Meandering

[jay]

Wondering if pavlova is really anything like angel-food cake... sitting in my office on a Friday night, partly to edit a paper and partly because there's nothing better to do.

The Mars Society component of our Haughton-Mars Project got a lot of attention in the newly-released documentary on the Discovery Channel -- lots of Bob Zubrin, lots of simulated EVAs in fake spacesuits -- but the NASA component got short shrift. A few passing glances and mentions of the "NASA base camp", that was about it (except for the Carnegie-Mellon guys and John Blitch with their rovers, which are inherently telegenic. Much more so than instrument packages or odd-looking jumbles of boxes and wires.) Very much humans-on-Mars focussed rather than science-on-Mars. Oh, well... NASA HQS can't second-guess us this time, and at least there won't be the crank letters and e-mails (e.g., about aliens among us, or literal perpetual-motion machines) that arrived in March after the RDF program on Channel 4 in the UK. The beauty of X.500... anyone can lookup your work e-mail address.

Mars drilling automation moves along... one company (Honeybee, in NYC) wants to wait until January to put their drill back together, so that trip (to NYC and Boston) will slip again, after it already got postponed once in September. Another drill prototype near Washington, DC (UTD Robotics) will be ready to talk to us in late November. And we discovered that a colleague here has already developed (unbeknownst to us) a drilling work-flow model in support of the 2003 rovers. This will be *very* useful, I think, especially if we can use it to show a 5-day drill duration with automation (vs. 15-days per 2m hole with current 2003-rover-level technology).

On the home front... I should have been in Minneapolis this weekend. That makes me quite grumpy towards Pat... it will be hard not spending the weekend glowering. Or hiding out in my office? (wry grin) I can always go visit the new Coldwater Creek store at Stanford Shopping Mall this weekend and hang out with my friends (at least two of which are suffering from pulled muscles and sore backs now).

But on Wednesday I got a surprise call from a friend I hadn't spoken with in months... that lifted my day, after things had been tense at home and with Nancy. My friend is surfing several breaking waves of change in zir life, which have begun cresting higher (and closer together) since 9/11. I just want to reach out and hug zir... I guess that many folks have re-examined their lives over the past two months.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm warning you; I'm feeling uncharitable, but spending the weekend in your office sounds like a fine solution. Go for it. Have a ball. :-)

Be hugged back. And yeah, it was nice to talk to you, too.

-J

Pavlova

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

This is a Pavlova, in its more ornate form:


A Pavlova is made with egg whites, but the end consistency is more like a moist meringue, just stiff enough to put something on top of it. It isn't usually browned on the outside or as dense as angel food cake.

The way I usually had it in Australia was with far less on top that what you see in the photo. Usually it was a large square of meringue cake with some kiwi fruit sliced up on top, perhaps one or two strawberries for accent, and a spoonful of passionfruit sauce with some of its seeds in it. Maybe it was lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar on top; whipped cream was on top maybe half the times I had it.

Re: Pavlova

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

*blink*

I've never seen pavlova that thick!

I've generally seen it 2-4 centimeters thick at the most, looking much more like a pizza than a cake (for values of pizza that include eggs, sugar, cream, and fruit).

And it always, always had whipped cream.

Did you have homemade, or in stores?

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I'm still all geeky-fangirl about the whole Mars thing. I'm fascinated by the science - yah, they'll put together a buggy and ride around and stuff, yah yah. The drill! Looking for soil samples! I have this wierd idea about Martian paleontology... actually, I have a lot of wierd ideas, and I'm utterly fascinated with every scrap of hard science that comes back from over there. :) I'm also incoherent right now, as the coffee hasn't kicked in properly yet.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

*blush* Well, we just got our 100,000th image from Mars... beyond our ability to catalogue and study, actually. Weird ideas are *good*... that's the best way IMO to make progress. The drill is problematic, in the sense of conflicting desires... a design that will work well on the 2007 large rover down to 2m or so won't be easily scalable to 100s of meters depth on future missions. And it is hard to fly something that high-profile without previous more-modest versions. And life, and water, if they exist on Mars probably do so at depth rather than near-surface.