Oh. Yeah, empanada = a small pie. 
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One time I cooked bacon on the exhaust pipe of my motorcycle. Tie with wire in foil and drive. It did leak and stain the pipe.
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There was a Seinfeld where Kramer cooks something on Jerry’s engine. You might need those skills in your van travels.
Taste test: I give this apple pie a solid B. May have lost close to a letter grade due to not being eaten while still warm out of the oven. Also some vanilla ice cream would hit the spot.
Kenji’s claims about par-cooking the apples may have merit. The crust is definitely better than store bought.
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Slept late but it was a nice day so went for a walk up to Ensign Peak, about 50 minutes north of my place. You can see most of the valley from up here.
To the west, on a not so hazy day, you can see Magna. There’s a copper mine there. The smokestack is as tall as the Empire State Building. It’s about 15 miles away. You can also see the sun shining off the lake and the airport. In the foreground, we have a lovely refinery.
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Cold Fusion
I’ve been planning to write something up about the current state of cold fusion research. This IEEE Tech Talk Blog Post does that. I wouldn’t say I agree with every word but that’s not surprising, as it’s written by someone I’d expect to be skeptical. For instance:
After more than three decades of simmering debate in specialized physics groups and fringe research circles, the controversy over cold fusion (sometimes called low-energy nuclear reactions or LENRs) refuses to go away. On one hand, ardent supporters have lacked the consistent, reproducible results and the theoretical underpinning needed to court mainstream acceptance.
Bolded is bullshit. I suppose I should be more charitable, but it’s annoying. Consistently repeating this claim doesn’t make it true. Especially as he follows by admitting there is consistent evidence.
On the other, vehement detractors cannot fully ignore the anomalous results that have continued to crop up, like the evidence for so-called “lattice-confinement fusion” adduced last year by a group at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.
What’s interesting about this post is the announcement that government labs have been/will be coordinating a new effort to look at cold fusion. And,
The researchers say they hope to publish their initial results by the end of the year. “I think the most important thing is to reveal a mechanism by which the phenomenon works,” says Gotzmer.
I mean ok, great. Good luck to them.
Every time I think about making a post on this topic I get discouraged. I will follow up soon but I guess this will do for now.
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Banana bread. Simple. Tastes about right. Maybe the bananas could have been riper.
I spent a lot of my Trump bucks outfitting my kitchen. I hadn’t done that before because this place was supposed to be temporary. Cooking is interesting now because there seems to be much more science-based info about it than there had been in the past. I’m also kind of a frustrated lab rat. In grad school, working in the microfab was a pita. It wasn’t like you could set up your own without a million-dollar equipment and materials budget. But cooking is doable for a few hundred.
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I never really thought about the problems with a flat Earth theory. I mean why bother? For some reason I thought the sun would go behind the Earth in this worldview. But that’s a problem because the whole thing would be dark at the same time, and even Flat Earthers must realize that doesn’t happen.
But if the sun goes around as in the tweet why doesn’t it illuminate the whole thing? That would mean no night at all. So the sun can’t be a point source of light. The light has to be somewhat collimated. So God is up there shining a flashlight on us while the Earth rotates like a turntable? Or is the Earth stationary and the Sun goes around?
There’s still the ellipse vs. circle problem but you can fix that if the flashlight isn’t perpendicular to the flat surface. But then how do you account for the apparent rotation of the Sun? You can see sunspots “move” across the surface, after all.
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Star Trek: Kirk
Gene Roddenberry envisioned an idyllic technological future without poverty or racism but he also recognized a threat from that same technology. Man vs. machine was a frequent theme of the original series. And Kirk always won.
On at least four occasions, Kirk reverses a logic-hold and forces the computer (Nomad, M-5, Landru, and Norman) to self-destruct. He destroys a doomsday machine in one episode and in another, the computers running the war between Vendikar and Eminiar. He took out Vol, a machine working a paradise grift. Once he even wins out over the Enterprise’s own infallible computer that is used to frame him for criminal negligence. (Kirk is so good at chess, he always whips Spock, so when Spock beats the computer, it’s obvious something ain’t right.) Kirk even bests Kirk when he’s faced with an android copy of himself.
For balance, there are a couple of episodes when the computer isn’t actually evil, it’s just a little out of whack (For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky and The Paradise Syndrome). Fortunately, Kirk is there to set things straight. No wonder he gets all the ladies.
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Reading
My 6th-grade teacher gave me a certificate for reading 106 books. (I’ve probably still got that thing stowed somewhere.) It’s got to be by far the most reading I’ve done in my life. She probably only believed I’d done it based on book reports and the worse-for-wear condition of the books she loaned me.
Reading’s been a lot harder for a while. I can’t focus. That’s partly a physical problem, in that I hadn’t updated my contacts and glasses in a while. I just got new multifocal glasses and it’s definitely nice to be able to see clearly when reading. They are taking some getting-used-to though, as I get slightly queasy after wearing them a while.
The other focus issue is harder to fix. What I’m trying now is 7 books going at once and counting it as a success if I can read at least one page from a few of them per day. Four of these books are food-related:
- Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat
- The Food Lab, by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt
- How to Bake Pi, by Eugenia Cheng
The last one’s more pop math, but still. Also got
- Something Deeply Hidden, by Sean Carroll
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, by Al Sweigart
The programming book is for beginners but I guess that’s my speed atm. I usually read before bed, so like 1-2 AM these days.
Afternoons have been cool but warming up now, so it’ll be easier to be motivated for walks.
Edit: It’s actually 8 books! Behave, by Robert Sapolsky is also on the list. SFAH was suggested in a post by @skydiver8, while Kenji’s book is often referenced here and everyone seems to like Bourdain.
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Reading 7 or 8 books at a time seems like it would be super hard to focus.
I go through spurts reading and at one point trying to get back into it I was worried that I had lost the ability mentally to focus long enough to really get into it, but it came back. I’m sure I’ve lost it again by now.
It’s definitely the “focus long enough” thing that’s hard. I can force myself to concentrate if I tell myself I only have to do it for a minute or two at a time. 
Before you read the rest of this, I’ll just admit now I don’t have a good answer.
Not to be overly philosophical, but I’m not sure why I do anything. I don’t know why I get out of bed, why I bother to shower, why I work out, or why I go for walks. I don’t have to. I don’t want to either, at least not before I begin.
Part of it is just a general feeling that “I should” because it’s good for me in some way even if it isn’t clear how. And if I don’t try it’s an admission that I’ve given in to depression. One thing these particular books have in common is that they’re written by people who are successful and passionate about what they do, and write that way. I wish some of that would rub off on me.
To try to give more specific reasons, I’m interested in food because I’m tired of oatmeal and peanut butter and jam on toast for breakfast. But if I’m going to cook, I’d like more than just recipes. Like what are my materials and their properties and how do they interact under different conditions of temperature, pressure and time? What tools and techniques exist and how do they work? That is, I want to get a good base of knowledge about the subject even if I never end up cooking any very fancy dishes.
I like math and physics because I always have I guess. When I was a kid, the Wright brothers and Edison and Einstein were my heroes and later, Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson. In engineering, the math and physics education is practical but not necessarily what you need to understand things like the foundations of quantum mechanics. That’s given me a slight insecurity that nags at me so I read this stuff to some degree to assuage that.
To an extent, the same is true for the Python book but I would like to write something simple to find and delete not-quite-duplicate music files from my drives. (I have thousands of mp3s.) I don’t necessarily have to read a book to do this, but again I’d prefer to have a little more background knowledge.
Maybe the real answer to the “Why?” question is in Sapolsky’s book and it’s something like “Free will doesn’t exist, I don’t have a choice.” I’ll see in a thousand pages or so.
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This is a toxic impulse I’ve struggled with.
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EmDrive
Google keeps sending me email about the EmDrive. They really, really want me to know and acknowledge that it’s dead. Ok, message received. RIP EmDrive.
Last week I was walking along this road, which is one-way for vehicle traffic. Pedestrians and bicyclists get the other half. I was passed by a Tesla going the wrong way, which happens. People get confused occasionally. Or they’re dicks. This guy had a vanity plate that read To Mars. Unlikely to be the big dick himself because it was a Utah plate, but still.
Utah, btw, is the Beehive State.
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Should be called the paper wasp hive state.
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The state highway signs look like piles of poo.
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EmDrive
WAIT. The news of the death of EmDrive may be premature!
The inventor says he had looked at the design in the recent studies and told them it wouldn’t produce thrust. The researchers added a dielectric section at the pointy end of the resonant cavity. This was supposed to increase thrust if any were produced. But Shawyer says he told them they hadn’t done this correctly and it was a bad idea to try it in a replication.
In any case, DARPA is going ahead with their own research, so hold the funeral.