I recently made a Bolognese-type pasta sauce with the aid of a panade - a paste made from combining bread and milk in a food processor. The starches in the bread absorb liquid from the milk to form a gel that coats the meat proteins in much the same way as fat, keeping them moist and preventing them from linking into a tough matrix. Once the panade ( Read more... )

I somehow managed to pass my qualifying exam, so I guess I'm now formally in the Ph.D. program or something. That's one major thing I was planning on worrying about for the next seven months that I won't have to now. But this also clears the way for actually having to get serious about research, turning in a degree plan, thinking about scheduling ( Read more... )

My first semester as a physics grad student is now complete. Jackson-based mental demolition notwithstanding, I've come out all right. One grade back so far, A-, though I still have no idea at this point whether grades actually matter, or whether anyone ever gets anything lower than a B ( Read more... )

So, uh, I guess I'm some kind of teacher now. Several weeks of TAing lab and discussion sections have been... not especially notable, which is sort of surprising. My students don't seem to hate me, which is probably mostly due to the fact that I speak English. It's the "for scientists and engineers" version of intro physics, which means you get ( Read more... )

In memoriam, uptime:

22:22:01 up 94 days, 19:17, 6 users, load average: 0.36, 0.28, 0.27

Who came up with this weekend crap? Partly the Jews, partly lazy English people, I guess? Terrible idea.

It's getting increasingly difficult to define myself (and how I spend time) independently of work. Who knew that my life would get even more boring when I finished TNG? I should read a lot more. That would require sleeping a lot more, maybe ( Read more... )

Started TA training today. There was an "Ethics in Research" lecture by a philosophy professor followed by a safety training seminar mostly consisting of videos of people getting hit on the head. Good stuff.

Looks like we've got a shooting war on our hands. Since I agree with Bill Hunt's appraisal of the situation (Blu-Ray is the only hi-def disc ( Read more... )

Good lord. I just reached some kind of audio nirvana listening to this song on my cruddy little $10 mp3 player, though the CMoy headphone amp I built, to my Grado SR80 cans. Since I'm so notoriously bad at spending money, this just may motivate me to actually go ahead and buy those speakers I've been planning to use to compliment that "TV"Probably ( Read more... )

Why have the top 4 stories on CNN for the past few days all been about the damn bridge? I finally got to walking by it this evening and it was nothing too special. Sort of cool-looking, I guess, and plenty of news vans/helicopters were still around, but it gets kind of boring to look at the same basic scene for days at a time; nothing's really ( Read more... )

Nothing like coming home from a tough day of backbreaking coding in the mine to a spotless house. She even organized and folded my dirty laundry. Haven't checked, but it may have been washed too. The content of my toiletries dresser has been rearranged in a more aesthetically pleasing order. Even the mess of cords dangling off the headphone amp I ( Read more... )