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A while back, I watched the No Reservations episode filmed surrounding the final days of el Bulli; the Catalonian restaurant often called the best in the world.
Since then, in the back of my mind, I've known that food can be more interesting than we usually make it, through the introduction of chemistry! Those who know me probably realize that the passion and culture of the food (which drove el Bulli) wouldn't be nearly as exciting to me as the application of science — not the most noble reasoning, and certainly not the takeaway anyone involved in that episode intended, but still very exciting from my perspective!
I left that knowledge alone for a while, moved out here, and became extremely lazy about cooking. Recently, though, I decided I'd play with some of the basic techniques of molecular gastronomy, just to see how it worked. After some trouble I managed to acquire a supply of basic ingredients — after all, they're not the kinds of things you can easily find in an ordinary grocery store.
I'm beginning with just the simplest techniques first, attempting to learn separate components before combining them into anything actually interesting. I imagine what I've managed so far might appear more boring than normal food, from the outside, but the possibilities are what excite me!
In fact, I've tried just two techniques so far, out of the many yet invented — the simplest: spherification and gelification, and only in their most basic forms.
Spherification
Spherification involves constructing a skin around a liquid, using calcium lactate and sodium alginate.
1/3 cup lemonade
4 grams C6H10CaO6
The target liquid is combined with calcium lactate, then frozen in small spherical portions. I chose lemonade simply because it was on hand, and seemed like a reasonable liquid to have "exploding" in your mouth.
1/4 cup water
2 grams NaC6H7O6
Next, the sodium alginate is dissolved in water, to make the spherification bath. While the spheres are freezing, the bath is refrigerated. Once the spheres are completely frozen, they are removed from their molds, and dropped into the bath. After a few minutes, they are removed from the bath and washed in water, to prevent further growth of the skin. Once the spheres have completely melted, they are ready for consumption:  There are a few things that I'm planning on changing next time:
- I left my spheres in the sodium alginate bath for too long; the skin was slightly thicker than I'd have liked. My understanding is that the reaction that creates the skin continues until it's removed from the bath and washed.
- The skin of my spheres was not particularly smooth. I believe that a rounder and smoother mold might have helped with this. Also, I didn't have a powered hand mixer to combine the sodium alginate and water; a more well-mixed bath might have helped in the smoothness department.
- There were air pockets in all of my spheres! They floated in the sodium alginate bath; I need to find a way to suspend them deeper without impacting their shape.
- My spheres were a bit too big. Luckily, there's an easy solution to this!
Verdict: more experimentation required! (and yet still delicious) Gelification
While both gelification and spherification are often used to make spheres, there's one key difference: gelification involves turning the entire material into a gel! Agar is the key ingredient in this process; the same algae-derived material used to keep microbes happy on petri dishes!
Conveniently, gelification is extremely simple; a target liquid is heated to boiling, and usually watered down somewhat. Agar is added, in its powdered form, and mixed in thoroughly. This mixture is then shaped as desired, and then cooled; agar is a liquid above 85°C, so the cooling process is the key to bringing it back into its solid state.
The shaping process is where most of the differentiation happens; one relatively easy shape to make is tiny spheres, resembling caviar. In order to make small spherical gels, a mechanism for creating droplets of liquid is required. After reading a bit, I found that people commonly use chilled vegetable oil. In the end, using a pipette to drop the near-boiling liquid mixture into oil that had been sitting in the freezer for a while turned out to do just the trick:
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup honey
2 grams agar
 Once the supply of boiling honey is depleted, the spheres are retrieved and washed in water. After making "honey caviar", I made a few notes to myself:
- The balls were extremely uneven. I had used an unfortunately large and hard to control pipette; for later experiments, I found a more appropriate one, with a small tip.
- The honey taste was extremely subtle; perhaps cutting down on the water would help.
I took another stab at gelification today, in the construction of a ridiculously time-consuming burger:
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup mustard
2 grams agar
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup ketchup
2 grams agar
The only difference between the preparation of the ketchup and mustard was in the cooling stage; the ketchup was cooled in the same way as the honey; dropped from a pipette (more appropriately sized this time!) into freezer-chilled vegetable oil. The mustard, on the other hand, was fed into surgical tubing, which I then placed in ice water. After a few minutes I used a syringe to force air into one end of the tube, slowly forcing the mustard out the other, leaving behind a stringy spaghetti-like condiment that was so solid it could be picked up in your hands!
The two were then combined to great effect:
 I'm quite pleased with how this, my third experiment, turned out; still, there are many more left to be done! If you have any ideas, let me know!
2011.11.17 in music
In the world of Internet-driven geeky music, there are few with more of a claim to fame than Jonathan Coulton. Certainly some are significantly more geeky, or nerdy, or whatever (the fact that I just had those two URLs available off the top of my head is rather sad), but none have the nearly universal success of JoCo — he's one of those rare nearly-universal geek idols. I was introduced to him a few years back by Robb and Savannah, probably around the same time Still Alive launched alongside Portal and the rest of the Orange Box, and I quickly collected a set of favorites which can still be commonly heard playing around my apartment today.
Savannah, Robb, and Matt have all had the opportunity to see him in concert, usually in the Boston area; for some reason, I was never in the right place at the right time... until this weekend! Opening for They Might Be Giants (another geek favorite, if not nearly as extreme, and much more popular!) at the Fillmore in San Francisco, he did a short show, hitting a bunch of his newer material and some of the classics. Having opener play everything you want them never happens — they'd never have enough time even with a full-length show, in most cases!
Still, there was much excitement to be had in the room when he opened with Code Monkey (I predicted this quite successfully), much jumping during I Feel Fantastic (for good reason!), and goofy faux-romantic swaying to Still Alive (which is insane considering the context, but I get it...)
All-in-all, it was a great time! I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for a full-length concert if he returns to the Bay Area.
The They Might Be Giants portion was also great; they did the entirety of an old album (from 1990!) — my only experience with them has been through their science-themed children's album, much more recently (well worth it, too... ignore the fact that it was aimed at children), so I didn't have as much context for their part of the show. Still, it was lots of fun; the floor was filled with excited fans, and that's all it takes to make it enjoyable!
After the concert, I had to get a cab ride back to Cupertino (Caltrain shuts down really early on Sundays...), which... is another story in its entirety!
I forgot to post this two weeks ago; this was my Halloween (I got home from work slightly too late to feed more than one group of children sugar-filled goodies):
All of the Halloween episodes! And yes, I made it through all of them.
There are over 15,000 photos in my Flickr photostream... here are the top 15 (the top tenth of a percent!) in terms of view count (almost all because of posts to reddit!):
#1: The BSG Cake
For my 20th birthday, Amy made me an awesome cake in the shape of the Battlestar Galactica logo. Earlier in 2009, Amy and I had watched Galactica together, inspiring her choice of cake design for my birthday. As you might expect, it was as delicious as it was awesome-looking! This cake tops the list primarily because we posted it to reddit, garnering a comment from none other than geek legend Wil Wheaton (Star Trek's Wesley Crusher) himself!
#2: Ben's Sandwiches
One of my RPI cohorts decided that it would be cool to graduate a semester early; in order to exact our revenge, a few of us got together and made ridiculous sandwiches for his going-away party. Forget Subway, forget all of the gourmet sandwich houses in Troy (note: there are none!), Carol's was the place to be that night, bar none.
#3: Amy's Firefly Cross-stitch
For my 22nd birthday, Amy was 3000 miles away, so a cake was quite out of the question; instead, something much more lasting: a cross-stitch for my wall, comprised of everyone's favorite characters from Joss Whedon's Firefly! It sits in the entryway to my apartment, and has inspired me to vaguely dabble in pixel art.
#4: My Minecraft Animals
Late in the Minecraft Alpha phase, Robb introduced our apartment to it, leading to 48 straight hours of nothing but crafting. While the furor died down quickly, most of us still play once in a while. For our last Christmas together, I made everyone painted wooden renditions of the mobs from Minecraft. Also comes with a reddit post.
#5: Robb and Savannah's Hand-XKCD
Robb, Savannah, Matt, Gino, Andrew, and I visited everyone's favorite east-coast city for the first-ever ROFLCon. Some (Robb and Savvy) were more bold than others (myself), and went up to Randall Munroe (who needs no introduction), asking him to "sign their friendship". Besides thinking that Robb was a girl, and mentioning them in his closing speech, I'd say he did a good job, considering the medium involved. No need to explain why this one is on this list.
#6: gnomines-clutter screencast
For GSoC 2009, I (vaguely) worked on some GNOME Games. One which never totally came to fruition was a Minesweeper/Gnomines clone in Clutter/JavaScript. This video got posted to Planet GNOME, and got up the hopes of a lot of people, only to be dashed by my return to RPI and distinct lack of time.
#7: Amy and I posing with the cake from #1
This is just spillover from #1, people clicking the "next" button on Flickr when visiting that image. It is pretty adorable though!
#8: Matt's Eyeball, Take Two
A few months after taking #11 and posting it to reddit, Matt and I decided (or, rather, I decided, and pinned Matt down 'till he agreed — it's not clear humans enjoy being flashed in the face) to try again. I'd say this one came out a lot better!
#9: Scallops and Chorizo
Another one of my cooking adventures with Carol (adventures which I dreadfully miss now that I'm so far away!); we made scallops and chorizo for dinner one night, straight out of Nigella. Another one with a reddit post... almost like there's a theme here.
#10: Peter and the Cookie
Please don't ask me what this is doing here; finding it here earlier today is what inspired me to do this post. Peter says he posted it to Twitter... I'm not sure that excuses it. Weirdo MobileNotifier fanbois...
#11: Matt's Eyeball, Take One
Inspired by a really cool eyeball picture that I can't find right now, I wanted to see if we could find as much detail in Matt's eye. Turns out... we can't. But that didn't stop us from trying!
#12: Mom's Glowman
There's no story here; I found a translucent Christmas ornament, put it on top of my flash, and took a picture, hoping it would come out looking pretty. It did!
#13: A Hopping Bird, in the San Diego sun
Another victim of reddit. If memory serves me, this was at one end of San Diego's Old Town. I accidentally caught it at just the right moment, hoverhanding the bird bath...
#14: A Spinning Bird, in the San Diego Zoo
It's odd to me that all three of these bird pictures make up the bottom of this list; I guess /r/birdpics is very consistent in view-count! This was in one of the aviaries at the all-around-awesome San Diego Zoo, and was a surprise to me when I got back to sort through my pictures.
#15: A Majestic Bird, in the San Diego Zoo
Of all the pictures from the San Diego Zoo aviaries, this is one of my absolute favorites. I don't know why, it's just a pretty bird and a pretty picture (making good use of my beloved 180mm f/2.8).
I wanted a background based off of Amy's beautiful cross-stitch that sits on my wall, so I grabbed Pixen and went to town on a digital copy:
I quickly realized that I needed to do the rest of the Whedonverse too. I'm not done yet, I still have Angel and Dollhouse (and Dr. Horrible!) to go, but here's what I got out of Buffy, which I've been spending a lot of time watching over the last few months: These were a lot harder to do since I didn't have anything to go by, but it ended up being a lot of fun! I'm most happy with Faith and Anya (the last two, for those unfamiliar with the show), I think they're the most immediately recognizable besides Spike. The Pixen source files are on Github. Feel free to fix things (especially Cordelia and Xander!) or make whatever use of them you'd like!
I wrote a SVG filter builder during a weekend a few weeks ago, which someone might find entertaining. You'll need either a WebKit nightly (it absolutely will not work in shipping Safari) or maybe a very recent Chrome. It'll work best with the WebKit nightly, though, I promise.
I also hacked up a really dumb game which is mostly rigged so that only Amy can possibly do well, but you can try if you want! "Match A Smudge to a Moment". This one should work anywhere (but best in Chrome and Safari). Make sure you turn your volume up (and click the play button as many times as you want to replay the sound you're currently trying to match to a smudge, and click on the smudge to match it (or click again to unmatch); there are no instructions on the page, you'll figure it out!)
Fun!
California
For the first time in my life, there's no clear "next step", and, finally, really no need for one, either. In June I moved across the country, all the way from Vermont to Cupertino, California, following the call of the most amazing job offer I could have imagined.
I spent the summer of 2010 in San Diego, so I'm at least somewhat acquainted with living in California; the Bay Area seems to be a little quieter, but I'm all for that! Plus, it puts me smack dab in the middle of what is quite literally the epicenter of the software world; the PARC and Stanford are to the west, with hundreds of startups dotted along in that direction, stretching all the way to San Francisco; Google is only a few miles north; Apple is less than a block east; and the home of pretty much every American tech company that matters is within biking distance.
Home
I decided quite quickly that it would be best to live as close to campus as possible, as I don't enjoy driving, don't have a car, and hate depending on public transit to get to work (it's fine if you're not on a schedule, like weekend trips, but not for getting to work). When I called to see what was available, there weren't many options; of the four apartment complexed I called, only one had any space, and even they only had two units available at the time.
Luckily, I managed to acquire one of those, and now call home the corner of Homestead and Stelling, right on the border between Cupertino and Sunnyvale, along with five hundred other people! It's a simple apartment, more than big enough for one person (it easily fit two when Matt was here, and we're going to get to see how well it fits four this week when my family comes out!).
I guess I'll take you on a brief tour of what I've done with the place:
It's got a couch, which Peter and I built the first day I moved in, and I've slept on way more than once; a back porch, with some chairs that let me hang out outside occasionally, and a few plants that mom put there when she was out, some of which have died, and some of which have lived happily.
This one is my favorite, because it's the least dead and seems to be the easiest to take care of, and because it doesn't shed purple stuff all over everything like one of the others does.
I have a projector, which projects a 100+ inch image on the wall for when I want to watch Doctor Who or Game of Thrones, or random movies with Peter/Alex/James/Charles/etc. (all of whom are leaving me in the next few weeks to go back to school). Plus the requisite receiver and speakers, with wires running all over the house. And I can stream video and audio to it from any of my Apple devices, wirelessly. Pretty awesome. The convenient thing about a projector is that it gets almost completely out of the way when you aren't using it.
And my extra iPhone as a remote (which is pretty awesome; one remote, just the few buttons I actually need, customized exactly how I want it — no mode switches or other crap like everyone (especially at Vivian's or at home) is used to, and there's a keyboard for the Apple TV if I want to search for something!)
After a rather harrowing experience driving home from IKEA with it, I also have the requisite computer desk, new home to Jayne and Trinity, and with plenty of space for paper and laptops and tablets galore. And speakers, attached to a legit soundboard, which merges the audio from 1) a cable to plug into random devices 2) Jayne and 3) an AirPort Express, so I can play music from anywhere to it and not have to worry about going under my desk to move the cable around like I had to in Troy. A bit overkill, but it works with no fuss.
Grandma's table and chairs sit in my dining room, which is not so much a dining room as it is an extension of my living room. I don't have many opportunities to use the table as anything but storage; I usually eat at my desk or on the porch.
When I was packing, I found the printed pictures from my closet door in Davison, so I carefully packed them away and put them on my bedroom door here, along with some bits of DJ's pen art. I've also got a little spot on the wall in my room with pictures of past homes; Colchester, Cary, our apartment on 15th St., and the complex in La Jolla. I'll add Hurley if someone finds me a picture.
I've got a second desk in my bedroom, adorned with random electronics, a soldering iron and power supply, and various related things. I haven't had an opportunity to do much here, but as I don't generally feel like working on software when I get home (except on the weekends!), I expect that to become a more common hobby.
The little dresser in my room was also by far the hardest piece of furniture to build. To anyone who complains about IKEA construction: you don't know what you're talking about. Chair, living-room desk, tables, couch — all IKEA, all relatively straightforward. That dresser, though, ... I got it from some random company on Amazon, and I swear I had holes in my hands by the time I was done constructing it, and I'm still surprised it hasn't fallen apart. But, it does its job.
My bike sits just out my back porch, near the mailboxes. Sometimes I take it to work, or to the bank, or to the bay, or wherever.
Every time I leave my house and venture into the apartment complex instead of immediately out to the main road, I get quite lost; I'm getting better at it, but I've been here long enough that I think there must be something wrong with their design (there is! the uniformity!).
Work
Work is fantastic. I noted before that I won't talk much about it here, but I can at least say that I have the best team I can imagine and that I love it here! A whole variety of different things have happened over the past two months that solidify my belief that this is exactly where I want to be.
I think it's going to be really bizarre at the end of August when I'm still doing the same thing, at the same desk, instead of returning to dear old RPI, but I'm quite convinced it's going to be a good bizarre.
I've made friends with a bunch of interns through Peter, but these are their last weeks; in just a few days, there'll be none left, and I'll have to make more friends! (as well as wait and see who comes back!) It's easier to get to know the interns, since we were all new at the same time; I wonder if starting work outside of intern season would have made it more straightforward in the first place.
The Bay
Despite being here for two months, I haven't done much exploring of the bay yet. A day trip to the South Bay, a day trip to Saratoga, a few into San Francisco and San Jose. I don't feel the urgency to get out every day of every weekend like I did in San Diego (to be fair, I'd be packing up to leave in another week or two, were it last summer again), which is leading to a more relaxing time, for sure!
Places I've been entertained by so far include the San Jose Repertory Theatre (to which I'm certain I'll be returning), the island in the middle of Stow Lake, Sammy's on Second (a little sketchy at first, but delicious, and then you can walk to the gardens and eat your sandwich), both the Computer History Museum and the Tech Museum (though the latter seemed like a distant shadow of the Boston Museum of Science), some cute little park just off the main road in Saratoga, a variety of different modes of public transit (compared to Boston, they're mad here, with a zillion separate companies running a zillion different services; the subways aren't run by the bus people aren't run by the light rail people, it's all crazy), a mysteriously missing trail by the Steven's Creek Reservoir, the Steven's Creek Bike Trail itself (gotta visit Google and the Bay!), and a wide variety of little places in and around the city of Cupertino.
Eventually some of these will get their own stories, but for now they sit as a simple list.
I'll probably be making a map in the near future, to add to and use to remember things, and I'm sure I'll post it here.
Back to work tomorrow!
For my birthday. "We are not gonna die. You know why? Because we are so... very... pretty."
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