The Mad Scientists' Corner (Vol. 3) - Food Edition. Hey, I've noticed that I've started saying "randonymity" a lot cuz I don't like the way "randomness" sounds. I wonder if it'll catch on. =P

Winter Smoothies. A couple years back, (back when Jamba Juice used to be Zuka Juice,) I came to the conclusion that smoothie business must plummet in the winter, when no one's in the mood for icy drinks. Therefore, I thought it'd be a crafty development if they could develop a warm (or at least room temperature) smoothie that didn't utilize ice. Now, I'm no smoothie scientist, but it's my belief that the thick texture of generic smoothies hinges on the congealing properties of ice on the otherwise fruit gruel (as evidenced by the fact that a "melted" smoothie gets really runny). Anyways, at the time, I thought that perhaps this problem could be alleviated by using watermelon. Watermelon flesh stays pretty thick when blended (or maybe I just didn't have a powerful enough blender). Well, after a bit of thinking, I decided that drinking a warm watermelony drink would be flat out nasty. So I forgot about the idea for a couple years. I remembered the idea a couple days ago and decided to give it a bit more thought. Maybe if you blended some yogurt or some tofu or even pudding with the fruit. I dunno, who knows if people would even want to drink warm smoothies? Well, by goll, one of these days I'm gonna try it just for kicks.

Sushi Chipotle. I think it'd be cool if they had like sushi bars where you like walk in and choose all the toppings/fillings that you want in your sushi. It'd work kinda like Chipotle, where you just walk down the line and say what you want. They'd start with like a massive sheet of seaweed, lump some rice in, then instead of meat, you'd have like your choice of fish, imitation crab, shrimp, or that kinda stuff. Then you could have your pick of vegetables like cucumber and avocado. Lump on some caviar, sesame, mayo, or whatever else you'd want, and then they roll it up, chop it up, and you check out. Dude, I would SO go to a restaurant like that.

Bread Gloves. (Ok, this idea is admittedly a bit dumb, but I didn't want to write an entry with only two ideas.) (So pretend for a sec that forks, knives, and chopsticks don't exist.) Alright, so in the history of food, I think one of the great milestones was the invention of the sandwich- it was one of those 2001: A Space Odyssey kinda apeman learning to use tools sorta events. The desire to keep your hands clean is ubiquitous in modern society. But the sandwich's contribution to this field has its limitations. The sandwich is admittedly a bit... 2-dimensional. What about something not flat? Like fried chicken. Well, wouldn't it be nice if you had like a glove that you could wear while grabbing the chicken... a glove that you could eat afterwards? BAM! Bread gloves. Not a whole lot else to say about this one, hahaha.

*Invisible Ice Cream. Ok, I don't know how or even why you would want to do this, but it came to me in a dream a few days later and I thought I'd tell y'all about it. Ok, so in my dream, I was in JCL and they had this new soft serve machine, but people were walking up to it and pulling the handle and walking away looking satisfied, but it looked like they were empty handed (the cones were invisible in the dream too). Then upon closer inspection, I realized that there was something there- the slightest outline of the shape of an ice cream cone. Ummm, it's like what anything in scifi looks like when it's engaging its cloaking device. Anyways, I woke up thinking it was kinda cool, kinda crazy, and ultimately pretty amusing. I think there's a market for novelty foods like this- in the same segment of the market as Dip'n Dots. So I thought about it a bit scientifically, and I guess the secret is in coming up with a formula for a sweet goop that has a refractive index close to that of air when it's frozen. Tackle that problem and invisible ice cream would be a reality.

Previous Edition>>

Every once in awhile, when I'm walking by a construction site, I get the feeling inside that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to be a construction worker. (Well, minus the hard manual labor thing, haha.) But yea, I think there's something to be said about building something with your hands that has a sense of permanence to it. Like the guys who just built the wet lab building on campus? They'll be able to come back 50 years down the line and point to the exact bricks they laid, show their children and grandchildren. They have something tangible, whereas white-collar workers can only point to a number in a ledger or something. (Aside from inventions/discoveries,) The products of intellectual work are so ephemeral. Seriously, when people get old, don't they start reflecting on what they did in life and search for proof that they existed? In that regard, the bricklayers have it pretty easy, huh? Well, not like I'm gonna go run off and join a construction team or anything, but the notion of your work outliving you is something to think about, no?

I've noticed that just like with food, it makes me uncomfortable when my clothes drop on the ground for more than a split second (in the laundry room). If it stays on the ground too long, I consider it dirty, and I gotta wash it again. It's kinda like I've got this 5-second rule for laundry. According to science (see Public Health 2004), touching the ground for a split second isn't that different from staying there for like 5 minutes, but still it bothers me. I dunno, I guess there's exceptions/clauses to the 5-second laundry rule just like there are for the food one. Like for the food rule, sticky/moist foods are automatically bad, as are foods that drop on questionable surfaces like the floor in any pho restaurant. For the laundry rule, my face towel and underwear that lands inside-out have only 1-second, tops.

And also, is it just me, or does it seem like sweat and/or natural body grease is like the best fabric softener in the world? Like no matter how much Downy or Bounce sheets I use, the clothes still feel better after they've been worn a couple hours than they do straight out of the wash. Sleeping in the clothes is like a 2X softness multiplier. Maybe it's the extra wrinkles or something, who knows? But I stand by my statement that clothes feel better after being worn around a bit. They should like figure out a way to bottle the essence of sweat or whatever that contributes to this effect and take out the stink; that'd be awesome, haha.

*It's taken years, but there's FINALLY a new episode (11) of Ninjai up.

**Finished watching the Read or Die anime series (R.o.D. TV). Good stuff

The Mad Scientists' Corner (Vol. 2). Ok, here's my most recent batch of things that I think the world would be better off with.

Coffee on the Tap. How come soda fountains have iced tea, but not iced coffee? Cuz a lot of times after a meal, I could really just go for an iced coffee. And why should it be that I can't just walk up to the fountain and get a cup of coffee pre-mixed with cream & sugar? I mean, I know that it's hard to keep coffee tasting fresh long after it's ground/brewed, but can't the same thing be said about teas? Ok, so the way I see it, if they can get iced tea on tap, and such a thing as (General Food's) International Coffee powdered coffee mix can exist, then there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to get coffee from a soda fountain, am I right? Seriously, I mean, Starbucks has pretty much got the hang of how to put out coffee on a massive scale (i.e. those bottled Frappuccinos). I bet if some other coffee company came along and put a comparable (but much cheaper) drink on tap, that'd be a pretty hefty step towards slaying the Starbucks beast.

VR CAD Gloves. Drafting is hard. Seriously. I mean, like, sure, drawing straight beams and stuff that connects at right angles isn't so bad, but more complicated shapes get really freaking tricky. A lot of times, it'd be easier to like gesture how something should be with your hands than it is to click it all into the computer by mouse. Well anyways, I was thinking back to a couple years ago when some joystick/controller alternatives appeared in the computer market and disappeared again shortly after (I think). Using gyroscopic action or some other such business, the controllers sensed when they were being moved in 3-dimensional space and used that as control input. Well, I figger, stick a bunch of those things on some gloves and you'd have a pretty convenient tool for a lot of computer input-related apps. Like to create a spiral you'd just stick a finger out and swirl it around a bit; to create a cylinder you'd make a circle with your fingers and move your hand in a line... that kinda stuff. I dunno, I think it'd be handy anyways.

Genetically Engineered Tapeworm. Tapeworms are parasites that live in your intestines and mooch off the nutrients of the food you eat, right? And (I'm not positive, but) I think people who have 'em tend to get pretty sickly. But that's the popular look in this sad day and age, isn't it? The skinny waif look is in? But aside from that whole malnutrition thing, another problem with tapeworms is that when they start reproducing, they can spread through your body, and, well, things get messy. Well, since genetic engineering is making some big strides these days, I think they should make designer tapeworms that in addition to being infertile would also only eat fat or something like that, leaving all the other necessary nutrients to its host. Then the relationship would be kinda symbiotic: you feed the worm, and it makes you skinnier (minus the usual risks). Everybody wins, hahaha.

REM Alarm Clock. Ok, I was trying to research this topic a bit more before I posted, but there's a lot of conflicting info on the net, so I dunno. I'll give you the gist of the idea, and if you actually wanna go invent it you can figure out the details yourself. Ok, so supposedly, the restful quality of sleep comes about when you get "complete sleep cycles." They say that you'll feel more rested if you wake up after a cycle than if you wake up in the middle of a cycle, even if it actually means getting less sleep. (So I've heard.) Well anyways, one of the major steps of the sleep cycle is REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement). And this is the part where I've read conflicting accounts... like some sites said that waking up during REM makes you feel rested and others said that it makes you tired. I dunno. Anyways, I think they could make an alarm clock that has sensors to monitor the sleeper's eyes. Like you know if you close your eye, touch a finger to your eyelid lightly, then move your eye around- your finger can feel the eyeball moving? There's gotta be some way to make a device to sense that. And that would signify what state of the sleep cycle you're in. And when you hit the right phase of sleep, the alarm would kick in and wake you up. But also, since you go through the cycles multiple times a night, you'd have to set the machine to like figure out how long your cycles are and like calculate how many cycles you'll be able to fit in and still wake up before the deadline. Crafty, no?

Previous Edition>>

Here's what my schedule looks like for the semester...

ASE367K - Flight Dynamics; MWF 10-11
ASE362K - Compressible Fluid Mechanics; MWF 12-1P
ASE324L - Aerospace Materials Laboratory; MW 2-3P, T 2-5P
ASE162M - Applied Compressible Fluid Mechs.; W 3-4P, TH3:30-5:30
ASE167M - Flight Dynamics Lab; M 3-5:30P
PED107D - Beginning Golf; TTH 11-12:30P
ASE379K - Research in Aerospace Engineering; (all my free time)

*adjusted to reflect schedule changes and those sneaky additional lab times that they don't tell you about up front when you register.

Went to the DMA today with my parents to see the "Splendors of China's Forbidden City" exhibit. It was pretty interesting. I've always had a hell of a hard time keeping the different dynasties straight. The exhibit focused on Qian Long of the Manchu dynasty, the last "great" emperor of China, supposedly. Anyways, I got a pretty good feel of Manchu culture I guess. One surprising thing I learned was that bats were used in all kinds of art motifs (cuz the word for "bat" sounds like the word for "good luck")- if someone'd told me that and I hadn't seen & heard it myself at the museum, I woulda thought it was total hogwash. But I guess I'd always known that the Chinese like those plays on words like that. All in all, the visit was quite an amusing experience.

*So let's see what I did this break? I went on a ski trip, read a whole lot, and watched anime and movies. I finished watching the Wolf's Rain series and didn't like it very much. I dunno, I used to think if they showed an anime series on Cartoon Network that meant it'd be good. But like this and Witch Hunter Robin completely shoot a hole through that theory. I also watched D.N.Angel which wasn't bad.

Movies watched, in approximate order of my liking (starting with favorites):
Closer, The Terminal, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Bourne Supremacy, High Fidelity, Appleseed, Troy, Kinsey, Blade: Trinity, Shaun of the Dead, Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Ocean's 12, Team America: World Police, Phantom of the Opera, Shark Tale, Sideways, Twins Effect, King Arthur

*Finished up reading two more novels this break:

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. I read this cuz in the intro to aerospace class, the teacher told us it was one of the classic literary works pertaining to our field. It's surprising how much Verne got right about how a moon launch would actually go, considering he wrote the book like 100+ years before the Apollo missions. At the same time though, there's a good bit he got wrong too. Reading the book made me think more about orbital mechanics than I have since sophomore year, and that's saying a lot, considering I had space apps lab between then and now. Anyways, the book was a surprisingly interesting read. A realistic portrayal of the problem solving process.

Nick Hornby's How to Be Good. Hilarious book about a failing marriage. Dares to say what I bet a lot of people think, but wouldn't admit. Anyways, one of my favorite passages from the book points out, [love is as undemocratic as money- it tends to accumulate around people who already have it.] In context of the story, I thought that was really deep. I like Hornby's style; I think I'll check out more of his work.

Skiing was meh this year. We stayed at the Harrah's, which has two bathrooms per hotel room- which I thought was freaking genius, haha. The weather was pretty horrible. The first day, the mountain was enveloped in a cloud/fog and at the worst of times, you could only see like maybe 10 feet in front of you. I got lost like 3 times trying to find the gondola to get off the mountain, haha. Skipped skiing altogether the second day cuz of weather again. Spent the third day skiing with the family. Wiped hard onto my back and hit my head so hard that my goggles flew off; it felt like I tore myself a new one... and I've got a pounding headache that hasn't gone away since. =/

But man, I came home to find that my secondary hard drive failed. My comp basically just refuses to load up while it's attached now. It gets halfway there and then the blue screen of death pops up for a split second and it reboots. I guess I had a hunch something like this was coming... it'd been taking 2 or 3 tries to boot up before I left for break, and it'd started making this loud, high-pitched whirring sound when it was on. It still works in safe mode, so I'm gradually moving all my movies and anime over to my primary hard drive and burning it all off. Ugghhh... pain in the butt. But dang, I only got this other hard drive like a year ago and it's already like dead. =/ I'll have to check up on the warranty or something.

gone skiing. be back around Jan. 6th-ish

*New Year's this year was ok I guess. Me, Michael, and Sammy tried our hand at planning a party, but that flopped horrendously... but not before we made like 100 jello shots. Anyways, we ended up going to a party at Steffi's place, which was not bad. Saw a good number of ppl I knew. I had in the neighborhood of 15 jello shots. Left the party and chatted with Michael, Sammy, Nien, and Jason for awhile and then went and crashed at Michael's sister's place. Woke up with a pounding headache.