Egg Salad Sandwich

My mayonnaise batting average is all the way up from .333 to .500. I followed these instructions. I whirred my immersion blender inside a jar as Lindsay dripped oil in. Nothing happened until the oil was mostly gone, and then all at once the egg yolk and oil turned solid, or at least, very thick. I added some extra olive oil to thin it out a bit, and then we ate some with asparagus. Today we made egg salad. If only we had some brioche or challah; think how much egg we could have consumed in a sitting!

The egg salad had hard-boiled eggs, red onions, carrots, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and our mayonnaise. The bread is my third (and best so far!) attempt at sourdough.

Stuffing

This post probably won't be useful for another eleven months, but I think it's worth getting the recipe down now. Besides, stuffing is good. For the last few years my stuffing has had cornbread and mushrooms as a base. Usually I put in pine nuts, but they're expensive right now, plus I dread the pine nut syndrome. Everything in this recipe is flexible. I think the most important thing is to start with the stuffing inside the bird and then take it out and bake it for a while to make the top crisp up, but I made a vegetarian one by cooking it outside the turkey and moistening it with some mushroomy water, and it was good too.

• some stale cornbread
• two large onions, or one onion and a leek, chopped
• two or three stalks of celery, chopped
• 1/2 pound wild mushrooms, chopped (chanterelles and hedgehogs are good)
• a handful of dried porcini
• lots of chopped parsley
• 1/2 stick of butter
• salt, pepper

Put the dried mushrooms in a bowl and pour over just enough boiling water to cover them. After they've rehydrated a bit, reserve the water and chop the mushrooms. If the fresh mushrooms are chanterelles or another mushroom that holds a lot of water, put them in a dry pan over medium heat with a little bit of salt for a few minutes, until they give off most of their liquid. Remove from heat and set aside the mushroom liquid in the pan.

Put the butter in a very large skillet over medium-low heat and cook the onion and celery for about 15 minutes, adding some salt and pepper. Add the fresh and the dried mushrooms and cook for a while longer. Add the mushroom liquid, and cook a few minutes more. Add cornbread by roughly crumbling it up over the pan until you're happy with the amount. Remove from the heat, and add the parsley. Let this cool and put it in the refrigerator until you're ready to cook your turkey (or any other bird you feel like stuffing).

Put the stuffing into the bird, not packing it in tightly or filling up the cavity completely. It's fine if only half the stuffing fits. Roast the turkey. When it's close to done, take the stuffing out of the turkey (a big metal spoon works well for this) and put it in a casserole dish with the rest of the stuffing, stirring to mix up the turkefied and unturkefied parts. Put this back in the oven until the top is starting to turn brown and get crispy, maybe 30-45 minutes. It's fine to do this after the turkey is finished.

George Eliot on Math Education

[Daniel Deronda] applied himself vigorously to mathematics, for which he had shown an early aptitude under Mr. Fraser, and he had the delight of feeling his strength in a comparatively fresh exercise of thought. That delight, and the favourable opinion of his tutor, determined him to try for a mathematical scholarship in the Easter of his second year: he wished to gratify Sir Hugo by some achievement, and the study of the higher mathematics, having the growing fascination inherent in all thinking which demands intensity, was making him a more exclusive worker than he had been before.

But here came the old check which had been growing with his growth. He found the inward bent towards comprehension and thoroughness diverging more and more from the track marked out by the standards of examination: he felt a heightening discontent with the wearying futility and enfeebling strain of a demand for excessive retention and dexterity without any insight into the principles which form the vital connections of knowledge. (Deronda's undergraduateship occurred fifteen years ago, when the perfection of our university methods was not yet indisputable.)

Serge Lang vs. Bob Somerby in a BLOWOUT!

I knew Serge Lang as the man who would walk into my math classes and start asking us questions, often to the professor's dismay. (Sometimes he asked the professor questions too: "Are you using my textbook? Why not?")

Besides math, Serge Lang is famous for two things: claiming that the link between HIV and AIDS has not been established, and keeping Samuel Huntington out of the National Academy of the Sciences. Lang gave me a few hundred pages of documents about the conflict, as he did with anyone who was willing to listen to him. He claimed that Huntington's papers were "utter nonsense." His biggest objection was to a paper Huntington wrote that purported to demonstrate the link between a society's frustration and instability. One of his indices classed South Africa as a "satisfied society." Lang thought (rightly) that Huntington's effort to quantify oppression and instability didn't correspond to reality. Huntington's defenders typically turned this into a straw-man argument. They said that Serge Lang objected to any attempt to turn things like frustration and instability into numbers, and that the argument was caused by a mathematician's resentment of the "soft" sciences. (See Jared Diamond's Soft sciences are often harder than hard sciences in Discovery.) Lang didn't actually have any problem with using numbers to measure satisfaction; his objection was that Huntington's index in fact measured nothing. Lang particularly hated Fareed Zakaria, now the editor of Newsweek, who wrote a letter saying that it was "a fact" that in the sixties, there were no "major riots, strikes, or disturbances" in South Africa. Lang had a file of New York Times articles on South Africa, all contradicting Zakaria.

Serge Lang's way of talking to students about this was to invite them to his office to take his test, which would determine whether they could tell "a fact from a hole in the ground." After explaining Huntington's paper and showing you Zakaria's letter, he asked two questions: 1) Did Fareed Zakaria use the word "fact" in his letter? 2) Comment on Fareed Zakaria's letter. The correct answer to the first question was yes; the correct answer to the second was either, "It is untrue that there were no major strikes, disturbances, or riots in South Africa in the sixties," or "I am not familiar enough with the history of South Africa to judge whether Fareed Zakaria is correct or not." After you answered, Lang had you sign and date your paper, which he would store somewhere secure. (I failed, like everyone else.)

At this point, Lang would explain the problem with academia: nobody bothered to find out whether claims were true. Instead, people just did "theoretical bullshit."

Bob Somerby has a political blog that predates the word blog. He makes the same argument as Lang, but directed towards the media, saying that they ignore facts because they find it hard to figure out what's true and what's not. Some representative articles:

• About the media's treatment of Al Gore: Inventing invented the internet!
• About the Valerie Plame case: Armando inquired about our "strange crusade."
• About education: Modern liberals don’t care about low-income kids. We dropped out decades ago.

The ides of March (beware)

March 15th is a national holiday in Hungary; specifically, it's nemzeti ünnep, which means national holiday. It celebrates Hungary's 1848 revolution against Austria, which they lost in 1849 when the Russians helped the Austrians out by sending troops to crush the revolt. (There is also a holiday commemorating the end of the revolution: October 6th, National Grief Day.)

We asked our topology professor when our homework would be due, since it would normally be on March 15th. He told us that he had forgotten about the holiday because like other nationalist days, it has been hijacked by Hungary's political parties. Each of them holds a rally devoted both to the holiday and to extolling themselves. He said that we should feel free to go to one of them, but that we shouldn't say "a fucking word," especially if we go to the rally of an extreme right wing party. (He also told us that it would be safer for us to say extreme right wing party than fascist.) Good topology professor, good advice.

Joel: not always wrong

My former roommate Joel usually turns out to be right. Five months ago when he decided to take only three math classes in BSM, I berated him for his laziness. Now, I too will be taking only three math classes. Combinatorics II will no longer be part of my life. It's excellent, but so are all my classes. Due to its similarity to Graph Theory, I think it has to be the one to go. See this post for my original list of classes.

Announcement of Summer Plans

I will be participating in NSF funded mathematical research from June 19th to August 18th in Johnson City, Tennessee, in the ETSU REU.

Stew

This is Rosanna's ground nut stew. Many substitutions are possible.

• chicken (legs are good)
• onions, garlic
• ginger
• garlic
• sweet potatoes or butternut squash
• tomatoes (canned is fine)
• curry powder
• cayenne or hot paprika
• raisins, dates
• (goose) fat
• peanut butter
• crushed peanuts

Brown the meat. In a big pot, sautee the onions, ginger, garlic, fat, and curry powder (at least 3 tbs.). Add the tomatoes and the sweet potatoes or squash. Pour in water or chicken stock to almost cover everything. Add in the raisins, dates, cayenne/paprika, and salt. Simmer till the squash is soft. Taste and adjust seasoning: you want it to taste too strong at this point. Take a few cups of liquid and mix it with a cup of peanut butter. Pour this bag in and mix, adding the crushed peanuts. Adjust seasoning, adding sugar or molasses if necessary. (Cinnamon and cloves might also be good.) Serve on rice or other starch.

Blogging Lapse

I have allowed my blogging duties to go undone. Now I must cover two weeks in the minimum amount of space. In the spirit of blogging, instead of writing about Béla Bollobás, I direct you to Patrick's blog. The only thing he failed to mention is that before we went, six of us sat at a dinner table passing a roast chicken with our hands, taking bites of it as it went around. It was a sickening display of savagery. I made polenta. I'd give the recipe, but then I would be plagiarizing Mark Bittman. I will respond to all emailed requests for it, though.

Jens Lekman

Since I'm writing about Jens Lekman, I may as well link to his Pitchfork interview. (I don't hate Pitchfork. Am I still cool?)

Jens Lekman's music is hit-or-miss. I used to think he only had one great song (Black Cab). My love for that song recently inspired me to give the rest of music another chance. Now, I realize he has a second great song: Higher Power, the last track on When I Said I Wanted to be Your Dog.

When promoters send CDs to college radio stations, they often put stickers on them describing the band. The stickers on Jens Lekman's CDs always mention the Magnetic Fields, even though they don't sound much like him. (The defunct MP3 blog The Mystical Beast says something like that here.) This song, though, sounds exactly like the Magnetic Fields. It has strings, and it has these lyrics:

In church on Sunday making out in front of the preacher.
You had a black shirt on with a big picture of Nietzsche.
When we had done our thing for a full christian hour,
I had made up my mind that there must be a higher power.

It's more intimate than any Magnetic Fields song. Sorry that I'm not an MP3 blog--you'll just have to go hunt it down yourself.

Classes

• Conjecture & Proof. The name of this class suggests that it is an introduction to basic mathematical thinking. This led my roommate last semester to not take it, which was probably the biggest mistake he's ever made. (He really would have liked this class.) The class's lectures are devoted to proofs that are really cool (there's really nothing else linking them); the homework is a few hard problems that require a lot of creativity to figure out, like Putnam problems. You're only expected to answer 60% for an A. And despite its name, I expect it to be my hardest class this semester.
• Graph Theory, with Gábor Simonyi. He did a card trick in class. I got to cut the deck.
• Combinatorics 2. This is a class on hypergraphs, which are a generalization of graphs. The professor, András Gyárfás, is very good. The first problem set is fun so far (though not easy).
• Topology. Also seems fun, also a good professor (Alex Küronya, whose name breaks Hungarian vowel harmony rules). There are too many people in it, though there's still plenty of time for them to drop it. Tomoko may be taking a class on advanced Galois Theory with this professor, in Hungarian. He told me and her that it wouldn't be hard, because he could give us reference material in English and German. Are all math professors in Hungary trilingual?
• Hungarian II with Erika. Patrick and I returned to take it, plus one girl who only started Hungarian last month but is very good at it. It will only meet once a week, which is a bit silly for a language class, but I'm talking plenty of Hungarian at home.