally shift.  There is something constant, but always changing nature about the place that is worth a lot to me. 

 

I was lucky enough to have started in a lab at Bell Labs that strongly believed in some daily private time.  Even the phones went dead for incoming calls during the period.  You could chose to collaborate, but the choice was yours.  When I moved to other organizations that didn't have this policy I found myself coming in very early to get a few uninterrupted hours.  

 

The organization that first used the private time approach evolved a few curious practices that seemed to be organic extentions.  There were a variety of small collaboration areas outside the (private) offices.  If you wanted to collaborate and could find someone else agreeable (signaling was done with colored flags just outside your office door),  you would often meet in one of these areas - somehow that was better than either office.  They had nice chairs and a blackboard and were tucked into quiet out-of-the-way parts of the building.  Places for special collaboration times.

 

Intersection and collaboration with others is also critically important.  The old Bell Labs Murray Hill installation was something of a maze.  Throughout a career your office would move and would find yourself collaborating with people in other parts of the building.²   I don't believe in most forms of brain storming, but I've seen it work in some small and stable groups.  These groups were usually attached to place, time and often had some ritual.  One of my favorites was unscheduled, but usually took place late on Friday afternoons (three to seven pm was common), invovled a couch, a nice view of some trees, had three or four regular participants who were friends and was fueled by chocolate covered coffee beans.  

 

Collaborations can, of course, be remote.  There is a growing understanding of what works and doesn't.  Collaborations in place often fail and remote collaborations are sometimes fruitful.  It is important to understand for you and your organization what works and what doesn't and why.  Much of it comes down to personality and relationship strength, but corporate culture often has a role.

 

Working on some ideas and projects, one tends to run into walls.  Ideas and approached become stale and work slows to a crawl.  A good approach is to shift the primary focus to something else - something entirely different.  Sometimes a break to an extremely different activity or place is called for.  Somehow the mind seems to be considering the original problem and a flash of insight can come.  

 

Proper toolkits help a lot.  Perhaps it is the time I'm from, but a real slate blackboard and high quality chalk are important to me. Whiteboards don't cut it.  When AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ after the AT&T/Lucent fission, the head of research recognized this and gave everyone a choice of board.  The same holds for paper and pencil for sketching - get something that feels wonderful when the pencil is in motion.   Sketching can be anything of the moment - sometimes visualization of the problem, sometimes working through equations and sometimes doodling or trying to focus and draw something.  The last is a form of meditation to me and a often a path to clearer thinking.  The paper has to feel good under a good sharp pencil.  Everyone will have something that is important to them - the point is figure out what it is and use it.  These are cheap paths that can encourage flow.

 

These are some of the tools I find useful - time from an earlier post and place and the interaction of time and place.  The point is you should find what placetimes and supports to them work for you.

 

Back to the beginning of the post.  Clearly the line is much more beautiful than anything I would pen.  Yesterday Om tweeted an Instagram post of his with a somewhat similar line by the poet Kahlil Gibran.  I've read quite a bit of his work. This one is famous and, while beautiful, breaks into sadness

 

Tree are poems the earth writes upon the sky

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That they may record our emptiness

Several years ago one of you had a similar line - the one at the beginning of this post - and I had to ask.  It turns out she had rewritten a someone similar line from a much older poem in her native language

 

God's fingers are the trees painting the sky

 

I realize poetry often doesn't translate, but consider Jheri's inspired variation much better and have been using it.  

 

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¹ I can't stress enough how important simple things like wiring are a well as trying to deal with all sources of error.  Play is even more important as is the ability to play with others who have different skill sets and views.  There is also a realization that hunting for the discovery - that rare eureka moment - is not what science is about, but rather finding new questions is much deeper.  But that is a core theme of this blog (hopefully)

² It is wonderful that cross disciplinary collaboration is "hot" again in some institutions.  I've never seen a place that supported it better than the old Bell Labs.

forty three years

The amount of time between Lindbergh's flight and Neil Armstrong's small step a bit further away...   Forty three years ...   For whatever reason I found myself thinking about Earth Day, a golden duck, and lightning in a bottle.

 

Forty three years and two days ago I was in high school in Great Falls, Montana.  The town is known for strong winds that keep the air very clean these days, but back then it was also known for the stack...

 

North of town, across the Missouri, was a large smelter owned by the Anaconda Company.  Montana was pretty much a company state and few commented on the pollution that came from the 500 and something foot stack on the property.  You didn't notice it unless the wind was light and from the right - er - wrong direction.  The surrounding land is mostly wheat farm claimed from the prairie and the stack was visible from a long distance.  People didn't think in terms of pollution, but that was beginning to change.

 

In the Fall of 1969 when I read Senator Gaylord Nelson's suggestion that a national teach-in take place to raise environmental awareness and perhaps create some political support at the grass-root level.  Shortly there-after the proposed was called Earth Day and April 22, 1970 was the selected.  Two of us, Doug Safely was the other partner in crime, were taken with this and started a little club "cleverly" called Students to Oppose Pollution.  We found a faculty sponsor and I think about six people showed up for the first meeting in September of 1969.

 

I'm not terribly sociable and both of us expected the effort to fold, but the next meeting filled one of the science classrooms.  It kept growing to the point where we had to use the auditorium by April and there was some media attention - the effort was on local TV and radio and we had our 30 seconds of fame on the Today Show.

 

It was a heady experience and gave me the false impression that we knew what we were doing.  We didn't.  Rather the time was right.  There was an enormous amount wrong in the country, but there was also a strong sense from a variety of movements that people could make a difference.  When I think about it these days I am reminded of what Douglas had to say:

 

...

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

...

 

 

Since then I've spent a considerable amount of time on a few causes I feel are important.  In the past decade I've spent several thousand hours trying to understand and communicate global warming information - I've been trying to move the needle just a bit.  And I've mostly failed to do that, but I've managed to learn quite a bit.  

 

This came into focus this morning as I was listening to a KERA Think podcast - an interview with Adam Rome about his new book The Genius of Earth Day.  As far as I know this is the only history on the period and I've just put it on my reading list.

 

It did give me a sense of how powerful empirical information could be.  I found a chemist at another company - the local oil refinery - and asked him about techniques to measure arsenic, cadmium, lead and a few other nasties.  Industrial scientists and technicians are rarely asked about their work and they love to talk about it.  Extra points to talk with an interested kid and I was very interested.  I went over to Smelter Avenue and dug up a dozen soil samples.  He showed me how to do the analysis and the results were rather frightening.  We did something about it our combined with our organizing Doug and I found ourselves honored with about three dozen other Americans - including one Richard Milhouse Nixon - with Field and Stream's highest conservation honor - The Golden Duck.¹  At some level I have more pride about that than my degrees.

 

In retrospect we could have done things differently.  Doug was much more outgoing, but both of us were probably below average.  It would have been brilliant to team up with Jeri - someone who reads the blog.  She was savvy and a communicator and much more would have been possible.  To say we were clueless would be understatement.

 

But something did happen and it changed my life.  This type of activity was almost completely grass roots and it seized the attention of the politicians.  Nixon probably did more for the environment in terms of absolute change than any President.  There was no real political divide at the time on the issue.  Laws were changed by the thousands and life is much better now than it had been.  It can be better - it needs to be better - but the amount of social change was dramatic.

 

The time was right and thousands of us caught lightning in a bottle.  Even with the Internet we have today no social movement has come close in the US.  I only hope something as strong happens again during my lifetime.

 

Oh - the smokestack?  It is gone now - taken down around 1980 for safety reasons.  The Company sold the property and now the land is a superfund site.  Great Falls now has some of the cleanest air in the nation - thanks to some of the strongest average winds in the nation, not that many pollution sources and change brought by thousands of Montanans and millions of Americans.

 

I was originally going to continue writing about the use of time - focusing on the places where time is spent.  That will have to wait, but I note that a friend in the physics department of a really well-known school noted the professors are pushing for offices that have CO₂ levels that are less than 150 ppm over outdoor readings.  CO2 levels are considered important as they are easy to measure and are a proxy for other serious issues, but there is new evidence that some cognitive impairment may begin around 700 ppm and is very evident at 1,000 ppm.  Outdoor background is about 400 ppm now - so they're pushing for 550 or below.²  

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¹ Pretty frightening for a vegetarian pacifist, eh?  That was a different time.  Sportmen were mostly interested in conservation and party divides on environmental issues weren't deep.  Nixon was probably the most environmental modern day President.

² Get in touch if you are interested in measurement and abatement techniques.

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Recipe Corner

 

I came across some sprouting broccoli and grilled it.  The taste is distinctive, but it is hard to find and regular broccoli would probably be fine, but the sprouting version is really special.

 

 

Grilled Broccoli

 

Ingredients

 

° 500 g sprouted broccoli (something over a pound)

° 1 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° salt and freshly ground black pepper

° tahini sauce (recipe follows)

° 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds

 

Technique

 

° cut off the leaves and the woody part of the stems.  Blanche for a few minutes in boiling lightly salted water, rise in cold water (or dump in ice water), and allow it to dry.

° toss the broccoli with the oil, salt and pepper

° broil or grill for a few minutes on each side until charring begins.  Set aside to cool

° plate, drizzle the tahini sauce over the broccoli and top with scattered sesame seeds

 

A quick tahini sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 50 g tahini paste

° 1/2 tbl honey

° 2 tsp lemon juice 

° small garlic clove peeled and smashed

 

Technique

 

° whisk the tahini, lemon juice, honey, a bit of salt and garlic.  Add a bit of water at a time until it gets to the consistency of warm honey

 

making use of time

Mary Roach is one of the more entertaining non-fiction authors and I've been enjoying Gulp over the past few days.  Highly recommended, but I'm afraid this isn't what I like to be doing.  Don't get me wrong - I love to read for pleasure, but there are other things that are better.  Things like tithing my time.

 

I've written about it before - the short version is I was looking at a few practices in religion that didn't make much sense on the surface to see if there was anything I could adapt.  I started tithing my time as money seems like a silly thing for the purpose if it is to be meaningful.  First it was about four hours a week to a variety of causes, but I wasn't learning.  Somehow I started working on the projects of friends and the epiphany came.  I was getting back much more than I offered.

 

I'm lucky enough to have friends with a range of very different interests and this has become a rich source of new learning and even serendipity.¹  These days my practice is to tithe my waking hours - about 11 hours a week.  I read for pleasure is there isn't a project to work on...

 

My goal, of course, is to be as poorly read as possible.

 

This is centrally important of my practice and to me as a person - perhaps something that differentiates my work from others.  It has given me a rich set of connections far removed from my normal boundaries.  One of the brilliant features of the old Bell Labs was its rich diversity in research interests.  While perhaps not optimal for some tasks, it was fantastic for discovering new areas.

 

Mentoring fits in with this, but there are times when you are working with people of different interests that the act of mentoring has a strong two-way flow and you find yourself being mentored.  It can be a waste of time if you lose your curiosity and just try to teach. 

 

Jean has been talking about time lately and Charlie has suggested I put together a post on the subject.  I'm not exactly a model user of it so caveat lector...

 

I don't multitask well when I'm supposed to be thinking deeply about something.  Multitasking is something that is generally inefficient - while there are a large number of processes running in our brains, the conscious mind seems to like single tasking and context switches from task to task when presented with multiple tasks. There is a cost in context switching ..  somehow the state of what you're doing needs to be saved and  the new process started.  When you re-enter the original process you have to somehow re-create the state of where you were.  For simple tasks this may not be difficult, but deep thought can be a disaster.  There are cases where it is impossible to recreate where you have been.

 

To single task I give myself blocks of time where I cut distractions.  The phone goes off, no net, no distractions from other people or even the critters.  The go is to find a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow - largely because it feels so wonderful and it has traditionally been very useful to me.   The first lab I was in at Bell Labs had this as policy.  Researchers could pick a three hour block in the morning or the afternoon.  When I moved to different organizations I had to create blocks of time.  If they were adverse to it I would come in before others started work leading to my practice of arriving at about 5:30am.  Others feel into the same practice - more than a few people in the Labs referred to going into cave mode.² I find it interesting, talking to some friends who teach graduate courses in physics at some of the best schools in the world.  They note that few of their successful students have any major involvement in social media and they tend to focus - no laptops during lectures, no smartphone use, etc ...  very much in contrast to what one sees in undergrad classes.

 

When I'm working on very deep tasks I tend to not work on them all day.  I do them as long as I can manage and then shift to other, usually easier, tasks.  If I haven't made progress in a month, and that is common for many tough problems, I set things aside and do something challenging that is completely different.  It doesn't have to be formal work - sometimes physically building something or getting heavily involved in a drawing is sufficient.  The remarkable thing is, during the different task, the mind seems to be continuing on with the original, but at a lower layer so I'm not conscious of it.  Sometimes there is a realization of what should be done, but more often the problem is much easier when I finally get back to it.  

 

I mentioned drawing...  I'm no artist, but I draw recreationally.  It is a very convenient way for me to empty my mind and prepare to move to focused work.  I'm picky about my drawing tools and usually throw the results out, but it is probably the closest I come to meditation.  A lot of people do variations on this - an athlete friend does photography and writes poetry to get into a state where she can focus on training and playing.

 

Playing ...

 

Play is centrally important.  Playing with others and their ideas when I can and approach work playfully where possible.  This means not being afraid to fail assuming you can learn from your failures.  It means that you have to budget time to allow for this.  Sadly many forms of work don't allow a playful approach.  I suspect it is not only useful for creative work, but at some level necessary.  Probably something for a future post.

 

There is more to say (the importance of exercise and the use of iPod time-shifting to give myself the luxury of at least 90 minutes a day), but I'm approaching my one hour limit.  I find it useful to put a limit on some tasks as it gives focus and forces single tasking.  It also prevents me from reading and editing what I've written, which for the purpose of this blog is a feature.

 

 Drop a line or leave a comment if you want to talk about this at a deeper level... and if you're looking for an entertaining read try Gulp.

 

 __________

¹ I gave a TED^x talk on the subject of serendipity and collaboration.  Time tithing is central to that practice.  I should note that I use the old definition of serendipity - namely it is the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice there is something new and interesting.

The talk isn't well done - I'm not a good public speaker.  Also the format of these talks is very restricted and not something I feel works well.  

² One of the companies I've worked with decided to try this internally.  My understanding is several hundred of their people use a two hour slot every day.  They can focus on their own work or use it for collaboration with others who agree and don't want external distractions.  It should be noted the employees have separate offices and a flag that indicates they can't be disturbed.  They've told me they consider it an important tool and something they hope their competitors don't adopt.

Many types of work don't adapt to this as interruption is a necessary feature.  There is a lot of very interesting research on the subject and some HCI workers are trying to offer the right interruptions at the right time - not an easy task, but potentially valuable.  

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

I'm a big fan of soups - particularly easy soups.  This one is mostly for a food processor, is simple and easy to modify.  It is particularly good with a warm crusty baguette

 

Avocado and Corn Soup

Ingredients

 

° 1 avocado

° 3 cups almond milk

° 4 cups corn kernels

* tbl finely chopped yellow onion

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1/8 tsp turmeric

° sea salt (I use Maldon)

° freshly ground pepper

° coriander chopped (you could use parsley) 

Technique

 

° blend everything but the corn and coriander in a food processor.

° add the corn, season and heat until warm - I think it is better warm that hot

° serve into bowls and garnish with the coriander

 

 

the car as an accessory for your phone

Today I was asked to give some educated guesses about industries that were ripe for disruption.  One immediately came to mind was automobiles.  Lots of forces that everyone talks about, but a last year a young friend mentioned it was frustrating that she couldn't send a message to her car.

 

It is odd when you think about it.  Most of us walk around with network connected pocket computers and think nothing of communicating with people around the world in many ways.  These computers have a growing number of sensors that provide information to us and other people or systems.  The most basic new cars have an order of magnitude more sensors than the most complex phones.  These are connected to a few networks and usually dozens of small computers (usually called electronic control units) that mostly lied buried away making sure some rather sophisticated systems mostly function.  But we are more aware of an infotainment layer - a layer that usually has a terrible user interface and user experience.  Not only is the experience bad, but we are stuck with it for the life of the car.¹ 

 

There are a lot of reasons why the industry moves slowly on automotive software. I won't get into that now as I only have an hour, but the infotainment systems do not require the type of careful design and testing required by drive train, stability control or restraint deployment systems.  In theory these could be more like PCs or smartphones.

 

Or - as my friend suggests - perhaps they should be designed to use her iPhone as a network connected controller and display.  Perhaps the car is properly just the transportation attachment to her phone and networked life.

 

Others have thought about that - Automatic uses a small box that connects to your car's OBD-II data link connector.²  This allows them to tap into realtime information that normally is only available to your mechanic and beams it to your Android or iOS phone via Bluetooth.  Now a lot of clever things can be done on your phone.  

 

What impresses me is not what it does as it could do much more - but that no car maker has gone this far.  I'm guessing they have a half dozen competent software engineers.  A large car maker has hundreds - but no imagination.  This is basically a hack using an available port that was never intended to do this sort of thing, but it works and people will see it as amazing and desirable.  

 

Much has been written on the relationship between people under 35 and their cars, but one thing I keep coming back to when I work with this group is the notion of a car has changed.  The old images conjured up by Ned Jordan for the Jordan Playboy in the Saturday Evening Post no longer cause the imagination to fly.³  The car has become more of a high maintenance appliance.  A very comfortable and useful one perhaps, but still an appliance that is not as central to your life as your smartphone.  It should be an accessory to your phone.

 

A few years ago I visited a dealer to look at the current version of our then eight year old car.  I've been happy with the car and its relatively clean interface and delightful shifter and clutch. The new model looked dramatically better on paper, but a test drive told me I couldn't live with the user interface.  I made the decision then and there to do some work on our car with the intention of keeping it at least five or six more years.

 

I understand why the car companies aren't going in this direction, but they are opening themselves up.  Someone, perhaps a Chinese, Indian or Korean company, could build a car that made sense as a smartphone accessory.  While it may not be mechanically brilliant there may be a generation that considers that point irrelevant.

 

There are many other interesting forces in addition to this ..  a lot of risk for some of them, but there are a few with little risk and nothing but upside.

 

So our cars are information producing objects and we're not terribly in the loop.  There is much more information than we could use and the relevant question is to consider what we need and how it should be manipulated and used.

 

Recently a short piece by E.O. Wilson appeared noting that not all of science is intensely mathematical.  

...

I was never more than a C student while catching up, but I was reassured by the discovery that superior mathematical ability is similar to fluency in foreign languages. I might have become fluent with more effort and sessions talking with the natives, but being swept up with field and laboratory research, I advanced only by a small amount.

Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Everyone sometimes daydreams like a scientist. Ramped up and disciplined, fantasies are the fountainhead of all creative thinking. Newton dreamed, Darwin dreamed, you dream. The images evoked are at first vague. They may shift in form and fade in and out. They grow a bit firmer when sketched as diagrams on pads of paper, and they take on life as real examples are sought and found.

...

 

While math is basic and essential for many areas of science, it is observation, logic, clear thinking and abstraction that is most important.⁴  In some areas there can be partnerships.  Nothing comes directly from playing around with pure math and hoping it appears in the physical world.  Nature doesn't make it that easy.

 

My background is very mathematical and it is a centrally important tool in my sport, but it is a tool.  One learns how and where to use tools and importantly, how and where to use information.

 

There is a tendency to measure everything and try and use it - extreme quantification.  The problem is the information and/or the models we have built are sometimes faulty.  With careful thinking one can be find far more parsimonious.  

 

In the mid 90s a few of us were involved trying to measure the human form to fit clothing.  We came up with a scanner that could digitize the body with about a half million data points.  A few years later I realized it was much easier to employ a good tailor who would take about 30 measurements.  Furthermore, the experienced tailor, could communicate information to the pattern maker and cutters that was much richer than our big and somewhat noisy datafile.  

 

It is possible to find examples of this everywhere.  Currently the "big data" approach often misuses information.  There is a notion that if you have enough "data" with the right sort of connections that you can mine that.  To some extent you can, but it is not an easy task.  There needs to be a deep understanding first and many lack that.  I've seen a few brilliant solutions and many more expensive and troublesome toys that offer misleading information.  

 

People have been doing smart and dumb things with data for hundreds of years.  Computers allow us to do even smarter and more stupid things.

 

Imagination, day dreaming and play are central to getting the core understanding right.

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¹ Some dealers update the flash memory of some your car's computers during regular service intervals, but this is rare and is often avoided even when the manufacturer recommends updates.

² All American cars since 1996 have these ports - there is a lot of error code information as well as real time performance information.

³ Check out the second half of this post for details on the brilliant ad copy by Jordan.

⁴ A smart high school student can grock special relativity with no more than a bit of algebra and trigonometry and a bit of careful reasoning.

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Recipe Corner

 

A few weeks ago Om posted something on Holi which brought back a flood of memories when I lived with a group of Indian graduate students at Stony Brook.  One of the foods I remember from Holi was a spiced milk - I think it was called Thandai.

I've had it with whole milk, but imagine it would be interesting with coconut milk and would probably also work, but be different and more healthy, with almond milk.   

 

Thandai for Holi

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 cups whole milk

° 5 tbl white cane sugar

° 1/2 tbl fennel seeds

° 1/2 tsp black peppercorns

° 12 green cardamom pods

° 3/4 cup raw almonds, peeled and slivered

° an inch of cinnamon stick

° 2 tbl rosewater

° crushed pistachios

 

Technique

 

° roast the seeds, cinnamon and spices in a small pan without oil over a low heat until they become fragrant.  Let them cool

° remove the cardamom seeds and discard the pods

° put the almonds, spices, seeds, sugar, cinnamon and rose water in a bowl and cover slightly with water.  Let it sit for about 2 hours.

° pop it in a blender and grind until you get a paste

° add the past to the milk and mix

° filter through a cheesecloth into a bowl. (Rohini had a very fine mesh)

° chill it in the 'fridge, serve in chilled glasses and top with pistachios

 

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