Food Urge

The previous entry made me really crave foie gras (any kind dammit!), some nice bread, maybe some pickles. I haven't had decent foie in a while. Man, where's a French bistro around Santa Barbara when you need one.

Mushroom Soup vDifferent

The basic mushroom soup,

Take lots of butter and sautee some shallots until translucent, dump in sliced mushrooms and sweat for around 7-8 minutes, pour in chicken stock and simmer for an hour, blend, add some sherry (can put in some herbs too) and bring to almost boil, serve,

is really good and really simple. It takes, from beginning to end, about 1:30 hours but 1/3 of the time you're swooning over the smell of sauteed shallots and the other 2/3 of the time the wonderful aroma of cooking mushrooms is running rampant throughout your abode, a good omen I'm told. Bourdain suggests some wild mushrooms thrown in to the mix for a bit more oomph or a dash of truffle oil at the end for pretension. Both work wonders.

Good as this basic recipe is, the soup is sometimes almost TOO mushroomy. As I was smelling the remains of my last batch (what, you don't sniff cooked foods from the fridge just for fun?) of mushroom soup, I wondered what else I could do with it. I had tried mushroom risotto with it with limited success but what if I wanted something else in the soup itself? A splash of color or something...veggie. Ideas to implement:

Peas. The fresh taste of cooked peas.
Pan seared asparagus...sweet, buttery, and slightly salty.
Something squashy.
Baby bok choy, lightly stir-fried flavor of.
Citrus?

Any of the above might will probably need to be pureed and added to the soup for yuppie presentation. I'm thinking an outer ring of mushroom soup, a middle ring of bright green something and an inner core of mushroom soup. The problem is it has to taste good IN the soup, not with it. I think some experimentation is in order...

BotCon 2007

Where is the Transformers BotCon 2007 being held?

That's right, in Providence, RI!

BOOYA!

Oh wait, I forgot to tell you. I'm "from" Providence.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled inane web browsing.

Sarin Gas

I first heard about Sarin gas in The Rock. It's a nerve gas that melts your skin off and stops your heart after making you spasm so hard you break your back and puke your own guts out, unless you stab yourself in the heart with a gigantic needle full of atropine. Naturally, I thought hollywood probably exaggerated. But exactly what happens?

This I know: neurons communicate with neurotransmitters and propagate through voltage-gated channels. So propagation, signal travel along a single neuron, happens almost like dominoes. There's a whole bunch of "gates" on the neuron that will flip in polarity. When they do so, they cause the next gate along the line to also "flip", creating a cascade effect. The cascade is started at one end of the neuron and continued to the other end, where there is a bulb (a "bouton"). The bouton will flood the synaptic cleft (the space between the pre and post-synaptic neuron boutons) with neurotransmitters. The flood out into the space and bind to the post-synaptic bouton, which will then start a gate cascade, which will continue the signal. One of several neurotransmitters is called acetylcholine. But of course, you need to control these transmitters too because once they flood the post synaptic bouton, they need to be removed so that the process can start again. There's an enzyme which breaks down acetylcholine and its name is derived from that which it controls, like most enzyme names: acetylcholinesterase.

Oh one more thing, the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system regulates nervous response (often called the fight or flight system). The parasympathetic is the system which is responsible for autonomic functions like breathing and your heart beating.

So, with the help of Wikipedia: Sarin gas, like most (all?) nerve gas, is an acetylcholinsterase inhibitor. This means that when nerves fire, there is no clean up afterwards. The synaptic cleft gets flooded with neurotransmitters. This probably has two consequences: 1) an initial overflow of too many nerve signals and 2) once the synaptic cleft is saturized, no more signals can be transmitted. I'm speculating on 1. Anyway, this happens in various ways for various nerve toxins but that's the general idea. Sarin is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, so it needs to be counteracted in two ways.

1) Atropine is a competitive antagonist against certain kinds of acetylcholine receptors, the kinds that are dominant in the parasympathetic nervous system. Suppression of the parasympathetic nervous system kicks your heart into overdrive because it is no longer suppressing heart speed. This counteracts the effects of Sarin, which mutes your entire nervous system, including the sympathetic portion which is responsible for your heart beating at all.

2) Atropine is usually used with Pralidoxime, which binds to certain kinds of (organophospate-)inactivated acetylcholinesterase. Presumably, Sarin inhibits acetylcholinesterase in this way and so Pralidoxime reactivates acetylcholinesterase, leading to the clearing of the synpatic cleft, leading to nerve function again, in this case the rather important sympathetic nervous system.

So Atropine + Pralidoxime works a bit like combining psychotropic drugs: Atropine suppressed the parasympathetic so that it combats the slowing sympathetic system suppressed by Sarin and also so you don't die in the time it takes Pralidoxime to run through your system liberating your acetycholinesterase and therefore bringing the sympathetic nervous system back up to normal levels.

How to set up a wireless router to work with a DSL modem

Not so much a guide as a subtle problem I had.

Was trying to get wireless router to work at a friend's apartment and nothing I did with the router would get it to connect to the modem, which ran an ADSL line on PPPoE. Eventually I noticed that it was getting an internal IP (192.168.1.100) assigned to it, meaning something else was acting as a DHCP server. A-Ha! Take on Me! Logging on to the modem (a "HuaWei MT800A"), I set the DHCP server to "none" and (this is key) went to the "save" menu and hit "save". Log back on to the router and choose PPPoE and set the logon/password fields and Viola da Gamba, it works!

Asparagus and Fish

Pan-seared sole in lemon sauce and garlic croutons with a side of grilled asparagus

Best with a light, whitish fish like sole or perhaps rockfish/red snapper. This is also made to degrade nicely: use the best ingredients you have but substitutes won't ruin it.

Ingredients:
Fish filet (Dover Sole in this example)
Flour (Regular all-purpose is fine. If no flour, leave out.)
Salt
Pepper (crushed peppercorns best, black pepper if no peppercorns.)
Butter
Bacon (a few slices, the fattier the better)
Bread ("real" bread is better. White will do in pinch.)
Garlic
Lemon
Asparagus

Equipment:
Oven, cookie sheet, tin foil, range, non-stick pan

Instructions:
Put 3 or 4 slices of bacon into pan with heat on medium-high. Turn occasionally and fry until bacon is crispy. Leave bacon grease in pan. In the meantime...

Cut up bread into little cubes, toss with olive oil. Dice garlic and sprinkle over bread cubes. Put on tinfoil on a cookie sheet and into the oven. Take out when crispy and the smell of garlic starts to waft through the oven.

Lightly dust with salt and peppercorns on both side and then lightly dredge through flour. Put a bit of butter into the still-hot pan and leave heat on medium (take care not to foam and burn the butter too much). Put the fish into the pan and turn the heat to medium-high. Sear fish for about 2 minutes on each side and then took for maybe a couple minutes more if the fish is thick. Take fish out and plate it.

If there is not enough grease left in the pan, put a little butter and melt it. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon and simmer over medium heat for 30-45 seconds. Pour over fish.

Sprinkle crouton over fish and sprinkle remaining garlic bits over plate for a little color. Make bacon bits out of the bacon and also sprinkle on the plate, more on the fish for flavor and over the rest of the plate for color.

Put some more butter into the pan and throw in asparagus, taking care to roll them around so they're coated with grease. Throw in about a tablespoon of water and cover with lid. Cook until water is almost gone or the asparagus takes on a deep green color. Uncover lid and roll asparagus around. Lightly salt. Roll around some more and cook for 1 more minute. Take out and plate with fish.



Enjoy!

Simple Etiquette

I'm in snob mode again but it still astounds me how so many people do not know the most basic rules of social etiquette or even communication. I'll get emails from students (if you write like this, then yes, I'm definitely antagonizing you and vice versa) that sound like the following.

"yo i dont know how to get to the site."

Now granted I'm not a full fledged professor yet but even as a human being much less a TA I feel like there can be some politeness injected into that rather pithy and inane remark.

Allow me to turn you, my gentle reader, into the witless object of my ire.

1) "yo"? Is that any form of greeting in written communication? I'll give you a hint: the answer rhymes with "yo." A simple "hi" would do.

2) I don't want to sound like Ms. Truss here but my GOD use at least SOME punctuation or capitalization. You're writing to a higher authority so it wouldn't hurt to at least say, if you insist, "Yo. I don't know how to get to the site."

3) Being vague is kinda sorta not good or whatever. "the site," for all I know, could be www.hotmidgetporn.com and I know you know how to get there. No? Just type in "www.hotmidgetporn.com" into your browser address bar.

4) You don't know how to get midget porn. OK, everybody knows how to get midget porn but let's just suppose for a minute that you were a little slow to get on the train. Of hot midget porn. You tell me this fact, which is completely irrelevant to my life, and expect what? Midget Porn? If you want to ask for something, why not try "Could you tell me...?" or "Please tell me...". Saying "I don't know..." leaving it at that is like a child yelling "I've pooped in my pants!" and nobody wants to touch that.

5) Who are you? Why should I help you find "the site" that has been plastered all over the syllabus and on the board of every class for the last 3 weeks? Are you some pervert in my class? In that case you've come to the right place, but couldn't you tell me? Wouldn't it have been so much easier to just write:

"Hi. Could you tell me how to get hot midget porn? --Bob from your Midget Porn class"

I am the TA. I am here to serve you, the student, but I am not your servant. You shouldn't treat your servants like that either. What kind of position would you put them in, asking them for hot midget porn?