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"That one sentence crystallized the issue for me, turned my frustration from a wall into a lens. Americans are being taught that we're too stupid to cook. That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. The messages are everywhere. Boxed cake mix. Why is it there? Because a real cake is too hard! You can't bake a cake! Takes too long, you can't do it, you're gonna fail! Look at all those rotisserie chickens stacked in the warming bin at the grocery store. Why? Because roasting a chicken is too hard, takes FOREVER. An hour. I don't have an hour to watch a chicken cook!"
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"Albany is no Cinderella city. There's very little that's romantic or beautiful about it. Inside its rectangular block buildings, laws are made and deals are brokered. With no natural exportable resources or major manufacturing, the Capital Region is hinging its non-legislative future on nanotechnology and homeland security technology. It doesn't pretend to be pretty, and it doesn't have much time or patience for bullshit. But people in this area love their college basketball, and they know what being underdogs is all about. Albany is the capital of a state that contains the capital of the universe, and it bears its odd place in the world with a measure of resignation and grudging acceptance. For each of the past four years, however, the city has sent basketball ambassadors out onto the national stage. When Siena and UAlbany have lost the close ones, they've done Albany proud. And when they win, they do so for the whole city."
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"Confidence has an overtone of posture; also it relates to the way I'm seen by others, or the way I feel about myself. Enthusiasm, on the other hand, has to do with the way I feel about something or someone else. Enthusiasm is a form of social courage; it's safer to criticize and scoff than to praise and embrace. "
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"Cohorts from 2004 and 2006 have now been tracked for five years and three years, respectively, and the study compares the female economists who received the mentoring and those who didn't -- women who were seen as otherwise having a similar range of abilities. Before participating (or not participating) in the study, those in the group receiving mentoring and in the control group showed no differences in the numbers of grants received or publications. Comparing the participants and non-participants in the years since the mentoring took place, the study found significant gains for those who received mentoring in three key factors: total number of publications, total number of publications in "top tier" journals, and total number of federal grants won."
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"The study then did an additional level of analysis, matching the results against data showing the degree to which gender stereotypes were present among the populations in various states, using national surveys on stereotypes that indicated significant differences in the extent to which gender stereotypes were accepted. When controlling for the variation in these levels of stereotype acceptance, the study found no correlation between relatively greater numbers of female faculty members and female students' choices of major. And with or without controlling for the presence of gender stereotypes in the state, the analysis found no relationship between the presence of male faculty members and the chances that male students would major in a female-dominated field."
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"Congratulations to NASA's Kepler mission team on their announcement of the discovery of its first five exoplanets (planets around other stars). All five are "hot Jupiters," meaning that they are the sizes of the gas giants in our solar system, but are extremely close to their parent stars. These are the easiest for Kepler to discover, so not surprisingly the first to be announced. The discoveries are based on about six weeks worth of data. "
Uncertain Principles
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"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
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« A Tale of Two Turbos | Main | A Statement of Fact Cannot Be Unconscionable »
Links for 2010-01-05
Category: Links Dump
Posted on: January 5, 2010 8:04 AM, by Chad Orzel
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Regarding link 1: I've been cooking and baking since I was small. I put the first full dinner on the table for my whole family when I was 9. My grad school classmates exhorted me to start a bakery. That being said, a good cake, a truly well done, tasty, properly textured, from scratch cake *is* hard. At 24 I can now (usually) make one. But if I want to be certain, I use Duncan Hines. There is no shame in boxed cake mix.
Posted by: ms physics | January 5, 2010 9:07 AM
Link 3: Yet another person who doesn't understand the difference between confidence and arrogance.
Posted by: Jamie | January 5, 2010 11:23 AM
Yes, Ruhlman, that's clearly the message. Also, the message of Jiffy Lube is that Americans are too stupid to change their own oil, etc, ad nauseam.
Few people in life are so effortlessly obnoxious as the hobbyist who insists up and down that a society filled with people who lack the same enthusiasm for that hobby is a defective society filled with defective people.
Posted by: John Novak | January 5, 2010 11:58 AM
Kepler has found strange features of some of those new exoplanets. I am a Fan or even Friend (I forget which) of Kepler Mission on Facebook, and it reported the following:
Kepler Mission @PLG There are objs being discovered in Kepler's field that are Jupiter-ish sized but hotter than host star. They've no idea what they are #AAS
Yesterday at 5:36pm · Comment · Like
As many commented there: that is really neat (um, not "cool" I guess.) It's part of what science is all about - dealing with challenging finds, not just collected the basic laws.
Posted by: Neil B | January 5, 2010 6:29 PM
Few people in life are so effortlessly obnoxious as the hobbyist who insists up and down that a society filled with people who lack the same enthusiasm for that hobby is a defective society filled with defective people.
Tell me about it. I used to share a house with cooking-types, who were constantly annoyed by my penchant for takeout and quick frozen things. And every time I did cook with them, they'd always finish with, "See? That wasn't so hard!" I know cooking's not hard. It's just most of the time, the increase in food enjoyment isn't worth the extra time, effort, and mess at a part of the evening when I don't feel like doing much.
Plus, if I start cooking rotisserie chicken, what will happen to all of the local Peruvian joints I keep supporting?
Posted by: Craig | January 5, 2010 7:14 PM
I can cook a chicken, but I can't find a chicken as big as the ones they make on the rotisserie at Costco. They're HUGE, and they last two to three days for two people!
Posted by: Jen | January 5, 2010 10:57 PM