Cooking for Geeks

Jeff Potter from Cooking for Geeks (link) visited Carnegie Mellon yesterday as part of a tour to promote his new book. Aside from an excellent talk covering some neat topics about cooking/baking (e.g., using a 48-hour warm water bath to cook meatloaf), the audience was witness to ice cream made using liquid nitrogen.

With a boiling point of roughly -195.8 Celsius, liquid nitrogen provides a significantly faster, albeit a little dangerous, way to make ice cream. On top of this, both the cream and water in the ice cream-to-be freeze significantly faster than normal, creating smaller crystalline structures and a smoother texture overall. Pretty cool.



Here is a short video of the ice cream demonstration (liquid nitrogen use begins at 2:45). Here's a link to his book.

What Can Virtual Worlds do for National Security?

Recently, Science magazine published an article by my mentor V.S. Subrahmanian and me regarding our work on virtual worlds. In the article, we discuss how virtual worlds and games can be used in conjunction with predictive algorithms to provide an environment in which national security and policy experts can explore the results of hypothetical political or military policy changes across the globe.

Here is the abstract from Science:

Military planners have long used war games to plan for future conflicts. Beginning in the 1950s, defense analysts began to develop computer-based models to predict the outcomes of military battles that incorporated elements of game theory. Such models were often restricted to two opposing forces, and often had a strict win-lose resolution. Today, defense analysts face situations that are more complex, not only in that conflicts may involve several opposing groups within a region, but also in that military actions are only part of an array of options available in trying to foster stable, peaceful conditions. For example, in the current conflict in Afghanistan, analysts must try to estimate how particular actions by their forces—building schools, burning drug crops, or performing massive security sweeps—will affect interactions between the many diverse ethnic groups in the region. We discuss one approach to addressing this prediction problem in which possible outcomes are explored through computer-based virtual-world environments.

If you have a subscription to Science, you can view the full article on their site.

For a nice summary of our work, please see Larry Greenemeier's article in Scientific American here.


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St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 81.

And, as they see it, the scientific investigation of nature is not only a most enjoyable process, but also the best possible method of pleasing the Creator.
For they assume that He has the normal reactions of an artist. Having put the marvelous system of the universe on show for human beings to look at - since no other species is capable of taking it in - He must prefer the type of person who examines it carefully, and really admires His work, to the type that just ignores it and like the lower animals remains quite unimpressed by the whole astonishing spectacle.

In the immortal words of Bill Nye the Science Guy -- Science Rules! In a time when the Church and Crown were at odds with the scientific community (this, obviously, is no longer the case . . .), Thomas More's fictional friend gives a simple, yet easily palatable argument as to why we should indulge our natural curiosity.