Musings
Well, that was fast.
August 30, 2009 - If you want to experience custom-made liquid nitrogen ice cream, it turns out you can, right now, in Chicago, at iCream.
Bragging Rights.
August 20, 2009 - One day, soon, you might be walking in your local Mall (Do people actually still go to Malls?) and see a super-space age ice cream stand bellowing clouds of misty smoke, and selling cyro-cream or some other commercial name for the product. It will be ice cream with a gelato-type of consistency, it will be delicious, and it will be prepared by cooling the ice cream mix down with liquid nitrogen. A patent for such a machine was awarded in late 2008.
When a patent is filed, the lawyers need to do a literature search to make sure your invention is original, and to provide the background. So there, in the reference list for this patent, you can see a paper written by me.
In 1994, after reading in Scientific American about two physicist-chefs experimenting with super-cooling ice cream mix with liquid nitrogen and getting creamy consistency with micro-crystals, among other culinary oddities, we figured this would make a more fun liquid nitrogen demo for kids than the usual frozen bananas and tennis balls. We were also pretty sure other people read Scientific American and pictures like this would not go unnoticed. The race was on!
So we tried this method out during a summer program: testing out some recipes, using pre-made mixes, and having kids stirring up their own ice cream in Styrofoam cups as we added liquid nitrogen - all to their gleeful delight. We lickety-quick wrote it up and sent it off to the Journal of Chemical Education; and while we have no idea how many people might have been thinking about it, we managed to end up with what will always be the original journal reference to "liquid nitrogen ice cream."
I'd (pretty much) say all of the people who do chemistry demos read this journal, and it (pretty much) spread around the world like a virus. Within a few years, making "Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream" became a staple of many outreach and demonstration activities. And after a generation, the chances of people knowing about this story are (pretty much) lost to time.
Over the years, I've asked people who were doing the demo: do you know the original reference to this? No one ever does. And when I tell them, they tend to think it's impossible - this must have been around longer than that. Well, it wasn't, but I was not about to do a literature review on "liquid nitrogen ice cream" to prove my case. Now I can point to the patent, because those lawyers did the work for me.
And what do I get from all this? The only thing that matters, in the end: bragging rights.
So there. Neener-neener.
Thirty-Five Years Ago.
August 15, 2009 - Today my high school class celebrates its 35th reunion. I'm in London as I write this, so I certainly hope everyone had a nice celebration.
I'm not particularly inclined to attend events like this,
though.
The Man from Earth.
August 10, 2009 - I recommend highly, if not higher than that, a film titled "The Man from Earth."
This is no regular "Sci-fi" movie. There are no space ships, aliens, ray guns, slime, robots, spandex, cute kids, explosions, or creatures that pop out from someone's belly. It's about an idea. A simple "What If?" scenario that then gets played out, and draws intelligently from a study of human reactions and behaviors.
"The Man from Earth" is a low budget piece made up of one long conversation that takes place in a cabin (an actual cabin, not a set), as an academic - surrounded by some colleagues from various disciplines, and who are surprised he's giving up his tenure and moving on - learn from him that he is a 14,000 year old man, who needs to "move on" as people begin to notice he does not age.
There's more, but that would be telling.
And it would make an incredible stage play.
Pure Joy.
July 31, 2009 - I direct a program where students from the US go to Beijing for 10 weeks of summer undergraduate research, and there is an equivalent number of students from China who come to the University of Michigan for a comparable amount of time. Providing this opportunity for global and international connection is definitely a highlight of what I do.
Twenty Years Ago.
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
June 6, 2009 - I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Tiananmen Square
on June 4, 2009, on the twentieth anniversary of the (call it what you
will) events of June 4, 1989.
Security was high (mainly checking for journalists
– if you were merely a tourist, there was not really a problem), and there
were a ton of badge-wearing volunteers carrying umbrellas (which were meant
to be opened in passive resistance to block journalists from their camera
crews).
There were crews of folks in color coordinated t-shirts who were in different zones of the Square.
We were there for about an hour or so, and while the crowds were a little thinner than usual, the place was still teeming with tourists from both China and from elsewhere. As typically happens, a family wanted to pose with us.
There were no banners, no attempts at any monkey business that we could see. Tourists and families from all over, and while no one was talking about it, there was a shared experience among the adults about the day, and about how much of a difference 20 years can make.
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
rapidly
fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they
are a-changin'.
A Great Wall.
June 1, 2009 - You know, this is just a picture of a painted wall in China, but I found it to be a totally appealling aesthetic subject.
The Hallucinatory Mind.
May 18, 2009 - Recently, cognitive scientists and magicians have been getting together to try and understand just why some illusionists are so successful, and how that all works. The answer is appears to be absolutely fascinating. We all spend a great deal of time hallucinating.
Think of the data taken in by your eye in terms of a digital image. There is a highly pixelated area of rich data in a small area of focus. As you move away from the focal area to the periphery of your vision, the amount of actual information registered by your eye is limited. Shocking. Because when you look at the world, is all seems pretty evenly pixelated. And here's the killer: your brain is filling in lots of information at the periphery of your focal area based on its past experiences with the world. You are hallucinating.
So when a magician pulls your attention with the right hand, it drops the left hand into your peripheral vision. If the magician then starts that hand along one physical path, your brain will literally fill in the rest based on past experience with motion, and you will see (that is "see") the end result of that gesture, not because it happened, but because you brain fills it in. So by changing the motion of the left hand in mid-stream, it can become effectively invisible because your brain will see its invented left hand doing what its trajectory suggests.
Not convinced? Want some proof? Here you go (forget the goofy story about the curve ball and experience this in the context that I just described).
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2009/the-break-of-the-curveball
Crossing the Road.
May 8, 2009 - In our youth, we learn to cross the road with safety. We look both ways; we don't walk out between parked cars; we cross at the crosswalks; we are cautious of following rogue chickens who step off the curb; in places like London, they even tell us which way we should look; and in Singapore, they are pretty insistent that we only cross where we are supposed to cross.
But in Istanbul, a few years ago, I learned that there are other ways to cross the road. The Turkish people, you see, do not say "to cross the road." They say "to throw oneself into the traffic." I like that quite a bit in its broader metaphorical sense. Because if it is true, as Tom Cochrane says, that life is a highway, then throwing yourself into the traffic is definitely the way to go about it.