Speaking of the cosmos, ChristyP pointed me to this very well done, shareable-with-your-geeky-kids interactive Flash animation, and commented, "I learned some new SI prefixes from this." Check it out.
bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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Metaphor collisions.
When a NYT journalist collides with a particle physics announcement, some of the resulting emissions are…. interesting.
We’ll let them have “Physics’ Holy Grail” on the grounds that it is a cliché, and thus within journalists’ area of expertise to pinpoint exactly the right spot where the use of a cliché is good word choice.
But then we go on to….
- Confirmation of the boson would be “a rendezvous with destiny” for physicists.
- The Higgs field is “an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses.”
- Particles “wade” through this molasses.
- “Without this Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, physicists say all the elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.” (Or hands, presumably. Or a moon. Remarkably, none of the physicists who say this would agree to be identified for the article.)
- Proton collisions leave behind “primordial fireballs” and also “debris.”
- The evidence for the Higgs boson is “[l]ike Omar Sharif materializing from a distant blur into a man on horseback in the movie ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”
- UPDATE! The NYT fact checkers are on the case! Since I wrote the above quote they have changed it to read “a man on a camel.” Good catch, fact checkers!
- Applause greets “data bumps rising like mountains from the sea.”
- Quantum theory “is the language of particle physicists.” Ah, so maybe we are dealing with idiomatic translation here. That would explain a lot.
- Encountering the “cosmic molasses” quote again, I went and googled the phrase. It turns out that the New York Times writer did not originate it. You will see it around in numerous places, such as this bit written by a British A-level student on a Q-and-A site. Come to think of it, the writing sounds familiar. But for all I know the term was originated by an actual physicist attempting to explain the actual Higgs field to laypersons. So I will give the writer a pass… except that he should have identified the source of the neologism.
- But he isn’t lacking in some creativity: the cosmic molasses is “normally invisible and, of course, odorless.” All right, all right, I think the writer is actually making a joke there.
Anyway, there are interesting results there, somewhere, under the flowery language.
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A homeschool post I can really relate to.
"Five things I hate about homeschooling" at Simple Homeschool.
It's not just a laundry list of gripes. It's an honest look at parts of the job that aren't so fun, and an explanation of how she copes with them.
I can really relate to "Being with my children 24/7" and to "The overwhelming responsibility I feel for their education." I cope in some of the exact same ways.
Besides those two things, I would round out my own "5 things I hate" thusly:
3. I hate that I can never quite get the house clean. I don't mean decluttered, because I am pretty good at keeping the stuff at a manageable level; I mean grime and fingerprints and unmentionable smears and crud in the corners of things.
I cope with this by hiring a cleaning service once a month. Frankly I wish I could justify the expense of twice a month. We spend the evening beforehand thoroughly picking up the things on the floor and clearing the counters so that the cleaner can work quickly and we get our money's worth, and then we stay in one room to do school while the cleaner is here. This has given me so much peace of mind, because I know that however bad it looks now, in less than a month we will be sure to have it all looking great… for a few hours. And at least the grime won't build up more than a month's worth of layers.
4. Homeschooling reinforces one of my worst character flaws: I am a workaholic. I am one of those people who doesn't know how to relax, or rather, who has to be doing SOMETHING all the time. And the nature of homeschooling is that the work is literally never done. Even when the teaching is over for the day, you could always get a head start on dinner, or on planning the next week, month, or year, or on fleshing out your philosophy of higher education, or researching college requirements online, or re-organizing some corner of the schoolroom. Look at me: I am sitting down enjoying some leisure right now while the children unload the dishwasher, and what hobby am I engaged in? Blogging about homeschooling. Hmph.
I haven't learned to cope with this very well, except to go along with my husband when he says, "It's Sunday afternoon and we are going to do something fun whether you like it or not."
5. I get extremely tired of the sound of my own voice. I talk and talk and talk and talk to the children, because that is my job, since I teach them. There is so much I have to tell them today, and so much concentrating I have to do to work out what I am going to tell them tomorrow, that it's hard to take the time to listen to them instead.
No, I haven't figured out how to cope with the sound of my own voice. Maybe I should ask my husband how he does it.
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Beer for beginners, part III: hefeweizen, altbier, and American pale ale.
The first trip to the beer store after I made my plan to learn about versatile beers, I came back with two German weissbiers, one American alt-style beer, and one American pale ale.
I am pretty sure that I had never had a proper wheat beer before in my life. Around here in the Upper Midwest, one of the more popular summer beers is Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss. I have had that more than a few times, especially when I was in graduate school. I am afraid I don't remember much about the taste (you can follow the link to see what Beer Advocate says about it), but what I do remember is that people were always wedging lemon slices in the necks of the bottles, something that (however they do it in Wisconsin) doesn't really function as an advertisement for beery goodness.
To learn about weissbier, I dutifully purchased a six-pack of Paulaner Hefe-Weizen (described in The Brewmaster's Table as "perfectly correct, though perhaps a bit lacking in flair," and as having "a by-the-books corporate literalness"). I also brought home two or three bottles of Erdinger Weissbrau, which was the second weissbier listed in the book. I made a mildly spiced korma for dinner (weissbier being supposed to go well with Indian food) and presented Mark with the bottle of Paulaner.
He observed that it was unlike most of the beers that he drinks, in that it was not an India Pale Ale, and gave it a suspicious sort of "hmmmm."
"The book says it is supposed to be redolent of bananas and cloves," I explained eagerly.
"Bananas and cloves? In beer?"
"Well, yes," I said.
"Hmmmm."
We poured the bottle into two glasses (it's true: I am such a lightweight that we split twelve-ounce beers) and I oohed and aahed approvingly at the fluffy head and the pretty yellow-orange color.
I sniffed it and didn't smell any bananas or cloves — well, maybe a little bit. As for the flavor, it was a little bit surprising. I had been conditioned to expect all yellow-colored beers to be, well, like a pilsner, which was the only yellow sort of beer that generally made it into our house (mostly in the form of Pilsner Urquell or Summit Pils), or perhaps like a Corona. This was… different. Mostly because it had a flavor. "It's… nice," I ventured. "I do think it goes with the food."
Mark said, "It's okay. We can buy it again if you want. I don't really like wheat beers. They aren't hoppy enough."
I wrote expressively in my lab notebook, "Nice. Mark not impressed."
The next night that we had beer, I made salmon patties (weissbier being supposed to go well with fish). I opened the Erdinger and poured it again between two glasses. Sticking my nose into the top of my glass and inhaling, I was met with recognizable banana-and-clove-y odor. "It's true!" I said excitedly to Mark. "It really does smell like bananas and cloves!"
Mark did not think so, although in his defense he does not eat very many bananas or cloves, so perhaps he is desensitized to traces of their presence. Quite possibly I am susceptible to suggestion, in that if a beer-tasting book had told me I could expect dill pickles, raspberry sorbet, or mothballs, I might also have discovered their notes in the weissbier.
I liked it, I remember, but sadly I forgot to write down my impressions. Probably if I had written them down it would have said "Nice. Mark not impressed."
Anyway, I went back to my beerwatching list and checked off "hefeweizen." Over the next few days we finished the beers, and I liked them better and better as the week went by, enough to note that I would not mind keeping them around, perhaps to have when we made curry.
"What do you think? Could we keep weissbier around?"
"I'll buy whatever you tell me to buy."
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Just a few short words about the other two beers we tried in this round.
First: The American altbier was my introduction to a beer concept that had somehow escaped me: What an American beer calls itself is not necessarily accurately descriptive. I knew from reading THE BOOK (yes, The Brewmaster's Table is starting to acquire all caps in pronunciation around here) that there exists a class known as an "American Amber Ale" (aka "Red Ale") and there is a class known as an "American Amber Lager" (interestingly enough, aka "Red Lager").
You might think, therefore, that a beer called "Alaskan Amber" would, on account of Seward's folly, be one of these two. It is not. It is an Altbier. Why it is not called "Alaskan Altbier" is something to ask their marketing people, I suppose. Anyway, I liked it okay — not so much by itself, but with dinner (bean-ham soup) it was nice. I remember, however, enjoying a local alt quite a lot the last time I had it, and so if I start experimenting more with American Altbier, I will probably return to that one (Schmaltz's Alt, brewed by Schell's in New Ulm, MN).
Second: The definitive American Pale Ale is supposed to be Sierra Nevada's — not that it is the best, but that it is exemplary of the style. I am sure I have had it before without paying attention. Mark likes it, and I don't, because of what I am beginning to think of as the Essential Beer Dichotomy of our family: hoppy enough for him is too hoppy for me. Although as you will see there are some exceptions to this rule.
Next time: Porter and pilsner, but not at the same time.
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Commenter ChristyP makes an appearance on the blog.
Sometimes I wish we lived in the sort of town that would make our friends say, “Aren’t we lucky we know somebody there? Let’s go visit!” instead of “Yeesh, why would you want to live in a place where, five months out of the year, you have to breathe through your mouth so your nose hairs don’t freeze?”
Fortunately, on occasion an academic conference or some other annual meeting will occur in Minneapolis, and then people remember we live there, and together those two things make it worth coming, at least when the conference is in June and not January.
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“It’s better naked.”
Marc Barnes, the freakishly young writer of Bad Catholic, has launched his new project aimed at spreading the word about NFP (mainly Creighton) to young people — teens and college kids.
The site, 1flesh.org, is part “what you didn’t know about contraception and condoms” and part “there is a better way.”
Check it out here
Marc’s blog post introducing the project is here:
Birth control has done nothing to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies, the Pill increases breast cancer risk, lowers female sex drive, and screws up the environment. We’re talking about how artificial contraception is one of the most falsely advertised products out there. We’re talking about how condoms ruin sex, how they’ve been remarkably ineffective in the fight against HIV, how they’ve done nothing to stop our modern explosion of STDs. We’re talking about the Pill and heart disease, about how the health benefits of oral contraceptives aren’t health benefits at all. We’re talking about the Pill’s potential to be an abortifacent, the bad philosophy behind artificial contraception, how contraception has increased the abortion rate, is linked to an increase in divorce, and how — in general — it’s been making relationships difficult for some time now.
And of course, we’re spotlighting the fact that there’s a much better way, all while having an absurdly good time.
I think there is still some cleaning-up to do, and I haven’t had time to evaluate the evidence marshalled against birth control and condoms on the various arguments pages, but it looks like a really good start towards raising awareness among young people that, no, you don’t have to take hormones or encase yourself in latex, and the benefits you are supposed to get might not even be, you know, real, let alone worth the cost and trouble.
Check it out. What do you think?
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Quotable Ace on scientific overconfidence.
Here’s Ace of Spades writing about the latest study to show, in the face of the establishment, that low-carb dieters burn more calories:
When evidence and data are thin, Narrative and Theory rushes in to take their place. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so too does natural science. Science — or, I should say, scientists — human beings with human flaws which science isn’t actually burdened with — do not like saying “I don’t know.” Even when “I don’t know” is actually the proper, most scientifically-valid answer.
“I know” is much more satisfying. The funny thing is that we only hear “the science is settled” in the precise cases where it’s not settled. No one ever says “the science is settled” as to whether the earth revolves around the sun. It is settled, of course; so no one has to attempt the Appeal to Authority to establish it.
A growing consensus says they know, you know.
So, for 50 years now, the medical establishment and the government have been telling fat people to do the exact opposite thing they should be doing.
Ace is also drawing a comparison to what he thinks of as the overconfidence of much of the man-made artificial global warming crowd; it doesn’t much matter the specific policies, though, as his point stands whatever the appeal to authority. It is a common logical flaw (or a very shrewd tactic, as it works so well on the gullible who don’t see their own weakness), and the point is well put.
Every once in a while, when I write against… oh, what shall I call it… “scientism,” perhaps… that belief that scientists are people with special moral authority to set policy… I wonder if I look like I suffer from sour grapes.
I trained for, and used to aspire to working in, academic scientific research (well, engineering, but to most folks it looks pretty much the same). I don’t anymore, mostly because of a series of choices our family made to secure our overall happiness. So you could say that membership in the Authoritative Class was within my grasp, and I let it slip away, and now I have sort of a grumpy habit of poking at Oz’s curtain.
I like to think that the training I did have prepared me to recognize the argument from authority in many of its guises, but perhaps that thought is just the argument-from-authority in another form.
Maybe if I were a working scientist instead of a nonworking one, I would be just as vulnerable to belief in the superrational powers of my own authority (at least in my own field) as journalists often are to belief in the powers of people whose work they don’t understand.
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No time to do this one justice.
Somebody needs to rewrite this article, but for homeschooling blogs instead of Pinterest wedding boards.
It might have seemed like my Pinterest Wedding was coming along nicely, but in reality the anxiety was mounting….You see, every time I planned a small detail, I would see someone do it better, with more whimsy, on Pinterest.
A few weeks before my wedding date, I’d had enough of being out-twee-ed and out whimsy-ed. I developed acute bridal apathy and quit Pinterest in a huff. After going cold turkey, I realized that Pinterest only shows us the good side of weddings. It shows a glowing example of how weddings can look when everything goes as planned. In reality? It rained all day leading up to our ceremony.
The piece is pretty amusing, and the analogy works. Don't spend too much time looking at other people's ideas. If you have to seek inspiration from other people, use what you learn from them to become a better *you,* not to compare yourself to other people's best-projected version of themselves.
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Fascinating update on grocery store munching.
Remember back when I asked readers whether they thought it was acceptable to eat your groceries in the store before you paid for them?
Check out this comment from Angela C.:
I work as a cashier for the world's #1 retailer, and I see some things that people do that would make you want to douse your hands and shopping baskets in hand sanitizer. Case in point: there is a homeless man who brings a live turkey into the store with him sometimes, and has it sitting in the child's seat of his basket. I live in a major metropolitan area so this is not a normal thing, at all. I see people with their dogs and kittens. Customers who leave the bathroom without washing their hands. I could go on but I won't. Suffice it to say, it might be better for those more inclined to eat at the store to wait till they get home and wash their hands first.
My kids don't ask to eat food in the store because they know I won't let them, but believe me, if they ever ask, I will now say "Are you kidding? For all we know the last person to touch this food was carrying his pet turkey around with those hands."
Perhaps we could make Angela's story go viral, and then everyone would be AFRAID to eat in the grocery store. A moral victory! Without even ruffling any feathers.
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Beer for beginners, part II.
part I is here.
So one of the first things I did as I read through The Brewmaster's Table, taking notes, was to try to get a handle on the "family tree" of beers, so to speak — all the classifications and sub classifications.
It started out fairly simple, with the world of Lambic:
Then things got a little more interesting, when I turned to the chapter on Wheat Beer:
But then I turned to the chapter on the British Ale Tradition, and my family tree sprouted suckers all over the place:
Let's just say that things didn't get any simpler when I got to Belgium. I have a few more pages like this.
This was all very overwhelming. I got myself a lab notebook:
I made myself a little Beerwatching List, so I could check off each variety as we tried at least one bottle of each:
But it was still kind of overwhelming, with 59 different kinds of beer, and that doesn't even count the fact that you can generally buy more than one brewery's version of each sort of beer.
Clearly I needed to prioritize.
After fussing around a bit considering what made the most sense (start with easy-to-find and move towards rarer? Tote the notebook to restaurants and order the most obscure draft beer on the menu every time? Geographical organization?) I decided to start with the most useful beers, by which I mean the beers that were listed in the book as being quite versatile and going with a lot of different kinds of food. Theoretically, from among that set we would find something that we wanted to keep in the fridge all the time.
The Brewmaster's Table has a handy lookup table to answer the question, "What should I drink with my food?" Conversely, one can use this really cool pairing chart to answers the inverse question, "What should I eat with my beer?" Turning back and forth between the two and taking notes, I came up with the following list of "Beers that supposedly go with lots of stuff:"
- Hefeweizen
- English-style porter
- Belgian saison
- Pilsner
- Helles
- Vienna lager
- American pale ale
- American amber lager
- Altbier
Ah, nine. What a nice short list to start with. Much better than 59.
Mind you, these aren't "beers that go with everything," they are just "beers that showed up a lot in the list of food pairings." Whatever. I went with it.
Tune in next time and I will regale you with Adventures in Hefeweizen. Hint for fellow northern plains staters: Not at all like Leinie's Honey Weiss.
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Kids on the bus.
Jamie has a good post called "Kids and the Low-Car Lifestyle," about how to navigate public transit with kids in tow.
I confess that I don't really know how I would manage without two cars, but I am aware that the only reason I don't know is that I have not made it a priority to figure it out. If it were high on my list to downsize to two cars, I think we could do it.
It isn't high on my list right now, though.
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Beer for beginners.
This post also functions as a test of the Blogsy app to post from the iPad.
I grew up (part-time anyway) in a wine-drinking house. From the time I was sixteen I was allowed a glass by my plate at dinner, and always some of the dinner conversation was devoted to the bottle on the table, where it came from, who recommended it, and always how well it matched with the food. I like to think I picked up at least a working understanding of wine-and-food matching there in my dad's kitchen, and I usually still don't make any gross errors when choosing a glass of wine in a restaurant. Although I am a bit rusty, as I will explain.
I was only of legal age to buy alcohol for three years before I got married, and of course I didn't buy many bottles while I was living on my own. When Mark and I married, we spent part of our honeymoon skiing and part touring the Sonoma wine country. When I came home and found myself browsing Surdyk's to put together a little bottle collection, I became aware of a rather steep mismatch between my appreciation training and my grocery budget. Also, the layout of Surdyk's emphasized a major tradeoff that had never really been apparent at home: the more expensive wine I bought, the less cheese I would be able to eat.
I always keep a couple of "good" bottles around just in case, and a bottle or two of bubbly in the fridge. But the short version of the long story: I learned to drink cheap (well, good-value) wine and like it.
Anyway, I sort of missed the whole serious wine-food-matching snobbery thing, because it's fun. We have a bit more disposable income now, and I suppose I could have started buying more expensive wine, but old habits die hard. I am not a penny pincher by any means, but when I heft a $30 bottle, I can hear a little voice whispering in my ear: "you can feed your whole family of six for this money at the family restaurant around the corner, the one with the $1.00 pie special."
Enter beer. Beer has a lot going for it. Let's review:
- You can buy really great beer for a fraction of the cost-per-serving of upper-middle-class wine.
- It usually comes in smaller containers, meaning that there aren't leftovers oxidizing in your fridge all the time, and it is always worth opening a container even for one person.
- It often (not always) has lower alcohol content, so you can enjoy a flight without necessarily landing under the table, and that is particularly good if you are a lightweight like me.
- There's plenty of variety to explore, both locally and globally.
- Some kinds of food match better with beer than with wine.
And finally — I didn't actually know much about beer, let alone about beer-food matches, so I would get to learn about it. To tell you the truth, I didn't really know the meaning of words like "lager" and "porter" and "ale" and "stout." I could recognize a pilsener and that was about it. I could identify a few specific local beers I liked, and I knew I did not like the bitter IPAs with which Mark filled our fridge, but other than that I didn't have a working knowledge even of my own taste. I decided I needed to rectify this situation. And for this…. I needed a BOOK.
The trip to the beer store would have to wait. I must first acquire the theoretical underpinnings, and then move on to the practical applications.
The book I chose was The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food by Garrett Oliver. It proved to be a good basic introduction to the world of beer.
It begins with a basic overview of how breweries produce the different kinds, what the various ingredients do to the product, and a history of the developments in beer-brewing. There is also a basic explanation of the principles involved in matching beers to food — the basic equivalent of knowing whether to choose red or white, demi-sec or dry, when you select a wine to go with your dinner. In that chapter, by the way, he argues that it's much easier to match beer than wine to your food, because there aren't really any foods that clash with every beer the way that some foods fight with any wine you want to pair it with — eggs, vinaigrette salad dressings, certain desserts.
Then it goes on to describe different "brewing traditions" around the world, each tradition divided up into specific styles, explaining what sort of food each goes with, and recommending individual beers that are good representatives of the styles. As a beer novice hoping to learn about the world of beer, this was exactly what I needed. Mark and I began working through the book immediately. (I'll write another post telling you about our process, which has only just begun.)
The "brewing traditions" chapters in the book, by the way, are lambic, wheat beer, British-style ales, Belgian-style ales, and Czech-German lagers, plus a chapter on American craft beers and one that pulls together three "unique specialties" (altbier, Kölsch, and smoked beers, in case you are curious) that don't fit into the other categories. Each chapter covers several styles: for example, the lager chapter has sections on pilsner, helles, Dortmunder export, dark (dunkel) lager, Vienna/märzen/Oktoberfest lagers, bock/doppelbock, and schwarzbier.
The book finishes up with a few short notes on glassware and serving temperature, neither of which we have bothered with much yet, except to note that if we decided to buy special beer-tasting glassware, a lot of the different shapes can be found at IKEA.
I will post later on what we have learned so far (some) and what we still have left to learn (a lot). For the time being, I will just note that as self-improvement projects go, you could certainly find many that are less fun than resolving to drink better beer.
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- Boundaries and whom to set them with.
- Neighborliness.
- Seventeen years later (part II): looking back at a series I wrote about “Gains.”
- Seventeen years later: Looking back at a series I wrote about “Gains” .
- The sudden sensation of “the good life,” part II: what do they all have in common?
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