Category: Uncategorized

Redefining “Success”: On Self-Care, Balance, and Overwork in Academia

Very true, although I didn’t have to get to death’s door to see it.

SAS Confidential

Author: Raul Pacheco-Vega
Originals: RaulPacheco.org  [ 1 | 2 ]

By some people’s standards I could consider myself a very successful academic. I have a job I love at a prestigious, internationally-recognized institution, I have a low teaching load, have successfully raised extramural grant money to execute projects, I have brilliant students, both undergraduate and graduate. I absolutely love my research and have fantastic collaborators worldwide and wonderful colleagues at my institution’s campuses.

Yet, I can’t help but remind myself that definitions of success vary. I’m not a fan of “publish-or-perish”, and sometimes I defy the old canon by refusing to engage in it. Yet other times, I just can’t stop myself from writing about a…

View original post 925 more words

Quick and Easy Bread Recipes You Can Do Yourself

On to my secrets!

Italian Home Kitchen Blog

484163886Have you ever wanted to bake some hearty, homemade bread but then realized you didn’t have all day to prepare dough, let it rise, and then (finally) bake it? Well here’s a secret: not all delicious homemade breads require half a day to bake. There are a variety of recipes that use baking powder or baking soda, instead of traditional yeast, for leavening, cutting your preparation time by at least half. You can make sweet and savory loaves, muffins, scones, biscuits, pancakes and even popovers without taking hours out of your day.

We have compiled a list of some of the best-loved and best-rated quick bread recipes, all of which you can easily make with your own two hands. These tried-and-true recipes will enable you to have a sweet or savory bread on your table in a pinch.

Popovers and Pancakes

Classic Popovers

Whole-Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes

Carrot Cake Pancakes

Biscuits…

View original post 187 more words

Cider and Stout, Upside Down #recipe

Dark on top, light underneath and thoroughly enjoyable.

This is an unusual drink idea, and one that actually works. Not quite ‘Lager and Lime,’ but much better.

We used a milk stout rather than the original Guinness, because a) the store was out of Guinness, and b) it’s nicer. Any dark beer will do, and lactose-intolerant people probably shouldn’t use a milk stout.

Stout and cider are about the same density, so layering them is rather difficult. Except if you know the trick. You need to increase the density of the cider. Bar tenders probably do this with ‘neutral syrup’ (i.e. a dense sucrose solution) or even (gag) corn syrup. We used honey. Much better.  You could use table sugar, but be prepared to lose most of the carbonation because all those little crystals will nucleate bubbling.

So, without further ado, here’s how to make them.

  1. mix 1 teaspoon of honey with about 1/3 bottle of cider. We did this with a single wooden chopstick. Save the chopstick because you’ll need it for step 2.
  2. Use the chopstick to pour a layer of stout over the cider. Put one end of the chopstick just above the cider and slowly pour the stout down it. (just like you did with solutions in chem lab. Didn’t take chem lab? You missed something worth the time). As the amount of stout in the glass increases, gradually raise the stick keeping it out of the solution. The middle glass in the picture shows what happens when you rush it, so don’t.
  3. Enjoy.

Rather proud of this

It’s 30 years Oct 21.

In honor of that I made an assignment for my class:

You find an odd DeLorean parked around the corner. Realizing that Doc Brown has left the keys in the ignition, you decide that a quick trip back to England in 1815 for the purpose of buying the film rights to Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma would be remunerative.

As usual, the car fails and you are stranded.

All is not lost, Miss Austen (or her brother Henry, a dashing naval captain) are good company and you decide to settle in for the long haul. She needs a business manager, and having few other practical skills, you volunteer. This means understanding English currency.

Fortunately, you have your laptop, with a python interpreter, and by the use of lemon juice, copper pennies and zinc you are able to rig up a battery to keep it running.

English money is denominated in pounds shillings and pence (L/s/d). There are 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. Half-pence (hapennies) and quarter-pence (farthings) are used so you must handle sums like 10/4/5 3/4

  1. Write a python program that takes a list of money and sums them correctly.

1/2/3

2/18/9 should sum to 4/1/0

Leading 0’s are usually left off, so 2/6 is 2 shillings and 6 pence.

  1. Make it do subtraction.

2/18/9

– 1/2/3 1/2 should be 1/16/5 1/2

\

Sources for period slang.

Georg_Friedrich_Kersting_005
It’s sort of important to use the authentic language when writing historical fiction, or at least to try to be authentic. In reality, who knows what they really said. I’ve assembled a few resources that I use. 

http://www.regencyassemblypress.com/Regency_Lexicon.html
There are a couple of books of regency slang available on google books, and a number of sites that clone them. This site is one of my favorites. I have to watch the social class, because they mix thieve’s cant with upper class slang. Lady Dalrymple is too much of a “Gentry Mort” to attend a “Bowsing Ken” for her Ratafia. The company might give her the vapors and she’d need her vinegar. Rather unlikely that she’d even understand the words, much less use them.

http://www.etymonline.com this is one I use to make sure I’m not putting in modern slang. In combination with the google ngram viewer, you can catch most anachronisms.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=biscuit+breaks&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=7&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbiscuit%20breaks%3B%2Cc0 This goes directly to the literature for usage counts. It can be surprising. I’ve occasionally found invented slang, such as the phrases Georgette Heyer put into her books to trap plagiarists and paraphrasers.

Welcome to my world.

I’m introducing myself, a computer scientist, an outdoors-person, a dashed good cook, and incidentally an author. Unlike my hiking, I definitely don’t want to “leave no trace.”

In any case here are a few pictures from my recent travels to whet your appetite.

IMGP0036 This isn’t too recent, but the Berkshire Royals broke into the theme from Blackadder one time when I was in Reading. (Reading UK, not Reading PA, although I’ve been there too).

DSC_0332 If you know what this is, at one time I’d have had to kill you. It’s a bombe! Visiting Bletchley park was something of a pilgrimage. I research in several areas related to this, and even teach an advanced graduate course where cryptography is a major topic. The gears were oiled and the guide pointed out that they had a timing adjustment – just the way old-fashioned cars did.

IMGP4025
This view is from the “Devil’s Kitchen” near Mt. Snowdon in Wales. Our car was parked down by that narrow lake in the distant haze. Nice climb, but hot (summer of ’14). I met a group of Royal Army trainees on their way down. Unused to the weather, they had nothing like the amount of water needed.

IMG_1059
This is from this summer, in Dartmoor on Hayter Tor. The track is hand-carved granite. None of that cheap iron stuff.

IMG_0703
I’m also a light-weight backpacker of no small skill. This shows my ‘trail-star’ pitched mid-winter on a scout campout. Huge inside and much less than one pound to carry. (about 400 grams in rational units.)

%d bloggers like this: