Breakfast on the balcony with unfussy apple cake
For whatever mundane reason (price probably), I’ve avoided adding Cardamom to my pantry for nearly a year now. Yet it’s exotic and floral sounding name keeps creeping up in my most frequented blog: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So last week I finally dished out the $7 it costs to get a small box and placed right above the only slightly less expensive cream of tartar. I hadn’t even opened the box until last night when I was preparing “Unfussy Apple Cake” and in an effort to stimulate my completely deaf palette, I added a whopping tablespoon to the batter. I have to say, I am still completely floored by the smell and taste of cardamom. It is neither cloves nor cinnamon nor coriander yet has all their potent earthiness and it is not jasmine nor allspice nor curry powder yet has all of their lifting delicacy. The cake then, became immediately about cardamom first and the apples and cinnamon played only minor roles only helping to nourish and decorate. Cardamom is now a new nexus in the complicated network of flavours.
I don’t have a great tie-in for why I wanna talk about science next, only that yesterday was about a lot of new things. My plans for the next two years are new for example. I’m in computer science now and physics is something I have to try to incorporate into my studies, not something I have to stay afloat in.
Yesterday, I spent five gruelling hours organizing equations into one giant Lemma (which will forever now be know as the superlemma… blog-title-pun!). In the end I had more questions then when I started but thankfully also more answers. I also had, unfortunately, 19 pages of pure math to risk sending to Patrick in an unreviewed form. I’ll save the exposition about the black hole paper for another post but it’s enough to say that I spend all my time bounding expressions. That is, I take a complicated expression, then I throw away a lot of complicated bits, and then I say that what’s left is close to either 0 or 1. Most of the time it should be close to 0. The nasty part is of course, to say just how close to 0 things are. This involves using many variables which will never appear in the final result but for the sake of being rigorous (and more importantly the sake of being scientific) crop up like weeds in every single expression I write. It’s amazing though that in this huge mess (see for yourselves) I still have time to stumble into narratives from the history of physics. Apparently, yesterday I made the same mistake that baffled physicists who tried to explain why polarized light in one direction could be rotated into another direction. It’s sobering to know that my mistakes are common and that I’m still doing real science. If you look at the paper it really doesn’t appear that way.