Thursday, November 20, 2014

Dewitos, Thanksgiving regional dishes, some football nicknames, Chopin's heart, Interstellar

So the last post discussed Mt. Dew, and Bryan mentioned Dewitos. i'd heard something about Mt. Dew testing flavors of Doritos, but didn't put any thought into it. Turns out, they're taste-testing doritos-flavored soda, according to Snopes. (Oh, eww.)

In other articles mentioning Doritos, NPR's Monkey See blog writer Linda Holmes was sounding off on a recently NYTimes regional thanksgiving recipes piece in a recent post called "'Grape Salad Is Not Minnesotan, And Other Lessons In Cultural Mapmaking". Her response was hilarious and spot on. My own home state is represented by turkey tamales. Please, children, we don't even have turkey every Thanksgiving; some (awesome) years, my grandmother and mother take a break and my uncles barbeque ribs, or Dad'll fix a brisket. A dear friend and Kentucky native had a similar response to his home state's featured item:
 Bryan:  i've also never heard of pocket stuffing
which is apparently from ky
i think it's just from the one dude's grandma
Anyhow, something that i knew on an intellectual level but didn't consider in any depth was dressing. At home, it's always cornbread-based, which takes moisture well and ends up almost like a Thanksgiving polenta. Having mentioned that, too, to Bryan, he hadn't ever had cornbread dressing, and looked up an article about the regionalism of various recipes. " Turkey stuffing tells a story: It reveals a lot about who you are and where you're from. If you call it "stuffing," for example, you probably grew up north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners tend to serve "dressing."   ". That sounds about right.

Here's a ridiculous info-gram about 'Habits of the World's Smartest People'.

Something else i had to google today was the backstory of the Buffalo Bills running back Anthony 'Boobie' Dixon. He's on my fantasy football team, and i find it odd that they don't use his given name on the roster. This article reports that the nickname stems from a Friday Night Lights character comparison, "
Dixon also explained his nickname, “Boobie,” which he got in college at Mississippi State.“It happened when I was a freshman in college,” he said. “The Friday Night Lights movie was coming out. I went out there my freshman year and I was balling and making plays and doing some of everything. All the players were calling me that. Coach Sylvester Croom at the time started calling me that and it just stuck.” James “Boobie” Miles was one of the lead characters in the movie. ". Also, since we're on the subject, Green Bay Packers Safety HaHa Clinton-Dix's given name is Ha'Sean, but his grandmother gave him the nickname, "
"My grandmother has been calling me that since I was a little kid, so just been a little kid thing," Clinton-Dix said. Does he like it? "I love it," he said. "Coach loves it. Everyone loves it, so HaHa, that’s what I go with."
Here is this story about the previously-secret recent exhumation of Frederic Chopin's heart (which lies in his native Poland, as the rest of him is in France, apparently smuggled back into Poland in what is probably a crystal jar of cognac, hidden under his sister's skirts). The line that drew my attention was, " "The spirit of this night was very sublime," said Tadeusz Dobosz, the forensic scientist on the team. ". He had what appeared to be a complicated love life according the wikipedia article, having broken an engagement from a Polish lady in his mid-20s, a complicated affair with French author George Sand, then a not-relationship relationship with a student, Jane Stirling, socialite and daughter of a Scottish Laird, who collected-by-purchase his entire estate upon his death, and " While there is no evidence they were lovers, she was often referred to, after Chopin's death, as "Chopin's widow" ". Wikipedia also reports that , " It has been claimed that the financial assistance said to have been provided by Jane Stirling and Katherine Erskine was actually from the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, and that the Scottish sisters were simply a cover for Lind's anonymity. Their father's will left them only £300, which was by no means enough to fund the sort of generosity that was provided to Chopin  ". Golly.

So i saw Interstellar the other day with a friend. We both enjoyed the movie while watching it, but would have preferred the movie to just end with **SPOILER ALERT** Cooper to get sucked into the blackhole/wormhole thing (and not have the whole father-daughter deathbed scene). **/Spoiler alert** Anyway, the movie did what i thought was a great job at explaining the relativity of time to gravity and speed, and it seems like others had the same opinion; Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a Q&A session here, and astrophysicist Kip Thorne's response is here. That last article reports that, while attempting to generate a plausible black hole, "
Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”
That's what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he'd supplied." Pretty neat.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

mach numbers, beauty noir, lobster trafficking, wine and the Packers, Mt. Dew and vitamin C

At the family T's the other night, the subject of Mach numbers arose, which are those corresponding to the ratio of speed of something relative to the 'local' speed of sound (in a fluid). Turns out, Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher who, among other things, photographed bullets breaking the sound barrier (and compressing the air in front of them).

I came across this facebook page with some amusing noir beauty tips (credited to H.P.Lovecraft). I like it a lot.

Speaking of strange artist mash-ups, here's one of Taylor Swift and Aphex Twin (via NPR). Don't listen to the first one (it sounded like the remnants of concussion feel). i think maybe To Cure A Weaking McGraw might be the most reasonable one, but honestly, they work surprisingly well. Kudos to the creator. Miss Swift has been in the media a lot lately given her recently released album and decision to pull her music from webstreaming player Spotify.

Last week, Woot.com was offering a deal via wine.woot there you would be shipped, among other things, 4 live lobsters. How does one ship lobsters? Carefully, apparently, in a cooler. There are a host of websites to answer this question in remarkable detailed fashion, " Keeping lobsters moist doesn't mean that they have to be submerged. In fact, lobsters are much better off being out of water during shipment. Therefore, do not pack them directly on ice because the melted ice can become a problem. A lobster in fresh water swell ups and can burst. Dry ice should not be used either because it produces large amounts of carbon dioxide that can asphyxiate the lobsters. " and " It is also best not to feed lobsters for two or three days before shipping. Full stomachs result in lobsters using more oxygen and increase the incidence of vomiting. No need for messy lobsters. " No need for messy lobsters, indeed.

Since we're on the subject of wine, i was in a car with some friends this weekend and we saw a sign for a wine to be enjoyed while tailgating. (This is a thing?!) We're in WI, that's probably not what folks are drinking at a tailgate, but i looked to see if the Green Bay Packers have an official wine. They don't seem to, but i did kick up an article stating " What wine would you pour for a Green Bay Packers fan, perhaps at a pre-game tailgate party? ". Hmm. They go on to recommend a vintage by former player Charles Woodson for the big spender ($250 for an autographed bottle), or vintages from local label Titletown wine, which "features a football and the motto "Sweet Taste of Victory."" ($15 for a bottle a white blend), and a few other local vineyard wares. Also, weird thing that i didn't know: "The Packers do not have official cheerleaders; they discontinued the cheerleading program in 1998 and use cheerleaders from nearby St. Norbert College and University of Wisconsin Green Bay " (and that can be confirmed on the wiki page).

My labmate and i recently discussed the benefits of imbibing Mountain Dew for medicinal purposes. It contains both orange juice and citric acid. That brought about the question of whether or not it provides vitamin C. Turns out (yahoo fail), citric acid differs from ascorbic acid by only one oxygen molecule, but it's ascorbic acid that provides vitamin C. Also, the orange juice amount is apparently negligible. And here is an article in which scientists are polled for their opinions as to whether Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse carcass.

A friend who is recently left the state FOREVER (cue melodramatic music) had a cold, but we still wanted to hang out, i was tracking down the length of time someone with a rhinovirus is actively shedding virus (ie. infectious): "RV is shed in large amounts, with as many as 1 million infectious virions present per milliliter of nasal washings. Viral shedding can occur a few days before cold symptoms are recognized by the patient, peaks on days 2-7 of the illness, and may last as long as 3-4 weeks." It was surprisingly difficult to find, and i study picornas for a living.
*update, i was chatting with KellyAT, who mentioned 'shedding rhinos'; and that brought to mind a whole 'nother mental image. Awesome.

A friend tweets for an oncampus entity, and another mutual friend commented that there was a tweet  featuring a shirtless Jeff Goldblum.
Bryan: i just went to the page
and there's something about shirtless jeff goldblum
i'm so very confused
 me:  i don't need to even consider imaging that, so i'm going to pretend you didn't type it
So i googled around to determine why this might be in the news, and came across this lightbulb ad. Then, i tracked down the twitter feed and applicable tweet. Ah, makes slightly more sense.