tingilinde

true religion

Homemade ice cream

One of the real joys of the Summer.  Make some timing the batch to be ready just before the fireflies start around dusk and forget about the heat and any serious cares.  Act your shoe size for awhile.

We did it last night. The photo is one of the guilty parties making absolutely sure blueberry ice cream was properly cleaned from the ice cream freezer's dasher.  

Two batches were performed, blueberry and raspberry, with freshly picked berries from a local NJ farm.

Steve, Jim, Nancy, Jeff, Norm  ...  the ball is in your court.  

Here is roughly what we did for the blueberry:

(all ingredients should be very fresh)

2 large pasteurized eggs (if you can't find pasteurized eggs, find a no-egg or a cooked egg recipe)
1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)
2 c blueberries
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 c heavy cream
1 c whole milk

• toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

• wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

• mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

• churn freeze

something to do with your spare time

learn clapping music by Steve Reich

the near-term future of automotive internal combustion powertrains from bosch

Probably as realistic as anyone's at this point.  It would be nice to move to more fuel efficient vehicles and electrification, but price and other consumer factors will probably get in the way for some time.

snip

What will the electric car look like in 2015? It will weigh around 1,000 kilograms. It will have a drag coefficient of 0.34, and its 40-kilowatt motor will be capable of speeds up to 120 kilometers per hour. In Germany today, the average distance covered each day by 90 percent of cars is under 80 kilometers. According to recent surveys, however, drivers want the electric car to have a minimum range of 200 kilometers. To make this possible, our electric car needs a battery with a capacity of 35-kilowatt hours. Based on the technology we expect to be available in 2015, this battery will weigh 250 kilograms and cost around 12,000 euros, or 350 euros per kilowatt hour. Depending on the design of the electric vehicle – how heavy it is, for example – and depending on how the lithium-ion battery develops, the cost of the battery may be slightly lower, at around 8,000 euros.

when place influences behavior

Coney Island is extremely kitschy - almost to the point of nailing the artform.  There are times when you need to give in and go with the flow.  Sadly the cyclone wasn't running, but the ferris wheel was and the place was crawling with carneys.

Doug celebrates strange places at roadsideamerica.  If you are looking for something appropriate for that tacky 12 year old in you...

(the cameras on phones are generally terrible, but they are handy)

watching a prandtl-glauert singularity

A really nice photo of a F22 tooling along at greater than mach 1

(thanks for the link Alan!)

One of the more interesting displays I've seen of the p-g singularity was done by cracking a whip on a humid day.  sweet

east coast beach volleyball at coney island

The sport is normally associated with the beaches of Southern California, but professional tournaments occur around the country - some of beaches and some with huge piles of sand trucked in for the occasion.

My connection is through a friend who will be playing at the AVP Coney Island, NY tournament later this week.  The qualifiers have a high level of play and are free (I think).  Many of the athletes are approachable in this sport.  By the time the tournament really begins on Friday the level of play will be very high.

the healing power of art

Noted in the WSJ (thanks for the link Steve).  

snip

These are the questions driving a fledgling organization called the Foundation for Art & Healing. With the help of an eclectic group of researchers, artists and health-care providers, the Brookline, Mass., foundation is mapping out a research agenda intended to determine whether artistic expression could be a valid clinical intervention—along with exercise, healthy diets and medicines—for reducing the burden of cardiovascular disease.

“We expect doctors to ask us if we smoke,” says Jeremy Nobel, a lecturer at Harvard School of Public Health and founder of the organization. “Should we expect them to ask us, ‘Do you have a creative outlet?’ ”

The idea has already attracted notable supporters. Johnson & Johnson, the health-care giant that markets health and wellness programs, and the U.S. unit of Philips Electronics NV are early corporate sponsors for the foundation. Laurel Pickering, executive director of the New York Business Group on Health, is an adviser.

“It could be an additional tool in our pocket to improve health outcomes,” Ms. Pickering says. But “the business community, in order to support this, is going to have to have some evidence that it does work.”

firefly season

In many parts of the East it is firefly season - in NJ we are at the richest part now.  Our development has so much spraying for things that probably don't need to be sprayed that the displays are on the lame side, but trips to "unimproved" regions can be spectacular.

A  piece in today's NY Times science section.

You can get involved helping a study at the Firefly Watch.

the polymath in the garden

a news release from The British Society for the History of Science:

Let’s hear it for head gardeners
29 June 2009 British Society for the History of Science

The head gardener has achieved far more than just a pretty garden. In fact, through advances in plant physiology, pathology and breeding, head gardeners have left an indelible stamp on today’s horticultural science. It’s time to celebrate the scientific contributions of these often overlooked individuals, says Toby Musgrave, a leading authority on garden history and the author of The Head Gardeners (Aurum Press Ltd, 2009). Musgrave will be championing the head gardener in a talk at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science.

It was in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that the head gardeners’ star reached its zenith. But these polymath servants, a creation of their time and masters of an array of interdisciplinary sciences and arts, did more than create and maintain vast and diverse gardens. “They also rapidly and comprehensively advanced horticulture,” says Musgrave. “Today, however, these invisible artisans and their diverse, influential works are largely overlooked.”

Musgrave will shine light on these forgotten heroes at the BSHS’ annual meeting in Leicester, UK on 3 July. He will reveal how Sir Joseph Paxton’s glasshouse designs turned the wealthy classes onto conservatories, which in turn stimulated plant hunting expeditions to jungles all over the world to collect new hothouse plants such as orchids.

Head gardeners like John Caie, John Gibson and John Fleming rose to the challenge of presenting tender summer annuals in bedding displays, a form of planting that came to epitomise the Victorian garden and which remains fashionable today.

And, says Musgrave, head gardeners are also responsible for breeding many of our favourite garden plants and edible crops. For example, Anthony Parsons' passion was “the improvement of various florists’ flowers” and his pioneering work his work on dahlias, pansies, verbenas, petunias, hollyhocks and achimenes resulted in dozens of new hybrids, the forefathers of many we grow today.

“The head gardeners’ advances and discoveries made in the sciences of horticulture, botany, plant physiology plant pathology, and plant breeding, as well as engineering and architecture shaped the emergence of modern horticultural science and popular gardening,” concludes Musgrave.  “Understanding the head gardeners’ role in developing new garden styles is central to understanding the conditions of their making, the evolution of the garden art form, and the continued influence these forgotten heroes exert on garden styles today.”

weaning people from the plastic bottle

Branded tap water (via the NY Times)

"organic" traffic control

Any analysis of automobile driving cycles and efficiency show that traffic control is very important - you want to minimize starts and stops and you want to keep reasonably constant speeds.

Here is a new traffic light control scheme.  

snip

Currently, traffic lights either have fixed timer controls or a centralized, control system. The widely used Split, Cycle and Offset Optimization Technique (SCOOT) is popular with those responsible for traffic control. It computes a single cycle time for all intersections, splits this cycle time into green times for each intersection and then adjusts offset times in order to minimize waiting times. SCOOT’s primary aim is keep traffic flowing smoothly and pedestrians safe. Modern traffic-responsive Urban Control (TUC) additionally takes public transport into account.

However, although these systems have been developed over many years, they do have several technical shortcomings and traffic jams do occur more frequently than drivers would like because problems with flow control. Fixed timers are obviously flawed as they do not respond to traffic itself and even centralized systems cannot respond optimally to the changes in traffic movements out on the roads. This leads to jams and waste drivers’ time, vehicle fuel, and to higher levels of localized pollution in towns and cities than might otherwise be present.

Prothmann and his colleagues used the organic computing approach to develop a decentralized traffic control system and compared its impact on traffic flow with a conventional system. The organic approach is based on industry-standard traffic light controllers. These have been adapted to have an observer/controller architecture that allows the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to pass on information to the other traffic lights on neighboring roads.

Tests at busy junctions in Hamburg demonstrated that the average number of vehicle stops can be cut significantly, delays avoided, and journey times reduced, all of which has benefits for drivers, pedestrians and city dwellers, and, in terms of fuel use and pollution, the environment.

greenwashing

Can a company claim to be "green" in its promotion when it is sponsoring Nascar and F1 racing - probably spending much more on those sponsorships than their green initiatives?

Companies need to be called out on these mixed messages.

It might be OK if the sponsors forced Nascar and F1 into a type of race that focused on energy efficiency, but that seems unlikely.  Even KERS isn't all that impressive in the scheme of things - motor racing is not directly advancing greenhouse gas emission reductions in the cars the rest of us buy.  Maybe if rules defined a small amount of fuel that could be used (say two liters of gasoline per 100 km of racing), but most feel that would dilute the sport.

I don't have any trouble with companies supporting green causes and I don't have any problems with the support of activities like auto-racing.  I do wonder about companies who spend millions on racing and also try to present themselves as "green"  But then most companies are probably into greenwashing more than actually doing something.

the perils of small sand

The sand on Prince Edward Island doesn't make the grade for beach volleyball

the last of the manned fighters?

Fifth generation fighters. Will unmanned aircraft takeover before F35 class fighters become operational in large numbers?

5th generation fighter planes from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

the eye-pod

what every astronaut and cosmonaut has dreamed of ....