Atomic Nerds

Via RobertaX, we get a tale of Feynman and Heinsenberg on a road trip (pardon the click chain to get there, but credit where due and all).

Hee… “Nice going…”

Tam’s looking at a pretty hefty auto repair bill. The Nazi Rollerskate has experienced some epic fail, and those things are NOT cheap to fix. Tam’s fixing on having a gun sale to cover costs, but the thought of Tam with fewer of her guns makes me a sad panda. So I went and hit the tip jar right n’yah on the left. It’s there below the photo and above the Amazon linkage.

My logic is, I may normally read blogs for free, but I’m entirely willing to drop money I’ll never see again on eating out with someone whose company I enjoy. The meal’s over in an hour and I’ll never see that food again in that state either, but yon blog has archives and the “company” is certainly fine. So it doesn’t bother me a bit to pay once in awhile for a friend in need, y’know?

Make sense to anyone else? I kinda thought it might.

ETA: Okay, so the relevant button is technically over on the right. I say left and right are bourgeois abstract concepts anyway. Hmmph.

This “total lack of anything to say” thing is starting to get severely old.

Anyway, have some linkage: Lunch, With Hawk. Exactly what it says on the tin: a man with a camera stops to have some nice barbecued chicken, only to have his lunch perched in by a hawk. If I had to make a wild-ass guess, I’d say it was a juvenile redtail- thus explaining the disorganized plumage, the presence in New York, and the cluelessness- but truth be told I’m not *that* great at hawk identification unless it’s presenting some nice clear collection of field marks to me. The commenters seem to think it’s a Cooper’s, though everyone seems to agree that’s a confused young thing.

Neat photos and the cook in the end is general proof of the badassness of cooks.

Still battling the forces of llama. Did you know that llamas secret a toxin that inhibits human sleep? Llamas are also the only animal that Alton Brown refuses to cook, on the grounds of “That’s just what it wants you to do, and I’m not letting that bastard win.” Kang won’t even try to eat it. She sniffed the llama, and went “arroooooo” and slunk out to build a new den in the back yard.

So while we continue to get llama fur and llama crap out of the carpet, have someone else’s effort, a rather clever short story about a radio host.

Llama!

Click for big.

…Because we didn’t, but one was shipped here anyway. It’s made content generation a bit tougher than usual; Stingray’s spent the week chewing on the walls and I’m fresh out of ideas.

So, for my readers with an interest in very early human history, a question: what colors would be available to a stone age or just plain primitive artist who wished to mark up a cave wall or rock with some nice paintings or petroglyphs, assuming he had pretty much any naturally possible to work with?

Also, for those who participated in last week’s meme, I haven’t forgotten about you- it’s just that coming up with five questions for everybody takes more creative energy than I thought it would, and that’s what llamas feed on before they get to your sanity.

Okay, the close runner up when I polled y’all awhile back on what you’d like to see here was the hash, so here it is. This recipe is from Bruce Aidells and Dennis Kelly’s The Complete Meat Cookbook, where its given title is “Hammy Yammy Hash”. That is the first and last time I will ever type that phrase. I have some dignity and so does my food. It’s pork and root vegetable hash, dammit.

The specific recipe is actually meant to be one of those in the book that’s essentially a tasty way to prepare leftovers from one of the previous recipes, and this one is meant to be subsequent to a meal of ham steaks or pork chops with an apple and cider pan sauce. Since planning the dinner menu is one of those chores that tends to be accopanied by a lot of blank stares and “ummmm”, we filled a slot earlier in the week with that recipe that we doubled and I kept two pork chops and some of the sauce to use with this one. If you want to do it just the way I did, earlier in your week, brown some pork chops or ham steaks in a big, heavy nonstick pan. Then, to the pan add the following ingredients:

2 cups apple cider, 1/2 cup packed light or dark brown sugar, 1 cup chopped dried apples, 1/2 teaspoon ground sage, 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 cup cider vinegar

Boil rapidly until the liquid is reduced to a little under two cups. Whisk in 1.5 tablespoons of dijon mustard and reduce to a simmer. Return the steaks or chops to the pan and cook over low heat for 10-15 minutes more. Put the meat on a platter and reduce the sauce more to a syrupy consistency if you have to. Serve. Save some sauce and meat for the damned hash if you’re going to bother with this runup at all. (Also I would consider cutting the sugar back quite a bit- this was very tasty but too aggressively sweet*.)

Alternatively, you can just use any leftover pork or ham with enough integrity to be diced, and instead of that sauce use maple syrup (uch, I wouldn’t) or a mixture of apple cider and brown sugar.

ANYWAY. On to the hash. We need:

1 1/2 cups peeled, diced rutabaga
2 cups peeled, diced butternut squash
2 1/2 cups peeled, diced red yams or leftover baked sweet potato
2 cups chopped onions
2 cups diced pork
2-3 tablespoons olive oil or melted butter
1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
pinch each ground ginger and cinnamon
1/2 cup apple and cider sauce, or maple syrup, or 2 tablespoons brown sugar dissolved in 1/2 cup cider
3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese (optional)

As I said, we made the pork chops in apple and cider sauce earlier in the week, so I had both the chops and the sauce ready for those ingredients. The grocery store had “yams” (red-skinned sweet potatoes, real yams are something else again and look like dead toads), so I elected to go with those instead of screwing around with baking sweet potatoes. I had no earthly idea about how much of any given root vegetable translates into cup measurements, so squinting at the proportions in the recipe plus the relative sizes of the vegetables in the store, I shrugged and picked up two medium-sized rutabagas, two yams, and two of the presliced quarters of butternut squash my store had in the produce section. (Didn’t want to mess around with a whole butternut and it saved work.)

1. Holy cats that’s a lot of “peeled and diced” things. First things first- let’s have some music to knife to. Last week’s 90’s alternative was a bit weird when Kurt Cobain started wailing “RAPE ME” while we were slicing mushrooms, so let’s try blues this time. Bound to be better**. Collect your implements: cutting board, favorite knife, peeler. The peeler may require some archaeological work in the drawers and cabinets- if so, wash it first.

2. Might as well go in listed ingredient order. Choose a rutabaga, lop off the top and bottom to make a more even gripping/slicing surface, and start peeling. As you begin navigating rough, irregular skin with highly variable degrees of force needed to peel while the blade frequently goes close to the hand holding the rutabaga, begin fantasizing about a different peeler. Make a note to yourself for the next visit to the cooking store. Remove all skin from both rutabagas.

3. Squash next! Since these are presliced quarters and butternut squash have nice, smooth surfaces with a gentle curve, this bit of peeling will go like a dream. Peel, peel, peel, with a merry tune.

4. Time to tackle the yams, which make the rutabagas look like racquetballs when it comes to regular surface and skin thickness. It helps to peel the narrowest end first and proceed toward the fattest- that way you’re not grating perfectly good yam mass off in huge sheets every time you get through a tough section and your hand and peeler go shooting forward. Easier on the risk of shaving off your own skin, too. Eventually the yams will be peeled.

5. Now comes the “fun” part: we’re going to learn how to dice on the fly. Slicing is easy- nice even strokes that proceed linearly- and so are chopping and mincing, which are basically just attacking the food with a knife until it’s pulverized down to the required level of “tiny pieces”. Dicing, on the other hand, requires creating pieces that are more or less the same size out of food units that are not shaped like cubes. Oh god.

6. First we’ll try it with the rutabaga! First technique tried: Halve the rutabaga, then quarter it, then keep on halving rutabaga units until you have pieces about the right size. Advantages: intuitive and easy to execute. Disadvantages: pieces are awkwardly shaped, not all the same size, and it took FORBLOODYEVER.

7. It’s not going to ruin anything if we’ve got a bit too much or a bit too little of anything, but in the spirit of trying not to be off by orders of magnitude, let’s take time out to grab a measuring cup and see just how much rutabaga we’ve got. Hmmm- it appears to be roughly a cup and a quarter of diced material per medium-sized rutabaga. We’ll put the other three quarters of rutabaga in a sealable baggie and I’m sure we’ll use them later for, um, something. Maybe more hash if this turns out nice.

8. Next we’ll have a go at the squash! Second technique tried: Slice the quarters of butternut, then line up the curved slices in lines a bit shorter than your blade, then slice again. Then very roughly chop to try and impose some order on the still-too-big pieces. Advantages: faster than the previous tried technique. Disadvantages: pieces still very unevenly sized. Also, squash is annoyingly sticky on the blade. On the plus side, the two quarters of butternut turn out to be worth almost exactly two cups of diced material.

9. Yam next. Juding by the volumetrics on the last two veggies, we have got waaaay too much peeled yam. Oh well. Time for technique number three: slice the sweet potato into thick rounds, then stack two or three rounds on top of each other and make several lengthwise slices. Turn the stack and repeat. Advantages: best technique so far for evenly sized pieces and reasonable speed. Disadvantages: probably wouldn’t have worked so well on a more or less sticky vegetable.

10. As it turns out, the larger yam, diced, is just a bit more than two and a half cups, so pop the other one in another baggie. Maybe we’ll grate it and the leftover rutabaga and have another run at fried vegetable pancakes.

11. Extract half an onion*** from the fridge, peel off the remaining paper, lop off the bottom, and start chopping. Ahhh. Bliss. Hack that allium down into submission! Transfer as much of the debris as possible from your cutting board to your measuring cup- perfectly, almost exactly two cups’ worth. Tidy the counter up a bit from where you got a little too enthusiastic on the chopping.

12. Get the baggie with the leftover pork chops and sauce. Extract the pork chops leaving as much of the leftover sauce and apple behind as possible. Slice each loin chop down the middle, then dice the resultant halves. Since meat has a dice-friendly consistency and chops are pretty flat, the cross-slice method will work well here as well. YOU ARE FINALLY DONE CHOPPING AND DICING JESUS HAPLOID CHRIST FINALLY.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, toss the rutabaga cubes with 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of the oil or butter. Spread in a large baking dish and bake for 10 minutes.

13. Yeah… somewhere in all that produce disassembly, you forgot you were going to have to turn on the oven and cook at some point. Ass. Turn the oven to 350 degrees. Toss your rutabaga… pieces… with some oil and spread in a large baking dish. The oven is now up to something under 200. Find a book.

In the same bowl, toss the squash in the remaining oil or butter. Season with salt and pepper, thyme, ginger and cinnamon and add to rutabagas along with the onions and diced ham. (If you’re using uncooked sweet potatoes, toss them with oil along with the squash.)

14. Now that you’re a few chapters in and the oven is ready, toss the rutabagas in the oven and set the timer. Throw the squash and yams into the bowl. Toss. That’s not nearly enough oil left to coat- hit it with some more. Much better. Now it’s time for a very exciting interlude to hunt for the thyme! Throw open every cabinet in the kitchen and ransack the spice rack! Get the stepladder! Find the oregano and the parsley and the dried bouquet garni mix and every dry leaf spice you own except the thyme!

15. Locate the thyme on the counter behind you where you never put it up after last week. Ass.

16. Add the pinches of cinnamon and ginger. Tenatively strew the bowl with conservative amounts of salt and pepper- you can fix too little easier than too much. Toss. Once the rutabagas are done with their initial bake, throw absolutely everything into the baking dish except the sauce and cheese and mix up as thoroughly as you can.

Mix well and bake about 45 minutes or until the vegetables are fork-tender, turning mixture occasionally with a spatula. If using leftover sweet potatoes, add them in the last 10 minutes of cooking.

17. Time for hurry up and wait. I settled for three fifteen minute increments on the kitchen timer with two breaks for spatula rearrangement.

18. 45 minutes later, using our trusty and highly calibrated Cooking Fork, the vegetables are… not fork-tender! FAILURE. TIME PENALTY TEN MINUTES.

When done, stir in the maple syrup or brown sugar dissolved in apple cider and mix until everything is well coated. Sprinkle with the cheese, if using, and bake for 5 to 10 minutes longer.

19. Okay, now that we pass the fork test, let’s address the sauce. Pouring it into a measuring cup, that’s… about half of what we want. Nab a bottle of hard cider from the fridge and top it off. Keep the rest for yourself. Sprinkle on the cheese- cheddar cheese and apples are a winning combination and it won’t hurt the rest. Pop back into the oven for another ten to let the cheese melt and bubble while you go enjoy your cider.

20. Extract from oven and spoon into the serving vessel of your choice. Nom.

This turned out reasonably well and there were no major disasters. It was tasty enough and worked well for the basic purpose of hash- converting leftovers and long-keeping vegetables into dinner. If anything it was on the bland side; if I make it again I’ll be looking to jazz it up, maybe with some garlic, maybe with some more salt, maybe just with more cheese. I also might consider roasting the veggies longer or at a higher temperature and then adding in the pork near the end of the cooking time.

Total prep time: ~2 hours not counting oven time.

*Or, try it as written first. Upon preview Stingray realized he’d forgotten the mustard when he made this. With that the sauce might balance better.

**Not really. Way too much wailing about being drunk and destitute. Not actually a huge change from Cobain. Next week we’ll try death metal- they will be the darkest, most brutal mashed sweet potatoes EVER.

***”A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter the size of the onion, the dish, or the woman.” - Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment.

So in my last Cooking Noob post, the majority of the comments I got about from friends later was not so much about the food but about an aside I had made while slicing mushrooms about how they’re a bit phallic and coincidentally also the sexual organ of the fungus and not actually the main fungal body itself.

Field biologists, who deserve their reputation within biology for being the most, ah, eccentric group, have one-upped me this week.

One of the more venerable models of field biology, if you’re not going to go sit on your ass following a group of social animals for nine months out of the year and write about them for the other three (like being a soap opera writer, except much less comfortable), is getting a whole pack of them together, begging your respective parent institutions for some money, and going off somewhere remote where the species are barely known at all and spending all your time on expense on discovery and collection- finding things no one else has seen, sticking them in jars or rough and ready taxidermy jobs, and once verifying their newness upon returning home, reporting the basic details of their existence to the world and then the best part, giving it a name.

Well, a herpetologist named Robert Drewes who is apparently well experienced in this sort of expeditionary science, having already gotten a frog and a snake named after him, made what was either the serendipitous or unfortunate choice to include a mycologist friend of his on his next trip to Remote Island No One That Speaks Latin Ever Goes, Africa. As hoped for, they netted some new species, including the mycologist, who discovered a new species of stinkhorn.

Now, when I say table mushrooms are phallic, you need a little bit of imagination. However, stinkhorns look like this:

The new species looks like this:

Given a world of possibilities, the mycologist opted not to name it after himself (although so far as I know he might already have half a dozen mushrooms named after him), but after his esteemed friend, colleague, and expedition leader: thus the newest species to join Dr. Drewes’ list of conquests is Phallus Drewesii. The genus name actually isn’t new- Phallus is a pre-existing and well-known genus, the one to which the common stinkhorn belongs. Dr. Drewes got the honor partly because he is the esteemed expedition leader, fearless leader, and all-father, but mostly because it’s one of the smallest representatives of the genus ever discovered.

And thus, by the hallowed rules of taxonomy, will be how a camp dick joke became immortalized in the Linnean system forever. I love science so much right now I think I may cry.

*sniff*

Darwin published two great books: Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man and Selection In Relation To Sex. This is not to say they were the only ones, but they were the ones to go on to have the most foundational influence on evolutionary theory to come. Sexual selection theory has, ah, evolved a lot since then, but Darwin’s original frame on the matter was the selective forces produced by competition among males, which he phrased as the “struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex.”

138 years later, it turns out everything is a lot more complicated than that, up to and including the individual definition of “sex”.

Reef and deep-sea fish in particular tend to develop systems of sex, gender, and reproduction that seem from a mammalian perspective to be odd. When your habitat consists of maybe a few square feet or less, or you could possibly travel miles of ocean without ever seeing another member of your species, the dynamic that we think of as the traditional male-female one becomes problematic. If your internal plumbing is actually fairly similar between males and females, with the important differences only being in which kinds of gametes your gonads are producing, then an option not on the table for animals that don’t just squirt their gametes out into the immediate environment and hope for the best becomes sensible: changing gender as convenient.

Let’s talk clownfish. Everybody loves clownfish because they’re colorful and cute as hell, and they make a nice little story of symbiosis with their relationship to sea anemones. They also make us pair-bonding hominids feel very warm and fuzzy because they form stable mated pairs that last until the death or disappearance of either partner. Awwww, cute.

Any given suitably sized anemone will contain a mated pair of male and female clownfish, and as many juvenile clownfish as that particular anemone can comfortably sustain. As a general rule the offspring of the original pair disperse shortly after hatching (effectively, they are plankton) and find an anemone that has room for one more, though they don’t like to go too far from their original home anemone if they can help it. All juvenile clownfish are technically neuters, with no functional reproductive organs. They stay this way until something in particular happens- the removal of one of the adult mated host pair. When that happens to the male, the largest of the juveniles will mature into a fertile adult male and take his place. Clownfish sort quite neatly by size that way- the largest clownfish in a given anemone is always the female, and the second-largest the adult male. Makes choosing an heir extremely simple.

When it happens to the female, the adult male will immediately proceed to become a female, growing in size and trading in his testes for ovaries. The largest of the juveniles then becomes an adult male and a new pair is formed.

Kinda puts a whole new spin on why Marlin was so desperate to find Nemo, doesn’t it? Personally I think the movie is much more interesting this way, but your mileage may vary.

I ran across this on an LJ friend’s journal (which is locked so I can’t link it, but hi Scarab!), and it seemed like a lovely little content-generator, so here goes. The rules of the game are thus: comment on the post and the original blogger will give you five questions. Here are the five she gave me.

1, The holodeck - possible during this century, or a little beyond our abilities?

Beyond. Physics is not my strongest suit, but the holodeck, while an incredibly spiffy plot device, is one of the most handwaved aspects of Trek physics. Generating an environment with effectively solid objects that appear and disappear at the push of a button is no trivial task… but if you don’t mind a creepier version, we’re MUCH further along the path to being able to manipulate the brain well enough that we could perhaps create the experience rather than the actual environment.

2, Is imagination important to a mathematician?

Extremely, as it is to any scientist, hard or “soft”. In order to innovate, you have to be able to take discrete collections of facts and then imagine possible new ways they could interact to create new results; otherwise you’re just cataloguing, and while you can get away with that to some degree in some of the sciences, mathematics isn’t really one of them. If anything they have a far greater pressure on them to be imaginative than many visual artists, as their field is one that exists purely in the abstract. Math is one of those fields where learning discrete facts and skills takes so much time (all of primary and secondary school and most of a college education) that it’s hard to see where the imagination and creativity comes in unless you ARE one of those people.

3, Your opinion on the assumption that violence in video games causes an increase in violence in real life?

Disagree. To the extent there’s a correlation I suspect it’s for the same reason there’s a correlation between people who play football video games and people that actually like to play football from time to time- people that already enjoy an activity are more likely to enjoy the video game version as well. As a species we seem to be perpetually preoccupied with the line between reality and fantasy, but in practice people that actually have trouble with the difference have a name- severely mentally ill. I’d question whether people who wring their hands over violence in movies and games have ever experienced real violence from either end; viscerally it’s an *incredibly* different experience. Some few individuals find they enjoy it, most emphatically do not.

4, The government: is there, or is there not, a worldwide conspiracy of some kind in progress?

I don’t believe our government or any other is competent enough to run a successful conspiracy. They can barely hold on to basic intelligence programs without having the New York Times cheerily reporting on every last detail, seem to be fundamentally incapable of spending or earning efficiently, and are the source of all jokes about bureaucracies. Run a highly secret and complex plan with thousands of participants? Not happening.

5, How on earth do you GROOM a dog with as much fur and form as Kang?

Vigorously. That thick double coat actually doesn’t mat or tangle and it sheds dirt, so it’s just a matter of “a lot of coat on a lot of dog”. Most of the time it needs minimal attention, but when they “blow coat”- shed out their entire undercoats, which happens twice a year- you can brush and brush and brush and there is still MORE LOOSE FUR. You need lots of arm stamina and to just do it daily until it’s over.

Gratuitous photo of Kang fully groomed for show:

Posture, young lady, posture!