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Modernist Cuisine at Home

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I hope that everyone enjoyed the holidays. Classes do not start until next week but for those of you with some time on your hands we do have Orientation sessions going on at Schulich Library, along with workshops on EndNote or Refworks citation management software. They are really worth your while (just saying).

I outdid myself this year on the sheer number of resolutions but I did get one gift, Modernist Cuisine at Home, that may get me motivated to start cooking. The book is a follow-up to Modernist Cuisine: the Art and Science of Cooking, a whopping six-volume set with 2,400 pages, with a team of scientist and chef authors led by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, the first chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer at Microsoft and all-around genius. Co-author Maxime Bilet was at the Food Science 25th Anniversary Symposium at McGill in 2012.

I was drawn to Modernist Cuisine for the science and technology side to cooking but I fell in love with the images and the challenge of the recipes. The full set is not only hefty but it comes with quite a price tag so I was excited to see that they made an addition to the Modernist Cuisine family with a reasonably priced, although still quite weighty, volume. To decrease the number of takeout meals I eat in a week I hope to spend more time in the kitchen, exploring the gadgets I have collected over the years, with my new book in hand.  Wish me luck.

If you’d like to take a look at the full Modernist Cuisine: the Art and Science of Cooking there is a copy at the Macdonald Campus Library. Request pickup at the McGill Library of your choice.

Happy New Year!

Image from Modernist Cuisine

With thanks to Santa for his enthusiastic support

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In keeping with the holiday theme, here is an observational study published just days ago in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on why Rudolph’s nose is red. They used a hand-held video microscope to measure blood flow.

Conclusions The nasal microcirculation of reindeer is richly vascularised, with a vascular density 25% higher than that in humans. These results highlight the intrinsic physiological properties of Rudolph’s legendary luminous red nose, which help to protect it from freezing during sleigh rides and to regulate the temperature of the reindeer’s brain, factors essential for flying reindeer pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh under extreme temperatures.

Happy holidays, from all of us at The Turret!

Image from BMJ

This article has been retracted

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Here is an interesting site, Retraction Watch, that documents papers that are pulled from published scientific journals. Papers or authors can be withdrawn from the literature for various reasons (fraud, misconduct, errors, etc.). Their tagline is “Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.” For example, they recently covered article retractions due to faked peer-reviews using Elsevier’s editorial system. Check it out.

There is a new service called CrossMark from CrossRef, the organization that provides Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The goal is to have a CrossMark logo on digital documents (Web or PDF) that links to information about corrections, changes, and withdrawals. Be sure to click on the logo when it appears.

NASA news: Mercury water ice

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NASA held a news conference today, unveiling new evidence for water ice at Mercury’s polar regions from the MESSENGER spacecraft.

MESSENGER is an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging. Powered by two solar panels, it was launched August 3, 2004, reaching Mercury’s orbit March 18, 2011 (UTC).

Mercury has a temperature range of 610 degrees Celsius: 427 degrees on the side closest to the Sun, and -183 degrees on the night side. There are crater floors around Mercury’s poles that are in persistent shade, since its rotation axis does not tilt. NASA’s latest data points to water ice and other frozen deposits in these craters.

The red areas in this image are the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury’s north pole, with the polar deposits in yellow.

Design your own apps

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I came up with an idea for an iPhone app on my way home from work so I decided to set my programmer husband on the task.

He registered as an Apple developer at developer.apple.com. You do need a Mac to develop an app because Xcode, the program used to write apps in Objective-C, only runs on the Mac OS.

If you are interested in designing an application and distributing it through the App Store you can follow the iPad and iPhone app development course from Paul Hegarty at Stanford on iTunes U. Assignments and PowerPoint slides are included. I watched the first lecture and learned a little about MVC (model view controller) design strategy. It assumes a certain comfort level with object-oriented programming, which I do not have, so he pretty much lost me at the introduction to Objective-C.

This image has Paul’s first ever app on the simulator that comes with Xcode.

Stay tuned for more homegrown apps updates!

Nature’s timeline

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I was browsing the website on the history of the journal Nature and came across their timeline. Scanning through the decades from the 1860s to the present gives an impressive overview of the history of science. Read about the argument over who the first person was to think up using fingerprints to identify criminals in 1880, or the debunking of N-rays (N is for Nancy) in 1904. Some key papers have come from Nature, including the famous paper on the structure of DNA from Watson and Crick in 1953. Explore the timeline and learn more about those early reports of X-rays, nuclear fission, lasers, holography, and isotopes.

The Library has an electronic version of the book A century of nature twenty-one discoveries that changed science and the world that you may be interested in as well.

LibriVox e-audiobooks

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I posted earlier this month about easy access to audiobooks through the Library. There are, of course, free resources for finding audiobooks that you can download and transfer to your mobile devices.  One such resource is LibriVox.

LibriVox, started by Hugh McGuire (Montreal-based), aims to create audio versions of books in the public domain (out of copyright). They ask people to volunteer and record themselves reading chapters of books, most of which come from Project Gutenberg. Internet Archive hosts their audio files for free so that in the end, you are free to listen to or download anything you like.

For those who enjoy reading out loud, there are no special requirements for volunteering so don’t be shy. I love the sound of my own voice 🙂

3D printing (revisited)

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As promised in a previous post on 3D printing, I took some pics of the MakerBot Replicator at the Access conference last month. To the right is me holding a record made for toy players. I had a Fisher Price machine when I was a kid and I would have gone nuts if I could have made my own records – on my Christmas list this year: a 3D printer for cutting vinyl.

 

There is apparently a universe of things to discover in THINGIVERSE, if you’d like to discover more things. If you are interested in modeling and 3D visualization, take a look at SketchUp.

 

Easy access to audiobooks

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I have nice memories of listening to books on tape during long car rides. Feeling nostalgic for the classic road trip, I once bought a murder mystery on CD for what I thought would be an entertaining ride to Toronto with my husband. In the end, the voice of the woman reading the book was so monotonous that we had to pull in to a Tim Hortons for fear of both of us drifting off. I now know to listen to a sample of a book before going to the trouble of bringing it along.

Libraries have been in the business of offering audio versions of books, in one form or another, for quite some time but e-audiobooks (digital versions available for download) have made access easier than ever.

There is a guide on the Library website to borrowing e-audiobooks, which includes Overdrive and EbscoHost books. The Overdrive books are great for fiction or language learning but you can also browse by subject for audiobooks on science or science fiction, for example, like Doctor Who episodes read by David Tennant (which I highly recommend). Download the recordings and play them back on your computer or transfer them to your iPod or other listening devices.

You can also find audiobooks in the Library’s Classic Catalogue. As shown here, you can limit your search results to eAudiobook. Likewise, the WorldCat Catalogue has a format option for audiobooks that includes eAudiobook, along with cassettes, CDs, and LPs, all of which are perfect for those long drives.

Enjoy the ride!