Exoplanets!

Sometime last month (hey, it's still May), I took a class on something called data visualization. Basically this amounts to practicing different ways of plotting my work and finding the most effective combination of colors, spacing, and timing (in the case of animations) that best communicate the message of each plot. Regarding color, I especially liked the attention we paid to finding ways to make a graphic or plot color-blind friendly. This was something I hadn't thought much of before, but it is important because it will allow more people, whether they be an audience member at a talk or someone reading a paper, to understand what's being shown to them. I like this example showing what different things look like to people with different color blindnesses.

I learned too many new techniques and tools to show them all here, but I can share this video assignment I made for the class.  It uses data taken from Exoplanets.org and this software called Glue being developed by Alyssa Goodman, the professor who taught this class, and a few graduate students. The video is intended to show how Glue can help answer some yet unanswered questions about exoplanets and their host stars.

Hopefully the quality will eventually render. Also, I should mention that I rehearsed that video way too many times as is evidenced by my laptop battery dying in the final moments of the narration. Needless to say, I was happy enough with the final video and I found Glue to be an amazing piece of software for data visualization.


:^)

Maintaining Mileage with some Thermodynamics

Since my 22nd birthday, I've run just over 1200 miles with my first marathon last November included in that somewhere. I've noticed that various treadmills and my GPS watch tell me that I use about 110 Calories per mile. That means I've used around 100,000 dietary calories which roughly translates into 500 megajoules of energy over those 1200 miles. That (according to Wolfram Alpha) is over 10 times the amount of food energy Michael Phelps consumed per day while training for the Olympics.

It's also 42 times the kinetic energy of a 40 ton semi-trailer truck moving at 60mph. My favorite comparison I found while doing this is that for an instant, that 40 ton truck has the same amount of energy as my iPhone will use in one year.

 I promise I have a life and didn't spend more than 30 minutes doing this...

I wonder how much of the energy I used actually went into moving my arms and legs and how much went into heat. As I wonder that, I'll be slowly increasing my weekly mileage in preparation for another marathon sometime this fall.

:^)

Ye Olde Post #3: Stellar Nebula Cake

There is a recipe in this book I have by James Peterson that makes a chocolate devil's food cake with a whipped cream filling and white chocolate topping. I noticed the white chocolate topping and thought, "I could decorate that somehow!" My idea was to melt the chocolate and pour it on the cake and put a spiral design in it to resemble a galaxy. But I'm getting ahead of myself, first I had to make the cake!

The process of making the cake reminded me a lot of brownies, namely the part where you melt the chocolate together with butter (and sour cream in this recipe!). The sour cream helps keep the cake moist, I think, which is especially helpful for a chocolate cake. This isn't the cake that I decorated, though. You see, the recipe suggested that I only butter and flour the bottom and sides of my spring-form pan. However, most of that seemed to absorb into the cake while it baked, meaning when I tried to turn the cake out of the pan as the recipe called for, the cake broke in half (first time that's happened in 8 years and something like 15-20 different cakes baked). To remedy this, I put together a special improvised mixture of sugar and water to make a syrup as glue. I could now use my pastry brush to apply the syrup to the sundered cake halves and restore them to unity.

Okay, not really, I just made another cake, this time ignoring the pan preparations the recipe suggested and using a buttered piece of parchment paper in the pan:

Anyway, (notice the spelling without an "s", because that's the correct way; sorry, I'll turn the sass off now) the next step is to slice the cake into layers, use that syrup (it's real, right there in that white bowl with the brush on top) to brush each layer, and fill the layers with a stabilized whipped cream. That is basically just whipped cream with a small amount of gelatin added so it won't absorb as easily into the cake (like that flour and butter did...). Once the final layer of cake was in place, the entire cake is sealed with the whipped cream and left to chill for a few hours.

While that happened, I began setting up for decorating the white chocolate topping. I wanted to color it somehow to make a spiral design on it, but I knew melted chocolate could be tricky to work with. If I decided to pour the chocolate on the cake and then add drops of dye to it, I would have to work fast to do a design before the chocolate cooled, I figured. So instead, I tried something I saw in this video for french macarons. Basically the idea was to streak food dye across a sheet of plastic wrap and pour the melted chocolate onto it. Then roll the plastic around the chocolate and place this into a piping bag with a piping tip:



This didn't quite scale up to a cake from french macarons (as the technique was designed for), and it more turned out like this:

Not a spiral, but with some help of a toothpick, I think I got something like a stellar nebula (or whatever pleases the imagination, really). One could even imagine that the chocolate cake represents the dark matter that is ever-present throughout the cosmos. I also added cake crumbs (interstellar dust often found in nebulae?) derived from the first iteration of the chocolate cake along the side. In the end, the presentation was okay and the flavor was delightful. Chocolate and whipped cream make a great combination.

:^)