Fly Me Away

I'm off to Ann Arbor this morning for the first of two post-doc interviews this week. Yikes. We'll see how it goes...

It's All Marketing's Fault

Michael Pollan's talk last night was pretty cool, and today's XKCD touches on an issue he made quite a fuss about. And you wonder why I got out of Food Science.

Sweet Potato and Corn Soup

Fall is coming, and so is Michael Pollan, so here's a nice, mostly local dish to warm you up on an autumnal evening. I got this recipe from my Dad, but I'm not sure where he found it. Cayenne and jalapeños aren't his usual style.

Start off by peeling and chopping up half a dozen medium sweet potatoes and cutting the kernels off three ears of corn:


You'll also need to chop up one or two jalapeño peppers:

Now you're ready to get cooking. Start by sautéing a cup of chopped onions (I happened to have a white and a red onion lying around, but any old onion will do) and a tablespoon of diced garlic in a tablespoon of peanut oil for a few minutes.

Then add 8 cups of chicken stock (or vegetable stock, either way):

Toss in the sweet potatoes:

Bring it all to a boil, then simmer for 10 minutes or so after that, or until the potatoes are nice and soft.

Take the soup off the heat, and (in the step voted most likely to result in a major kitchen disaster), puree the lot of it:

After cleaning up the mess and thinking how nice it would be to have an immersion blender, add the corn and peppers to the soup:

Finally, dump in a quarter cup of molasses (or maple syrup), along with a tablespoon of kosher salt, half a teaspoon each of cayenne and ground black pepper, and a pinch or so of cinnamon for seasoning:

Bring it all back to a simmer, garnish with some chopped green onions, and serve with a chunk of nice bread (in this case, spicy cheese bread from the farmer's market).

Pretty good, despite the baptism of fire for my shiny new toaster. You haven't really been cooking if you don't have to clean stuff off the walls afterwards. Enjoy!

Scratchiness in the throat

I'm hoping the scratchiness and headache is just stress and the aftereffects of Yann's bachelor party last night, and not the creeping swine pestilence. Basic Instructions provides helpful advice, as always.

Well, Shoot.

Dang it. I missed Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day yesterday. :-)

Hunting And/Or Gathering

Another excellent haul from the Farmer's Market today. I've got big plans for these veggies...

Phase Contrast, Eat Your Heart Out

Linked from BoingBoing, but nevertheless:

Check this out.

Absolutely stunning glass sculptures of viruses and bacteria by Luke Jerram. Beautiful.

Adventures In Foreign Lands

So, just before all of the excitement of the last month came crashing down on me, I got a chance to spend a week in Oxford, England, at a research conference. It was a tremendous opportunity, and good fun all around.

It was the Gordon Research Conference on Vitamin B₁₂ and Corphins, and was a really cool opportunity to present my research to a lot of big name scientists and do a whole lot of networking. More on that later. The coolest thing about it was the venue: Magdalen College (pronounced "Maudlin") at Oxford University.

The way Oxford works is that the University sets the curriculum and owns a lot of labs and teaching facilities, but the students live in individual colleges, which are formally independent from the university. Magdalen isn't the oldest college at Oxford by far, but it has been there since the mid-1400's. The architecture is stunning. Here I am in front of the college chapel, which has really neat monochromatic stained glass and a 15th century copy of the Last Supper inside.

This is the New Building, where Oscar Wilde lived when he was a student here. There were students playing croquet on the lawn at one point during the week. I swear, the grass is cut to the point where it's never more than a half an inch long. The grounds staff are mad.

We were put up in some 17th century houses which had been renovated recently as undergraduate dormitories. They were all right, and made up 3 sides of a nice little brick courtyard:

The fourth side was a chunk of the medieval city wall:

The way the Gordon Conferences work is that for a solid week, scientists in a certain specialized field get together to present unpublished and exciting work in that field. The big names and heavy hitters get longer talks, and some junior folks get invited to give shorter talks, in this auditorium here:

I was really honored to give a 15 minute talk on my project, although it was a little disheartening to find that I can, in fact, sum up 5 years of work in 15 minutes. It seemed to be very well received, though. I got a lot of questions, and had several people come up and want to talk science afterwards, which was pretty exciting. I think I may have promised to do some experiments for Bernhard Kraütler (the organizer of the meeting), but I'm not completely sure...

They scheduled the meeting in a really nice way. There was a morning session from 9 to noon and an evening session from 7 to 9, with poster sessions in the late afternoon. The middle of the day was free for touring around town, which was great. Oxford is a fantastic city, and I recommend it to anyone.

We went to a bunch of places, including Oxford Castle (a functioning prison from ~1200 until 1985, now a museum):

and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which was amazing:

I also had some nice morning walks around the grounds of Magdalen - very restful after long days of thinking hard and networking. It's hard to be "on" for a week straight.


In between science and tourism, the conference also fed us pretty well. We ate at the Magdalen dining hall, which was somewhat familiar...


I probably gained 5 pounds. An exercise regime of eating a big meal, sitting on your butt for 3 hours, eating a big meal, wandering in a antique-induced daze, eating a big meal, sitting on your butt for 3 hours, then going out for late nights of beer-fueled nerdery for a week takes it out of a guy, I'll tell you.

I'd do it again in a minute. Makes me think maybe I'm in the right line of work.

Quality Cinema

I think I need to rent this movie. It looks ridiculous.



Parkour is so cool.

Where Can I Get A Good Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster Around Here?

Hey, look: it's the original BBC Radio broadcasts of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Interesting to see which jokes were there from the beginning...

Strangely Compelling

I'm not sure why I like That 1 Guy so much, but I suspect it's a matter of deep-seated washtub neurosis.

Foreign Futures

So, I just finished reading Ian McDonald's spectacular collection of short stories Cyberabad Days, set in India in the near future (say, 30 to 50 years from now), and it got me to thinking.

Altogether too much science fiction is set in an obviously American future. Star Wars and Trek are obvious examples, but I'm looking at my shelf, and nearly all the science fiction, no matter how far in the future or how distant from Earth, is full of basically American, Western cultures. Seems lazy, now that I notice it.

I think this might be why I liked District 9 so much. I mean, sure, it had exactly one three-dimensional character and plot holes you could fly an alien mothership through, but there's no denying it's a South African movie. That made it much more interesting than it otherwise would have been.

I'm going to have to track down Ian McDonald's novel about his future India, River of Gods. I was really impressed with his writing, and with his depiction of a distinctly Indian future. Obviously he's not from India, and I don't know enough to know what he got right and what he got wrong, but I really liked it.

The future should be, will be a foreign country. Maybe the best way to really drive that home in fiction is to take advantage of the tremendous diversity of cultures that we actually have here and now. Hmmmm.