Cookies

During the two weeks of hiatus that have plagued this blog, I have been a busy little ninja. My research has progressed in leaps and bounds, I've raced my bike a half-dozen times, I've brought down the house at the ol' Karaoke bar... and I won't be writing about any of that. You've heard it all before, a thousand times over.

Instead, I will tell you about a little get-together I arranged, wherein a bunch of grad students of similar backgrounds got together to make traditional holiday cookies. And by "tell you about", I mean wimp out and post photos. At least they'll have captions.

It was messy work.

Very messy work.

Some got messier than others.

The cookies are customizable. Some are filled with apricot jam, some with raspberry.

And some are filled with liquid chocolate. Eat your hearts out.

Jay made a super-cookie, raspberry AND chocolate. And signed it.

For goodness' sake, Jay, don't sit down!

They were delicious.

Reason #438 That I Hate Time Trials

alternate title: Inescapably Creepy

apologies in advance to my punchline, who generously donated his time and worked tirelessly for the team.

First, some background. In most bike races, everyone starts together, with one foot on the ground and one foot clipped in to its pedal. In Time Trials, though, racers start one by one, with both feet locked in to the pedals. How do they stay upright? They have a holder.

The holder stands behind the cyclist, holding his or her saddle, and the cyclist trusts the holder to, well, hold.

This puts the holder in the somewhat awkward position of having his hands under the rider's butt, which is as close to the holder's body as possible. Emphasis on "awkward".

As a holder, you stay as professional as possible, and the whole process is an accepted burden of bike racing. It's no more sexual than saying "I'm inside you" to another man going into a sharp turn. Then again, we've been known to refer to the Men's C racers as C Men (it ain't just a homonym for sailors, y'see).

So when I look at pictures that were taken on Saturday morning, I can't help but cringe a little. Particularly the shots from the Women's races. Even in context, but especially out of context, they just look inappropriate.

This one's not so bad:

"It's just business, ma'am"

This one looks terrible. I'm grimacing, and I'm hunched over... as if I was caught in the middle of something naughty.

If photos had audio, this would be "grunt"

The story behind it should be a lesson for all Time Trialists. When you roll to the line, keep your butt off the saddle, so that the holder can see what he's grabbing. Otherwise, he has to reach under you, blindly grasp at where he thinks the saddle is, and hope against hope that his hands find plastic. Thus, the grimace and the strained posture.

There's pretty much no way it could get any creepier than that. Right?

Wrong.

Half Baked

It is a truly miserable feeling, running out of energy mid-workout and with no food. That feeling, that abject sense of exhausted desperation, is only slightly worse than the feeling you get when you buy the overpriced energy bars that stave off that wretched bonk.

Sick of paying 2-plus dollars for every bar, I resolved to make my own, and for a fraction of the cost! This was 2005. It has taken me this long to work up the ambition to attempt this noble feat.

And yet here I am, on the cusp of greatness. While grocery shopping today, I felt the urge to experiment, and with the aid of my fancy new toy, the necessary ingredients were procured. I have enough left over to make about 5 more batches, which would bring the price per bar to just about $0.15.

No one has ever accused me of being a baker. The stove top is my comfort zone, and I can stir fry with the most mediocre of them. The oven, though, is a mystery to me, a magical cavern of mysticism and convection. Still, recipes can't be that hard, can they? Right?

Don't be fooled by that fake-foreshadowing. The whole process was actually ridiculously easy. Observe!

• 2 c. uncooked Quaker Multi-Grain cereal
• 3/4 c. raisins
• 1/4 c. diced pitted prunes
• 3/4 c. flour
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tsp. b. soda
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 c. vegetable oil
• 1/2 c. brown sugar
• large egg
• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 2 tsp. vanilla

Step 1:Whisk the oil, eggs, and brown sugar.

Step 2: Mix in the applesauce and vanillaThe mixture should now resemble baby spit-up. You will wonder whether you've made a mistake; you have not. Carry on!

Step 3: Add everything else.
Mix until homogeneous.

Step 4: Pour into a greased 9x13 pan
Step 5: Bake at 350 for 35 minutes. Also, you should have preheated the oven to 350.

That's where I'm at. The bars are currently half-baked (hence the title), and the suspense is killing me. I cleaned up, I paced around the kitchen, and now I'm blogging. The smell has filled the air, and the apartment is abuzz with anticipation. I'll let you know how they turned out.

In the meantime, here are the lessons I learned while baking:

• Make sure to have all the ingredients before starting. Apparently my apartment has 6 times as much baking soda as flour. There was plenty of cinnamon, though.
• A kitchen can never have enough measuring utensils.
• Brown sugar is a delicious pain in the ass.
  
• Whisks are much better for mixing large volumes of liquid than are forks.
• Whisks are a poor choice for mixing clumpy, sticky batters. Whisks are little prisons for the clumps.
• You're never too old to lick the spoon
  

UPDATE:

Success! Kind of! A good first attempt, anyway. They could be sturdier, like less mushy. Not sure how to go about fixing that... longer oven time? more oats? less applesauce?

Suggestions, please?

And yes, that is a tiny ninja, guarding the bars.

UPDATE #2:

These bars need a name. Therefore, a contest:

You have until March 15th to suggest a name. The winner gets a free batch of the bars.

Saturday Morning Special

Will is doing a no-handed trackstand.
You just can't see it, because the sun hasn't begun to start to hint at rising

I have to echo Will's apt, if succinct, post.

Yesterday, more than 200 people showed up to race in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. It was February. It was 6:30 in the morning.

My Cat-4 field had 84 starters. The 1-2-3 field had 110, the maximum that the promoters would allow (why restrict the number of racers, by which I mean the profit? does the rulebook dictate the limit?). That is a decent size field for any race, but it's especially good for February. At 6:30 in the morning.

Jason works on his bike, 45 minutes before the start

Bike racers are a peculiar breed, and there are a particular set of foibles that characterize us, even down to the hopelessly amateur level. Yesterday morning confirmed that we are all profoundly masochistic. In case you didn't know that already.

I am pleased with my result, and I am looking forward to the season-proper. And that's all the race report you'll be getting.

Addenda:

Motivation: On the drive to Brooklyn, we listened to the Rocky IV soundtrack. Guaranteed to boost your wattage. SYNTH SOLO!!!

Noteworthy performances:

• Jason should be a 3. He is a 4. To avoid the "sandbagger!" accusations, or maybe just because he could, he spent half the race at the very front, pulling us around the course at high speeds. And then his bike ceased to function, and he had to drop out. There is no justice.
• Eric had alluded to pre-race jitters, as is customary before one's first-ever road race. He would be using this race to gauge his fitness and skills, but he had no ambitions. Well, Eric got 7th in his race. How's that for a gauge?
  

Sometimes humor...

...transcends politics

Overabundance

There is a pretty fast turnover in residents in my apartment, usually about a year or two. People come, and people go, but their spices never leave. Who packs spices when they move? Nobody, that's who.

So my roommates and I have a lazy susan full of spices, none of which we bought. Luckily, we all have the same philosophy of cooking: Damn the recipes, full speed ahead. Adding flavor is as easy as hunting through the spice cabinet for something that sounds cool. As in, "Ooh, is that ginger in the back corner? That could work!"

We try not to think too much about how old the mystery spices are... 'cause spices don't go bad, do they?

Anyway, as a precursor to inventorying the contents of the spice rack, I took a quick glance. Here is what I found.

Why, oh why, would we ever need this much cinnamon?

The First Law

For generations, some wild-eyed scientists have scoffed at the
warnings of common sense. Knowing that the Laws of Thermodynamics
forbid perpetual motion, they still struggled, quite in vain, to
create such a device. If only, they reasoned, we could defy
Thermodynamics, we could power the whole world, eliminate poverty, end
war!

Well, it seems that unbeknownst to the world, someone has finally
succeeded in flaunting those Universe-governing laws. Alas, they did
not use their discovery for good, but for the evilest evil. It seems,
dear reader, that they seek only to torture TAs.

Though I struggle mightily, adding homework after homework to the Done
pile, the damn To Grade pile never shrinks! "Conservation of Mass" my
tiny white ass!

Seriously, this is only a twice-per-month gig for me; I don't know how
you teachers do it. Respect.

Research Philosophy

It occurs to me that the following post will out me. Not just me, but my classmates as well. Hell, the majority of my field will be outed by this post. Sorry.

What with The Future looming on the horizon, I've spent a lot of time this week touching up the ol' Curriculum Vitae. What's more, I've put together a Research Objectives document, because the powers that be have required it. It's a task I took seriously; it introduces an audience to me as an aspiring professional, and equally as important, it forces into solidity the flurry of ideas swarming about my little brain.

At a conference a few summers back, I had the great honor of sharing a few rounds with some of the invited speakers. It was a momentous night within a truly formative weekend, and I'll never forget the parts of it that I remember. It was the psychologist from UConn who, in a particularly somber moment, advised that "in grad school, you learn how science works, it's someone else's idea... the post-doc is where you find your research niche, create your career trajectory".

And now, wondering about my trajectory, I realize that I am not a humanitarian.

Don't get me wrong, I am a humanitarian. Perhaps even a humanist. Mostly, though, I'm just not the altruist you might've thought me to be.

The best example is also the most recent. There's an amazing paper that deals with the Uncontrolled Manifold Hypothesis and preadolescent gait. Nobody's ever looked at UCM analysis of gait before, as far as the authors or I know. It's kind of groundbreaking, a foray into uncharted territory for a controversial hypothesis. As I've described it thus far, it's cool - and meaningful - enough to stand alone.

There's more to the article, though. Half of the subjects are children with Down Syndrome, and the hypothesis was that the motor control strategy of "Typical Development" children would differ from that of Down Syndrome kids in a way that could be measured by UCM analysis. (For those who are curious, it does)

Of course, UCM in Down Syndrome is very important research! The scientific community absolutely should be trying to help Downs kids, helping all impaired individuals. It is a noble endeavor we undertake when we repair dysfunction.

For me, though, the real headline is UCM. Its application to Down Syndrome is just window dressing.

This is a trend in my field. Once upon a time, we studied motor control for its own sake - blacksmiths and horses and dancers were observed doing what they do best, simply out of curiosity - and impaired subjects added another piece to the puzzle. For example, a lesion that severed the "touch" pathways led to a wealth of knowledge, because with it we could find the patterns to which the body defaults.

Maybe because of scarce funding, maybe because everyone fancies themselves a saint, or maybe just as a field-wide case of "keeping up with the Joneses", motor control research has evolved. Now, the labs that exclusively study healthy control are few and far between. Neurorehabilitation is sexy.

I realize that the house of cards that is my reputation has been set to crumbling. No longer can you have the illusion that I am in the business of Biomedical Engineering for the sake of curing disease or restoring function. With this confession goes my facade of magnanimity.

Know this, though: I am not the only one. Without mentioning him by name, I could tell you about a certain Biomedical Engineering grad student whose efforts in the fight against cancer are little more than a pretense to play with Data Mining and Pattern Recognition. He would likely be as inspired by a Netflix recommendation optimization as by epithelial histopatholgy discrimination.

I ask you, is there something wrong with that? Is he a worse person for it?

It's so odd. How many other fields are laden with the de facto requirement that their projects save the world? Imagine if a thesis about Sir Gawain also needed to discuss the use of the story to combat illiteracy. Preposterous!

If my passion needs to be a means to an end, if Rehabilitative Science progresses because I heart motor control, then so be it. Everybody wins.

The reason I was late to work this morning

I was almost to the lab, when I spotted this:


Coming soon to Rutgers Magazine... Rutgers University Cycling and Really Really Ridiculously Good Looking Team

The Scam

This is my first winter in housing where I am responsible for the gas
bill. In the past it was my parents, or the university, or even my
landlord that took care of gas. Now it's on me.

January, as you can imagine, brought with it a huge shock, as the
sub-freezing temperatures drove the gas bill sky-high. There was a
small panic in the apartment, and even split three ways, the utility
bill hurt.

Rational minds prevailed, and rather than abscond to Arizona, we
noticed that our electric bill had barely budged, even though our
electric heaters had been on all month. We resolved to lower the
themostat, crank the heaters to overdrive, and hope for a warm
February.

Thankfully, this month has seen unseasonable warmth (tangible proof of
global warming, say the same people who called record-setting October
a fluke), and with our thermostat way down, we looked forward to a
smaller utility bill.

Imagine our shock when the bill arrived this weekend, even bigger than
the previous month's!

There was no panic this time, just dejection. Powerless in the face of
the Utility Gods, we felt woefully insignificant, depressingly
impotent. We were doomed to pay ri-damn-diculous bills, no matter how
diligently we shivered through the winter.

All was not lost, though. Determined to find some rational explanation
for my financial ruination, I looked at the detailed report... and
there it was, the clue in the report, the needle in the haystack. The
gas usage for this month's bill was an "estimate".

Surely this was the mistake. Surely The Man doesn't just pull a number
out of thin air when the Meter Reader can't read the meter (say that
five times fast!).

Long story short, it seems that that's exactly how it works. How
convenient for the gas company! How sharp!

So I called this morning, waited on hold for 20 minutes, and read the
meter to the operator.

Savings: ~100 dollars

I am the hero of my apartment, at least today.

The moral of the story, my dear chickadees, is simple. Don't take it
from The Man. Also, buy me a beer.