What I Learned This Week(ish) #4

1. I made my first tres leches cake for my birthday.  I used Alton Brown's recipe, but converted the weights using this site.  I know better, of course.  There are good reasons for using weights vs. volume measurements.  However, the 9-volt battery in my kitchen scale was coopted by a child to be used in a racecar remote control. And now it's dead.

I only put the whipped cream on half at a time.  I was going to freeze the second half, but then I found folks to share with so I later ended up doing the whole thing.  Raspberries were my addition, but the cake is usually served with some kind of nut or berry garnish.

I am just learning to use my new iPhone camera, so this didn't focus quite right.  Going onto the bucket list: Photography class.

My cake was a little dry... I wanted more of the leches.  At El Charro Cafe, my model for tres leches cake, they serve it with extra of the milky glaze to drizzle over the top or pool around the cake for dipping. (They order from a bakery.  Once, I asked Tia Sandy how to get a recipe for it and she replied, "There are at least 25 ingredients in the thing.  Just order one!") I may have overdone the flour or sugar slightly.  I also might have overcooked it a bit.

I'm going to give it another shot, once I get a battery in my scale.  I need to wait for a very special occasion, though.  The stuff is so good it's practically lethal.  If you are borderline diabetic, don't make this cake.  It will take you the rest of the way.

Did I tell you I had a pretty interesting dream in which I won a date with Alton Brown?  Weird, because usually my dreams don't have that much of a plot. Unless being chased by someone/something and not being able to run fast enough counts.  Haven't had one of those in a while, though.  Anyway.

2. I learned that, indeed, as predicted, owning an iPhone AND a Kindle Fire has pretty much made a paradise out of life on Earth.  I'm fulfilled, and can now die happy.  Well, maybe if I had a few more iTunes and Amazon gift cards. And a good protective case for the phone.  And if my Kindle could get online at school, and if Dropbox.com and Box.net weren't blocked.  And if it were easier to read the e-books from the public library on the Kindle.

I guess I can't die, yet. Anyway, my children still need me. Good times with them this week.

3. KSLG out of Humboldt County is a great radio station.  Once you get past all the advertisements for gro-lights and hydroponic systems, the music is great, and I love the community spirit of that area. If we have anything like that in Tucson and I just don't know about it, please, let me know.  I've been streaming it online ever since we got back.  On my Kindle through the TuneIn app.

4. Well, that's about enough for one week(ish).  It's Fall Break, after all, and my birthday week.  Can't be working too hard!

Awestruck

Another video, yes.  You know I don't do this very often, so humor me and watch it.

I was a philosophy of science minor in college.  Why?  I loved the feeling of fascination, of vastness, of  the absurdity of our pretensions, of not being sure of what I knew or thought I believed.  The feeling that probably none of us really knew anything at all, although the wisdom of ancient philosophies and spiritualities probably had a lot of things right, first of all being that we need to try to get over ourselves.

Epistemology, ontology, metaphysics.  I loved having my mind blown on a weekly basis, reading things I never knew people thought about.  I only vaguely remember the names of the philosophers or the specific arguments that each contributed to fields such as, say, cognitive theory.

But I remember sitting around a large table (or maybe it was in a room of oddly placed right-handed desks, leaning over my notebook with my left shoulder, the students all vaguely facing the professor at various angles) and listening for the first time as it was explained to me that we could possibly be brains in vats of ginger ale orbiting Neptune, hooked up to electrodes to make us believe that we were experiencing sensory input through a physical body.  I remember the feeling I had.  Almost like deja-vu, it was a melding of the meanderings of my childhood mind (Is it all a dream?  Is it really my birthday but the whole world is pretending it is August 15 in order to surprise me?) with the logic, writings and questioning of a few thousand years of philosophers.

My mother thought I should be a scientist, but I couldn't imagine any fun in working in a lab all day.  I felt incredibly self-conscious in the chemistry lab.  I couldn't imagine pulling data off of machines for hours at a time, or performing operations on the tiny parts of the brains of rats, and I especially couldn't imagine all the recordkeeping.  Lab notebooks!  Living nightmare.  But I loved the awe of science.  Dark matter.  The Copernican Revolution.  Artificial intelligence theories.  What does quantum physics imply about spirituality?  Physicality?  So much fun.

I probably need to return to some of this reading.

The following video explains a bit about why those feelings I had are so appealing, addictive, and actually advantageous.  And the video is visually gorgeous as well.
The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck - by @JasonSilva from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

Laptops for Learning-- Please Donate!

Please consider donating to my current Donorschoose project. It is my most ambitious proposal yet, and if it doesn't get funded I will have risked 4 of my hard-won points (earned by completing other successful projects) for nothing.

Laptops for Learning



The idea is to get some laptops for use in my classroom at Tucson High Magnet School, to support the writing process as well as our online learning community (a Ning site.)

This proposal will get us 10 mini Dells with wireless internet capability. Sweet.

Our local TUSD override election, props. 401 and 402 failed in November, which, paired with crippling budget cuts at the state level, means that there will likely be few to no computer upgrades and inadequate maintenance for years to come. However, the techs at our school know that I created this proposal and they have offered tech support for any computers I get for my classroom.

Please help if you can, or at least spread the word!

Thanks!