Happy PI Day!!
@marty This is my first attempt at pie in like 10 years. Maybe 3rd ever and first attempt at home-made crust. I give it a C- for appearance. Ex thought it was a pancake. But I learned a few things. One of which is, don’t bake in the middle of the fucking night if you’re going to fill the place with smoke.
What’s the grade for taste? Looks good. The crust at least looks delicious. No mistaking it for store bought.
Am I a fool for asking what’s in the pie? Apple pie?
A differential operator walks into a bar full of polynomials. As the differential operator walks around it starts harassing the patrons demanding their money and differentiating them into oblivion. This goes on for a while until the differential operator notices a shady character in the corner of the bar. Upon approach this shady character says, “I’m not afraid of you, I’m e^x!” To which the differential operator replies, “You should be, I’m d/dy.”
The joke can also be generalized:
A linear operator walks into a bar full of vectors. As the linear operator walks around it starts harassing the patrons demanding their money and mapping them into its null space and then mapping them into zero. This goes on for a while until the operator notices a shady character in the corner of the bar. Upon approach this shady character says, “I’m not afraid of you, I’m an eigenvector!” To which the operator replies, “You should be, I’m nilpotent.”
Don’t know yet. The odor of baked apple has permeated my body to the point I’m not in an apple pie mood atm.
Yeah. Tried this seriouseats method for filling:
and crust:
I used Granny Smith apples, which I could get for ~$1/lb. Probably still could not beat Costco bakery pie price though. Five lbs of apples Kenji called for resulted in quite a bit of apple that wouldn’t fit in the pie. Not sure what’s up with that.
My algebra is too limited to get the generalization. :(
Just one so far. If you mean because of the blueberry or whatever it is in the second video, they just show the dough making process there. It applies to whatever kind of pie you like.
If you eat porridge the apple would be delicious with that, or a smoothie or with some pork chops.
Porridge? I think that’s oatmeal here. I have it most mornings. It would be good! Also had a little dough left so I could make empanadas.
Nat makes porridge starting at :30.
Oh. Yeah, empanada = a small pie. 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
The last one’s more pop math, but still. Also got
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.
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.
