Baby, it's cold outside

If Boston was a giant Stirling Engine, able to spin on a few degrees of temperature differential, our Energy problems would have vanished this winter. We've been alternating cold and warm spells for a couple weeks, recently ending up on the cold end of that cycle. Friday brought us the first significant snow storm of the season, a half dozen inches that fell during a few hours of blizzard conditions. At the peak of the storm, life in Boston went back 150 years in a few minutes, as the roads suddenly got narrower, commerce ground to a halt, and travel times lengthened a hundredfold.

While I was on a seemingly unending conference call, Elissa drove the mile to pick up the kids at school, leaving a generous half hour early to be sure and get a parking space. An hour later she was still there, blocked by a dozen cars unable to move up the gentle slope of the road that had suddenly changed into a sheet of glare ice. An hour after that, she dragged into the house with my daughter and her friend, stranded with us until her parents could hike over with snow boots to replace her sneakers.

Luckily, dinner that night was pizza, the ingredients for which came off the shelf and which could easily be stretched to accomodate extra guests. I guess it's a residual habit for us "Survivors of the Great Blizzard of '78" to keep the larder full in the winter. We're not quite as pathological nowadays as we once were; it was a standing joke back in the '80's that even the lightest dusting of snow anywhere in New England would create flash mobs in the supermarkets, with the shelves stripped bare of eggs, milk, and bread. Nowadays things are pretty much back to normal, although I do occasionally spot another "old timer" slipping an extra carton of milk into the shopping cart, "just in case."

Fox trails in the snow

It's been snowing lightly since dawn, and all morning the dogs have been fussing at the back door wanting to go for a romp. Finally, I put on my coat and gloves, and out we went. The dogs were beside themselves with joy, gamboling in the snow ahead of me as we passed through our yard. As we came to the street, I clipped on their leashes and we walked together up the hill towards the old reservoir.

Climbing the hill I noticed that our old friend the fox had made its presence known, as there were three sets of fox tracks that came down from the abandoned reservoir, through the fence, and across the road. For the last year they've been a shadowy presence, spotted every few weeks but only for an instant in the distance, or as a sillouette in the light of a street lamp. The snow made their presence more concrete, recording their passing in a way that couldn't be waived off as wild imagination or fantasy.

Continuing my walk with the dogs I mused that, like the fox, I had recently left some footprints in the snow and now needed to consider what they'd revealed. You see, I'm currently working at a rather large company, doing useful but fairly mundane work of the "another cog in the machinery" variety. I'd fallen into that gig through a combination of chance, intent, and corporate acquisition, a high profile at a risky startup being traded for the relative security of the corporate staff, working with a new bunch of folks who knew me only in my current role. But, I'd recently gotten a call from an old friend who needed some advice on positioning his new company, so over lunch I walked him through the intricacies of pitching his business plan to a VC and demonstrating his prototype software to them.

Like any prototype, his had the dual problem of being not nearly complete, and not quite stable. This often leads to the demo strategy of showing only what works 100% of the time, which is safe but often boring:

"As you'll see in our demo, our company has leapfrogged the research community by creating the first Quantum Computer based on nonyl qbits, allowing 512 degrees of freedom in each computational state. The entire system is held in isolation by suspending it in liquid Helium-3 within a 10 Tesla magnetic field. No one else can do this."

"Uh, your demo shows you can add together two numbers, as long as the result is less than seventeen."

"Right! But we can also use this same technology to resolve Elliptic cryptographic sets, solve knapsack problems in Order(N) time, and predict tomorrow's NASDAQ opening stock prices."

"It adds two numbers."

"With a few years more work and $50M of your dollars, it will do so much more!"

Well, unlike my friend's hypothetical addition problem, his corporate positioning issues were tractable. Basically, he needed to telegraph more of the "magic" his team believed was potential in the technology, without turning the business and development plans into fantasy. I gave him some suggestions as to what areas to expand into detailed examples, and where to generalize. After promising I'd keep my eyes open for talent he might need, I bid him farewell.

Back at the office, dealing with the email backlog caused by my lunchtime absence, I pondered that conversation's impact on my attitude. It felt great to be able to work at that level again, if only for an hour and gratis, but how real was that effort compared to the certainty of a paycheck, albeit with its daily headache and sense of going nowhere? Like the fox caught out of its den by the snow, I'd left my footprints behind in the expectations of my friends, a couple of signed NDAs, conference paper reviews, and in one case an issued patent that had fallen out of a chance lunchtime conversation. Now, I found myself wondering if I was still a carnovore, or had become one of those "politically correct" Disney analogs, a lion surviving on nuts and berries so as to not upset anyone else in the jungle.

I'm still not sure where those tracks in the snow may lead.

Cooking with Chemistry

I did a quick trip to my favorite Chinese grocery store yesterday evening and wandered down the aisle with all the varieties of sesame oils and vinegars, looking for a particular brand of black vinegar for a recipe I was making. Rice vinegar....Wine vinegar.....cooking sherry, with and without salt.....black vinegar (sweetened and unsweetened)..... Ah, there it is.

Just as I picked up the bottle, my eye fell on an adjacent one containing not dark brown liquid but a clear one, its label all in Chinese. Curious, I turned it around and read "Potassium Carbonate solution, with Sodium Nitrate." Huh? What's that used for? The very fine print gave the answer: "For reconstitution of Dehydrated Squid. Wash after use."

Guess I haven't gotten to that volume of the cooking encyclopaedia yet.

Musing on that juxtaposition of Chemistry lab and cooking ingredients during today's dog walk, I started making a mental list of other odd ingredients I'd heard about over the years. For example, a friend once told me of his Grandmother's special Christmas cookies, which included as an ingredient a substance she called "Baker's Ammonia" (a.k.a. Hartshorn, or Ammonium Carbonate,) which he recalled required a special trip to the Apothecary to purchase a tiny glass bottle of the pungent substance.

Then there's Sodium Hydroxide, Lye, which is of course famously used in Norwegian Lutefisk preparation. It's also used to process Southern corn grits, and for that matter to peel Peaches commercially. Hopefully, all such preparations include more than a token amount of post-processing neutralization ;-)

At the other extreme of the pH scale, there are the usual suspects -- Tartaric acid, Citric acid, Acetic acid, etc. Further afield, there are some old Cocktail recipes that include Hydrochloric acid, purportedly to "improve digestion."

So maybe the ultimate appetizer menu is Lutefisk with an Acid Tequila cocktail. NaOH plus HCl makes Salt --- instant Margarita!