I’m sure you’re noticing a continued hiatus of my blogging. It’s amazing how in a short amount of time one can get two job offers, accept one of them and then have to do a lot of stuff to do in order to move across country!

On top of that, my husband and I are taking a MUCH needed vacation start a week from today for two and a half weeks. When we get back, it’s time to move!

But I’ll try and at least post some good food pictures before I leave, that way my audience is not deprived of at least some great food to view.

Neutrinos are leptons, a subdivision of fermions which were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli back in 1930 as particles which travel close to the speed of light, and in many other ways similar to electrons (mostly because electrons are also fermions), but lacked an electrical charge and were the result of beta decay. However, the particle did not receive it’s formal name of neutrino until the great Italian scientist Enrico Fermi gave it the name, the Italian diminutive of the neutron “the small neutral one,” or neutrino. There are three varieties of neutrinos (called flavors) which is indicative of the type of charged leptons they are emitted with during beta decay. The three flavors of neutrinos are:

1. Electron neutrinos (ν_e)
2. Muon neutrinos (ν_μ)
3. Tau neutrinos (ν_τ)

These three flavors of neutrinos, like their more commonly known lepton brother the electron, all have a spin of 1/2 and all have a mass, which was unknown experimentally until 1998 when a team of scientists at Super-Kamiokande conducted an experiment which could detect ν_e and ν_μ. Since neutrinos do have mass, they do have weak gravitational interactions with more massive particles, but of the four known forces (strong, electromagnetic, weak and gravitational) gravitational is by far the weakest force; the strong force is 10³⁸ times more powerful than gravitational if the gravitational force is of a value of 1. Subsequently, neutrinos are also subject to the weak force (10²⁵ times stronger than gravitational), and this is the primary force which allows them to travel through great expanses, viz., from the sun to the earth’s surface and distances far below the surface of the earth.

The reason why we even know that the sun does emit neutrinos is because of the pioneering (and Nobel Prize winning) work of Raymond Davis Jr.. Davis (who I should note got his Ph.D in Physical Chemistry, and not astronomy or physics!) devised a series of experiments in the late 1960s into the early 1970s in varying locations (starting at Brookhaven National Lab and later on in Lead, SD about one mile under the ground in a nickel mine!) in which solar neutrinos were detected using huge vats of perchloroethylene (or dry-cleaning fluid) that, when the neutrino struck and interacted with the chlorine in the vat, radioactive argon would be produced that would be detected quantitatively.

When Davis published the results, it was noted that the number of solar neutrinos detected using his method was about 1/3 of the theoretical number, and so many of the neutrino scientists at the time were skeptical of his “quantitative” results. However, as time and technology improved, other scientists repeated Davis’ experiment in other locations around the globe, and found results similar to Davis’. The “solar neutrino problem” remained a mystery for many years until it was later discovered at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) that the “missing” 2/3 of the neutrinos that Davis and others had lacked in their experimental results weren’t really missing at all! Rather, it was discovered that neutrinos in fact, can change flavors, and so the detectors that Davis and many others had been using for years were only detecting the radioactive argon produced by ν_e, even though ν_τ and ν_μ were also being produced from the intial ν_e, but not being detected appropriately.

There is still a lot of work to be done with neutrinos, including trying to more quantitatively analyze the antineutrino. But that is work for future scientists!

For now, you all get this recipe, since winter has arrived (at least in this neck of the woods) and nothing beats the cold like a good hardy soup.

Step One: Gather at least some of your ingredients, assuming you still need need to purchase more cheese for your soup.

From left to right: fresh mozzerella cheese, cheddar cheese, velvetta chesse. Four bottles of beer that you’ve not drank in about a year, and two cans of low-fat broccoli cheese soup.

Step Two: Cut up all of the cheeses, dump into crockpot. I used my 6qt crockpot for this, and I definitely needed the room it had!

Step Three: Sate the dog who is whining that you’re paying more attention to your crockpot than her by throwing her a piece of cut up cheese. Be highly amused you caught on camera her goofy face licking the cheese molecules away from her chops.

Step Four: Dump the cans of broccoli cheese soup and lots of frozen broccoli into the crockpot.

Step Five: Add beer, making sure to taste all of the bottles, just to make sure none of it has gone bad. Enjoy the foam that comes from adding the beer to the crockpot, and just wonder how much more foamy it would be with some dry ice thrown in there! Give the stuff a stir, cover and set on high.

Step Six: Run out to the store, and purchase more cheeses that you wish you would have gotten at the store two days before, but didn’t. Perhaps grab lunch while you’re at it, since this a lot of work for just one crockpot of soup!

From left to right: Gouda cheese, Swedish Fontina Cheese and Queso Melting Cheese

Step Seven: Cup up some of the big blocks of cheeses you just purchased (tasting them just to make sure they’re not moldy), dump into the crockpot. Throw in about 2 tablespoons of butter to help the cheese mix well with the beer, along with about 3 tablespoons of corn starch in cold water, recover and let cook.

Step Eight: After cooking for approximately 5-6 hours on high, all of the cheeses should be melted together, and the soup should smell like beer … a lot. Serve in individual bowls with some bread.

Verdict

Next time I make this (which I will), I will probably reduce the beer to only two bottles for two reasons. One, while my husband liked the general idea, he does not drink alcohol, and does not like the flavor of beer. Personally I thought the beer favor was there, but wasn’t too pominent, but according to the non-drinker in the house-hold, the beer was overwhelming. I’d personally blame the Amber Bock (which somebody brought to my house actually), but that’s me. The second reason is despite the addition of the corn starch, the soup was not very thick. I wanted a thicker soup. It was somewhat thicker left over, but I want thick to start with when I eat something like this for dinner.  In any case, this was not a bad soup, and if you like beer-full, thinner cheese soups, this should hit the spot for you!

Most people are familiar with these mirrors, being popularized Hollywood in TV and movies as the main means by which police and sometimes more shady characters get information out of people (see picture above). The basic idea is that the person in an interrogation room cannot see outside of the room, but the people in the observation room outside of the interrogation room can look in, but are not seen by the people in the interrogation room.

If you Google two way mirrors, you find the same general explanation about the lighting and the basics, but let me go into more detail and a bit of optics, because the explanations are meaningless if you don’t understand why it works optically!

Within the domain of optics, all materials have a point in which they are considered optically thick. If you follow the link, it provides you with an equation which shows how the intensity of light varies with the thickness of a material. The intensity of light is also dependent on the wavelength of light examined as well. Therefore, a material can be optically thick in the visible region of the spectrum (such as a silicon), but yet be optically thin (that is, having some level of transparency) in the mid-infrared region or vice versa. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll stick to discussing optical thickness within the visible range since this is the main area of interest for two-way mirrors.

Most people are familiar with how their bathroom mirrors are extremely reflective. Going back to the concept of optical thickness, it’s easy to understand how your run-of-the-mill mirror really is very reflective when one realizes that the mirrors are reflective because the coating on them is optically thick. Looking at the graph below from the wonderful folks at Edmund Optics, it’s quite clear that aluminum mirrors that are optically thick are also EXTREMELY reflective. The enhanced Al mirrors they offer have over 95% reflectance between 0.45-0.65 microns, which is 450-650nm, the majority of the visible spectrum that we humans can see.

Thus now we understand that our general mirrors are mostly likely aluminum-based and are optically thick. How thick is optically thick for aluminum you ask? In most of the applications I’ve ever used aluminum for, I would consider a coating of 600nm and greater optically thick. If I had to guess, your average bathroom mirror probably has a coating of at least 1000nm or 1 micron thick. For those who are unfamiliar with the micron or nanometer scale, consider that the average thickness of a human hair is around 75 microns, making that an optically thick aluminum surface approximately 1/100^th the thickness of a human hair!

Alright. We now have a basis of what optical thickness is, and how that factors into a regular mirror. The mechanism by which a two-way mirror works is simple — you produce a mirror with an aluminum coating that is NOT optically thick! As the case is, when aluminum or any other material is not optically thick, some fraction of light will pass through that material (and any other materials which are optically transparent). Therefore, the production of the two-way mirror means applying a very thin film of aluminum on the surface of the glass to be used as the mirror.

At this point, we can pick up with the rest of the online resources on the subject. The coated surface is placed towards the direction in which you want to see from the outside, but do not want seeing out. This direction is also extremely well lit, while the other side is dark. This scenario is needed for two reasons. First, you’re relying on light intensity working in your favor. If the direction with the coating is well lit, you will have enough light that penetrates through the aluminum coating to allow an image to be seen on the non-coated side. Conversely, you’re relying on the dark side to have minimal light intensity penetrating through the glass (glass on average cuts down about 4% of light intensity) to reach the other side. Secondly, on the coated side, you’re relying on the subject in question not to be close by the mirror. Thus, the image they see is the reflection of themselves, and not of the observers on the other side of the mirror. If you ever get the chance to look at a two-way mirror, and you’re in the “lit” side, move up close to the mirror and cup your hands over your eyes. If there is some light on the other side, you’ll actually be able to see through that mirror because an optically thin surface is transparent — but you may have to be REALLY close to the surface to notice this.

So, that’s the more technical discussion of two-way mirrors.

Ingredients

• 1 package of hot Italian sausage (mine had 6 links in it) — if you really can’t handle the hot stuff, use mild
• 2 cans (16oz) of diced tomatoes, undrained
• 1 can (16oz) of plain tomato sauce
• 1 can of tomato paste
• 1 large (26oz?) can of concentrated tomatoes
• 1.5 cups white wine
• Various Italian seasonings… I used….
  • Lots of garlic (probably 3-4 heaping tablespoons of minced garlic)
  • Onion powder (see the balls of white in the above picture? My onion powder was a bit clumpy)
  • Basil
  • Oregano
  • 2 Bay Leaves
  • 1.5 tablespoons of Pine nuts
  • Thyme
  • Marjoram
  • Crushed Red Pepper
  • Rosemary

Instructions
Cut up sausage. If it’s a bit frozen, this makes things easier. Dump this into the crockpot (I used my 4qt one). Dump everything else into the crockpot. Cook on high for 6-8 hours, or on low from 9-11 hours. My sauce was clearly done cooking in about 7 hours on high, and the house smelled like an Italian gourmet shop.

More as an FYI… the reason why I make this much sauce at a time is that I divide the sauce up into plastic storage bags for later use. And by later use, I mean, weeks even months down the road, by almost immediately freezing them in my freezer. When I anticipate using a packet during a week, I take it out of the freezer to let it thaw, and then warm up the sauce when I need it for a meal. I actually made this particular batch back in August when I was at home sick — so if I can make it with half of my brain shut down for the day, anyone should be able to make this without a hitch!

The final state of graduate school is panic. At this point, you wonder why first year graduate students don’t know anything and why do they insist on asking you all of these questions. Additionally, you’ve got the stress of trying to finish your dissertation, all while you look for a job. At this point, you want to tell the world, “GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE, I’VE GOT ENOUGH ON MY PLATE!”

Right, so I’m not panicky… yet.

Thus, things like my five minute vodka sauce make my life easier. It allows me to make something very tasty very quickly and without much brain power (especially when I’m putting in 10-12 hours at the lab daily). Thus without further ado….

Ingredients

• 3/4 of a small container of tomato paste
• 1 heaping tablespoon of minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon dried basil
• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• Salt & Pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup of Vodka (I prefer Absolut)
• 2/3 cup of Fat Free Half & Half (or regular, or even heavy whipping cream)

Instructions
Combine olive oil and garlic in a small sauce pan on medium-high heat. Once the garlic starts to brown, add the tomato paste and stir together to thoroughly mix, and to prevent burning. After the mixture is combined, add the vodka and the basil, constantly stirring. At this point, you want to up the heat a bit more since the alcohol needs to cook off, and stirring it constantly will help ensure that the alcohol is all cooked off. After about a minute, add the fat free half and half, salt and pepper. Continue to stir and allow the mixture to come to a minor boil and then lower heat to low or turn off depending on the state of your pasta you’re cooking with this.

I served this vodka sauce with gnocchi, since gnocchi are a hardy enough pasta to be able to handle a sauce like this — which isn’t very thick, but has a robust taste to it.

If you’re so inclined, they will have a live webcast on this website: http://webcast.cern.ch/index.html

Within the blogosphere, there are a lot of doomsday people saying that this experiment will destroy the universe. True, Physicists don’t REALLY know what’s going to happen when the LHC starts up, but the end of the world will not come tomorrow, mostly because they aren’t going to be colliding anything tomorrow. They are just going to send some particles around their mammoth sized synchrotron.

I’m definitely interested in seeing how the LHC operates. Hopefully the years of hard work and money doesn’t go to waste in the end.

A cheesesteak from Spataro’s in the Reading Terminal Market (yes, I realize it’s not Geno’s).

Dim Sum at Imperial Inn on N 10^th and … I forget the closest cross street! It’s literally within spitting distance of the Philadelphia Convention Center.

L to R: Beef in Rice Noodles, Chicken Feet, Shrimp Spring Rolls

Closeup of the Chicken Feet (yes, I did eat them, but there isn’t a lot of meat on the feet!)

Closest to Furtherest Away:Cha Siu Baau (YUM!), Shrimp Spring Rolls (I only ate one of the 3 since I’m allergic to shrimp), Longan Tofu (dessert)

I apologize that I only have a picture of the sign, and nothing much else to show for it, but I didn’t think it was appropriate to take a picture of the Italian Market when it really wasn’t up and running.

Today we focus on Italian Meat Stromboli. When I made this, it struck me as silly to just make a pizza since my husband and I hadn’t had stromboli in a long time!

Step One
Start with dough. Pictured below is a ball of wheat flour dough I had made and frozen a while back and took out of the freezer in the morning and sat out on the counter during the day while I was at school. You don’t have to use wheat dough, but I like anything that helps me (and my husband) get more fiber into my daily diet. Pictured beside the dough is the mixture of flour and cornmeal I use when I’m rolling out my dough. Ever wonder how pizza places are able to so easily slide pizzas in and out of their ovens? The secret is cornmeal. The flour helps the dough not stick to the counter, but the cornmeal helps to ensure that the dough doesn’t stick on other surfaces after it’s been rolled out. I have approximately 1/2 cup of flour and 1/4 of a cup of cornmeal there.

Step Two
Roll out your dough to the desired size. For me, I never try and roll out my dough much larger than the sheet I’ll be baking the final product on. In case you’re wondering, that’s an Airbake cookie sheet I am using. Airbake not only protects your cookies from burning, but your pizzas and other bread-goods too!

Step Three
Add whatever desired innards to your stromboli. The first picture shows a layer of hard salami.

Then on top of the salami, partially cooked Chicken-Spinach-Asiago Cheese sausage all cut up and fresh mozzarella.

As if that wasn’t enough, I topped it with fresh basil from my garden, tomato slices from my garden tomatoes, and a light sprinkling of finely grated cheddar cheese.

Step Four
Roll the sucker up. I suggest that in the placing of the innards of the stromboli, you designate one side as the “flap side” which will be the flap that can open out to the world once the stromboli is rolled up. That’ll help avoid the worry of not having enough dough to catch and close up the rolled up stromboli. In this picture below, the stromboli has been rolled up, brushed with a fine layer of olive oil and a dusting of garlic powder has been applied as well.

Step Five
Cook and eat. I baked this stromboli for about 35 minutes at 350F, or basically until the crust had started turning golden brown. A word of warning: with a stromboli like this, with fresh mozzarella and fresh tomatoes, be prepared for some liquid to leak out towards the end of the cooking. This is normal, but can make things a bit messier. Garnish as desired. I always eat Stromboli with tomato sauce, so this is how I serve it in my house. One can always vary things up for the sake of fun and diversity.

PS
The leftovers were even better!

The sad part is that I’m so determined to work on my dissertation that I’m modifying Matlab code as we speak!

As not to leave my regular readers otherwise empty handed, I present a list of topics I will work on posting in the future. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but these are the topics I can think of with blocked eustation tubes.

• Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) ← Since this is a new topic for me, I fully intend to give a demonstration with this post
• Cheesy Chicken & Lentil Stew
• Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Principal Component Regression
• Chicken Tikka Masala (in a crockpot!)
• Spectral Non-Linearity
• 5-Minute Vodka Sauce