Monkey Monday: recently closed browser tabs ahoy! 8 February 2010 1:21 am
Posted by Tracy in : eating,fangirl,food snobbery,geekery,Harold McGee,news,random,reading,school , add a commentGo go gadget Google Reader, still shortening my attention span after all these years:
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This link to one blogger’s notes about December’s Food and Climate Change Summit is to remind me to blog up my own notes about that event already, geez I am such a slacker yadda yadda.
The Fat Nutritionist continues to rock harder than oh, I dunno, but something that rocks really hard.
Michael Ruhlman takes on the idea that people in the U.S. are too stupid to cook with (and I quote exactly): The World’s Most Difficult Roasted Chicken Recipe. Now if only everybody had the time and mental energy to cook more often, I think something like Heaven might emerge. Even for people who don’t like to cook, because I for one like inviting people over for dinner. (more…)
Random old news of awesomeness. 2 February 2010 5:50 pm
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,eating,geekery,Harold McGee,health,health at every size,nutrition,pictures,random,reading,science,weird,whoops , add a commentSometimes it’s especially good to celebrate good things, and today’s post is dedicated to just that. I am supposed to be reading about the role of women in the invention of food science during MIT’s early years, which makes thinking good thoughts all the more important. Sample bit o’grumpy-making:
In his autobiography… Ellen [Henrietta Swallow Richards]‘s husband, Robert H. Richards, stated that “Ellen Swallow wanted a Doctor’s Degree, but although she worked hard for two years, she had to give up the idea. This was probably one of her greatest disappointments in life. It seems to me possible that some of the difficulties may have arisen from the fact that the heads of the department did not wish a woman to receive the first D.S. in chemistry.”
—Richards, R.S., His Mark, cited in Goldblith, S.A., Of Microbes and Molecules: Food Technology, Nutrition, and Applied Biology at M.I.T., 1873-1988, pp. 20-1
Graaaar! (Also, way to write about your partner like she’s a stranger, dude.) As far as I can tell, Ellen H. Swallow Richards was a stupendous badass and entirely too awesome for the jerks at MIT who wouldn’t admit her to the faculty (she was the Institute’s first female student—a Special Student category seems to have been made up entirely for her—and the first female member of its Instructing Staff), let alone let her complete a Ph.D. Also, if I read one more “Ms. X married Prof. Y, so he was probably her thesis advisor,” I may have to go into hysterics or something. Sigh. Hence my need to write about some good news!
Most of the stuff in this post isn’t particularly new, because I’ve been behind on all kinds of news for basically a year now, but if you’re like me, and have trouble keeping up with stuff, or just want to read about stuff that’s happy once in a while, then you’re in luck. Geekery ahoy! (more…)
Monkey Monday: reading break edition 1 February 2010 9:37 am
Posted by Tracy in : eating,events,geekery,monkeys,not even vegetarian,nyc,random,reading,restaurants,school , 2 commentsOk, so I am up to my ears in reading about public policy for metropolitan regions, and loving every minute of it (even if the equation typography occasionally offends my math nerd sensibility). Which is to say, I got into a class at the NYU Wagner graduate school of public service (y’know, policy, planning, management, all that boring wonky stuff that I love so very, very much). Woohoo! Important take-home lesson for everyone: seriously, do not even try to wrangle NYU cross-school registration through the main registrar’s office, which will give you about half a dozen forms to fill out and have signed by people in at least three different offices (also they may not know which members of certain schools’ student services staff are newly retired, and look at you confusedly when you say yep, you emailed that guy already and got an auto-reply email that said “go back to the previous step.”) Instead, email the professor of the class you want to take, get permission to take the class, and contact that professor’s school (ideally with the professor backing you up). In my case, the result was not one but two friendly emails saying, hey, fill out this web form and we’ll do the rest. Yay!
Here are a few more awesome things I have learned since my last post: (more…)
