One of the most recent events that we dealt with was a near blow out of our tire. Last Friday we had new tires put onto our car. Somehow in the process, the tire people broke the tire. Long story short, the tire developed a bulge and began coming off of the rim. It probably was a good thing this was noticed, since we would have otherwise experienced a blow out on the interstate.
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| The bulge is at about 4 o'clock on the tire. |
In other news, last week I took a survey that asked if I blogged, and if so, what on. Of the 15 different check boxes, I think that I had blogged about 12 of them between this blog and my previous blog. The people recording the responses probably wondered how someone could write a blog that covers fashion, cooking, travel, music, religion, academics, science, car mechanics (see tire above), child rearing, sports, and philosophy. Nevertheless, today we will be blogging about only three different topics: food, academics, and politics. The first topic is accessible to pretty much everyone. The second topic is of a more limited scope in terms of interest. The final topic is of little interest to anyone.
Ice Cream.
One activity of interest that we have started doing is making ice cream each week. Engineer J is the lead researcher for this endeavor, since most of the ideas come from Pinterest. So far we have made five batches of ice cream:
Academics.
Since there is a small faction of readers who actually care about what we do in school, here is a quick update about our academic pursuits.
Engineer R still does his research. He has spent the past several weeks researching what can only be described as head cheese. For those who have been blessed to never encounter head cheese, and hence are unaware of its off-putting taste and appearance, head cheese is a meat product made from pressing scraps of garbage meat together with other animal byproducts to form an amalgamate of meat, fat, cartilage, and "other stuff." But what does this have to do with Engineer R you ask? This can be explained as follows.
In "the business," people will sometimes refer to a student's mathematical calculations as "head cheese." Used this way, head cheese refers to a calculation that is altogether complete nonsense, but has meaningful parts that have all been added or multiplied together. You see things like this occasionally on exams of students who just want a "formula" or who just see two numbers and automatically multiply them together.
Think of a scurry of squirrels. One can find the average length and the average weight of the squirrels in said scurry. But if you multiply these two values together, you get a meaningless piece of head cheese. The unit is the ft-pound, which is a unit of energy. Although, squirrels are energetic, so I guess this totally makes sense after all.
Over the past two weeks, Engineer R has been tasked with explaining to a colleague (of sorts) why head cheese is not a valid method for evaluating a data set. This week he feels like he finally made some progress in loosening said colleague's iron grip on the validity of her formula. It does not matter how many times you roll the dice, head cheese is never going to be a winning combination.
Here are two pictures from Engineer J's work with a molecule modelling program called PyMol.
- White Mint Grasshopper: This ice cream had mint flavoring with crushed up grasshopper cookie in it. The sweet and condensed milk was a bit strong, which we have subsequently covered by using a bit of imitation vanilla.
- Chocolate with Strawberry Wafers: This ice cream was a sort of Neapolitan flavored ice cream. We tried to use those pink wafer cookies as a mix in for this ice cream. The results were mixed, since the flavor was fine, but the texture was off. The wafer cookies became slightly soggy, which detracted from the experience.
- Pumpkin Spice and Chocolate Chip: This was a somewhat seasonal ice cream. This ice cream seemed to be a nice convergence of our earlier experiences making ice cream. There pretty much were no issues with ice cream. We had a bit of an issue getting it to freeze, but the final product was an overall success.
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough: For this ice cream we made some eggless chocolate chip cookie dough and divvied it up through a vanilla flavored ice cream. It was a little tough to get the dough to go into the ice cream is small enough chunks, but the result was pretty successful.
- Green Mint Oreo: This week we made a mint flavored ice cream with crushed mint Oreos broken up and mixed in. This ice cream was a success we felt.
Comment below if you have a flavor that you think we should try. We can also provide the recipe if you really desire. It is quite simple.
Academics.
Since there is a small faction of readers who actually care about what we do in school, here is a quick update about our academic pursuits.
Engineer R still does his research. He has spent the past several weeks researching what can only be described as head cheese. For those who have been blessed to never encounter head cheese, and hence are unaware of its off-putting taste and appearance, head cheese is a meat product made from pressing scraps of garbage meat together with other animal byproducts to form an amalgamate of meat, fat, cartilage, and "other stuff." But what does this have to do with Engineer R you ask? This can be explained as follows.
In "the business," people will sometimes refer to a student's mathematical calculations as "head cheese." Used this way, head cheese refers to a calculation that is altogether complete nonsense, but has meaningful parts that have all been added or multiplied together. You see things like this occasionally on exams of students who just want a "formula" or who just see two numbers and automatically multiply them together.
Think of a scurry of squirrels. One can find the average length and the average weight of the squirrels in said scurry. But if you multiply these two values together, you get a meaningless piece of head cheese. The unit is the ft-pound, which is a unit of energy. Although, squirrels are energetic, so I guess this totally makes sense after all.
Over the past two weeks, Engineer R has been tasked with explaining to a colleague (of sorts) why head cheese is not a valid method for evaluating a data set. This week he feels like he finally made some progress in loosening said colleague's iron grip on the validity of her formula. It does not matter how many times you roll the dice, head cheese is never going to be a winning combination.
Here are two pictures from Engineer J's work with a molecule modelling program called PyMol.
Politics.
(Editorial remark): This is the part that you can totally skip if you are tired about reading about politics. Frankly, I would skip this part myself I had not actually written it. What you see below is a very condensed version of some different thoughts that I (Engineer R) wrote. It has not been thoroughly edited, so enter at your own risk. There might be grammar and spelling mistakes.
As most of us are aware, there has been a large fervor of activity lately surrounding the election for President of the United States. Even some people who usually avoid posting about politics jumped into the fray. Naturally, there was an uptick in posts about how the government is going to steal everyone's guns and land (maybe that is just because of our current location), as well as an increase in posts about some lady's emails. Strangely enough, Engineer R has actually done a school project on that lady's emails. It was probably one of the most boring things he has ever worked on. (Most of the actually interesting stuff was probably redacted).
It does seem like there are a number of people hurting after this election. The weirdest thing is how people from all sides of the political spectrum think they are the ones that got the shortest end of the stick.
Before the rather surprising results of the election actually came out, there seemed to be a local consensus that something catastrophic would happen to our society. It was never quite clear which candidate they thought would bring this about. Of course, none of these people sounded at all paranoid or given to conspiracy theories. Most of the loudest voices were from people that lived through the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the impeachment of Dick Nixon, the Cold War, the Iran hostage situation, an AIDS epidemic, and numerous conflicts in the Middle East (some stemming from September 11)--if they think something serious is going to go down, they must have had some sort of remarkable vision about it, right?
Post election, the tides of trouble seem to have mostly shifted to people who have lived through nothing. A Donald Trump presidency is the greatest tragedy of their life. They obviously have never been forced to eat head cheese covered with Vegemite.
All that can be said now is that President-Elect Trump better find a way to get robots to give their jobs back to 1 million Steelers, Packers, and 'Ganders by 2020.
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