Cop Car's Beat

Easier way to do things

Especially now that I am rapidly approaching the 3/4-century mark, I am accepting that there are easier ways of doing things than the ways I've been using for ages. Something that I've figured out this week has cut a couple of hours off of the time it takes me to make Mushkatzoni cookies. In case anyone is interested in following my (lazy) example, I'll describe what I did.

The instructions given in the posting (link, above) include, "Form [the "dough" *] into logs (I use a small cookie dough scoop and keep my hands damp to minimize the amount of mixture that clings to my hands.  Place on a greased cooking sheet (or use cooking parchment), and flatten, slightly." Note that each cookie is hand-formed, separately. By the time I get through hand-forming 96 cookies (I habitually make double batches because I have no small mixing bowl for my mixer), my back is giving me fits. As I am just getting over a weeks-long battle with sciatica, I don't need more problems with my back. BUT...we must have our cookies!

For the 96 cookies (plus or minus) that I baked, yesterday, I lined a jelly-roll pan with waxed paper, plopped the "dough" onto the paper, smooshed the "dough" out with my hands, put another sheet of waxed paper on top, and rolled the "dough" out to completely fill the bottom of the pan. Next, I up-ended the jelly-roll pan onto the counter, placed the now-upper layer of waxed paper under the now-lower layer (to provide a double layer of waxed paper under the "dough"), and proceeded to cut the "dough" into strips in one direction and cross-cut those strips to provide the desired cookie size (see photo, below).

This (below) is what the cookies look like on the parchment-covered cookie sheet (baking sheet to you real cooks) before baking...

and (below) after.

The cookies look a little different than when hand-formed; but, my back thanks me! A note on cutting: I used the edge of an old single-layered cookie sheet to cut with. (Most of my pans are double-layered with air core.) Very quick cutting since the sheet was a bit longer than the length of the jelly-roll pan (and thus of the "dough").

* "dough" is in quotes because I associate the word with flour and there is no flour in these cookies - well...except for within the bread crumbs!

The Rest of the Story:

Probably not news to you

As my blog friends have proven to be a savvy bunch (witness comments to previous postings concerning particle physics), I'm sure that you are all well ahead of me in reading about and interpreting reports from CERN's LHC exerimental teams. None-the-less, I pass along the latest posting from Slashdot.org.

Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter43

Posted by Soulskillon Tuesday November 27, @04:00PM
from the news-for-nerds-stuff-that's-matter dept.

Covalent writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the 'Big Bang machine' that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at MIT and Rice University. The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either 'color-glass condensate' — a flattened nucleus transformed into a 'wall' of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be 'quark-gluon plasma,' a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles."

While I'm posting, I pass along this thought-provoking article from the same source.

How Do We Program Moral Machines?266

Posted by Soulskillon Tuesday November 27, @02:37PM
from the needs-of-the-many-outweigh-the-needs-of-the-few dept.

nicholast writes "If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge? NYU Prof. Gary Marcus has a good essay about the need to program ethics and morality into our future machines. Quoting: 'Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work. That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems.'"

 

Further, from the same source, comes a hopeful development that reminds me of beating swords into plowshares.

What Will NASA Do With Its Gifted Spy 'Scopes?90

Posted by Soulskillon Tuesday November 27, @01:25PM
from the regift-them-to-spacex dept.

astroengine writes "NASA has begun surveying scientists on what they would like to do with two Hubble-class space telescopes donated to the civilian space agency by its secretive sibling, the National Reconnaissance Office — which operates the nation's spy satellites. But the gifts have some formidable strings attached, including costs to develop instruments and launch the observatories. The telescopes, though declassified, also are subject to export regulations. 'We need to retain possession and control,' NASA's astrophysics division director Paul Hertz told Discovery News. 'That doesn't preclude us from partnering (with other countries). It just sets boundaries on the nature of the partnership.' NASA also isn't allowed to use the telescopes for any Earth-observing missions. Topping the list of possible missions for the donor hardware is a remake of NASA's planned Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, known as WFIRST. The mission, estimated to cost between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, is intended to answer questions about dark energy, a relatively recently discovered phenomenon that is believed to be speeding up the universe's rate of expansion."

 

And, finally, an item from the same source - concerning an "Aha!" moment brought on by our own global pollution considerations.

Hairspray Could Help Us Find Advanced Alien Civilizations164

Posted by Unknown Lameron Tuesday November 27, @08:03AM
from the at-least-the-fashionable-ones dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Charles Q. Choi reports that hairspray could one day serve as the sign that aliens have reshaped distant worlds because one group of gases that might be key to terraforming planets are CFCs. 'Our hypothesis is that evidence of intelligent life might be evident in a planetary atmosphere,' says astrobiologist Mark Claire at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres. Detecting signs of these gases on far-off worlds with telescopes might serve as potent evidence that intelligent alien civilizations were the cause, either intentionally as part of terraforming or accidentally via industrial pollution. 'An industrialized civilization will be one that will use its planetary resources for fabrication, the soon-to-be-detectable-from-Earth atmospheric byproducts of which could be a tell-tale sign of their activity,' says astrobiologist Sanjoy Som. CFCs can be easily recognized in planetary atmospheres because their atmospheric 'fingerprint' (i.e. chemical spectra) is very different from natural elements, and are a tell-tale sign that life on the surface has advanced industrial capabilities. Using state-of-the-art computer models of atmospheric chemistry and climate, researchers plan to discover what visible signs CFCs and other artificial byproducts of alien terraforming or industry might have on exoplanet atmospheres. 'We are about a decade away of being able to measure detailed compositions of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets,' says Som."

Time

From Slashdot.org:

Particle Physicists Confirm Arrow of Time Using B Meson Measurements108

Posted by Unknown Lameron Monday November 19, @06:50PM
from the one-way-trip dept.

ananyo writes with bad news for John Titor. From the article: "Four years after its closure, researchers working with data from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's particle physics experiment BaBar have used the data to make the first direct measurement confirming that time does not run the same forwards as backwards — at least for the B mesons that the experiment produced during its heyday. The application of quantum mechanics to fundamental particles rests on a symmetry known as CPT, for charge-parity-time, which states that fundamental processes remain unchanged when particles are replaced by their antimatter counterparts (C), left and right are reversed (P), and time runs in the reverse direction (T). Violations of C and P alone were first seen in radioactive decays in the 1950s, and BaBar was used to confirm violations of CP in B meson decays in 2001. To keep CPT intact, that implies that time reversal is also violated, but finding ways to compare processes running forward and backward in time has proven tricky. Theoretical physicists at the Universityof Valencia in Spain worked with researchers on BaBar to exploit the fact that the experiment had generated entangled quantum states of the meson Bzero and its antimatter counterpart Bzero-bar, which then evolved through several different decay chains. By comparing the rates of decay in chains in which one type of decay happened before another, with others in which the order was reversed, the researchers were able to compare processes that were effectively time reversed version of each other. They report in Physical Review Letters today that they see a violation of time reversal at an extremely high level of statistical significance."

Updates on the sciences from Slashdot.org

Artificial Self-Healing Skin Can Sense Touch18

Posted by samzenpuson Monday November 12, @04:46PM
from the touchy-feely dept.

thomst writes "Tim Wogan reports that chemical engineer Zhenan Bao of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and her team have increased the conductivity of a self-healing polymer by incorporating nickel atoms. The polymer they have produced is sensitive to applied forces like pressure and torsion (twisting) because such forces alter the distance between the nickel atoms, changing the electrical resistance of the polymer. Their work is published online in the November 1 issue of Nature Nanotechnology (abstract here, full article paywalled). Now Bao and her team are working on making the polymer more flexible."

Supersymmetry Theory Dealt a Blow118

Posted by samzenpuson Monday November 12, @05:31PM
from the state-of-things dept.

Dupple writes in with some news from the team at the Large Hadron Collider. "Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature. The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry. Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now. Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model. The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY. Prof Chris Parke, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: 'Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital.'"

 

P.S. Hunky Husband was way ahead of me on the latter article. He sent me a link to a Yahoo! article on the subject last evening.

Another example of taking personal responsibility

Well...in this case, it was a matter of taking corporate responsibility. The excerpts below are from an article on Slashdot.org, How CoreSite Survived Sandy.

When Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, the combination of high winds, rain, and storm surges wreaked havoc on homes and businesses alike. SlashDataCenter paid close attention to New York City, where floods swept the southern tip of Manhattan. With a data center on the Avenue of the Americas, CoreSite Realty escaped the worst the storm had to offer. But was it coincidence or careful planning?

....

First off, can you explain your [Billie Haggard's - CC] role within CoreSite?

We build, maintain and operate all of our datacenters, from the construction to the facilities, engineering, and security of all the data centers. So they’re the ones the in the field making all the magic happen. 

....

What sort of contingency planning do you always have in place? And what sort of specialized plans did you have in place for Sandy, when it came on your radar?

For any incident, we have a business continuity plan as well as a disaster recovery plan. And they’re driven by certain timing—disasters are. For Sandy, five days out, what it triggers is—we hold a meeting, and we go down through our checklist. Do we have this? Do we have this? Do we apply new people? Do we need to reserve hotel rooms? We go through and we check communications, the staffing of our personnel, looking at our individuals, and determining whether they have special needs. Coordinate with people we depend upon, which is our vendors and contractors. Things like making sure we have an electrician available, so if we need to we can run an alternate power source, if we have an extended outage.

Something that gets missed, when we have extended outages like this, is feeding people. So just taking the preparations and going out and shop and have three days worth of food at the site. Spare parts, run through all of our equipment checks, make sure all of our operations are ready to handle an outage.

So specifically for Sandy, it’s five days out, going through the contingency plans, making sure that we’ve gone through the checklist and making sure that everyone knew what they were doing and making sure all the preparations were made.

On the evening of the 29th, when the hurricane made landfall, what happened?

We had three people on site, one facilities person and one operations person. [Uh...I don't know who the third person was! CC] We didn’t know what the impact was going to be. And, initially, we started talking about power, and the lights started flickering. Our facilities personnel made the decision that utility power was not stable, so we proactively transferred our site to generator [power]. Because you don’t have to have an outage to create problems in the data center. Those momentary flickers take hits on the batteries, they can cause spikes on the electrical grid, grounding problems and things like that. So we proactively went to generators, prior to Sandy hitting. So we were all stable.

....

So at what time did you start worrying that [3.5-day supply of fuel for the generator - CC] wasn’t going to be enough? Or did you?

Well, I’ll tell you, the best investment I ever made… was that we paid $9,000 at the beginning of the year to have a guaranteed fuel delivery within eight hours. So when everyone started scrambling, trying to find fuel, ours was already paid for. We were at the top of the list.

So eight hours in, we already had fuel trucks running. And every 24 hours, we had fuel, even though we didn’t need to.

....

You said you had three days worth of food on-site, and three employees there. So they had cots, and slept on-site?

Yes. We reserved hotel rooms, but talk about lessons learned: what we found is even though we had personnel in hotels, they lost power and water in the hotels. So it was actually more advantageous for the guys to be at the sites sleeping, and they had water and shower capabilities and food.

We also found that our customers didn’t plan on not finding places to eat, and we were actually feeding our customers.

So how much food did you actually have on hand?

We had more than three days, and we actually had food delivered from uptown.

....

As the hurricane moved through, and past, it sounds like CoreSite’s experience wasn’t that bad. What lessons did you learn from all of this?

One is to ensure that our documentation and our checklist goes beyond 24 hours. I think that most of—if you look at the tier ratings, how a datacenter is classified, Tier 1, 2, 3, or 4 and 4 being the most reliable—all the requirements are based on 12 hours. Twelve hours of fuel, twelve hours of water for your cooling systems, and we’ve always looked at 24 hours. In preparations for disasters such as Sandy, in the future, we’re going to expand that to three days.

And the other thing is, we had to depend a lot on outside organizations. As I said, the data center becomes an island. And within the building at 32 Ave. of the Americas, the biggest problem was with network people. Even though the data center stayed up, we actually had customers of the building that had lost power and had lost connectivity and so we were sending electricians to reroute power and connectivity on our site so they [customers] could use our power and our connectivity to power their facilities.

The other thing is making sure our customers understand that temporary systems are not good in situations like this. One of our major carriers, their backup system was to bring up a rollup generator. And from what I understand, they paid to have this generator there in four hours, and when they had this generator up, the police confiscated it for emergency use. So their backup generator wasn’t there any more.

 

Back to life

Now that the elections are over in the USA, can I (please!) quit being exposed to blogs wherein the writers lament/obsess/wail/caterwaul/blather about how the Democrats/Republicans/Libertarians/Greens/Independents are nothing but a bunch of lying/thieving/inhumane/stupid crooks? I have had it "up to 'here'"! There for a while, I was threatening myself to remove my whole blog roll, it got so bad; but, that would have kept me from reading the one blogger who did not get him/herself all lathered up.

Whew! I feel better, now!

Bragging on family

While I don't normally plug commercial products or ventures, I'm "bustin' my buttons" over my S-I-L's new book - her second (that I know of!) The following excerpt is from a posting on Helen S Fletcher's blog, The Ardent Cook [Update: Pastries Like a Pro]. (Helen is Hunky Husband’s wonderful, much-loved younger sister.)

European Tarts –  Divinely Doable Desserts with Little or No Baking

By Helen S. Fletcher, on October 25th, 2012
Copyright, Helen S. Fletcher, 2010.  All rights reserved.
All photos by T. Mike Fletcher, unless otherwise noted.

European Tarts – Divinely Doable Desserts with Little or No Baking will be released on December 1st – just in time for the holidays.  So start making a list of anyone you ever knew that likes to cook/bake/eat.  For an advance peek at the blog, go to www.europeantarts.com,

This is a unique concept in cookbook publishing.  While this book is fantastic for anyone interested in baking, the blog that accompanies it makes it almost foolproof for anyone.  The blog holds a lot of  how to photographs, just like this blog, to assist anyone who needs additional help or just wants to see how I do something.  So please do visit it to see what I mean.

An example of taking personal responsibility

Not everyone can afford to do so, and most of us have existing homes; but, building one's home to withstand projected environmental factors makes sense. Below is a posting from Slashdot.org.

Building the Ultimate Safe House143

Posted by timothyon Saturday November 03, @08:27AM
from the don't-forget-the-toilet-paper dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornadoes and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war. Fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, has earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and is designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for 'bunkerlike' safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with 'radial engineering' wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure. Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, says it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some 'extreme' building techniques don't make financial sense. 'You get to a point of diminishing returns,' says Buck. 'You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.''

At least posting a couple of photos

A few weeks ago, in Week in review, I wrote of planting some additional mums at the front of our house - white ones to set off the colorful mums that were planted a couple of years ago. Had I known that the colorful mums wouldn't show up well (mostly, because there are only a few minutes each day during which sunlight plays on them), I would have put larger white mum plants behind the then-small colorful mum plants to assure the whites would be large enough to show. (I'm hoping that I can entice the whites to grow rapidly in proceeding years!) Here's a photo (below).

For the past two or three weeks, instead of feasting at the long, tubular peanut feeders out by our woods, a female red-bellied woodpecker has been frequenting the smaller feeders that are just outside the living room windows. At times, she merely sits atop one of the feeder support poles or an arm of a pole, poising like a statue. At other times, she makes repeated flights up to the top of the largest window pane to flog her reflection (I'm assuming!) Here she is (photo, below) making like a statue. Contrary to the way it looks, she isn't issuing a call or gobbling down a peanut. She sits, much of the time, with her bill partially open.

BTW: The white plastic bucket that is in the grass behind the bird is water for the deer and other critters.