Mad Doctor Hrothgar's Word-Hoard

My father (in town to hear me sing with the Baltimore Bach Choir) and Becca and I made sweet potato gnocchi, inspired by our friend’s recent efforts. We more-or-less followed this recipe for russet-and-sweet potato gnochhi with fried sage and this recipe for sweet potato gnocchi with a pecan salad, using all sweet potatoes, fried in fried-sage butter and garnished with sage, and served with a toasted pecan salad.

The gnocchi dough was not quite “tolerably sticky”, but we ploughed ahead anyhough. Becca, as our lead gnocchi-ball maker, reports that adding a little more flour and slightly more hand-kneading to the second pair of “ropes” did make a noticeable difference. Future endeavors will employ greater patience and slightly more than 2 cups of flour.

Fried sage is delightful, surprisingly crunchy and flavorful, also imparting a nice sagey twist to the gnocchi’s frying-butter.

Messy and labor intensive, but straightforward and well worth the effort. The sweet-potatoey flavor really came through (I used coriander and cinnamon instead of nutmeg in the dough), and played pleasantly against the sage. We served it with a habanero mead, still one of my finest to date. You can see the line of recently-bottled blueberry and cherry meads in the background of one of the photos above, and the yeasty dregs of the blueberry in the foreground of another.

Tags: , family, food, friends, pictures // 1 Comment »

I’ve always done well with the solitude and quiet-time a long bus or train ride offers – four or eight hours with just me, the window, and maybe a book. Centered and calm, I get my mind right for whatever adventure awaits me on the far side of the ride.

This bus, however, has wifi, and power outlets. The number of little distractions this affords is a bit obscene – I can go whole hours without a moment of introspection. I’ve been able to wrangle my plans for the arrival-side through phone calls, email, text messages, and VoIP, contacting a half-dozen friends, rewriting tonight’s intents at least three times through a tangle of comm-tag. I’ve allowed myself to dive into this new mode fully, for the sake of experiment and novelty, but I think I’ll restrain my indulgences on the return journey.

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So I’ve got a Google Voice account! For those out of the loop, this provides me with a telephone number that will ring any or all of my other phones when you call it, and connect me to you on whichever one I pick up. The killer feature is that any voicemail left through that number will be transcribed by robots and turned into an email and a text message — and it’s a pretty damn good robot, at least with commonly-used words and phrases. Here’s a button, with which you can connect directly to my voicemail and leave me a message. If there are particularly inaccurate (and therefore amusing) transcriptions (such as the title of this web-log, as rendered in the title of this post), I’ll post them here as well.

Or how about “Mary is merry because she will marry today?” -> “maria’s married because she will married today”

From a New York Times article doing the same thing:

hopefully 79 you have a couple
field kinda gets reviewed
room what’s up coming at 7701
also shoot shaving she is about 3 o’clock
monday cool my apple dealed citgo you

is the result of speaking Anglo-Saxon at Google Voice — of course, the original text is the first few lines from Beowulf:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah.

Tags: , electricity, poetry, vikings, voice // 1 Comment »

• 2 quarts of frozen blueberries
• 12 pounds of thistle honey
• zest and juice of a lime
• 1 tsp of yeast nutrient (hello, I’m a hypocrite!)
• package of RC-212 yeast
• water to 5 gallons

I brewed the blueberry mead on Saturday – after having gotten up at 4 to take a harbor-walk and bake blueberry-lime scones, because I couldn’t sleep – the lime zest worked so well in the scones, I decided to use limes instead of another acid (blueberries are decidedly non-tart) in the mead. I heated the honey, though I’ve lent my thermometer so I’m not sure to what temperature, skimmed off some honey-scum, then poured it over the frozen blueberries and added cold water to nearly 5 gallons. The temperature immediately dropped to room temperature, instead of taking hours like it can with heated must (even with added cold water!) — another bonus of the frozen fruit. Next time I do a mead without fruit, I may add frozen water to the must to speed the cooling.

The mead started out lovely and fine, smelling sweetly of blueberries as I stirred it twice daily, until this morning, where a headful of hydrogen sulfide gas greeted me when I took the lid off the bucket. This has happened before, and (like all things) will surely happen again – it implies the fermentation is frustrated, and is making icky-poo farts instead of springtime-fresh CO2 and ethanol. Thankfully, this is not a batch-breaker, and is fixable with time, decanting, and maybe a little more lime juice.

I’m bugged that this happened alongside the addition of an appropriate amount of yeast nutrient – I finally got to visit the homebrew shop in Columbia (it’s lovely) because a friend needed some citric acid for cheesemaking, and I decided to buy a bottle of DAP+urea, just to see what it’s like. It’s possible the fermentation got off to a quicker start, but not significantly moreso, and now it’s farting at me!

Patience is.

In other news, I visited Jo and Nathan’s new house with Liz and Nat, and after a nice long hike, ended up in Takoma Park, all 5 of us quite hungry and in front of a brand new pizzeria, Roscoe’s (”the highest quality, most delicious food that you can find in a free-wheelin’ kind of town that honors renegades, railroads, roosters, and Roscoe.”), which was fabulous. Good food, stunning desserts, and our waitress will be a first-year at Oberlin in the fall (she overheard our fond reminiscing, and chimed in with the bubbly enthusiasm of youth).

In other other news, I think I shall go to Boston in a week or two, and visit my northern friends. I’ll probably stop to bug Becca in Lancaster on the way, followed by transit-transfers in Philly and NYC. If any of my friend-clan should be in either of those otherwise interstitial cities, I’d happily spend more time in their company.

Other, broader travel inspirations should be lobbed in my general direction – I need to get out of Baltimore to clear my head (despite all the good things I’m doing with people and food and alcohol, I’m feeling stuck and directionless, and am watching too much Hulu).

Tags: , fermentation, food // 1 Comment »

I haven’t written here in forever. I won’t try to cover everything that’s happened in the meantime (I mostly want to talk about fermentation), but here are some highlights:

• The school year has ended. My 14 AP Computer Science students have taken the exam, scores should be released in the next few weeks. If the class averages a 3 or better, they may dictate the course of my facial hair.
• I helped my long-time teacher-buddy James move to North Carolina, as he’s run away to join the academic circus. The spatial thinker in me thoroughly enjoyed packing most of a 16-foot moving truck into a 5×10 storage unit.
• Then nearly a week on the beach with my sister, her baby, and 30 other fabulous people, in a 3-bedroom house. A constant ebb and flow of glorious humanity that deserves its own post.

And now I’m back! Tuesday morning was spent beneath blueberry bushes and climbing cherry trees, picking fruit to feast upon and ferment. I got 3 gallons of sour cherry mead going last night, and am researching the nuances of blueberries presently.
Sour Cherry Mead (working title)

• about a half-gallon of sour cherries, unpitted. All the brewing literature suggests that one should freeze-then-thaw fruit before fermenting with it, as this breaks down more cell walls to release the good stuff within. However, I am impatient, and my freezer is packed with the twelve thousand metric crap-tons of frozen food that didn’t follow James to NC, and I have a sneaking superstition that freezing fruit diminishes it somewhat. So fresh fruit it is!But why leave the pits in? Beyond the call of sloth, one needs a nitrogen/nutrient source for a healthy fermentation. I don’t want to use additives like DiAmmonium Phosphate, so I left each cherry’s Genesis Device intact, supposing that seeds must contain those secret things needed to goad life out of a swirling nebula of honey and pulp.
• 6 pounds of (wildflower) honey. I decided I wanted a darker honey – I think they ferment better, and would provide a deeper flavor to balance the sharp cherry tones. For a change of scenery, a different bike-path, I decided to get my honey from Safeway. “Surely,” thought I, “they’ll have a large-ish size of halfway decent, darkish honey!” — what a fool I am. Six one-pound glass jars later (would have been cheaper at Whole-Foods), I wrestle with the least pleasant automated checkout system in the multiverse, confusing its delicate sensibilities by trying to pack my scanned goods into my backpack, instead using the mandated urban tumbleweeds hanging from its electronically-weighed bagging rack.
• some ginger, sliced. Several ounces.
• water, to 3 gallons.

I hadn’t heated the honey in my last few batches, and have found them to be cloudy, and with a few off-characters (that do fade with time) that I’d rather avoid. So I’m back to briefly bringing my honey (with sufficient water to dissolve it) to above 150° for a few minutes, skimming off the scum, then adding cold water to this in the fermenter to bring the temperature back down toward the room’s.

Fearing the mold, I submerged the cherries in enough of the hot honey-water to cover them, and heated them to the same 150 degrees, being extra mindful not to get them so hot (180) as to activate the pectin, which makes jelly, and cloudy mead. I mashed them with a potato masher, hopefully breaking a few cell walls in the process.

Then into the bucket! Loosely covered, and cooled to nearly room temperature, then I pitched in the yeast (Lalvin RC-212, for those keeping score), and stirred vigorously (a young yeast colony craves oxygen for reproduction).

Now, we wait.

My impatience-for-science sated for the moment, I’m might just freeze the blueberries to see the difference that makes, and to let me wait before starting that batch. I’ve got just enough thistle honey (12 pounds) for a 5-gallon batch, and a matching number of blueberries (not quite a gallon).

Onward!

Tags: , family, farm, fermentation, food // 1 Comment »

Twice in the past week I’ve found myself talked down to by car-drivers, who condescendingly sought to inform me that The Road Is For Cars. That, despite headlight and tail light and stopping at stoplights and allowing faster traffic to pass when safe, my place is on the sidewalk (which is just plain wrong, unlawful and unsafe). That I’m “going under the speed limit” and if not on the sidewalk, should be in the nonexistent curb-lane or parking lane, “with the wheelchair people”.

I’ve ridden my bike for a few years in the city, and these are the first times I’ve been thus chastised. My interpretation: a) bike use is on the rise and b) some bikers make drivers mad.

Bikes are becoming more visible in the area:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-bicycles0319,0,7842854.story
http://patrickmcmahon.shutterfly.com/2515

And not everybody is happy to share the road:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/traffic/bal-md.dresser16mar16,0,1202795.column

So it’s in the news, and the bikes are on the streets more than before. The dismissal of cyclists as road-users is nothing new, but I’d wager it’s rising with the bicycle tide.

Maybe I’m an easy target for belittlement, not a fierce spandex warrior or behoodied bike trickster. A mild-mannered commuter, and thus a safe vent for misplaced frustration.

It bugs the hell out of me.

It’ll do me good to have a few more informed responses at the ready, beyond “I’m a vehicle too, we can share the road”. http://www.baltobikeclub.org/index.pl/bikelanefaq is a good place to start.

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I wrote a little vocabulary mind-map tool this afternoon, with the idea that I’d use it with my students tomorrow or Tuesday — for my CCNA kids, not my APCS class, though I’ll probably share it with them as a point of interest. It’s not an applet yet, as I wanted local file-saving but wasn’t interested in looking at digital signing at the time, but a few pokes and jiggles should be all it needs.

The insides ain’t pretty, but it does what I want – kids can group words spatially, and are automatically color-wheel colored by location, and also topologically with links between them. They can enter their own definitions and save the resulting vocab map for later contemplation. It doesn’t yet print or save to a portable format.

But it’ll do the job, especially for one-off in-class organization activities, and it was a nice afternoon of zoning out with cozy old Java, and that’s what counts.

http://cs.oberlin.edu/~dadamson/WordMap.jar (needs Java 6)

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So AirTran canceled my Dec 23rd flight to Dayton – ice prevented its flight crew from getting to Baltimore. The next flight they were able to book us on was the Twenty-Frickin’-Sixth, which is the day after Christmas. So I didn’t do that, and instead took a 2 am Greyhound to Cincinnati, by way of Pittsburgh, which was overbooked by a handful of people in Columbus, but a fast-talking army-boy finagled a last-minute express bus for the ten of us. And so I arrived in Cincinnati 22 hours after I headed to BWI the afternoon before.

The time I spent in Cincinnati was non-stop delightful. Sister Kate and niece Aurora were there (having taken a Christmas-eve train to arrive at 3 am on the 25th, and we (along with our parents, plus George) ate gladly of apricot soup and goat cheese, drank merrily of grapes and honey, thought great thoughts, and played great games.

Among them was time-honored Scrabble (two bingoes for your humble mad doctor, “AIRLINER” and “TOASTIER”) and the low-overhead party favorite Telephone Pictionary:

On Sunday, my dad and I went out to the family farm (Chanyata, “at the edge of the woods”) and tooled around the property on his favorite-toy ATV. I grew up playing on this land. Returning here is like wandering through the ruins of Cair Paravel, through the grown-over woods of Narnia.

Better than a lamppost, for it can call me home.

(I flew back to BWI, and ended up shuttle-vanning it with a pleasantly-coincidentally-also-just-landed friend, but got stuck at nearly the tail-end of the (optimal?) Traveling Salesman route for the widely-scattered passengers’ destinations – what should have been a half-hour’s straight drive turned into an hour-plus tour of the city. (the last passenger after me was going to Pikesville – woe for poor bucketing!))

Tags: , family, farm, feet, nature, photos, transit // 1 Comment »

Thanks to my father’s video call, which reminded me that there’s a camera staring me right in the face.

This was realized only after the baking, so I’m afraid I’ve got no photos of the construction and extrusion. (here’s somebody else’s chocolate-mint gasket assembly)The dough was much crumblier than I anticipated, even with additional cream cheese. The initial triangular-prism construction went relatively well, and I divided both the plain and chocolate prisms into three equal lengths. Stacking three plain cookie-sized prism with a chocolate within resulted in a structure four times bigger than I wanted, and the stretching-shrinking wasn’t easy -  a few tugs, and cracks began to form, which I had to heal with my caress, then repeat, until I got to slightly bigger than I had meant to, and considered it good enough. This “triforce” prism I cut into three, and put another (appropriately resized) chocolate prism in the middle. This monster was extra-huge, as I hadn’t shrunk enough on the previous iteration. In order to get a reasonable number and size of final cookies, I had to buckle down and patiently stretch all the way to cookie-normal.

I suspect had I been more patient on the first iteration, I’d not have met so much distortion in my iteration-two patterns. May Euclid forgive me.

zero, one, two.

I’ll note that the cookies shown in the previous post were made by a cheater: they were assembled from 4-to-the-Nth-power triangles of equal size (16, in this Iteration-2 case). Not so in Doctor Hrothgar’s lab – each of our Iteration N gaskets are assembled from exactly three handcrafted Iteration (N-1) gaskets, plus a full-sized chocolate spacer.

2 = 3*1 + 0

iteration three - imagine a giant chocolate cookie in the middle.

I've got a koch in my gasket!

zero, one, two.

Once the Koch snowflakes were out of the oven, I found it difficult to secure the perimeter.

an L-system and the Mandelbrot Set

The tree was grown, step by iterative step, but not rigorously. I definitely cheated on the branch lengths.

The Mandelbrot set, however, was meticulously plotted by imaginary, nanoscale keebler elves, merrily leaping all over the plane.

I has a bucket, it has a bucket in it.

Off the cookies go, mostly for CS and a scant two dozen for the faculty cookie exchange.

Fun fact for the Mac crowd: if you’ve got a built-in camera and an external camera, and want to use a particular one in iChat, one intuitively selects it in the iChat preferences pane. But to use the same camera in PhotoBooth (the still-picture app), you must select the camera you don’t want to use in iChat’s prefs, then open PhotoBooth while iChat monopolizes the “primary” camera.

So, because PhotoBooth doesn’t have a preferences pane of its own, it reflects and inverts iChat’s prefs. Fnord.

Tags: , electricity, food, fractals, photos // Add Comment »

It’s recursion-time in AP Computer Science-land, and tomorrow is the day before the day before winter break (and hence the last day on which there will be any reliable number of students),

So I’ll be algorithmically generating fractal cookies today, following Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ guide – though I’ll be making triangular Sierpinski Gaskets (which EMSL have only made from clay) instead of the square Sierpinski Carpets.

This is the plan.

I imagine cayenne and cinnamon will be involved, as well.

I’m inspired by my college Knot-Theory professor’s cookie offerings, wherein he decorated cookies with various archetypal Knots – one can discuss a knot invariant based upon the number of strokes needed with an icing-gun.

I also picked up a Romanesco Broccoli today, as a fractal classroom conversation piece.

What other edible lessons have you enjoyed, in math or CS or more broadly? Pie in mid-March, of course, but what else?

My camera battery-charger has grown legs, else I’d photo-document my fractal endeavor. Stay tuned for text-rendered developments.

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