omenti

when smart controls aren't

I try to average about 150 watts for an 80 minute period on the rowing machine.  I'm about 20% efficient, so I need to move about 600 watts out of my body.  Humans are well designed for dumping heat and within a few minutes I'm sweating - really sweating.  The basement averages about 65°F during the Summer so I only wear cutoffs and still need to go through more than a liter of water.  By late November the temperature has fallen to 50°,  I start the session in cutoffs and a tshirt, but within five minutes I'm too hot and the tshirt comes off.  In Summer and Winter I'm still uncomfortably hot for several minutes after finishing - the glow of exercise:-)

  

Last week was chilly.  It was 17° when I took out the recycling at six am immediately after exercising.  My neighbor saw me and shook his head and returned to scraping the heavy frost from his windshield.  I was wearing my cutoffs and tshirt - no coat or long pants.  Why wasn't I freezing in the chilly morning air?  What do we mean by thermal comfort and how do we sense it?

 

You probably have between 1.7 and 2.0 square meters - roughly the  area of a car's hood.¹  Embedded in the skin is a rich sensor network.  We tend to think about touch and pain, but there are also about 160,000 thermal receptors. They don't measure the same temperature measured by thermometers, but are sensitive to dry bulb and radiant temperatures, local air velocity, humidity as well as your current metabolic output.  Their output is used to regulate body temperature and are the basis for your sense of thermal comfort.

 

It has been known for decades that dry bulb temperature isn't a great proxy for thermal comfort, but we uses it because it is easy to measure and integrate into HVAC systems.  The result has been inefficient spaces that aren't optimally comfortable.  A thermostat isn't going to help much - most only measure and stabilize dry bulb temperature in small areas.  You can break a home or building into multiple zones, but the several of the quantities needed to calculate thermal comfort are missing.  A 'smart' thermostat may save some money by only tightly regulating temperature during specific times when you are around, but that isn't enough.  Perhaps an improvement over your conventional thermostat if you're lazy, but hardly smart.

 

Years ago I lived in an old Sanford White house built around 1890.  There wasn't any air conditioning and the furnace was ancient, but it was surprisingly comfortable.  The It was very good at allowing you to control and stabilize mean radiant temperature - a measure that can have a larger impact on thermal comfort than dry bulb temperature. You could also control local wind speed through the use of well placed windows and ceiling fans.

 

Local weather stations measure what is important to thermal comfort are some way off - probably be part of a wearable or, more likely, network of wearables embedded in or very close to your clothing.²  This network would have to communicate with local devices - including your clothing.  Smart fabrics and clothing designs might dynamically regulate thermal insulation properties - its clo, a kind of R value for clothing.³   

 

You can take  steps to be more comfortable and reduce your energy bill at the same time.  Insulating the body is much more efficient than heating a full house.  For cold winter days modern thermal underwear can be extremely effective and even comfortable.  Make use of the fact that those 160,000 thermal sensors aren't evenly distributed - they're more concentrated on your your feet, ankles and calves, hands and wrists and neck, and face.  Dress accordingly and use radiant heat as necessary rather than cranking the thermostat.  Move around a bit rather than just sit - crank up your metabolic output.  Minimize drafts - sealing air leaks is usually one of the most cost effective ways to lower your heating and air conditioning bills.

 

Air conditioning works by lowering the air temperature and sometimes humidity.  The lower temperature increases your heat loss by convection and lower humidity by evaporation of skin moisture  - even when you're not sweating up a storm. Fans work by increasing the air velocity across your skin increasing heat loss by convection and evaporation (if the air isn't too humid or hot).  There is also passive or active radiant cooling, but let's stick with fans for the moment.

 

Moving air requires much less energy than refrigerating it.  The cooling effect is immediate and can be local.  Heat evaporation loss increases roughly as the square of air velocity, but thermal comfort is a bit more difficult to determine.  Some rules of thumb are a one meter per second airflow can offset a 3°C (5.4°F) increase in indoor temperature and three meters per second is good for 7°C.⁴  There is a lot of experimentation you can do.  I use a small reasonably efficient personal fan installed under my desk that creates an airflow towards my chest and head.  

 

Computational fluid dynamics is being used to design quieter and more efficient fan blades and more efficient electric motors are being used.  Some ceiling mounted fans can gimbal and deliver airflow to where it is needed.  While fans have a fundamental limit of not being effective as air temperature approaches your skin temperature (about 95°), they are generally underused and a good deal of design cleverness remains to be discovered.  Last Summer I started using a fan during my exercise sessions - it made a dramatic difference in my comfort as well as ability to maintain my power output level.

 

Much can be done by thinking differently about design and biology  - and even rediscovering the past.  But remember that no matter what you do, it makes sense to measure what you are trying to control.

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¹  Knowing a person's skin area is useful in medicine and sports science.  A variety of techniques are used, but a quick estimate, good to a few percent on people with average builds is the Mosteller formula.  

body surface area (m²) = (height(cm) * weight(kg)/3600)^0.5

The formula loses accuracy for those with very low or high body fat percentages and those who have lost a lot of weight. 

² ARPA-E has announced a program designed to investigate micro thermal regulation as well as thermal comfort regulation.

³ clo is a measure for clothing insulation and has the same units as R values (°K-m²/watts).  1 clo = 0.86R.  A tshirt has a clo of about 0.1, a flannel shirt about 0.35, a normal down coat is about 3. 

⁴ This is a rough rule of thumb.  The effect is more pronounced at lower humidities and less in wetter air.  Fans make a lot of sense in the desert Southwest.  Quite a bit of experimental work has been done correlating thermal comfort with as a function of fan position and wind speed.  This paper from the Research Division of the California Air Resources Board is an excellent resource.

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Recipe Corner

 

The excess of Thanksgiving is over, so a simple and healthy soup seemed in order. It is great with good bread.  I think it improves if left overnight in the refrigerator, but if you have several enthusiastic eaters you may not be able to test my conjecture.

 

Chickpea Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 15oz cans of chickpeas,  

°3 tablespoons olive oil

° 2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped

° 4 garlic cloves, chopped

° sprig thyme

° 1/2 cup white wine 

° 4 cups of vegetable broth (no salt)

° salt 

 

 

Technique

 

° heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat.  Cook  onions, garlic and thyme until the onions are soft

° add chickpeas and wine, bring to a rapid simmer and cook for a few minutes to reduce the wine by about half. 

° add the broth and crank the heat to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cover for about a half hour.  

° purée with a food processor or, better yet, an immersion blender.  Salt to taste.

 

 

clocks in the sky

The Arizona desert is a fine place for getting reacquainted with some old friends in the night sky.  The air was dry and almost chilly and moonless sky was as transparent as the dark Montana skies I knew as a kid.  The mountains on the horizon cut their blackness into the sky as it slowly rotated above them.  The binoculars stayed on in their case. I hadn't seen the Milky Way this well in years. Turning my attention towards Perseus I located Algol and without thinking realized I was comparing it to a few other stars to estimate its brightness.

 

Algol is one of those stars that amateur astronomers learned about when they got ot the point where they wanted to learn about the sky rather than just looking at it.  It is easy to find and reasonably bright. Well - mostly it is reasonably bright.  It has an apparent magnitude of 2.1, but every 68 hours and 49 minutes it dims by about 70%.¹  It is very regular variable star.  

 

Well - sort of ...  

 

It is really three stars orbiting around a common center of mass.  Two are very close - only about  0.06 Astronomical Units - the distance from the Sun to the Earth.  The third is about 2.7 AU - still ridiculously close for stars, but most of the interesting action is between the tight pair.

 

Algol A is very bright blue star and its tight pair Algol B is a larger, but fainter orange star.  The orbit happens to line up with a line of sight to Earth so Algol B passes in front of A effectively dropping the brightness as seen on Earth - like clockwork.

 

Due to the close distance some of Algol B is being sucked into Algol A - the sight must be incredible.²

 

Looking at it again I remembered a game I began to play as a teenager.  A game that is still with me.  I try to imagine what might change - history or even life itself - if something in Nature was altered.  I stay away from altering the fundamental physics and chemistry, but are still many rich things to imagine.  What color would plants be if the Sun had a different spectral type, what if we didn't have a moon, what if our axis was in the plane of our orbit, what if the Earth's mass was 20% more - or 20% less, what if our orbit was more elliptical, ...? 

 

In High School we learned about the Longitude Prize in Mr Wolff's world history class. It completely captivated me at the time.  Navigation requires knowing latitude and longitude.  Latitude is trivial - a simple sextant will do.  Longitude requires knowing what time it is.  Before the prize good clocks weren't up to the task - a precision chronometer was necessary and a remarkable story unfolded.

 

I had been doing my little thought experiments and, on the way home from school, it struck me what if Algol had a shorter period or the apparent brightness change was greater?  There would have been a clock beating in the sky.  Would this have enabled precision navigation for mariners thousands of years ago?  How would the world have changed?  

 

Dozens of questions arise. Little thought experiments where you hold everything constant except one variable that gets perturbed is a powerful technique for critical thinking. Quite a bit of physics, particularly in the early stages of an investigation, use it.  Of course it is fundamental to experimental science and has applications elsewhere.³  You can test any number of ideas with the technique and it can be a good out-of-the-box thinking technique.  Just be sure and apply enough rigor to the ideas you generate.

 

Now we place our own precision clocks in the sky and have revolutionized navigtion in the process.

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¹ Apparent magnitude is the brightness of an object as seen by an observer on Earth.  Ptolemy popularized a scheme that divided the visible stars into six magnitudes.  The brightest was the first magnitude, the dimmest was the sixth.  Each brighter level was considered twice as bright as the previous level.  In the 19^th century as photometric techniques were developed the scale was redefined such that a first magnitude star was 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude - the fifth root of 100 is about 2.512, so the difference in brightness between a 2.1 and 3.4 is 2.512^(3.4-2.1) or about 3.11.  Some objects are brighter than 1 and most are dimmer than 6.  The sun is about -27 and a full moon is about -13 (so the Sun is about 400,000x brighter than a full moon)

² The figure is from a paper from the CHARA interferometer group.  A fantastic instrument that does long baseline optical interferometry to resolve objects that are too close together to separate with conventional telescopes.  Note that Algol B has a distorted shape - this is real.  The distortion on C is an artifact.

³ FaceBook for example:-)

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Recipe Corner

 

Everyone who is cooking this week probably has a menu firmly at hand.  I'll list some vegetable roasting techniques may be useful

 

° Use a sheet pan.  A deeply set pan holds the steam from the roasting vegetables making them mushier.

° I don't cut produce to uniform sizes.  I like a bit of variation.  Also carrots are often best roasted whole.  Broccoli is often good split lengthwise.  

° spread them out on the pan - crowding over steams them.  Remember most ovens have very little airflow.

° some vegetables need more oil than others.  Mushrooms take more than sweet potatoes for example.

° toss them at least once during the cooking 

° crank up the temperature 425° to 450° The Maillard reaction and caramelization are your friends.  Of course you have to watch the cooking more closely if you move to higher temperatures.  The difference between perfect and ash can be a couple of minutes.

 

 

the pursuit of happiness

A follow-on discussion with Jheri after the last post centered on words and concepts that are well-known within a culture, but are so much a part of the culture that they are difficult or impossible to define on the outside.  The Danish concept of hyyge came up.  Sometimes called coziness outside of Denmark, it is much deeper and is considered a fundamental part of life and culture. (here is a pronunciation)  Using just a few words Jheri paints her own beautiful version.  With her permission I sent it to a few people, but it deserves wider distribution. 

 

Hygge is a Danish concept that is hard to define. Some say it is coziness, but that doesn't go deeply enough. It is something a lot of Danes aim towards and you see it in everything from Danish design to how they value their spare time.

Imagine you are with little group of your favorite friends. You are in a small house and have just finished a wonderful meal with good wine. Your friends have started into stories while a fire burns and candles glow. You can see the snow falling outside. You don't have to worry about finding your way home and can sleep as long as you like the next day. Everything is perfect and supports a larger calm happiness. It is in tiny things and those that are large. It isn't something you buy.

I think this is partly why the Danes are constantly rated among the happiest peoples. Even against the weather:)

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I've been working on trying to make risottos without dairy products and have been having some luck.  This one was delicious - there was a bit of saffron lurking in the cupboard from some earlier dishes that needed to be used, so why not?

 

Butternut Squash Risotto

 

Ingredients

 

° about two cups of butternut squash cut into half inchish cubes

° 1 small yellow onion, chopped 

° 2 garlic cloves, finely minced

° 1/2 cup dry white wine

° about 6 cups of vegetable stock (I make my stocks without salt so I can add it in the dish)

° 1-1/2 cups Arborio rice

° 2 cups baby spinach

° 1 tsp saffron threads

° black pepper and salt to taste

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 425°F

° put the squash on a try and bake until tender - 15 to 20 minutes

° heat the stock on low heat in a saucepan

° in another pan sauté the onion and garlic is a small splash of stock (1 tbl?) on medium heat until the onions are translucent

° add the rice to the onions and then the whine.  Cook stirring until the rice absorbs the wine.

° add a few cups of stock along with the saffron and pepper.  Stir, cover and simmer until the stock is absorbed

° add a bit more stock, stir and cover. A good time to adjust the saltiness - I didn't use much.

° repeat until the rice is tender, but still a bit al dente - you may have left over stock.  About a half hour or so.

° remove rice from the neat and add the spinach and roasted squash.  

 

 

incomplete and overly complete words

Many words and phrases commonly used by scientists have very different meanings to non-scientists.  Energy, power, mass, inertia, momentum, confidence, model, space, measurement, error, signal, color, space, time, vacuum, evolution, theory, particle/wave duality ..  the list goes on and on.  A certain amount of code switching is necessary for effective public communication - the same may well be true in your field.  People like Neil deGrasse Tyson and E.O. Wilson are expert communicators, but much of the community struggles.¹  

 

Some of the communication problem is solved by education.  Some concepts can be described by language accurately enough.  We have words for the concepts of the Newtonian world.  But other concepts are a bit too nebulous outside of math.  The mathematics of quantum mechanics are very clear, but language is too incomplete for accurate description so phrases like Schrödinger's cat are often invoked.

Within the field lurk a rich jargon - terms and phrases that are confusing with misleading literal meanings to outsiders   Color as the analog to charge in quantum chromodynamics, superposition to describe the linearity of state-space, entanglement to describe tensor products of composite systems, singularity - I can't give a description in a few words...   Labels for some rather bizarre beasts that allow easy communication.  Public descriptions are a form of handwaving, often visual and usually devoid of math, that give a bit of a flavor.  

 

The imperfections of incomplete language fade within the field, but a more serious language problem lurks.  In the past few weeks conversations with Jean and Jheri  and  a podcast by Horace triggered some thinking about the problem one encounters when language is too complete.  What happens when something has a name and is used in such a way that we are fooled into believe it is fundamental - an element of reality?

 

Most of Newton's physics is an accurate enough description of the world that most of us experience.  Adequate, but not deep.  Newtonian gravity got us to the Moon with relatively simple calculations and greatly accelerated the understanding of Nature.  But it had three fundamental flaws.² Newton's gravity couldn't be fundamental and the hunt was on for something better.  Einstein found it and it was simple in retrospect.  His insight was to reconsider the meaning of now.

 

The concept of now is a deeply engrained concept  Einstein's beautiful 1905 paper is nearly equation-free and opens with a discussion on how one synchronizes distant clocks.  He then analyzes what happens when the observers of the clocks are moving with respect to each other and shows the notion of things taking place at the same time - simultaneity -  has to break and he had Special Relativity.

 

Now was no longer a rigid absolute - relatively killed that notion.  We still have problems thinking about it as it really is as most of our observations are in a very restricted part of reality. 

 

If Special Relativity weakened now, quantum mechanics undermined here.  Quantum mechanics doesn't describe the location of a particle as a simple set of components, but rather as something more abstract - a probability density.  This is extremely important at dimensions that are microscopic to our senses and almost unnoticed at our scale.  We can describe the world very precisely at a small scale, but that is overkill for most of us.  We still think we have a good handle on here, but at a fundamental level the notion has little meaning.

 

Einstein may have broken out of the the now box we thought described reality, but he had problems with the loss of here.  General Relativity, the beautiful theory that vanquished the problems of Newton's gravity and gave us a much deeper window into Nature, relies on proper heres and nows (although not the old universal now).³  

 

General Relativity breaks down at small scales.⁴  Much of the excitement about the BICEP2 observations last Spring was a hint at a deep connection between relativity and quantum mechanics.  Other observations reduce the chance that the original BICEP2 interpretation is correct (not totally though) - such is the way of Nature.  She is what she is and not what you hope she is.

 

We live in a series of boxes of some rather rigid and complete language constructs.  Some may be true and others certainly aren't.  Shattering a box is a fundamental leap - it changes how we view the Universe and is usually accompanied by a storm of completely new questions.  

 

What are the overly complete language boxes in your field?  How does one realize they exist?  Physics is easy as deep questions of Nature point to where something is broken and the questions are simple in principle.  

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¹ Colleen and I put quite a bit of effort into a book that attempted to describe energy at a level that people might make informed personal choices.  Writing something that is clear, accurate enough and not boring for a general audience proved to be too difficult.

²  It did not explain why the gravitational force on an object was proportional to its inertial mass, it didn't explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit, and it implied all masses in the universe were instantly connected to each other gravitationally.

³ It is probably worth mentioning that the word theory has a very special place in the natural sciences.  It is a well substantiated explanation of some part of Nature that is repeatably tested and confirmed through experimentation and observation.  Theories are predictive and explanatory. It is a very high standard.  Outside of the natural sciences the word usually means what a scientist could call a guess or conjecture.

⁴ A unification of quantum mechanics and gravity is elusive, but the current best theory of matter is a bit more abstract.  Being about sixty years ago it became clear we could retain here and now as there was something more fundamental.  You probably learned about the particle and wave nature of matter in high school or college physics and probably saw a few experiments to make the point.  The fundamental objects of reality aren't particles, but rather quantum fields.  You are an incredibly complex swarm of quantum fields that happens to be able to think.  The math and physics behind this usually doesn't come until at least the junior year for physics majors, so the deep result is rarely mentioned outside the field.

 

 

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I've been making some Thai dishes, but one of the problems has been most dishes call for fish sauce.  I'm a vegetarian, so that doesn't work (for the same reason I can't eat at most Thai restaurants).  Here is a pretty good curry paste I threw together that allows you to easily make veggie Thai food.  I had a lot of spices onhand so be creative.  The peanuts, a sweet, tamari, citrus, chili, ginger and lemon grass are going to be important as a base for exploration.

 

Vegan 'Thai' Curry Paste

 

Ingredients

 

° 1/2 cup roasted peanuts

° 1/4 cup maple B grade maple syrup

° 1/4 cup tamari

° 3 inches of ginger

° 2 limes - juice and zest 

° 3 keffir lime leaves

° 1 or 2 dried chilis (how much heat do you want - I went with 1, but some people want heat)

° 1 stalk lemon grass

° 1 tsp turmeric

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1 tsp coriander

° 1/2 tsp cinnamon

° 1/4 tsp cloves

°1/8 tsp each nutmeg, cardamom, finely ground pepper

 

Technique

 

° throw everything into a blender and blend until you get a smooth paste.

° refrigerate for a few hours (at least) to allow the flavors to come together.

 

  

community, sharing and an interesting restaurant

Frank's single-wide was cozy with both the propane furnace and the wood burning stove blazing against the -20°F night.  Warm cinnamon buns, hot chocolate and blankets made up for the trailer's thin insulation as we talked almost until dawn about the Internet and Montana's native people. 

 

Frank ran The Big Sky Telegraph - an early community network effort dating to the late 80s brining Internet connections and expertise to rural Montana.  Frank's notion was to train the trainers and find uses that would get communities to warm up to this new fangled Internet thing.  Maybe enough to fund links to more schools and libraries isolated homes with a special focus on native peoples.

 

Vijay had just joined AT&T Research out of Xerox PARC.  He had a deep interest in education MOOs having seen good success with one in the Phoenix school system and we were talking about this and other reasons why native peoples might want to get online.¹  Our Human Computer Interaction department had an interest in social virtual reality systems and community networks, so we jumped at the chance and found ourselves in Dillion, Montana.  It was Vijay's first exposure to serious Winter.

 

When traveling in snow country it makes sense to have a backup plan.  Our hotel was in Butte, but a storm made travel treacherous.  A big basketball game managed to sell out all of the rooms in Dillon, but Montanans have a gift for taking care of fools and strangers.  

 

We began to flesh out ideas - a MOO would built for students students where we had human connections - New Jersey, Montana, France and India.  Everyone would be exotic to each other and there would be language and time differences in the mix.  We needed to do something for the adults.  It started with a bulletin board and chat system for sharing resources. Community sharing has long been deeply embedded in rural Montana.  I grew up with gasoline and other supplies from a non-profit community cooperative.  The hope was to build something lightweight where the unit of transaction would be karma. 

 

The sun rose and the temperature soared to 0°F by noon.  We had a lunch meeting at Dillion's best steak house before driving up to Butte.  Not seeing anything suited for a vegetarian on the menu, I asked if they could throw together something.  The server said they weren't that kind of restaurant and shortly the manager appeared  You order steak if you want to eat in their establishment.  I congratulated him for having standards and got a photo of the two of us standing together.  Over the years I've been able to get something even if it is rarely good.  This includes restaurants one would assume are completely meat oriented.  Perhaps only in Montana.

 

How the kids used the MOO turned out to be rich in learnings.  Similar constructions with better graphics have mostly replaced the text based realities - Minecraft comes to mind.  The karma barter system managed to get off the ground, but it remained small.  There was a bit of expertise and physical goods sharing along with a few commercial trades.  Not terribly surprising in retrospect as people had been doing this with newspapers and church bulletins.  The communites it served were too sparsely populated for it to take off, but it was better than nothing.

 

About five years ago I was listening to As it Happens on CBC radio.  Alberta and Saskatchewan were in the midst of a serve drought.  A farmer in Manitoba called and said he had extra hay and could ship it West - free to a fellow farmer if someone would pay the shipping.  The act touched the Canadians and within a day dozens and then hundreds of farmers were making similar offers.  

 

About the same time the US Farm Service Agency created Hay Net - roughy the same idea with a very simple interface.  Farmers would show if they had or needed hay so a deal could be made.  The service expanded to include grazing land.  The community of farmers had expanded beyond the local.

 

A few months ago I was invited to join a Switchboard site. Hay Net for trusted communities.  The idea is to put a ask/offer mechanism in a community of trust - a space where most people are closely connected to each other by at least one common bond.  The software is very simple and the middleman can be completely eliminated.  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are generally terrible at supporting tightly bound communities and communities of trust.  They are more about lose associations often filtering and focused on getting you excited about transactions that are outside your trusted community.  

 

The switchboard I'm on is associated with a college - Students, faculty and alumni.  It is one of the few online social constructs I've seen that actively brings together multiple generations.  I've seen trades of musical performances for (long) rides to the airport, original music composed for a 75^th birthday , lots of free career counseling and even a bit of direct farm to home sales.  It is up to your imagination and some people are very imaginative. People are encouraged to write up the successful transactions - there is an online sharing of gratitude.

 

I won't comment on the viability of the business model, but this sort of operation can be extremely inexpensive and could become important in some communities.  People who study trusted community suggest there is a size sweet spot between a few hundred and about ten thousand depending on engagement.  It is a natural augmentation of the types of communities I identify with and a very different niche than what is exploited commercially.

 

from the Switchboard site

 

snip

...

Last week I spoke at a panel on the sharing economy. I was on stage with with an employee of AirBnB. I felt a bit out of place. Long before AirBnB there were independent bed and breakfasts across the country. My mom ran one out of my childhood home. And although we’d receive notes in the guest book along the lines of, “Thank you for sharing your home,” for my mom it was, “Thank you for sharing your money. We we can now pay our mortgage.” She never continued a relationship with a single guest.

It seems there are transactional economies with monetary exchange, and there’s sharing (full stop), an economy of gift giving built from the simple, primal, inexhaustible, currency-free activities of communities giving, receiving, and reciprocating. In my mind, there is a gulf that separates the two. It perplexes me that we lack the discernment to recognize the difference. As Lewis Hyde put it, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establish a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection…a gift makes a connection.”

We at Switchboard are often asked what our product “does.” “What’s the value proposition? What would people have to share? How is this different from a Facebook group?” This question is one of the hardest to answer. What it “does” is a reflection of the hearts of the people who use it, and the connections they make there. A web is formed from Camas to William to the Payne family to Rosanna to Daniel to Dante to Ethan to Ethan’s grandmother to Sarah to my fellow grape pickers to Martha to me. I’m not Facebook friends with a single one of these people, nor have I the desire to be. These types of webs aren’t built or maintained there. This web is different. It was built by kindness, generosity, and grace, and constructed within the practically invisible doorframe of Switchboard. The value proposition of this doorframe is our belief that sharing and receiving these necessary gifts is our reason for being alive.

... 

 

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¹ A MOO is text based online virtual reality system that allows several users to be connected and lets them talk to each other as well as create and manipulate virtual objects.  

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Recipe Corner

 

I've heard parsnips can be substituted for carrots in cakes.  I didn't go all the way - a mixture of parsnip and apple.  Easy and delicious!

 

Apple-Parsnip Cake

 

Ingredients

 

° 175g butter

° 250g brown sugar

° 100g grade B maple syrup 

° 3 large eggs

° 250g AP flour

° 2 tsp baking powder

° 2 tsp autumish mixed spices (like pumpkin pie spice - I mix my own, so use what you like)

° 250g parsnips peeled

° 1 medium apple (I used a regular Fuji) cored and peeled

° 50g pecans or walnuts coarsely chopped

° 1 small orange - zest and juice 

° cream cheese icing (it seemed appropriate - I made one with cc and maple syrup)

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 350°F - use the middle rack

° grate the apple and parsnip (a food processor is the way to go)

° grease and line two 8" cake pans - a single 10x10 square would also work

° melt butter, sugar and maple syrup over a low heat and then cool enough to work in eggs

° whisk in eggs and then stir in everything else

° pour into the pans and bake for 25-30 minutes until the top springs back

° cool and frost