So I learned from Carl Sagan in ‘Cosmos’. In any case, it’s Pi(e) Day.
For those who don’t pay attention, the simple ‘logic’ is as follows: March 14 = 3/14 (in the U.S.) = 3.14 = pi … pi Day!
But if we ‘mirror’ 3.14 we ‘get’ PIE (don’t think too hard about it, just hard enough), so it’s also Pie Day, and in 2010, I think it was, I made four pies or so for our Pie Day activities, and additional pies were brought by colleagues for our pastry-heavy celebration.
And March 14 is also Einstein’s birthday (1879); there are too many wonderful quotes by Albert that get tossed around (see also: en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein, especially the ‘disputed’ section), so I’ll just lead with one of my favorites and call it a day: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
Links, Pie:
Inside: Thai, not pie; left and right; a kitchen sojourn.
I.
Ms. S. had Thursday-day free and so for lunch we headed downtown to Sirin, one of two Thai restaurants on the same block, more or less. We parked further away, back near Hooligan’s, and enjoyed a really fresh March day as we wandered along the sidewalk.
Service was fine, though the woman working ‘font of the house’, so to speak, was perhaps a it overwhelmed, as she first took a bit to appear, then disappeared to find a table for us, served some people along the way, they set a table for us at a later point, and then showed us to our table. It was only a couple minutes and I’ve spilled too many words over this, leading a reader to believe, perhaps, that I found this a dire or even pressing situation, which it was not.
But it was the only ‘bad’ (or not good) part of the visit. Our actual server was great, and the menus provided more or less mirrored those available online. Alas, their specialty martinis ran about $10, so those were not going to be a lunch treat; the downloadable menu didn’t list their prices. For meat eaters there are plenty of lower-cost options on the lunch menu, such as a ‘spicy’ beef salad, which had three peppers next to it; I’ve eaten at places where ‘medium’ was rather hot and ‘hot’ was only for the experienced diner, bot hot here was rather mellow. Piquant, I might say, and pleasantly so. I’ve found that to be the case in several environs where Thai restaurants are … rare.
I always treat myself to an iced coffee or an iced tea, and today it was the former.
Yum.
II.
Another essay I’ll sketch here but never get around to writing is structured more or less as follows:
- Intro: an anecdote about “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” from my childhood
- Part I: “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, experience with the book, self-analysis according to the claims of the left-brain, right-brain dichotomy
- Part II: The left-brain, right-brain myth and debunking it
- Part III: The reality of brain lateralization and brain plasticity
- Conclusion: … something else leading to an anecdote about music or math or intuition or such, probably based in my adulthood
That outline provides all the obvious, major points. The introduction and conclusion would each be short; parts one through three would each be subdivided into — probably — three sections.
Instead of doing that writing right now, I instead provide a few links that circumlocute Part II for me relatively well:
Links:
- Right brain Left brain
- Left-Brained, Right-Brained Pop Psychology Horsepucky
- This ‘Left-Brained, Right-Brained’ Lark
- Mind myth 2: Left brain right brain
- Why the Left-Brain Right-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die
You might just want to start with the last link, as it’s the more well-organized page.
Colin Pantall’s blog post, despite the title — Left Brain = Bullshit Producer, Right Brain = Bullshit Detector — is not about the brain, but it provides the impetus for some interesting art criticism or meta-criticism, so I include it.
A related topic? “The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked” by Christopher Wanjek
III.
Food, foodie, food blogging, and similar trends interest me. ‘Evidently’ (air/scare quotes intended for maximum ambivalence and/or irony), ‘we’ were all into certain things a while back, such as putting a frozen banana in a food processor to make “banana soft-serve”, our nearly instant non-dairy “ice cream”. Discovering and rediscovering this came and went in waves.
And evidently last year we were into roasted chickpeas. I could say that I was into roasted chickpeas before X, Y, or Z, except that’s not true. While I learned about them via a ‘Good Eats’ episode quite a while back it was only last year (first relatively early, then returned to this year, actually) that I revisited that episode and decided to roast some as a snack. And evidently this was a ‘thing’ online on food blogs.
There’s always a ‘thing’.
And a follow up to roasting chickpeas is … roasting, say, lentils.
I’m fascinated by the ‘logic’ (non-ironic quotes here, but the term is still a bit problematic) of how this could spread.
My ‘experience’ has a ‘starting point’; that ‘Good Eats’ episode. That’s the origin, and I made it once. Later, based on my memories and on my desire to use up a batch of chickpeas I cooked, I decided to revisit this recipe/technique. Another logical progression, all tied to my personal history. And yesterday, after making a large — 2lb — batch of blackeye peas, half of which I portioned into single servings and half of which went into a large plastic bow, I extrapolated from the chickpea experience and decided to expand it to other legumes. Why not, of course? And if cowpeas, why not lentils? ‘Obviously’ my doing all this exists in a single causal chain limited to me, more or less, and going back to a television episode.
And yet my doing these things coincides rather well, though sometimes a bit ‘behind the curve’, with what various food bloggers are writing about. In a sense I’m not inspired by them, as I only google to check details about how I might do a certain thing (a recipe variation, etc.) after I’ve decided to do it, and yet ‘my’ ‘personal’ actions track with the actions of an internet swarm.
In recent years the term ‘meme’ has taken on a meaning involving GIF files or similar images, cats and dogs, awkward and/or mistranslated sayings, and so on, but were I to employ the term now — either literally or ‘metaphorically’ (a semi-ironic reference to the meme’s origin as an information-centric analog of the bio-chemical gene, see Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene” (1976)) –, I’d be thinking more of Dennett and Hofstadter, of “The Mind’s Eye” and of Hofstadter’s “Metamagical Themas”. All worth reading.
In any case, to the kitchen I went. A half cup of cooked blackeye peas were rinsed, shaken dry, coated a bit with canola oil and salt and chili powder, and placed more or less single-layer in a 425F oven. Alongside them went a thinly-sliced sweet potato attempting to become sweet potato chips. And once the cowpeas were complete a batch of quickly cooked lentils received similar treatment.
Notes: to turn either legume into a dry roasted treat I’d use a lower temperature and longer time, but getting crispy chips required more heat, and this was the compromise. But as-is or was-was, both were great, as they lost a good deal of moisture, shrank, and browned a little. I added both to a green salad with Italian dressing
Related Links, Sweet Potatoes:
- Crispy Paleo Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries
- Guaranteed Crispy Sweet Potato Fries & Sriracha Mayo Dip
- Baked Sweet Potato Chips
Conclusion:
- 13 Reminders That Big Cats Are Basically House Cats
… #13 … yes … that reminds us of a certain E. - Stop Surfing the Internet Now
And useful advice from that link? “Carry a notebook.”
