Skip to main content

Walkabouts and Lettuce, ahem, Escarole

I've had an undeniable urge to write about well... nothing... this week.  I'm finally giving in.  Indulge me and in a bit, we'll get back to the normally scheduled physics programming.  This all started when I went for a brief walk around campus. First, I hit our local Wells Fargo where they serve free coffee.  As a point of reference, if you open up an account with these guys you can just walk over every morning deposit what you would have spent on coffee and walk out with a cup of coffee.  It's like Starbuck's, but you come out ahead.

Next, I headed back across campus towards the library.  Someone recalled one of my books so I had to hustle and get it back before the end of the week when the overdue fines begin to accumulate.  Walking past the engineering technology building, I noticed that PAID was getting ready for their weekly luncheon.  PAID is the professional association for industrial distribution.  What's industrial distribution you ask?  It's a brilliant new degree they've started offering at Texas A&M.  Let me describe it with an illustration. Let's say you work for a high tech firm as an engineer. You're concerned that eventually your job will be outsourced overseas and frankly your concern is well-founded.  Occasionally, you go to sales meetings where you meet the account manager outside who hops out of his $60,000 BMW wearing his or her $6,000 watch and you head into visit with the customers.  Industrial distribution trains people to be that guy; the $6,000 watch guy!  The guy that got out of the BMW!  Someone's always going to have to sell engineering technology over here even if it winds up being made over here.  The ID department seems to have figured this out, and based on their weekly free lunch is capitalizing on it nicely!


Still heading for the library, the next thing I encountered was a big sign for the upcoming Desserts with Delta Gamma.  The event will  take place at the Delta Gamma house this weekend, and the proceeds will go to help out with various charities related to vision, including the group that supplies seeing-eye dogs.  We're headed over to the event with Jr. and Sam on Saturday afternoon.


Finally, for the last trivial detail of the week, I finally solved the round-edged vs. pointy-edged escarole mystery.  We cooked sausage escarole pasta[1] this week.  It's a recipe from Martha Stewart back in the day when the magazine inserted a page of four pull-out index card sized recipes each month.  The four recipes together constituted an entire meal you could make in two hours.  The cards, obviously intended for their male readers, were about the size of baseball cards and contained precise instructions that allowed no room for error.  The facing page to the cards contained plating suggestions.  The four cards are still featured in the magazine, but sadly they just contain four random recipes now, not a meal, but I digress.  During our stint out on Long Island, we kept finding this stuff labeled as escarole:


You can see from the picture that the same thing happens in TX.  The stuff is pointy leaved and doesn't taste anything like the real deal, but after two years of finding nothing but pointy-leaved escarole, I began to believe that was the only kind there was.  As it turns out, that's very much not the case.  Apparently, there's an unspoken rule that escarole and endive have to be shelved adjacent to one another although there are no requirements that they be labeled.  The pointy-leaved stuff, as it turns out, is endive!  Escarole looks like this:

Notice the nice rounded leaves.  It tastes so much better!

OK, that's out of my system.  Next time: more science!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in concept very sim