Jogging, take upteen point 1

Jogging has never been my thing. For one thing, I never learned how. That nice critical period between full-out kid running all afternoon and learning to adult jog in high school never happened for me. I wasn't able to walk unaided for about 50% of high school, so you can understand how jogging was out of the picture. I tried to pick it up a couple of times in college, but ice and subfreezing temperatures did little to encourage me. I tried again last year, knowing that I should get more aerobic exercise, and it would tire out my dog quicker, but a couple of weeks in my knee when 'pop' and wouldn't really bend for a week or two, so that was that.

On top of all this (which in my mind was plenty sufficient reason to never tie on jogging shoes again) is the fact that I hate athletic clothes. Or more specifically, pants. I do not look good in athletic pants, though I can pull off a rocking pair of jeans. I also just hate wearing pants. They are the only things (pace an over-laced corset top bridal gown) that are capable of making me feel claustrophobic. I have never liked them, and I suspect never will. I wear ankle to tea mid-calf length skirts and dresses all day, everyday unless I am gardening, which is just necessity.

I've been toying with the idea of trying, again. One, because I know I should do more aerobic exercise than just walking. Two, I need to wear my dog out. I was putting it off knowing I would need to get warm weather appropriate exercise clothes (no, I do not just have shorts lying around. Especially not ones that fit). When I discovered that Target sold running skirts, which there is essentially a miniskirt with running shorts underneath and a nice flowy top, I was willing to take it as a sign. I have also found that the internet* sells knee length running skirts, should I be able to keep this up. That will be my reward if I can learn to run 3 miles without slowing to a walk or stopping.

So this afternoon, a gloriously sunny warm but not hot afternoon, I started again. I put on my running clothes, tied on my shoes, and got Penny on the leash. I grabbed a house key on a carabiner, and tied a doggie bag to the leash, and we were off to the races.

There is a large block in our neighborhood that is just under a mile around. I walk it several times a day already with Penny, so I thought she wouldn't get too distracted by smells (a dead garden snake was the only real pit fall in that category). I admit, I started out slow. One, to let me build up to running a full loop, and to train Penny how to jog. So my plan was to jog  6 houses (about 150 yards), walk 6 houses, and repeat for two loops.

First realization: running for me is a rapid walk for Penny. The only time she really ran was when we chased a squirrel together (which required me sprinting all out). So she need to learn that "Penny, ready, jog" was not the same as "Penny, let's run!" She mostly had the hang of it by the end of the second jogging section.

Second realization: I should probably brace the knee that went 'pop'. It didn't pop this time, but it was definitely a weak point.

Third realization: Jogging can almost be enjoyable. Maybe. And its quite effective at tiring Penny out (she sleeps by my side as I type this).

My plan is to repeat this every other day, making the jogging sections a little longer every time, until I can consistently run a solid two loops. Then increase from there. The other days I will do my usual walking.

Here's hoping I can keep this up. I kinda want that knee length running skirt.

~PhysicsGal


*Please note, I am not endorsing this company in any way, they are just an example of the fact that I am not alone.

Easy Tortilla Pizza

Saturdays have long been pizza nights with us. In college, it was a nice break from dining hall food. In married life, it was a night I didn't have to wonder if I had the ingredients to make something inventive. Even in my early days of insulin resistance, a pepperoni pizza, extra pepperoni, was low glycemic index enough that I could enjoy it. Now if we order in, I just eat the toppings (thank you chain pizzas with unlimited topping deals).

Some weekends though, I go the extra step and make our own. Homemade pizza is insanely simple to begin with, especially if you have a stand mixer or a food processor for making normal pizza dough. Of course, I can't have the normal pizza dough, so until I find a good low carb flour that acts like flour, I've fallen back on something I learned in childhood--the tortilla pizza.

I think I first learned to do this from one of those 90s kid shows that focused on doing stuff, and not melting our brains with hyper symplified topics (Cyberchase anyone?). Instead of using pizza dough for the crust, you use a large size tortilla, and then build the rest of your pizza like you normally would. It creates a super thin, crisp crust that while not entirely pizza like, is a much better crust than anything with cauliflower (sorry fellow low carbers, but there is no member of the cabbage family that belongs anywhere near my pizza).

Fortunately, there is a brand of low carb tortillas sold at my local megamart (mostly oat fiber and stuff like that), and so I expect in most grocery store. From a base such as this, you can get as fancy or as easy as you please. Last night, I chose easy, because I could. Top with canned tomato sauce, add some spices to make it taste like pizza sauce, shredded mozzarella (I like the part-skim for this because there isn't as much crust to absorb the extra oil), and toppings to taste (I like pepperoni, mushrooms and banana peppers). I like putting a little of the cheese over the toppings to hold them on).

Pizza before I added toppings. Tin foil or parchment paper makes clean up easier.

 Then it goes into a 425 degree (F) oven for 15-20 minutes until the cheese is bubbly and brown. Let it sit a moment before cutting into wedges, and eating as normal. Enjoy!

~PhysicsGal

Beautiful Sunday Morning

Fall has miraculously come to the Carolinas before November this year. I'm told it has in the past, but for the two years I've been here cool mornings and falling leaves happened well after people were putting away their Halloween decorations.

For the last week or so, its been in the fifties at night, and the mid to high seventies during the day (about 13 C and 25 -ish C if you are a metric system person). Our air conditioner doesn't go on at night, you start wanting to actually get under the covers and you appreciate that dog at your feet. The air is beautifully brisk when I put the dog out in the morning, and still is when I walk her after breakfast. Most morning there is a fine mist, not thick enough to be fog and not humid enough to be haze that gives our neighborhood with all its tall, old trees the look of a fairytale forest when the sun shines through.

Of course, it also means that things are starting to look dead. Especially since after a very rainy summer we are going through a small dry spell. So our grass is rather brown and dead looking. Our persimmon tree in the back started to lose all its leaves, as is a tree of our neighbors  which overhangs our yard. So if the sun isn't shining brightly, from the functional part of my kitchen our backyard looks pretty dismal at the moment.

So imagine stepping outside after seeing this dismal sight while getting the coffee going, thinking it was completely cloudy out, and seeing this:

The first is there to show how depressing my yard is. The second is my attempt to capture the sky on a camera that is more than a decade out of date.

It's hard to believe the day will be anything but nice after something like this.

Diogenes of Sinope's Modern Quest Ended

Diogenes of Sinope was rather a character. You'd have to be to mess with Plato, insult Alexander the Great  in public, and be the grandfather of stoicism. Other than living in a large ceramic jar, he is probably most famous, at least outside of history and philosophy circles, for carrying a lantern in the day and declaring that he was looking for an honest man (my generation knows him from the show "Arthur" if nothing else). 

I have always joked that my modern day version of his quest (minus the lantern) was to find an honest car mechanic where I live. At least twice I know for certain that mechanics I have gone to have tried to get me to 'repair' my car for exorbitant sums when nothing was wrong (per a different, trust mechanic, who lives nowhere near me). I know next to nothing about cars, so I admit, I am a perfect target. I also naturally respect people in their area of expertise. But I dislike being taken for a milk cow. 

Low and behold, my quest has come to an end. A honest mechanic who is thorough, but also works in a way to save me money. Thereby purchasing my custom until one us moves or joins the choir invisible.   

Something was leaking water in my car. And when I say in, I mean in the passenger compartment. The front passenger seat carpet is wet like I left the window open in a typhoon. I'd listened to enough "Car Talk" to guess air conditioner wasn't draining properly. The whole system had been replaced in the spring, by mechanics I no longer trust, and who had always found something expensive and wrong with my car. I would not have put it past them to 'forget' something so they could fix it later for another payday. I took it to a highly rated mechanic who I sadly did not know about before. The whole repair will cost less than $80, parts and labor, including all the testing/time figuring out what was wrong. And he sat down to explain exactly what was wrong until I was satisfied. I have never had such a good (or inexpensive) experience with a mechanic.  

The honest mechanic does exist. Hallelujah. 

Low Carb Manicotti

Italian-American food has always been a favorite with me. How can you go wrong with cheese, tomatoes, garlic and bread/pasta? And of course, that last part is why I haven't enjoyed anything like italian food for well over a year. I tried making zucchini noodles (they taste like zucchini, fall apart like zucchini and sauces do not stick to them). I tried miracle noodles (texture: rubber band. translucent color--off putting when combined with tomato sauce). I had frankly resigned myself to longer having my favorite savory comfort food.

Earlier this week I had a moment of desperation/inspiration. I had read about people using tortillas for lasagna noodles, but always thought the texture would be oh so wrong. But earlier this week, I was desperate enough to try. Low and behold, it wasn't too bad. I over sauced it, but that was my fault.

Last night, I realized that there is another flat-sheet pasta/cheese/tomato sauce dish that requires less sauce, and a higher ratio of cheese to pasta: manicotti. We didn't eat it much when I was a kid, not when lasagna was so much easier than try to shove a cheese mixture into an oversized penne noodle. But the important thing was same ingredients, less sauce.

Doing it with flat sheets of pasta or tortillas is easy as pie. Mix up your favorite italian cheese combo (I like half and half ricotta and mozzarella, with black pepper, nutmeg and basil), making sure that there is a hefty portion of good melting cheese or a couple of eggs in there to hold the filling together. Cut your tortillas into roughly square pieces, however big you like. You can save the scraps for baked chips or just munch on. Evenly distribute a generous portion of the cheese mixture on one side, roll, and place seam side down in a baking dish with sauce on the bottom. Repeat until your dish is full or your ingredients are used up. Cover with another layer of sauce, top with grated mozzarella and parmesan, and cover the dish with either a heavy lid or tin foil. Bake in a 375 degree oven until it is bubbling throughout, then remove cover and allow cheese to brown slightly, another 10 minutes. Allow to sit outside the oven for 10-15 minutes before serving,

I forgot to take pictures before I started dishing out, and lets face it, manicotti once you start dishing out is not the prettiest thing, so I'll add pictures later. But it looks like manicotti. And it by and large tastes like manicotti. If you have ever eaten whole wheat pasta, you are already familiar with the taste and texture rendered by the tortillas. The nutmeg helps smooth the contrast between earthy whole-grain-y-ness of the tortilla and whatever the opposite of that is in the cheese and sauce. Overall, thoroughly edible, and even delicious.

I'll count that as a win.

~PhysicsGal

NB: this is not a super low carb dish thanks to the cheese and the fruit sugars in the sauce, and the few carbs in low carb tortillas. But its low enough for me for dinner, so I thought I'd share.

Lasers

Lasers are one of two technologies that led to a revolutionary advance in optics (the other being semiconductors, which I'll discuss in a later post). The word 'laser' was originally meant as an acronym for a curious piece of engineering, that gained such wide traction it has become a word. Technically, it stands for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". Radiation here is the generic term for electromagnetic waves, which encompasses visible light, UV, infrared, microwaves, gamma rays, x-rays and radio waves, among many other types. Since their invention, laser's have become staples of the modern world. They are what make cds, dvds and blurays possible. They are central to anything fiber optic, and have become so cheap and ubiquitous we use them instead of the tradition wooden pointer for presentations, and use them as levels. Their uses in science and engineering are bordering on innumerable, not to mention their use in medicine for precision surgery and low collateral damage treatments. They range from size and potency from smaller than a AAA battery and some temporary blindness if you look straight into it (e.g. laser mice) to the size of a small house and the ability to fuse atoms (lasers at the National Ignition Facility).

Via WikiCommons

Lasers come in several different basic types:dye, gas, solid state, LED/semiconductor, chemical, fiber,  free electron, and more recently 'exotic material' lasers. They each have their advantages and disadvantages.

•  Dye lasers can give very tunable wavelengths, which is an issue with most lasers, but the materials used are also (more often than not) highly toxic and annoying to work with. They are dropping out of favor as other types of laser become more tunable without the toxicity issues. 
• Gas lasers are bulky, but low cost, very narrow bandwidth  and very very common. Helium Neon (HeNe) lasers are used for a variety of research and education purposes. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) lasers are used for welding, cutting and telecom purposes (the latter at obviously much lower powers). Depending on the gas used they have a range of available wavelengths. Also, far less toxic than dye lasers. 
• Solid state lasers use crystals or doped glass as the gain medium. The first laser used ruby. These are typically bulky, and are limited by thermal considerations, but they can output very high powered pulses. They typically have very narrow bandwidths, and are not tunable except by integer multiples of the frequency. 
• Fiber lasers are a subtype of solid state lasers where the gain medium is many loops of  a fiber. They have  a distinct advantage over bulk crystal lasers in that, since the fiber is very thin, they can be efficiently cooled. However, they cannot operate as at high powers, since the intensity of the light passing through the fiber can cause distorting and non-linear effects. 
• Semiconductor or LED lasers are lasers that use light emitting diodes to create laser light. Below a certain threshold, the LED acts as a normal LED. Above a certain amount of current, the material begins to lase. This type of laser can be very compact (they are used in laser pointers for example), and offers a broad range of available wavelengths, presently from near UV to  near IR. They are relatively inexpensive compared to other types of laser media. 
• Free electron lasers are kind of an oddball laser, because it uses a relativistic beam of electrons as its lasing medium. They are huge (garage sized), incredible expensive, but also high powered and highly tunable. They are not as popular now that LEDs can offer much the same tunability. 
• Chemical lasers are used for applications were very high powers are needed, such as military applications. Instead of pumping a lasing medium with light or electricity, a violent chemical reaction is used. 
• Exotic material lasers use different types of radioactivity to pump a medium. These are more lab experiments at the moment (Although I'm sure someone would think of a use, I can't think of why I would want to use radioactivity and not light or electricity).

 With the exceptions of the free electron laser and chemical laser, lasers work in a weird but fairly simple manner. The gain medium is confined and two partially silvered, concave mirrors are put at either end (in the case of electrically stimulated lasing, only one mirror need be silvered). Because the mirrors are partially reflective, partially transmissive, pumping light can come in, and laser light can leave, but roughly half the light can be contained to continue the population inversion necessary for lasing. Curving the mirrors inward, even slightly, helps to avoid light lost at the edges and diffraction effects. Outside of the cavity, there will be a series of lens to produce a clean light beam, and make sure it is going in the right direction. In the case of a solid state laser, there is usually an optical diode to prevent light from coming back in and destroying the crystal. 

1) gain medium
2) pumping energy (electricity here)
3) Back mirror
4) Front mirror (and lens, it looks like)
5) Laser beam
(via WikiCommons)

Inside the crystal, the atoms are undergoing population inversion. This nifty little video gives a good visualization of the process. Every atom has discrete energy levels, and in jumping between a higher level and a lower level, can release a photon. In a laser, the idea is to put enough energy into the system that most of the atoms are in the higher energy state, and then releasing that energy in the form of light. Not every material is capable of lasing, because it must be capable of staying in that higher energy state for  some (atomically long) time period. Otherwise, it is impossible to achieve population inversion. 

That being said, you could make a laser, given the right resources, out of a surprising number of things, including but certainly not limited to, a glass of beer or a gin and tonic. The first thing to do would be to cap the container somehow. In either case, you could with a partially silvered mirror, a fully reflective mirror and an electrical supply use the carbon dioxide dissolved in the liquid to create a laser (albeit not a very good one). In the case of the gin and tonic, tonic water contains a small amount of quinine (the  drink is said to have been invented as a way to get British troops to take their malaria medicine, since quinine itself is very bitter), which will fluoresce under ultraviolet illumination. Fluorescence alone will not cause lasing unless you filter the reflected light for a specific wavelength and force all the atoms to the same energy level. This can be achieved using traditional filters, Bragg gratings or nano-fabricated mirrors, which can be tuned to reflect only narrow band light. 

That is an extremely brief look at lasers and how they work. But I need to move onto other topics, so this will have to do for now!

~PhysicsGal

The best anti-anxiety: a loving dog

I'm not a laid back person, if you couldn't tell yet. I have a lot on my plate right now. I'm stressed.

A lot of my old stress relief (chocolate, bread, chocolate in bread, among other things) are now no longer options. My favorite bar (with wine and warm chocolate) and best friend  are in completely different states.

What I have is a small, energetic dog (Penny) who wants nothing more, it seems, than to cuddle with me, lick my face and take walks around our quiet neighborhood (also, car rides, but those are less frequent). And she is weirdly in tune with my moods, and is marvelously forgiving when I am in a truly horrible mood.

This morning, I was in a horrible mood. I was in a murderous, panicky, run-away, I-will-strangle-the-next-person-who-talks-to-me mood. I took Penny for a walk, like I always do before I head to work.

She is the most exuberant little thing. She walks along beside you and then jumps after a cricket, and then comes back. She smells the wind, and then just grins at you. Two miles of this, I was, if not zen, calm enough to smile when my students walked into the classroom.

God bless little dogs.