Thu, 29 Jun 2006

Trans Fat Mystery
The story of food chemicals is rarely straightforward. That’s also the case with the story of transfats. Here’s an article that provides some useful diagrams showing where the word ‘trans’ in trans fat comes from. It also explains the difference between saturated, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. Here’s an article on alternatives to transfats that discusses fully hydrogenated vegetable oils. It doesn’t explain why they have the consistency of candle-wax at room temperature though. I’m still working on that.

posted at: 20:48 | path: /living | link

Mon, 26 Jun 2006

Chemical Composition of milk
And here’s an article in the chemical composition of milk, just to round out the picture.

posted at: 18:03 | path: /living | link

More on whipping
Aha. I knew I was still missing a piece of the whipping puzzle. Here it is.

posted at: 17:48 | path: /living | link

Whip it real good.
I decided to try to find out if it is possible to whip almond milk. I mainly decided this because I knew if I made a blog entry on it, it would wind Colin up (hi Colin! :). It turns out, though, that the chemistry behind whipping things is really fascinating and complicated. So complicated, in fact, that I don’t have time to write an entry that does it justice, and instead must simply record the following links for posterity:

Here’s an interesting article on why it isn’t possible to whip olive oil. But that didn’t seem to tell the whole story. Here’s a very in depth article on what whipped cream is. Here’s an article on hollondaise sauce, which explains how you can trick oil into being an emulsion and being sort of ‘whipped’, or at least creamy, by using eggs. Basically, it all comes down to the type of fat, and the chemical structure of that fat. That’s why it is possible to whip coconut cream. Coconut cream contains saturated fats and saturated fats, due to their non-kinky tails, get to form micelles. And micelles can form suspensions in water. And that’s the story in a nutshell ;).

posted at: 17:40 | path: /living | link

The Scope of a project
Have you ever wondered how to define the scope of a project. It’s pretty key to a project’s success, I think. Here’s a nice bit of information on it.

posted at: 17:15 | path: /work | link

Thu, 22 Jun 2006

Talking Ancestors
Apparently, there’s a lot of debate in the anthropological community regarding whether or not homo erectus could speak. Here’s a page with a bunch of interesting articles that address this question. I’ve only read the first article, but I found it very interesting. It suggests that homo erectus would not have been able to speak in a modern sense, but was probably developing an increasingly elaborate communication system.

posted at: 19:41 | path: /living | link

Lice help out anthropologists
It looks like the story of the human migration out of Africa was a bit more complicated than a situation where one day some homo sapiens in Africa decided to head for the distant hills. For starters, as noted on this page, the animal believed to be the predecessor of the animal homo sapien (yes, we are animals), homo erectus, first appeared in Africa about 1.8 million years ago and then spread into Asia and Europe. According to this wikipedia article homo erectus used stone tools, and possibly had some ability to control fire. Recent evidence, as reported by the science daily website, suggests that the earliest examples of the species homo sapien showed up in Africa about 195 000 years ago, so that’s quite a bit of a gap between tool using homo erectus and homo sapeins. Basically there were stone tool using animals hanging out in many parts of the world for hundreds of thousands of years before humans appeared.

Even more interesting, according to the science daily article, it took homo sapiens about 150 000 years to then start doing any of the cultural stuff we generally associate with humans. Until then, homo sapiens, although genetically distinct, weren’t doing much else to distinguish themselves, aside from making slow improvements to stone tool technology. Then, about 50 000 years ago, things seemed to take off culturally, for reasons that aren’t yet known- with art, burial rituals, etc.

So where do the lice fit in? Apparently, researchers have been able to use lice genes to date the appearance of human clothes. That’s because the appearance of clothes provided the lice with a new habitat, and a new type of louse- the body louse- was born. Based on this, humans started wearing clothes roughly 70 000 years ago. Isn’t science fun?

posted at: 18:10 | path: /living | link

No blobby strawberries!
I just bought a huge whack of strawberries! Yay! I will try, but I’m sure I won’t be able to eat them all, so I’m going to freeze the remainder. According to this page the key to them not turning blobby when frozen is to freeze them separately on a cookie sheet, after a chilling period in the fridge.

posted at: 18:05 | path: /living | link

Wed, 21 Jun 2006

Humans out of Africa
Every so often a new question will pop into my head, and I’ll wonder “Why wasn’t I wondering about this before now?” Today, I started wondering what made the human species migrate out of Africa. Not surprisingly, lots of people in anthropology have also wondered about this. Here’s an interesting page on genetics and migration, although I’m a bit weirded out by the Christian terminology. Here’s another link, which somewhat disturbingly suggests that migrations were driven by the fact that early humans had used up the resources in their immediate areas. Doesn’t bode well for our in built conservation tendencies, does it?

posted at: 16:14 | path: /living | link

Tue, 20 Jun 2006

Fear of Criticism
I was thinking about criticism today, and how it is mysteriously powerful. Generally speaking people dislike criticism, or even fear it. In fact there’s even a name for strongly fearing it: enissophobia. Thinking about this, I started to wonder why this is. What makes criticism such a threat to us? According to this webpage some people are more afraid of criticism than others, but I’m not sure if any actually likes or relishes criticism. The internet is strangely silent on this matter.

posted at: 16:40 | path: /living | link

Mon, 19 Jun 2006

Twig Furniture
Our hedge pruning has finally started. At the moment we’re working on taking out old center wood to open up the middle of the hedge and let new, hopefully straight and leafy branches grow up. In the meantime, we’ve got tons of inch thick branches lying around. Fortunately, we can give them to the city for composting, but I also started thinking about twig furniture. Here’s a lengthy rant/how to article on the subject from mother earth news.

posted at: 12:46 | path: /living | link

Tue, 06 Jun 2006

Random Expression Generator
As part of my second project, evolving models of evolution, I need to randomly generate mathematical expressions. As usual, I would rather not reinvent the wheel. Here’s a function in matlab that will randomly generate functions. Here’s a paper that presents an automatic tool to do the same. And here’s a somewhat tangential link that discusses creating a random expression generator that can be be used to automatically create calculus quizzes.

posted at: 13:49 | path: /school | link

Women’s strength
My two ongoing fitness goals are to incorporate running into my list of activities, and to have enough upper body strength to lift a canoe. Thinking about this second goal, I wonder what the typical body strength of a woman is. In looking for information on this, I found this interesting excerpt from the book War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. It has some information on female strength, particularly relative to male strength.

posted at: 12:32 | path: /living | link

Mon, 05 Jun 2006

Ontario Harvest Calendar
Here’s a calendar for when produce is available in Ontario. We’ve moved through asparagus season, and are now into rhubarb and moving into strawberry season. Strawberry season! Yay! And here’s another, just for comparison. It’s a bit more detailed.

posted at: 10:09 | path: /living | link

Sun, 04 Jun 2006

Summer Dinners: Manners and Social Usages:
I love reading old instruction manuals that reveal just how different the mentatility and perspective can be when discussing something relatively familiar- like a summer dinner- if things like time period and social class differ. While looking for summer dinner ideas I came across this book, written in 1887, on Manners and Social Usages in the United States. Some choice quotes from the summer dinner section:

“There is a season when the lingerers in town accept with pleasure an invitation to the neighboring country house, where the lucky suburban tit likes to entertain his friends. It is to be doubted, however, whether hospitality is an unmixed pleasure to those who extend it.”

“As the dinners of the opulent, who have butler, waiters, French cook, etc., are quite able to take care of themselves, we prefer to answer the inquiries of those of our correspondents who live in a simple manner, with two or three servants…”

At the same time, I find that there are often genuinely good ideas for aesthetically pleasing meals and interesting foods in these manuals, even if they need some tweaking to fit in to the current style. For example:

“Now for the ornamentation of the dinner. Let it be of flowers—wild ones, if possible, grasses, clovers, buttercups, and a few fragrant roses or garden flowers. There is no end to the cheap decorative china articles that are sold now for the use of flowers. A contemporary mentions orchids placed in baskets on the shoulders of Arcadian peasants; lilies-of-the-valley, with leaves as pale as their flowers, wheeled in barrows by Cupids or set in china slippers…”

Granted, barrows wheeled by cupids might be going a bit far, but I like the idea of fun flower holders that add to the decoration of the table.

posted at: 15:31 | path: /living | link

Summer Foods
Summer! I love the summer! And this summer, now that we have our own little yard, with BBQ, I am becoming obsessed with BBQ and other summer food options. I really like the idea of cool summer foods that don’t heat up the house, or foods that can be cooked outside, because that reduces the need for The Dreaded AC. I went on a search for Summer Foods, and found this page which had the good suggestion that fondues are a good summer food. Not something I would have thought of, because I tend to associate fondues with the winter, but I think they have a point, because you can easily have fondues outside.

posted at: 13:04 | path: /living | link

Thu, 01 Jun 2006

Knee Braces
And now I turn to the controversial topic of knee braces. Nobody seems to know if they really work. this page is pretty typical of the information out there. It basically says “Well, the might kinda sorta work… maybe… sometimes.”. All I can say is that I used to wear one, when my knee was particularly crappy, and it did seem to help, if only to keep things a bit warmer and comfy. Then again, my knee problems are quite minor in the grand scheme of things, so maybe that’s why.

posted at: 15:00 | path: /living | link

Gotta get that knee going
So Hilary was here, running the marathon, and it was very inspiring and fun. I keep making brief forays into the running world, and then conking out- but this time around I thought I would use the momentum generated by the weekend to really get going. However, before that can happen I must defeat The Stupid Knee.

Now, before you think I am just a whinny baby (Oh- I would run, if it weren’t for my knee, boohoo), I should say that several years ago I popped it right out of its socket falling out of a bunk bed, and it’s been a little wonky ever since.

However, this time I’m serious. Yes. This time, I bought a watch. And I never own watches. So this time I must Do It. And this time I’ve got my knee’s number. I realized yesterday, as I limped along home, that I’ve never actually hurt me knee while officially ‘running’. No! I aggravate my knee all the time by doing *other* stupid knee things that are completely unrelated to running- like sitting with it bent at uncomfortable angles, or… just as an off hand example (ahem)… running across campus in flip flops carrying my laptop…. Normally doing said things just makes my knee hurt for a while, but it doesn’t interfere with my biking, so I don’t care. But now, I may have to do something. And with that, I bring you the knee guru.

posted at: 10:26 | path: /living | link

All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.