Would you eat any of the following dishes?

• Gelatin Bomb
  
• A cucumber fun house, perhaps
  
• It looks like a cross section of the Swamp Thing's brain
  
• You have to wonder if this isn't some hot dog version of the freeze-dry process used to deliver Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt.
  
• The ringed food appears to be a dense, compacted mass of grubworms and lawnmower bag clippings.
  
• Deep-Fried Frisbee in Crimson Sauce.
  
• Core sample from a mass grave
  
• Ketchup-Pistachio Cake. Good? Nay - but distinctive.
  
• This has a name like Snowplow-Cut Butt Steak, or something.
  
• Deviled lymphatic tissue and overboiled parsley, perhaps.
  
• It's push-button chicken loaf! How modern.
  
• Pig Ass with the Bones Still in It. Or, perhaps, Oinker Cheeks.
  
• Ironed Chicken with Tomato Fragments.
  
• One of those puke-in-a-bowl-and-shove-it-in-the-icebox surprise dishes that occur with alarming frequency. Garnish with shaved things; serve with whipped lard.
  

I just read a book called The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks. And it is the funniest and most disturbing thing I have seen in ages. It is basically a look at the sickly underbelly of retro cookbooks and the hideous attempts at food contained therein. Here are some choice passages:

"...you'd be convinced that our forebears ate nothing but Snout au Gratin or Cheesy Nostril Salad."

"I'm really not feeling well anymore."

Mikki and I went bowling yesterday afternoon. This was the first time either of us had been bowling in 4 months. I bowled a 346, which is slightly above my series average. All games were above 100 and one (127) was significantly above my average (113) so I did well. Mikki didn't fair so well.

Today I bought music online that I already had free MP3s of. If I hadn't taken the free MP3s, I never would have bought this music as it was from a band who's previous offerings I was not impressed by. I bought the music because I believe in supporting artists that put out quality work.

Please update your policies to account for this very effective method of gaining earshare.

Sincerely,
-mouser

PS: stop promoting worthless hacks.

I'm not sure if my sister was just being weird or what, but when she sent me some recipes she likes for my birthday... she omitted all of the quantities from the ingredients list. It just says "Tofu, oil, corn starch,..."

Still, I wanted to try to make one of them, so I found a similar recipe for "Ma Po Tofu" on the jar of chili bean sauce she sent and another similar recipe for "Mah Paw Dau Fu" in the cookbook she sent. Both of these recipes and the one on the index card (for "Ma Pu Tofu") that my sister wrote are all different. But I was able to cobble together something that turned out pretty well. I used the ingredients from my sister's recipe card, and got approximate quantities from the other recipes. There were only one or two ingredients that were on Jen's recipe that weren't in either of the other two... so I had to guess on the number of mushrooms, etc.

Anyway, check it out.

Today the lab isn't quite as empty as it was; there was another car on the street as I came in, and there were at least 6 cars in the parking lot for my building.

Dan and Mike came over yesterday. We watched Broken Vessels which I enjoy a lot, and generally nerded out. Got the printer working with new wall wart, named it Serious Beefus, and printed out lots of useless crap. I encourage drive-by warprinting - the wireless network is open and the printer is globally shared. No faxbomb pages tho, please.

I was determined to find a GoogleWhack with "dermatoglyphics" in it. I'm not sure if using a proper noun is cheating or not... but I found one. Ha.

UPDATE: dermatoglyphics acupineology brings you to the same page and doesn't have any proper nouns in it. So there, Dan.

Welcome to christmas day at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The parking lots are all empty, the streetlights are off, and there is no traffic anywhere. All of the guards look at me like I am insane and no one looks happy at all. There was a strange gathering of at least 10 guards in my lobby, where there are usually only two.

The guards now have their own copy of the access list so they didn't have to radio in to Marconi himself to find out if I was authorized. Yesterday there were a few other people working in the building; today I'm the only one. All of the pods were sealed and there were only guard vehicles in the parking lot.

So the weather was finally not crap and I was able to take the giant printer home. I felt a little weird wheeling it out in the evening on a day when everyone was gone. I figureed the guards at the door would make a stink about it. But I asked them if they needed to examine my PRF and they just waved me through. I think next time I'll submit a PRF for the Q supercomputer and see how far that gets.

Anyway Dan was in town and hanging out at Javi's place so I went over and had burgers with them. Then Nate showed up with his Xbox and Gamecube and we played about 10 seconds of Donkey Konga (with the bongo attachment) - what a horrible game. Its like DDR except you don't have to do much moving and there are irritating sounds every time you hit the bongos. I got some funny pictures of Dan playing, but they're on his camera so they'll probably never see the light of day.

Then we played a long game of Mario Party and one thing was made abundantly clear: I totally suck at that game. I came in pretty much dead last on everything except for the stamping colors game, where I always won. I ended up with 1 coin and no stars. What a disgrace. Still a fun game though.

What the hell is up with "Wa-Luigi?" Did they go over-quota on creativity that year? And that dude needs to eat a sandwich.

Anyway, after leaving I went home and set up the printer only to find that they gave me the wrong wall wart for the JetDirect network print server box. I guess I'll have to wait until after break to get networked color laserjet action going in my house.

Went over to Bobs for a quick test of the STI focuser and the damn thing still doesn't work. I am so frustrated; I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

So it's Christmas Eve and I'm at work.

When the lab shut down for the holidays yesterday they implemented a hightened security plan. I had to get my name put on a special list to be allowed onto lab property at all. So when I drove in this morning, I had to stop at the checkpoint on the main road and give them my badge, and they called it in to see if I'm on the list.

Then, I drive around and get the Best Parking Spot Ever™, and see one of my co-workers leaving (at 8:30am?). When I get into the building, they take my badge again and call the checkpoint to verify that I had come through there. Lots of overhead (and its weird that the building guards didn't have their own copy of the list...), but whatever.

The only problem was that the checkpoint guys said I wasn't on the list when the building guards called. Nevermind that I had just been there about 5 minutes earlier and that they probably hadn't processed anyone else in the meantime. So I had to wait around for about 10 minutes while lots of radios were used to contact lots of guards all over the know universe until someone with the right list finally looked up my ID number and confirmed that I was OK.

Geebus.

I don't know why we spend so much time traveling around the sun; you can just stay in the same place and see the whole thing - it rotates every month or so on its own! But regardless, I've spent the last 29 years going around and around the sun.

Of course... if we weren't flying around the sun at thirty kilometers per second (relative to the center of the sun), we would just fall in. It would only take the Earth about a month to reach the sun falling straight towards it... so we would have just enough time to see the whole thing revolve once. (If you want to know, yes I simulated this problem, and it is something akin to 2,732,076 seconds before the Earth reaches the surface of the Sun.)

So yeah, I'm at work on my birthday and clearly distracted by whimsical apocalypse simulations. I opened all my gifts as they arrived, so the only thing I've actually received today was a bag of cookies from Coker. They're yummy.

But I'd like to thank my parents for the binoculars, lens, book, and shirt; my sister for the cookbook and sauce; Nina's parents for the books, DVD, and rocket kit, and Mikki for the sushi. Oh and Barb for actually doing the cooking of the cookies that Rob gave me.

My birthday, as usual, is a pretty lackluster affair. Time to get back to work.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that my simulation was flawed (used a constant-acceleration equation at one point). Due to the massively increasing acceleration, the actual time would be in the realm of 4306 seconds, or slightly over an hour. But of course the simulation also gives an impact velocity of faster than the speed of light. So basically what we've shown here is that I should be fired; I don't know what I'm doing. And whatever it is, it isn't what I should be doing.

From a CNN article regarding yesterday's demonstration launch of Boeing's Delta 4-Heavy:

"...each of the three hydrogen-powered Rocketdyne-built RS-68 main engines generates 17 million horsepower, about the equivalent of 11 Hoover Dams."

Anyone out there have any conception for how much 17 million horsepower is? How about 11 Hoover dams? How many Libraries of Congress worth of data would you have to process to understand these units?

A brief trip to Boeing's overview website for the RS-68 engine shows that the rated thrust of the engine is 650klbf. Great, so now we've got it in English units. Personally, I find pounds-force and pounds-mass to be the biggest embarassment ever on the face of English units and the fact that we still use this system (when even the English have abandoned it!) is disgraceful.

Just so you can all sleep at night, the rated thrust of the Boeing RS-68 rocket engine is 2.9 megaNewtons. If SI units aren't your bag, perhaps you'd perfer it in stone parsecs per fortnight femtosecond.

Also of interest in the CNN article is the fact that they refer to it as a "successful" demonstration launch. Nowhere do they mention that the burn times were anomalous and that the payload did not reach its intended geosynchronous orbit. In the world of satellite launching, we refer to that as a "total loss." Nice work, CNN.

So my roommate Robin, who has been living on the floor in the computer room for awhile now, got an apartment in town and we just moved him into it. Oh, and the weather is currently the worst we've seen all year.

It's blizzarding out and cars are sliding all over the place, and Mikki and I are helping Robin move all of his stuff into his third-story apartment. Guh. However, it's a good thing that he got an apartment because his wife and my girlfriend and two of her friends from grad school are all converging here at the same time. Would have been a disaster to have them all trying to stay here at once.

Plus he farts a lot.

So over the weekend I went down to Carlsbad for the first time since April and went caving. Now, since the end of my mountaineering adventures of this summer, I haven't really gotten any exercise... at all. So now I'm fat. And by fat I mean less thin. Anyway, my out-of-shape-ass had a hard time with the trip down to Gunsight and then Little Door caves. Because we were doing some technical rigging, I had a 50 pound backpack on, and the Little Door approach involves a 45°+ ascent for 1,000'. And that is hard.

Anyway, despite eating a lot of bananas on Saturday night, I was still really sore for the last two days and today it has gone down to just a mild ache in my calves and butt.

But the good news is that we closed out all the high leads in both caves and did some survey/photo work to finish them off. Now we don't have to go back to them ever again except for recreation (which won't require a tech pack).

It was great to be caving again; I had a wonderful time despite the physical stresses. I hope that, once I finish my degree, I can get back to a regular regimen of caving.

My Lord of the Rings: Return of the King extended edition DVDs showed over the weekend and I made an initial stab at watching them last night. Crikey is that movie long. Robin and Mikki and I went out for sushi last night and after dinner I threw in the movie while they worked on a cheesecake. The movie (and, due to some vagueness in the recipe, the cheesecake) didn't finish until 12:30am. Wow.

And, of course, there are four alternate audio tracks to go along with the 3.75 hour movie, and then two full DVDs of bonus content. It'll be 2008 before I'm done watching this. Or at least next week.

Sadly, the cheesecake was lemon flavored. :(

"The Tarantula is the largest stellar nursery we know in the local Universe. In fact if this enormous complex of stars, gas and dust were at the distance of the Orion Nebula it would be visible during the day and cover a quarter of the sky." - from Spaceflight Now

Clearly there has been some clerical error and the Earth is not in the most awesome possible location.

"The site was down these last days following a total crash landing d'un waiter. We unfortunately lost all the data being on the machine, as it is extremely probable as certain sections of the site do not function correctly. D'autre leaves sections TOSEC and Neogeo CD is temporarily inalienable."

Getting my emulators and ROMs from a site in France keeps me on my toes. I love how "server" becomes "waiter" via Babelish. It's like Engrish only nerdier.

Well the Hobby de Jour™, astrophotography, is still going strong. The moon is now past new and there won't be good observing conditions for another three weeks. Observation comes in chunks about once a month due to interference by the moon. So I won't be taking any serious pictures for awhile. However, on the last trip out with Bob, I did manage to get a couple that I really like. I've created a special section of the Astrophotography section of this website for highlighted photos. Check them out! I'm really happy with the Orion picture, it came out so much better than I was hoping.

So what am I going to do with my evenings now that the moon is out? Probably work on my thesis. However, this weekend will see a resurgence of a long lost hobby - caving! I'm actually going down to Carlsbad again (first time since early spring). John's Gunsight project is getting wrapped up and I've been invited once again. We're going to take down the rigging leading to the upper passage that James climbed to last time. But before we do that, I'll actually get to ascend the rope this time and check out the new passage that only three people have ever gone down before. I'm excited. I have to pack tonight; leaving tomorrow around 3:30.

I was over at Bob's place last night using his telescope (while he worked on his take-home final for class). At one point he wanted to go out for a Mountain Dew and the sky had gotten temporarily cloudy, so we grabbed his dashboard GPS, laptop with netStumbler on it, and drove a circuitous route through Los Alamos looking for wireless hotspots. We found over 100 access points in about 10 minutes of driving. I think about half of them were totally unsecured.

So my group at work recently bought a pair of HP Color LaserJet 3500n printers and associated external ethernet print servers. Unfortunately, the JetDirect print servers can't be set up to work with our network for some reason, and we aren't allowed to have non-networked printers in our offices. So the group decided to put the printers up for grabs, and anyone who wanted to use one in their home office could do a property removal thing and temporarily keep this lab property at their home.

Surprisingly (to me), no one wanted one! So I took one. Basically, it's a full color laserjet that I can keep for as long as I work at the lab, and the toner and paper and maintenance is courtesy of the lab. How sweet is that?

So as I'm driving the truck to the shop this morning, I find myself behind an SUV that has a ton of jesus bumper stickers. "My boss was a jewish carpenter," "Jesus," "Re-elect GWB," "In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be unmanned" [I actually kinda like this one], and the requisite fish.

But what's this down in the corner? A radio station bumper sticker for 88.3 KLYT. It says "Behold the power of Christ" at the top. I'm sure the owner of the truck thinks of this as "K-Light" but to the more discerning, mature readers like myself, it's "clit radio." BEHOLD!!

[note: apparently the station is now a translator for the M88 christian radio network and somehow they don't make a point of advertising their awesome callsign.]

So my truck has been making a goofy rattling noise whenever I have the clutch in and I give it some gas, so I brought it in to the shop this morning to have them take a look at it. They said it's probably the clutch release bearing ($300) but as long as they're doing the 5 hours of labor to get at it, I might consider replacing the entire clutch ($800) which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been done to this truck. So that's sort of a bummer, but I knew that it was coming; the clutch has always been a little iffy on this thing.

I got up at 1:50am, went to pick up Bob at his place, then drove over to the end of the runway at the Los Alamos Airport and set up my camera on a tripod to take this picture:

My telephoto lens is pretty blurry at 300mm anyway, and that really isn't a long enough lens for this event. Plus, my tripod is wobbly. So the shot is not well defined... But that is Jupiter moments after fourth contact at about 2:36am. The weather was very kind to us - mostly clear skies and no wind. I submitted my photo to SpaceWeather but it was so bad in comparison to some of the telescope-driven shots that it was just listed as a footnote.

My understanding is that because of the current position of Jupiter, it will continue to be occulted by the moon once a month for the next two or three months, so I might get additional chances to try this shot. If so, maybe one of them will be at a more reasonable hour and we can set up Bob's telescope to get a much higher resolution and more stable shot.

Of course, after getting back home I had to process the photos and pick the best one and get it online... so I didn't get to bed until 3:30am. And now I'm basically running on coffee.

So they just topped out the new building under construction at the laboratory (right next to my building). Part of the tradition of topping out a major building is to put a tree on the top and to sign the last beam to be installed. The tree in this case went up with a full complement of christmas lights as well as a piece of light-up santa lawn junk. The LANL website had pictures on Friday of the steel workers signing the beam before it was hoisted up, and then a closeup of the signatures. One of the signatures carried the addendum "MFIC" which, to lab web content auditors means nothing, but to me means "Mother Fucker In Charge."

Apparently someone must have complained, because now the same image is there except that the closeup on the signatures has changed such that the only visible writing consists of "..JOB," "...GER," "Thanks T.F.", and "JRO." Lame...

I had the first of hopefully many nerd-outs at my house yesterday. I set the arcade controller up in front of the couch and Steve brought over his X-box and 4 controllers. There were a total of seven people involved and we spent most of our time playing Halo 2, Tetris, Rampage, Smash T.V., and watching silly videos from... The Internet™. Robin made steaks for dinner and I made dip. Fun was had by all.

"I awoke with Cornelius screaming, 'Aren’t you fucking listening to me? The boat is sinking!!! You have to get off of it!' While dragging me by the arm out of bed. He was at the end of the bed pulling on my arm, eyes blazing with fear and frantic to save me. The cats, meanwhile were hiding under the 'sinking' bed. My arm was killing me because he was pulling on me so much. I said. 'Cornelius. Wake up.' He replied, 'Are you fucking insane!? Get off!' While he continued to pull my arm out of the socket. Finally after getting out of bed and getting him into the bathroom light he awoke. Awoke to feel really bad about getting me up and bruising my wrist. The cats have never forgiven him!"

I wasn't aware this was going on, but today my department at MIT changed its name from "Nuclear Engineering" to "Nuclear Science and Engineering," effecive immediately. So I guess now my degree will include the magic word science and I won't have to explain to people that I don't really do any engineering.

So.

A friend of mine had some kind of hideous stomach virus that led to frequent vomiting and a long-term case of the trotts. On the advice of her husband, she took some Pepto and the only result seemed to be that her shit became jet-black.

Of course, after verifying that taking pepto wouldn't cause harm to someone who was not in gastro-intestinal distress, I took one of her pepto tablets yesterday. No effect. Today we've progressed into phase 2 of this experiment. I'm taking the maximum dose of the tablets (one per hour) all day long. I'm on tablet 3 right now. No effect yet.

Her experience with the tar-runs involved the liquid pepto, so if this tablet thing doesn't work out for me, tomorrow we're proceeding with phase 3: liquid pepto. I'll keep you all posted on this important research.

UPDATE: Phase 2 was unsuccessful. I took six Pepto chewable tablets over the course of the day and there was no noticeable effect. I'm into phase 3 now, having taken a good dose of liquid Pepto this morning at about 9. So far there have been no... data points, as it were.

Bob and I went down to the overlook a couple nights ago to test out new gear. The trip report and a couple of photos are here.