Alles Gute hat ein Ende

This marvelously-witty-satire-turned-food-blog project was a team effort.  Unfortunately said team is no more.  Hence said project is no more as well.

Safe journey, space fans, wherever you are.

Pictures of sexy cupcake pies and dogs and crêpes

We made these cupcakes except we adapted them to fit the ingredients at hand -- Kahlua and coffee liquor instead of bourbon, and hazelnuts instead of walnuts.  The pie crust Leah made from scratch!  We ended up with a spare cake.  How awesome is that?! 

Here is what goes in the cupcake pies.  Those are chopped hazelnuts with mini semi-sweet chocolate chips.

The cake batter was a vanilla cake mix, but we added coffee liquor (we only had enough Kahlua for the ganache) instead of the Kentucky bourbon the recipe called for.  What's better than hazelnuts and coffee flavor??

We used a bag with the corner cut off to pipe the ganache onto the cupcake-pies.

There wasn't enough room in the cupcakes for all of the cake batter, so we used the extra to make a small cake:

We also made crêpes with salami, provolone, tomatoes, onions, and a little bit of oregano and basil.  This was Leah's first time making crêpes and only the first one fell apart!

 We didn't eat the dogs. 

And yes, Leah does in fact own a pet gargoyle.

Macaroni, and the best roast beef I've ever tasted

Come back with me to 4 Jan 2010 for a moment.  What were you doing that day?  I remember exactly what I was doing: eating some fan-freaking-tastic macaroni:

Now jump forward to 15 Jan 2010 (yesterday).  What were you doing then?  I was gorging myself on the most mind-bendingly delicious roast beef I've ever eaten, courtesy of your friend and mine, Leah Morabito:

We made Outback Steakhouse-esque green beans again, and this time with half the brown sugar.  Delicious!  Still not quite OS caliber, but pretty darned close.

A new direction!

Since I don't have anything terribly interesting to contribute in terms of witty and original social commentary anymore, I decided to take this incredibly popular blog in a new direction: food!  Pretty much all I do anymore is make food (with Leah) and study physics (also with Leah).  And sleep occasionally.  So here are some interesting things we've made recently.  Yesterday was a lamb flank from Central Market, which Leah marinated with olive oil, minced garlic, coarse ground pepper and I think an Italian seasoning.  We also had orzo with lemon juice and some lemon zest (too much, perhaps), and also my feeble attempt at Outback Steakhouse-style green beans.  (Next time I will use probably half the amount of brown sugar that recipe calls for.)

And since I don't have a vegetable steamer, we built one that sort of looks like a spaceship:

First semester of graduate school is done!

Tons of work, but definitely worth it! I'm taking the electromagnetism and astronomy qualifying exams in January. If I pass them both then there are only two left, and then I can focus on research for the next 5 years! Huzzah!

A message from Lewis Black

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy67kwA6Xm4

First graduate exam

Friday was my first exam in graduate school. As Dr. Kantowski handed out the exams he said, "I hope you'll agree that this exam is fairly easy, but just long." Everybody groaned, because that same statement has prefaced all too many physics exams in our respective pasts which promptly proceeded to eat our respective lunches. But this time he was actually right: it was not hard, but much too long for the amount of time we had. I'm feeling pretty good about it right now. There are only 11 of us in this class so hopefully he'll have them graded by Tuesday.

I'm definitely in the physics department

As I've started studying more complicated physics, I've met along the way so many physicists who understood more than I ever thought possible. So much, in fact, that they had forgotten just how dumb the rest of us still are. I vowed I would never, ever become that way. No matter how much I studied physics I would always remember what it was like not to know anything about the subject, so I would never respond to a future student's question with my advisor's favorite phrase, "Oh, that's trivial." (And of course his explanation following that ominous response is ever-faithfully NON-trivial.)

Today in my office, as the five graduate students in there were studying for our qualifying exams next week, I suddenly realized that I was already a good way up that ivory tower I so dreaded ascending. Two specific examples jump out at me. First, we have started using LOTS of slang for things that at one time seemed far too nuanced to merit such language. Second, I noticed that we complete one another's sentences in ways that must seem completely nonsensical to the non-physics student. A conversation this afternoon perfectly embodied both of those:

Tom: "Hey, when you do the potential of the grounded cube thing, do you end up with an infinite series?"
Me: "No, because they give you V on that last side so you can do the integral. So you can do the orthogonal thing and get a real number... Oh wait, no, sorry, you still get the series but if you know V you still get all the coefficients. Otherwise you're stuck with the integral."
Tom: "Yeah, ok."

We had this exchange sitting about ten feet apart, without writing anything down or pointing at anything on a chalkboard. The contexts of these problems have become so familiar that our brains automatically set the stage, complete with props, so it's perfectly acceptable to resort to using words like "thing" repeatedly and with regard to different abstractions --- Thing #1 was the conducting cube, but #2 was the orthogonality property --- with no loss of clarity.

China spouse market!

Maybe I should consider this...

Volunteers soldiers are amazing.

Don't stories like this leave you awestruck? What really got me was the 18-year-old kid. He was 10 on Sept. 11, 2001. That would be... 4th grade. I was 14, a freshman in high school. And as I sat in my gym class and the proctor came to our class and read the note that said two hijacked planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and two more were still in the air, that was the first time in my life that I actually feared for my life. (I had been in high school for all of two weeks. That was a pretty overwhelming welcoming present.) And the very last thing in the world I wanted to do was to join the Marines and go fight the guys who felt justified flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers. And here is this kid, 10 years old, deciding right then that that was what he was going to do.

I'm not patriotic by any stretch of the imagination, but there is something about a person who volunteers for military service that absolutely blows my mind. Not in an are-you-kidding-me way, but in a that's-not-a-natural-thing-for-human-beings-to-do-and-it's-amazing kind of way.

I learned something about pee today.

If you eat a ton of asparagus, when you pee it out the smell will almost knock you off your feet. Good gravy. It doesn't even really smell like asparagus pee. It smells like death. As my good friend Chris put it, "It's worse than rank beer shits."

Today was my last day to be a college tutor.

I hate college more than just about anything, but there are some things to which I have become very attached. Tutoring physics is one of them. Today the class I tutor - or rather, the ones in the class who actually come to tutoring on a semi-regular basis - all signed a card for me and gave me a Starbucks gift card. It was then that I realized just how much fun I've actually had there. And part of me worries that tutoring/teaching in the future won't be the same because in the future there will be an age or professional gap between me and my tutorees, either as graduate student vs. undergraduates, or teacher vs. students. When there's nothing to distinguish me from anybody else, the atmosphere becomes very relaxed and comfortable, and people don't feel stupid asking questions. It is my sincerest hope that in the future I will be able to foster an environment at least somewhat reminiscent of what we've had here.

My house is full of WTF.

My housemate makes our house the only place on this planet in which one could open the freezer door and find this:


Did you see? Look a little closer:


Apparently those Walmart receipts spoil pretty quickly if you don't freeze them. *Sigh.*

How to [Lose] a [Social] Life

The Fray has a song called How to Save a Life. I am learning how to destroy one. A social life, anyway. This is how you do it:

What I learned about graduate school today

Okay, I'm not actually in graduate school yet, but I'm still learning lots about it. For example, today I learned there is almost nothing which will torpedo one's chances at getting into graduate school faster than a sub-par subject GRE test score. At one particular school to which I applied, a summer research internship AND a letter of recommendation from a sitting faculty member still only got me wait-listed. Sheesh.

Small victories

You've probably noticed that recently Google added an auto-complete feature to its search boxes. When you start typing and then pause for a second, a list appears below the box which contains "suggestions" for your search. I assume Google keeps track of all the phrases people search for, and adds them to the list if they receive some number of searches. Anyway, I consider it a small victory when I search for something for which Google has no auto-complete suggestions. Sometimes I try to "beat" the search box. I type something obscure, pause, wait with bated breath, and usually fist-pump if Google can't come up with anything.

Not even a REAL rejection letter, University of Illinois? :-(

You had to do it by e-mail, huh. Is postage that expensive??

Thought for the day.

This courtesy of Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic.  Regarding the dubious executive compensation over at AIG:

I'm not angry and bitter; I'm about as mad as I am at the prospect of people who bought homes they can't really afford getting a bailout while I continue renting--which is to say, not very.  Life is rather too short to spend it getting angry at remote strangers.

The "self"-checkout at Dillons is very misleading.

During my last several treks to Dillons, I bought lots of fresh (unpackaged) produce, none of which had barcodes.  I don't even know how to check out barcode-less produce at the self-checkout station thing, so I got in a regular checkout line (with a human cashier).  But as soon as I got in line, a cashier standing a few feet behind all of the registers said, "Sir, if you'd like I can help you check out at the self-checkout."  So she took my stuff and punched in a whole bunch of numbers (with blinding speed) for the produce I had, and that was that.

The point of this story is that I don't think Dillons should be allowed to have those big signs above the self-checkout machines that say "self-checkout," because that's not what they are anymore.  I don't remember this phenomenon during our myriad trips to Dillons when I was younger, so this must be a recent development.

University of Oklahoma, you're pretty cool :-D

I got in! With a fellowship to boot! Now I just kinda (really) hope everybody else says no so I don't have to make a tough decision :-P