Random Stuff LXXVI
One perk of being a faculty member is that I sometimes get to eat at a fancy restaurant with a visiting speaker or faculty candidate.
My boss’s default venue for distinguished guests is a “fusion” restaurant-not the sort of place I’d be willing to pay money to eat at, but somewhere I’m willing to broaden my culinary horizons at the department’s expense. It’s pretty fancy-schmancy, but not uncomfortably so. Fancy enough that when the waiter saw me dump six packets of sugar into my first glass of iced tea, he brought a small beaker of clear syrup, a solution of approximately equal parts sugar and water, along with my refill. Cool, Schlieren lines!*
Generally, I avoid dishes that contain too many pretentious words, like ragout or reduction; but once in a while, something will catch my eye just from being so weird-sounding. The last time I visited this particular restaurant, it was a dessert: “Chili Chocolate Cake.” All of us at the table discussed it, but I was the only one brave enough to give it a try.
I soon discovered that Chili Chocolate Cake was ordinary chocolate mousse cake spiked with pure capsaicin up to about 30,000 Scoville units. My experience with each bite went more or less like this (time in min:sec):
0:00 Looks exactly like chocolate mousse; tastes exactly like chocolate mousse. What’s the big deal?
0:03 Hey, that’s an interesting tang-kind of like orange peel without the orange flavor. Kinda like it.
0:07 Okay, my lips are starting to burn. Don’t like this part so much.
0:12 AAAAAH! It burns! It burns!
0:14 - 2:30 [chugging iced tea in an attempt to quell the agony, with only gradual success]
Every bite was like that. I was so morbidly fascinated I couldn't stop eating it. Our guest speaker must have thought I was an idiot.
Some people can’t stand to have the same kind of cuisine two nights in a row, even if the meals are vastly different. It doesn’t matter if it’s spaghetti with store-bought sauce at home for dinner on Monday, and pizza at a fancy restaurant on Tuesday: they’re both “Italian”, and once you’ve had Italian, anything even remotely Mediterranean is deadly poison for the next 48 hours. Kathy is one of the biggest generalizers I know. “We can’t have that-we ate food just last night!”
I’m almost the perfect opposite. I have a finite (and exponentially decreasing**) tolerance for leftovers, but I don’t generalize at all. To me, pizza and pasta are as different as pizza and muktuk. Mongolian beef tonight? Kung pao chicken tomorrow? Great! (Well, the second example might pose a problem. For physiological reasons-mainly, loss of sleep from having to get up every hour to cycle water-I try to avoid back-to-back high-salt meals.)
After three months of near-continuous ass-freezing, we finally got a couple warm days early in March; and last week we had a couple of days that would have been suitable for biking to work, if the roads had been free of ice and snow. But just as the last of the permafrost melted, we awoke last Friday to the tail-end of an all-night blizzard. Though we had the requisite gale-force winds, miraculously it hadn’t cooled off much; it was a warm blizzard. Everywhere that the snow touched a cold object, it stuck. All the trees in the neighborhood were flocked on their windward sides-and not by just a coating of snow; we’re talking several inches of horizontal snowfall.
The swirling snow built a long fin, projecting out several feet, atop the leeward side of a house across the street. Check it out:
I’ve seen the snow on the roof of a house sculpted by a blizzard before, but never an accumulation of snow like a wide, horizontal stalactite.
A probably lost cause I’ve long been fighting for: getting people to stop saying “Plantar’s warts.” First of all, plantar isn’t a name-it refers to the underside of the foot, just as palmar refers to the front (technically, anterior) side of the hand. Second, and also because it isn’t a name, it isn’t capitalized.
One nice thing about plantar warts is that all known remedies for them work pretty well in the long run, including ignoring them completely (the way I successfully treated mine in high school). The body is pretty good at fighting them off, but it takes its good old time about it; so even though their cause is ultimately doomed, the warts can get painful enough to warrant some sort of treatment.
Another of my lost causes-this one all but hopeless-is to encourage people to use shat as the past tense of shit. I acknowledge that shit is an acceptable, and indeed the preferred, form, but to me it just sounds wrong. And spit as a past tense even more so. “He spit on the floor.” “Oh yeah? Well, me spit in your face!”
And yet I have no problem with fit as the past tense. A referee once complained that I had written in a manuscript “We fit an exponential curve to the data.” But fitted make the sentence all awkward. Not that this perceived gaffe made the difference between acceptance and rejection, anyway: the reviewer shat all over the manuscript. Our fit/fitted “error” was the least of their complaints. It’s kind of a blow to the ego to submit one’s first primary-author paper, and get it back with the comment “No respectable biochemist would be seen in the same county as these data.” (Yes, that is exactly what they wrote.)
________________
*Schlieren, or Schlieren lines, are ripples in liquids or gases causes by differences in density. If you quickly stir your beverage after adding sugar, you probably won’t see them, but if you pour sugar into a liquid in a clear vessel, wait a minute, and then gently swirl, you’ll see some killer Schlieren spiraling up from the center of the bottom, like an inverted tornado. Pouring the sugar syrup into plain iced tea generates a turbulent cascade of Schlieren. I’ve been known to demonstrate this effect at a table of senior faculty.
**The amount I enjoy leftovers, relative to the original meal, decays as the function e-(n/k) ln(2), where n is the iteration of leftovers and k is the number of times I have to have that particular leftover before my enjoyment drops by a factor of 2. For most foods, k ~ 1, but k may achieve a value of 4 or 5 for certain reheating-friendly delicacies like Thanksgiving-day mashed potatoes. For real, homemade macaroni and cheese, k = ∞. In fact, k is negative between n = 0 and 1, because mac & cheese is better the second time around.
My boss’s default venue for distinguished guests is a “fusion” restaurant-not the sort of place I’d be willing to pay money to eat at, but somewhere I’m willing to broaden my culinary horizons at the department’s expense. It’s pretty fancy-schmancy, but not uncomfortably so. Fancy enough that when the waiter saw me dump six packets of sugar into my first glass of iced tea, he brought a small beaker of clear syrup, a solution of approximately equal parts sugar and water, along with my refill. Cool, Schlieren lines!*
Generally, I avoid dishes that contain too many pretentious words, like ragout or reduction; but once in a while, something will catch my eye just from being so weird-sounding. The last time I visited this particular restaurant, it was a dessert: “Chili Chocolate Cake.” All of us at the table discussed it, but I was the only one brave enough to give it a try.
I soon discovered that Chili Chocolate Cake was ordinary chocolate mousse cake spiked with pure capsaicin up to about 30,000 Scoville units. My experience with each bite went more or less like this (time in min:sec):
0:00 Looks exactly like chocolate mousse; tastes exactly like chocolate mousse. What’s the big deal?
0:03 Hey, that’s an interesting tang-kind of like orange peel without the orange flavor. Kinda like it.
0:07 Okay, my lips are starting to burn. Don’t like this part so much.
0:12 AAAAAH! It burns! It burns!
0:14 - 2:30 [chugging iced tea in an attempt to quell the agony, with only gradual success]
Every bite was like that. I was so morbidly fascinated I couldn't stop eating it. Our guest speaker must have thought I was an idiot.
Some people can’t stand to have the same kind of cuisine two nights in a row, even if the meals are vastly different. It doesn’t matter if it’s spaghetti with store-bought sauce at home for dinner on Monday, and pizza at a fancy restaurant on Tuesday: they’re both “Italian”, and once you’ve had Italian, anything even remotely Mediterranean is deadly poison for the next 48 hours. Kathy is one of the biggest generalizers I know. “We can’t have that-we ate food just last night!”
I’m almost the perfect opposite. I have a finite (and exponentially decreasing**) tolerance for leftovers, but I don’t generalize at all. To me, pizza and pasta are as different as pizza and muktuk. Mongolian beef tonight? Kung pao chicken tomorrow? Great! (Well, the second example might pose a problem. For physiological reasons-mainly, loss of sleep from having to get up every hour to cycle water-I try to avoid back-to-back high-salt meals.)
After three months of near-continuous ass-freezing, we finally got a couple warm days early in March; and last week we had a couple of days that would have been suitable for biking to work, if the roads had been free of ice and snow. But just as the last of the permafrost melted, we awoke last Friday to the tail-end of an all-night blizzard. Though we had the requisite gale-force winds, miraculously it hadn’t cooled off much; it was a warm blizzard. Everywhere that the snow touched a cold object, it stuck. All the trees in the neighborhood were flocked on their windward sides-and not by just a coating of snow; we’re talking several inches of horizontal snowfall.
The swirling snow built a long fin, projecting out several feet, atop the leeward side of a house across the street. Check it out:
I’ve seen the snow on the roof of a house sculpted by a blizzard before, but never an accumulation of snow like a wide, horizontal stalactite.
A probably lost cause I’ve long been fighting for: getting people to stop saying “Plantar’s warts.” First of all, plantar isn’t a name-it refers to the underside of the foot, just as palmar refers to the front (technically, anterior) side of the hand. Second, and also because it isn’t a name, it isn’t capitalized.
One nice thing about plantar warts is that all known remedies for them work pretty well in the long run, including ignoring them completely (the way I successfully treated mine in high school). The body is pretty good at fighting them off, but it takes its good old time about it; so even though their cause is ultimately doomed, the warts can get painful enough to warrant some sort of treatment.
Another of my lost causes-this one all but hopeless-is to encourage people to use shat as the past tense of shit. I acknowledge that shit is an acceptable, and indeed the preferred, form, but to me it just sounds wrong. And spit as a past tense even more so. “He spit on the floor.” “Oh yeah? Well, me spit in your face!”
And yet I have no problem with fit as the past tense. A referee once complained that I had written in a manuscript “We fit an exponential curve to the data.” But fitted make the sentence all awkward. Not that this perceived gaffe made the difference between acceptance and rejection, anyway: the reviewer shat all over the manuscript. Our fit/fitted “error” was the least of their complaints. It’s kind of a blow to the ego to submit one’s first primary-author paper, and get it back with the comment “No respectable biochemist would be seen in the same county as these data.” (Yes, that is exactly what they wrote.)
________________
*Schlieren, or Schlieren lines, are ripples in liquids or gases causes by differences in density. If you quickly stir your beverage after adding sugar, you probably won’t see them, but if you pour sugar into a liquid in a clear vessel, wait a minute, and then gently swirl, you’ll see some killer Schlieren spiraling up from the center of the bottom, like an inverted tornado. Pouring the sugar syrup into plain iced tea generates a turbulent cascade of Schlieren. I’ve been known to demonstrate this effect at a table of senior faculty.
**The amount I enjoy leftovers, relative to the original meal, decays as the function e-(n/k) ln(2), where n is the iteration of leftovers and k is the number of times I have to have that particular leftover before my enjoyment drops by a factor of 2. For most foods, k ~ 1, but k may achieve a value of 4 or 5 for certain reheating-friendly delicacies like Thanksgiving-day mashed potatoes. For real, homemade macaroni and cheese, k = ∞. In fact, k is negative between n = 0 and 1, because mac & cheese is better the second time around.