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After having not seen each other for almost a year, Carol came out to Cupertino for a whole week! I took the week off, and we had pretty much the busiest, most amazing week ever together. I'll write about some of the things in more detail later, but here's a linkified extremely-brief summary: (there are a few pages of pictures on Flickr, as always)
Friday, 2012.04.13
Saturday, 2012.04.14
Sunday, 2012.04.15
Monday, 2012.04.16
Tuesday, 2012.04.17
Wednesday, 2012.04.18
Thursday, 2012.04.19
Friday, 2012.04.20
Saturday, 2012.04.21
Sunday, 2012.04.22
Having lots of time to think about the web and little time to create content, I took a few minutes out of this weekend to make a silly little thing with d3.js.
Not being a driver, I find myself walking around a lot - to work, to visit people, to find food. Some of those walks are longer than others, and I thought it would be neat to be able to visualize and compare them!
I built trips.hortont.com to do that. The map on the right is a little confusing, because it is four cities, superimposed, with my "home" in each centered in the same place (using our 15th St. apartment for "home" in Troy, since I had three). Lots of things respond to hover, and clicking the different sorting options provides a few different ways to look at the trips (and adds a splash of color!).
The most interesting thing that sticks out of the data (to me!) is the relative shapes of the four cities. Cupertino and La Jolla are way younger than Troy and Colchester, and are clearly more "designed"; La Jolla with swooping curves all around, and Cupertino with a strict grid (except around IL, of course).
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!
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