A Very Portland Solstice Party

Hello and Happy Solstice from Portland, Oregon!  Here at Chez Perkinson we're combining hilarity and engineering to manufacture a very strange dinner.

Tonight, we're having some friends over for a "raw food" dinner.  The raw food movement believes in preserving the live enzymes and health benefits in food by avoiding temperatures above 105 degrees Farenheit.  We've got some friends who love natural, organic, raw food...so we're doing this for them.  Welcome to Portland!

Dad and I just spent an hour and a half julienning onions, zucchini, red peppers and, most difficultly, Thai baby coconut into "noodles" for some Pad Thai.  While doing this, we were drinking freshly-squeezed carrot/apple/ginger juice, each glass containing the juice of a full pound of carrots (the byproduct of shredding 2 pounds of carrots for use in a "Save the Tunas" Salad made entirely of veggies, nuts, and seeds).

Figure 1. Onion "noodles," marinating in Tamari.

We made an unholy number of "noodles" -- a full lasagna tray full of them.  Every single "noodle" was "lovingly" (snarkily) handcrafted by me and Dad over the course of about an hour and a half.  The onions, zucchini, and red pepper were straightforward, but the Thai baby coconut required some good old MIT engineering!  The task was getting "noodles" out of this:

(from Robin's flickr photostream)

So, for those of you who are ever subjected to the unfortunate instruction "julienne baby coconut into 'noodles,'" I present:

How to Open a Baby Coconut

You will need:

• A young Thai coconut
• A glass, and a health nut you want to be nice to
• A hammer and chisel
• A power drill with a 3/8" drill bit
• A second-story window above some pavement 

Instructions: 

1. Cut some of the excess "padding" off the side of the coconut.  This padding acts as a shock absorber, and we're going to be throwing it out of the window later on, so it's best to remove the padding.
2. Wash off the power drill and drill bit.
3. Drill a hole in the side of the coconut, on one of the sides where you've removed some of the padding.  This hole is to relieve the pressure on the inside of the coconut so the inside juice will flow more quickly.
4. Cover this hole with your thumb while drilling a hole in the top pointy part of the coconut.  The pointy part will direct the coconut milk into a nice stream.
5. Overturn the coconut above a glass and let it drain.  You may have to clear out the holes when they get clogged.
6. When the draining is complete, find the health nut and give them the glass of young Thai coconut water.  Now they owe you one!
7. Wash off the hammer and chisel.
8. Go back to that first hole you drilled -- it will be easier to break the coconut around there.  Place the chisel, then hammer it down until you have a bit of a crack in the coconut.
9. We didn't have much of a chisel.  It was more of a spatula.  If you have a good chisel, you can probably just chisel the coconut open at this point.  If you don't, or if you want to have more fun, go find a second story window above some concrete.
10. Position the coconut so the pilot crack is facing downward, raise your arms, and throw the coconut down as hard as you can!  A kiai helps.  Repeat until a big crack forms; one well-aimed throw should do it.
11. Tear the coconut in half.
12. Cut into, um, "noodles."

Great, so now you have some coconut "noodles."  Should you like, I could teach you how to make "pad thai" out of this stuff. 

Figure 2. A tray of "noodles," with coconut above red pepper above zucchini.

Happy Solstice!  And, if you're back on the East Coast, enjoy your White Christmas. :-)

The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet

I went to see The Nutcracker on Wednesday night at the Boston Ballet.  Verdict: I cannot imagine a better rendition of The Nutcracker.  I'm not really a ballet person, and I don't have a yearly tradition of seeing the show, but I figured that if I got decent seats and went to the Boston Ballet, it had to be pretty good.  I wasn't disappointed.

The evening began with a face-numbing trek through the 20-degree + wind chill Boston evening, in search of snacks and a water bottle.  So cold.  Argh.  Things got better after that...


Things I liked about the Nutcracker at Boston Ballet:

1. Set changes.  I don't think I've ever seen a production with better set changes.  There were at least three layers in the original set.  The curtain opened on a piece of fabric that depicted some buildings, and the workshop building was backlit so we could see "into" the workshop.  Later, that layer rose, showing a Christmas through a thin, transparent sheet.  When the transparent layer rose, the scene went into motion.

Later, in the scene where the Nutcracker gets big, the previously-small set items like a chair and a sofa and a Christmas tree got huge -- the tree was pulled upwards until it was twice as big as its original size, and the set pieces were replaced with big versions.  The Boston Ballet went all out on this scene.

After the intermission, the curtain opened on that transparent layer again.  The scene was a dreamy cloud land, which was created by filling the stage with a couple of feet of fake fog.  The fog was held in by the transparent layer, so we could really look at the "clouds" from the side.  When the transparent curtain rose and the dancing began, the fog spilled out.  It was a very cool effect.

2. Flying things.  At the end of the first act, right before the intermission, a huge wooden hot air balloon was lowered onto the stage.  Clara and the Nutcracker got in, and it was lifted off the stage!  It takes a huge production to pull off something like that.  Right after the intermission, the balloon was flying around a bit before it landed again.  Also, the guy who gave Clara the Nutcracker was flying through the air at various points in the show...just for good measure.

3. The baby mouse and the gingerbread man.  There were some small parts that you don't see much in normal productions (I think).  For example, the evil mice also included a "baby mouse," played by a little boy.  It was pretty cute.  There was also a gingerbread man costume, and some people got into a fight over the gingerbread man, causing one of its arms to be ripped off!

4. Good dancing and costumes.  I'm not really a ballet person, so I can't comment on this too much, but everything seemed really smooth.  Dancers didn't seem to mess up.  Lots of people in the audience clapped at various dance moves, so I guess the ballet regulars liked it too.  The costumes were also great -- colorful, sparkly, varied.  They were very pretty.  Some of the ballerinas were supposed to look like flowers, and their skirts looked very much like flower petals.  Well...okay, nearly all the costumes were great.  Some of the guys had very form-revealing pants (complete with slight bulges in the front), such that you see their, uh, gluteal musculature in great detail.  Maybe this is normal and I'm just not used to the ballet.

Overall: I really recommend seeing The Nutcracker at the Boston Ballet.  Even if you don't usually go to the ballet, you'll be able to tell how well done it is.  No, they aren't paying me to write this...it's just hard to imagine any improvements they could make.

Bonsai Tree Photos

A Zen interlude...because it is fun to look at tiny trees.  I love some of the detail on these trees, and how realistically old and gnarly they look despite their small size.

 (from Mike's flickr photostream)

The above photo, and all subsequent ones that are from Mike's flickr photostream, are from an exhibit in Portland, Oregon!

 (from Chris Guise's flickr photostream)

 (from Rob Shenk's flickr photostream)

 (from cowtools's flickr photostream)

 (from Cass Chin's flickr photostream)

The above photo came with the quotation, "The game of bonsai is like a swordfight..." which I think is pretty great.

 (from Chris Tank's flickr photostream)

 (from Mike's flickr photostream)

 (from Johann Dréo's flickr photostream)

 (from inajeep's flickr photostream)

 (from Flatbush Gardener's flickr photostream)

 (from cowtools's flickr photostream)

 (from publikaccion's flickr photostream)

 (from Flatbush Gardener's flickr photostream)

 (from Daniele Prati's flickr photostream)

 (from Bart's flickr photostream)

 (from the Wikimedia commons, courtesy of Sage Ross)

Happy holidays!

 (from Peter Hellberg's flickr photostream)

Many sizes of sharks

This weekend I'm in Charleston, SC, and I have learned that sharks can be tiny.  I was standing on the boardwalk at Folly Beach, and I saw a fisherman catch something, and it was a super tiny shark!  The shark I saw was a bit smaller than this:

(from Peter Metzger's flickr photostream)

The fisher threw the shark back, but I was all excited about sharks at that point.  I thought that perhaps the Talus Slopes blog could introduce you to the many sizes of shark this week!

The smallest shark is the dwarf lantern shark.  It's only 6-8 inches long.  You could keep it in your kitchen sink and feed it sardines.  I don't have any good lantern shark pictures, but here is a tiny dead shark to look at.

(from bac_clin's flickr photostream)

The biggest shark is, of course, the whale shark:

(from pelican's flickr photostream)

Whale sharks are huge.  The heaviest one ever weighed was over 79,000 pounds!  I have no idea how they weighed it.  The longest one was over 40 feet long!  They mostly eat plankton, though (lots and lots of plankton).  You might not think it, given what they look like:

(from Olivier Roux's flickr photostream)

 (from KAZ2.0's flickr photostream)

I can imagine fitting my entire body into that thing's mouth before it realized I wasn't plankton.

I think it is time to talk about teeth.  Sharks are made entirely of teeth.  Don't let their smiley faces fool you...

 (from Hermanus Backpackers' flickr photostream)

...sharks are made of teeth.

(from Herman Yung's flickr photostream)

Sharks have multiple rows of teeth, as you can sort of see above, and they keep growing more teeth and shedding their old ones throughout their lifetimes.  Newly-grown teeth are moved into place on a terrifying "conveyor belt-like structure," apparently.  A little shark called a "lemon shark" replaces its teeth every 8-10 days, while the great white replaces its teeth every 100-230 days, depending on age.  Apparently, some sharks can shed up to 35,000 teeth in their lifetime!

(from kecko's flickr photostream)

Grr.  The shark above is suspended in formaldehyde, for some reason...

Shark teeth are kind of useful because they turn into fossils eventually.  There were sharks around 450 million years ago, and these days they're mostly known because of their teeth.  Shark teeth have also been weaponized:

(From the Peabody Museum, Salem)

Here are some pictures of people holding sharks.  A medium-sized blacktip shark:

(from vgm8383's flickr photostream)

And here's a shark that was dragged onto shore to be measured, and is now being dragged back out to sea:

(from Eliott Gilfix's flickr photostream)

More fun facts about sharks: 

• Sharks don't have an air bladder for buoyancy.  Rather, they have a large liver filled with buoyant oil, and some very lightweight cartilage.
• Some sharks keep their eyes open when they sleep, and their eyes will actively follow divers that pass by.

Sizes of sharks:

(from Popoto, Wikimedia Commons)

Some sharks, such as the Port Jackson shark, also have some very neat spiral egg cases:

(From Golden Wattle, Wikimedia Commons)

Thanks for joining me on this trip through the wonderful world of small and large sharks!  Ending on a responsible note, I'd like to encourage everyone who reads this blog to avoid eating sharkfin soup.  It's very expensive and classy, yes, but it's generally made by cutting the fins off of sharks and then throwing the shark back into the ocean to die.  Be humane to our toothy friends!

(from Peter Smithson's flickr photostream)

Half Birthdays Are Awesome.

Half birthdays are those things you celebrate when you are about 6 years old, and you still think that half years are significant qualifiers to your age.  So, when I mention my half birthday these days, people tend to think that I'm a dork.  That's okay, though!  It turns out that half birthday parties are awesome.

Saturday was my half birthday, and I had ice cream cakes.  One of them said "Happy Birthday" in frosting, so I cut off half the letters and ended up with "Hap Birth."  On two occasions, groups of people started singing me the birthday song and stopped halfway through.  Then, one of my friends gave me half of a six pack of soda, and another friend gave me half of a bottle of scotch!  (Ken also got me a full present -- a metronome -- because half a metronome isn't very awesome.)

The Talus Slopes blog heartily endorses half birthday parties.  Unleash your inner six-year-old!

(From Kevan Davis's flickr photostream)

Speed Flying

This is a very special week.  I've been planning on posting about this sport called "speed flying" for nearly as long as this blog has existed, but this week I'm finally going to do it.  The reason: I have finally seen a video that does justice to the awesomeness of the sport.  Here it is.  Watch it.  Full screen mode recommended.


First Person Speedflying - Video from clipupload.com

(This video, like many videos, is courtesy of Ken's internet browsing skills.)

First, for those of you who don't ski, the first few seconds of the video (before they start flying) give a pretty good feeling of what skiing feels like.  And then they're threading their way between rock formations, briefly landing on top of houses, doing flips, and sometimes just coasting above the clouds.  I don't think I'd have the guts to come as close to the rocks as these guys, but the rest of it looks like so much fun.  I...sort of want to try it.

(from ludo29's flickr photostream)

Before I'd heard of speed flying, I once had a dream in which I skied off a cliff, parachuted down to the ground, and continued skiing.  I started thinking about awesome sport combinations, like skydiving + skiing + pistol target practice.  Each is fun by itself, so why not combine them?  Then I found out about speed flying, and I found out about the biathlon (shooting + skiing) while watching the Winter Olympics.  If we could just combine speed flying with the biathlon...well, then we'd probably be in a Bond movie, but my dream would be realized!

 (from lee_ciaran's flickr photostream)

On the other hand, speed-flying.com says that nine people died in this sport in 2009.  They probably had more testosterone coursing through their bodies than I do, and were probably trying pretty gutsy stuff...but maybe I'll hold off until the sport's a little more developed.  Maybe someday in the future, people will create the bunny hill of speed flying.

Really Old Trees

What do you think the world's oldest tree is?  Take a moment to think about it and make your guess.  The answer is at the end of this post.  When you've made your guess, continue on...

(from Alfred de Brujin's flickr photostream)

I became interested in really old trees when I was looking at pictures of the world's biggest trees, the giant sequoia redwoods.  Here are some pictures, and please click to see bigger versions.  This is General Sherman, the largest tree by volume in the world, thought to be between 2300 and 2700 years old:

(from the Wikimedia Commons)

Here's the "Grizzly Giant," another huge tree with branches that look like huge trees by themselves:

(from the Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite pictures of the redwoods are the ones that show people standing next to the base:

(from Mark Knowles's flickr photostream)

It looks like people are about to be stomped on by giants.

So, redwoods are pretty big, but they aren't the oldest of trees.  If you want to figure out what the oldest trees are, you have to qualify it a bit -- you could be talking about individual clonal trees (those with genetically identical offspring), clonal colonies (clonal trees connected by an underground root system), or non-clonal trees.  I'll start with the younger trees and move on towards the older ones.

The oldest non-clonal tree is named "Methuselah," and its estimated germination date is in 2832 BC.  It is about 4800 years old.  This tree predates the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, and was born shortly after the Egyptian civilization unified under its first pharaoh, and it's still thriving in the Methuselah Grove in California.  It's a bristlecone pine, and it is in a grove full of very old bristlecone pines that looks like this:

 (from Matt High's flickr photostream)

The oldest individual clonal tree is about twice the age of the Methuselah tree at 9550 years old.  Its name is "Old Tjikko," and it's a Norway Spruce tree living in Sweden.  It was named after a dog.  It is thought that this tree sprouted as the ice age was receding from Scandinavia, but due to the harsh conditions, it remained a stunted little tree until the last century, when the warming climate caused it to start growing upwards.  You'd think that this amazingly old tree (it predates writing and the wheel) would be large, but...

(image copyright Leif Kullman)

That's it.  Crazy, isn't it?  That fairly small tree is so old that when it first sprouted, the newest big idea in the world was agriculture.

So, we come now to the world's oldest clonal colony tree.  These are the trees that are connected by underground root systems.  Individual trees may only reach an age of 130 years or so, but the underground root system lives on.  Take a moment to remember your guess from the beginning of this blog post...

The oldest clonal colony tree is a colony of quaking aspen trees in Utah named "Pando" (Latin for "I spread").  Its age is estimated at around 80,000 years, placing its date of birth in the Middle Paleolithic.  If this estimate is correct, the birth of this tree would coincide roughly with the emergence of homo sapiens.  The height of technology was the stone arrowhead and tools made out of bones.  And some of those roots that began their life then are still around, according to scientists.  A quaking aspen grove looks like this:

(from C. Devon Sanderson's flickr photostream)

That's all the interesting stuff I have to talk about tonight.  Until next time!

Montage of Awesome Things

I don't know where my camera is, otherwise I might be posting photos from last weekend's hike through the Middlesex Fells.  In lieu of hike photos, I'll be posting some awesome things for your perusal!

1. Fun fact that will blow your mind: you know the wake that forms behind boats traveling in deep water?  This kind of wake:

(From Neil Willsey's flickr photostream)

It turns out that all wakes formed behind boats in deep water have the same angular measure, 39 degrees, regardless of the speed of the boat!  Cool, huh?  This angle was first calculated by Lord Kelvin, and the wake shape is thus called Kelvin's Wedge.  I'll be studying it for my final applied math project.


2. I want to make a dessert called a cherpumple, the turducken of dessert foods.  It's three pies baked into three layers of a cake.  Watch the video here, it's quite excellent!  Anyone want to help me make one?  Maybe my friends over at Unwholesome Foods will help...

3. This is one of my favorite videos of the month.  It's courtesy of Ken, who sent it my way (as is the last video, actually).  It's a video of people repelling down into an active volcano.  Check it out, it's awesome :)

4. This week I learned that the Norwegian word for sorcerer is "trollmann."

5. Here are some assorted pretty pictures to start off your week, and to get you excited for winter. :)

(from MarcoIE's flickr photostream)

(from Asbjørn Floden's flickr photostream)

(from Asbjørn Floden's flickr photostream)

(from claustral's flickr photostream)

Happy November!