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• 02:53 LED traffic lights: no heat means no melting snow, meaning... no visible lights. Sweet irony indeed. | @DVICE bit.ly/7K72ey #
• 02:55 The Matrix's 'Morpheus' will battle Predators. Ok, that could be interesting... | @scifiwire bit.ly/5y6khq #
• 22:06 HALLMARKS OF FELINITY bit.ly/WX0QP (with thanks to Carl L Potterr of Facebook) #
• 22:07 Just goes to show, there are some whom even 24's Jack Bauer can't intimidate. Such as.... well... Santa? | @scifiwire bit.ly/5PTXoA #
• 01:10 Now THIS is a good idea instead of text messaging while driving. www.drivesafe.ly #
• 01:11 Patrick Stewart To Be Knighted | twurl.nl/ofds8o @trekmovie #

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• 02:05 Who says in this day and age that you can't build a better mousetrap? | @DVICE bit.ly/7zRdsk #

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Could this be the geekiest tree topper ever? At least of those commercially available, not handmade, maybe.

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• 20:28 Listening to my two favorite Christmas songs... "It's The Most Fattening Time Of The Year", and "The Night Santa Went Crazy". #
• 20:35 Remembering Gene Barry who died 12/09/09.: He starred in original "The War of the Worlds" in 1953. bit.ly/7gmY3L | @scifirules #
• 22:27 For the umpteenth time, there is no "correct" way to spell (C)Hanukkah as there is no exact English translation of the Hebrew word. #
• 22:29 If anyone tells you different, they're either lying, argumentative, ignorantly stubborn, or uninformed. Accept ALL substitutions. :) #
• 22:35 Star Trek veteran Chase Masterson’s ‘Yesterday Was A Lie’ gets good reviews, comes to theaters in 2010. bit.ly/8y3qBN | @TrekMovie #

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A few days ago, Emma Bull pointed me to a recipe for masa chocolate chip cookies that was apparently first published on rec.food.cooking, and is now variously available on the Web. I have yet to see an attribution, unfortunately, but I will admit that I haven’t searched very diligently.

I made the cookies, with minor modifications, and liked them quite well. I didn’t have any chocolate chips, for example, so I crushed and chopped most of a Babaevskii 75% dark chocolate bar and used that instead. (What’s not to like?) I used a mixture of Demerara and Muscovado sugars. I’m allergic to casein, so I used a butter substitute instead of real butter. The chocolate, btw, came from a wonderful store called European Delight, which is on Route 355 in Rockville, MD.

I almost never measure anything when I’m cooking, and it had been a very long time since I made cookies, so I wasn’t spot on at first: I didn’t put enough masa into the batter, and the initial batch all merged into something that looked like one large happy slimemold. I then added more masa, and the rest came out as individual cookies. Mind you, all of them tasted just fine, and it wasn’t just the chocolate, though I’m sure that didn’t hurt.

This afternoon, lisajulie and I were at Mom’s Organic Market, where we saw some Italian chestnut flour. I said it might be fun to use it in the chocolate chip cookies, and she suggested that it might be even more fun to try to make the lovely Italian pignolia cookies that we apparently encountered at similar delicate ages.

As I remember them, the original cookies were quite chewy, and when we discussed that, later, she said she understood that using a liquid (corn syrup, for example) as part of the sweetener tended to produce a chewier result, so I tried that, and I give the recipe that way. The cookies I made this evening are not actually chewy, but I presume that there are several factors involved in that. For example, I may have used more baking powder than they actually wanted; next time I will probably leave it out, or use much less.

Despite a lack of chewiness, they are pleasant enough that I will reproduce the recipe here, with my modifications. Do remember, though, that I did not actually measure any of the ingredients except the egg, which really measures itself, so if you make these you will almost certainly have to play with proportions a bit to get them the way you want.


Ingredients:

1/2 cup salted butter, softened (I used one of the newish brands of fake butter, as I am allergic to casein)

3/8 cup brown sugar, packed (I used dark brown Muscovado)

3/8 cup honey (the original called for white sugar)

1 large egg

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup instant masa de maiz

1/2 cup chestnut flour

Unnecessary Secret Ingredient: tiny pinch of cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 pinch salt (optional, but I used it because the fake butter is unsalted)

Pignolia (pine nuts) as necessary (see below)


Method:

Beat butter, sugars, egg, cinnamon (if you are using it) and vanilla until fluffy. This takes approximately forever.

Add masa, chestnut flour, soda, and salt; mix well. Stir in some pignolia. (They should be scattered about the inside of each cookie, but you will be putting more on top, so don’t overdo it.)

Roll into balls about 1 inch in diameter or slightly larger.

I found it convenient to put some pine nuts in one hand and push the doughball into them with the other; you want to end up with a bunch of them on top of each cookie. I found that the pine nuts didn’t stick very well, though, and it is probably a better idea to brush the top of each cookie with beaten egg and press the pine nuts into it.

Bake on ungreased cookie sheets at 375 degrees F for about 10 minutes.

Allow to cool on cookie sheet for several minutes before you transfer them to a rack to finish cooling. They will fall apart if you try to transfer them too hot, and they will stick if you let them cool completely on the cookie sheet.

---

I was wary of using only chestnut flour, as I thought it might have a fairly strong flavor, so I made them (and list them here) as a 50-50 mix with masa; but now that I have tasted them I think they would probably be good with just masa, just chestnut flour, or any mixture of the two.

Cheers —
jon

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The nitrogen laser has mostly been behaving itself, though it did coat the inside surface of one of its windows with powdery glop, obliging me to remove and replace that window. I can’t really complain, though. For the most part it is a happy little camper, and it appears to be delivering a little over 200,000 watts. (Should be more, but I may have screwed up some parameters in the design. I am expecting to rebuild another of my nitrogen lasers fairly soon, and we’ll see whether I can coax better performance out of that one.)

So, what do you do with a nitrogen laser? I suppose that depends on lots of things, but one common use for them is to pump organic dye lasers. (See, for example, the photo in my previous posting.)

I have a cold, and I have very little energy, but I can only sit around blowing my nose for so long, after which I get kinda stir-crazy. Hmmm, there’s this nitrogen laser on the bench; I wonder if I can make RGB “white” laser light from one single cuvette of dye...

It is not too horribly difficult to get two colors at once if you choose your dyes carefully. Two-color dye lasers have been reported in the literature, probably several times. I’m also sure that people have pumped multiple cuvettes of different dyes, and combined the outputs to get an RGB mix; but that isn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted 3 dyes in the same container, all lasing at the same time.

That was clearly not going to be easy, for a number of reasons. First off, shorter-wavelength dyes can often transfer energy to longer-wavelength dyes. Sometimes you can make use of that, to help the longer-wavelength dye lase better, or to assist a dye that doesn’t absorb nitrogen laser output very well by transferring energy to it from a dye that does; but if enough energy gets transferred away, it can stop the shorter-wavelength dye from lasing. For example, adding even a very small amount of Rhodamine B [which lases red] to a solution of Fluorescein [which lases green] in ethanol will quench the Fluorescein and stop it from lasing. (I know this because I tried it.) It should come as no surprise that finding a compatible set of three dyes is considerably more difficult than it is with only two.

Once you have three dyes that appear to play well together, and a solvent to put them in, you then have to adjust the concentrations of all of them. This (he said, through slightly gritted teeth) turns out to be absolute flaming madness. I got 3-color lasing, just barely, several times, ...and lost it several times while trying to balance the colors. At one point I diluted the solution slightly, and the red dye just stopped lasing, pouf. Gone. Argh. It is also regrettably easy to add too much dye, which tends to stop all of the dyes from lasing.

One ends up doing a dance in which one dilutes the solution just a little, adds a barely-visible amount of dye, tests it again and notes what is off balance this time; ...lather, rinse, repeat. I won’t even get into the issue of aligning the optics every time the cuvette goes back into place, which are also fairly tweaky. (Yes, I know, I should build a strong and upright cuvette holder, and I should tie down all of the mounts that hold the lenses and mirrors, not just some of them. I will get there, eventually.)

Some of the intermediate results, though not quite what I was looking for, were fairly pretty:



(All three colors can be seen in that pattern, but they are not correctly balanced, and there isn’t any part of the beam that is more or less neutral in color. Sigh. At least it was nice to look at.)

This effort ended up taking me about two and a half days (...and I still have the lousy cold; feh!). Here are two views of the final result, which I arrived at earlier this evening. The first shows the output of the dye laser on a paper target; the colors, at least in the central spot, are [finally!] moderately well balanced, though I’m sure the CRI is appreciably less than 100. There are, after all, limits.







The second was taken with a diffraction grating in front of the camera; the dye output is on the right, and the dots on the left are the spectrum of the output. The bright red object at the bottom of the image is the top of the cuvette that contains the dye solution.



“A pleasant afternoon’s entertainment.”

[Ahem.]

Note: I have added a report with more technical detail to the Joss Research Website.

Cheers —
jon

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I'm a third generation fan of two soap operas: As The World Turns and Guiding Light. Been watching since I was a kid, before I was enrolled in school. My whole life, really. In recent years, I've gone weeks or months without watching or have watched very intermittently, but they're my shows, dammit, and there are characters/actors that have been on them my whole life.

Guiding Light was cancelled and ended this past September.

Today CBS announced that they're canceling As The World Turns and the last episodes will air in September 2010.

It's hard to convey the familiarity that comes from watching specific characters/actors five days a week (or almost that) for more than thirty years. Even when I haven't watched in ages, I could tune in and it was familiar. And there are so many memories attached to the shows. And, of course, these were the shows I watched and discussed with my Mom for my whole life and sometimes with my grandparents and great aunts.

Some nifty people are putting classic clips of both shows on YouTube (and even some entire episodes) and those are fun to look at and sad, too.

Earlier this year I had to say goodbye to the Bauers, Spauldings, and Coopers; next year I have to say goodbye to the Hughes and Snyders. Feh.

I can think of five or six actors who have been on As The World Turns my whole life, some since the '50s and '60s.

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• 20:57 "Resident Evil : Afterlife" might be pushed back to early 2011 from 9/2011, but not set in stone yet.. bit.ly/5gH4jC | @scifiwire #
• 20:58 oops, typo... that was actually from 8/2010. #
• 23:03 One of the most awesomest Instructables I've seen! Make noise-reducing music Headphones for around $20. bit.ly/66fzR3 #

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