LHC on the Daily Show

Jon Oliver visits the LHC to do some investigative reporting on it's much publicized "potential" to destroy the earth. And once again the Daily Show proves it is more credible than most major news outlets*.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

*Major news outlets, the NY times included, never pointed out that the person leading the charge against the LHC was at best misinformed and most likely a crackpot. Nothing sells papers like "Scientists About To Destroy the Earth!!"

Quick Link: Feeding the White House Obsession

I think I'll also occasionally post links that I've found interesting and/or fun, hence the Quick Link label.

The White House has released an Obama photostream of pictures of the Obamas' life in the at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I must admit that I love it. You see wonderfully composed pictures of Obama throwing a football in the Oval Office, talking to advisors about any number of crises the country is facing, spending time with his family, hugging the girls or running with the dog. I think it's a good move by his advisors. It humanizes him but also shows him in positions of authority. But I must admit, some of the photos, like the football one, look like they were taken by stalkers who happen to be photojournalists. And if you can believe Saturday Night Live that might not be too far from the truth :).

Bagels!

There are few things more delicious than a warm chewy bagel topped with a thick slathering of tangy cream cheese. On the other hand, there are few things more disappointing than biting into a dry, puffy donut shaped bread product masquerading as a bagel. Unfortunately, even in Berkeley, home of the snobbiest of food snobs, we find many more of the later than the former. You can track down a few true bagels, but my modest student salary does not permit those luxuries on a daily basis. So I was delighted to find a “bagel recipe for the ages” in my new “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” book by Peter Reinhart. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is not so much a cookbook as a guide to bread making. It reads like a good text book, desiring to give the reader the tools to understand the process by teaching its fundamentals. He first explains the chemistry of bread making from flour choice to baking methods and then presents a large number of different types of bread as formulas rather than recipes. With this information in hand the aspiring baker can correct her mistakes and eventually improvise.

The bagel recipe is a labor of love, but manageable for beginners like myself. It doesn’t take an entire day, rather it requires you to make and shape the dough in the evening and then let it sit overnight in the fridge to let the flavors to develop before boiling and baking them in the morning. The result is immensely gratifying.



I found the recipe transcribed on another blog. I don’t really know the ethics of posting someone else’s recipe on your website, but I would guess if you acknowledge the creator it’s probably ok. If you are at all interested in bread baking I would highly recommend this book; there is no substitute for the wealth of information it contains. My additional comments to what is posted on the blog are:

1. Big bagels are awesome, I don’t know why she wants them smaller.
2. I’ve used brown sugar instead of malt and it has worked well.
3. The dough is too stiff to use in my stand mixer without significantly degrading its lifetime, so I do most of the kneading by hand.
4. It takes me much longer than 10 minutes to do the kneading. You can judge when you are finished by seeing if the dough passes the “window pane” test which Reinhart describes in his book. You cut off a small piece of dough, hold it up to the light and stretch it until it is paper thin. If it does not tear you are ready to move on to the dividing and shaping. He also specifies that the dough have a satiny feel to it and not be tacky or sticky. Satiny is very important. It takes time to achieve so be patient. You will know satiny when you feel it.
5. The pastry scraper is an indispensable tool. It makes dividing and cleaning much much easier.

**Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been a New Yorker. Therefore I am not liable for failure to reach their impossible standards.

Subtitles

This blog is on its 2nd subtitle (3rd if you count initially not having one). The first try was “Living The Good Life as a Berkeley Graduate Student” which was lame and cliche. This second attempt, “Flavors from the Natural and Culinary Worlds”, is sure to make particle physicists groan. The relevance of flavor to cooking is blatantly obvious but the relevance of flavor to physics is apparent to only a lucky few. As a particle physicist I study quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter. There are 6 known quarks which we distinguish by their “flavor”, an attribute which denotes how they interact with other fundamental particles. In particular I am interested in what we call “heavy flavor” or massive quarks. I hope to write my thesis on a measurement of the production rate of the bottom quark at the LHC. The bottom quark, or beauty quark if you call it by its underutilized but more elegant name, is the 2nd heaviest quark in the Standard Model. Its production rate is an interesting measurement in its own right since it is not well predicted by theory, but it is also an important for developing a technical understanding of heavy flavor at the LHC, which we expect to show up in many new physics searches.

The physics lessons aside, I am not happy with this subtitle either, so expected it to change. Suggestions are appreciated!

The Obligatory Hello World Post

In a fit of madness this weekend I decided to create a blog. I'm not sure why I did it, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that once upon the time I used to love to write. I wrote princess-saves-prince fairy tales when I was little and tried but failed with some longer format projects in elementary school. In high school the only awards I ever received were for English, not science or math. I miss it and my skills have gotten rusty after 8 years of neglect. The only exception is when I briefly had a blog while living in France (miraculously it still exists: http://l-t.blogspot.com). I'm skeptical that this blog won't go the way of 99% of blogs: a few months of posts and then it sits gathering dust on a server somewhere. But here's to trying.

I named it Physics and Food because those are some of my favorite things and this blog will most likely be about the things I like. That being said, I don't really want this blog to be about me. I think it will be mostly short posts on news items relating to physics or whatever else catches my eye, and perhaps somewhat longer posts on recipes I've made or other food related items. Occasionally I'll throw in a short story when I have enough time to put one together.

You can get in trouble for having blogs, so I am going to try to make this the type of blog that doesn't get you in trouble.

So bear with me on this experiment... or ignore it, it's up to you.

Graduate Students Rejoice

Today, buried in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama made the following statement:

"My budget also triples the number of National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships"

To any graduate student in the sciences (physical, biological or social) this statement is enough to make you salivate. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is a nationwide fellowship given to graduate students in their first couple of years of grad school and lasts for 3 years. I was lucky enough to have one for my first three years of graduate school and I can't say enough how wonderful it was. I'm not just talking about the extra cash it put in my pocket. The real benefit it gives is flexibility and freedom to the graduate student who is usually little more than an indentured servant. We teach or work in a lab to earn our living stipends, which can be useful and rewarding, but can also be painful and a hindrance to our progression. If you are spending all your time teaching you can't make progress on your research, as many of my theorists friends have found. You can get stuck in a lab doing research you don't like or working for somebody you don't get along with, or you might not be able to work in the field you want to because there is not enough funding from the group. The NSF GRF saves the graduate student from these fates by giving her independent funding so she can find her own way to the research field of her dreams. It lasts through the first 3 years of school, which is generally enough time for the student to find her way into a stable group that she is happy with.

Midway through my first year of grad school I realized I was unhappy with my research situation. Normally I would've been stuck there until I could find my way into another group that had available funding, which would've taken at least a semester. Instead I simply contacted the professor I knew I wanted to work with, finished up my outstanding projects and moved on to my current group. The situation could have gotten much more ugly if it were not for that GRF.

So thank you President Obama (or Steve Chu or whoever suggested it) for remembering the grad students!