Adventures in Eating: Peanut Flips

Church Produce did it to me again.  Maybe it's partly my fault.  I did willingly look around the store at the shelves containing the weird processed foodstuffs.  But the good people at Church Produce are the ones that stock said shelves with said weird foodstuffs.  We may never know who is truly to blame, but I do know that I came home with a bag of "Peanut Flips".

You're as curious as I was now, aren't you?  What the hell are these things?  Why is the anthropomorphic peanut on the bag wearing a baseball cap?  Is 32% peanuts a lot?  It's certainly less than a bag of actual peanuts would be.

The bag makes a lot of interesting claims.  Firstly, "Peanut Flips" appear to be healthy.  They're baked not fried.  They have no trans fats and no cholesterol.  Pffft.  They left all the fun out!  You might as well tell me they were prepared by librarians in bunny suits in a dust free clean room.  Here's another scary advertising blurb from the bag "Peanut Flips is an exciting snack sensation that is raved about throughout Europe and available in the US."  Any truly great snack treat should be raved about in the US and ostracized and/or mocked in Europe.  This does not bode well.

So I opened the bag and poured some Peanut Flips into a bowl.  As you can see, they look like cheese curls.  That could be good, right?  Everybody love cheese curls or at least their delicious cousins, Cheetos, right?  Well, Peanut Flips are just greasy, peanut-flavored cheese curls.  They're strangely addictive, but they are also pretty filling (thank you, Mr. Peanut Grease).  So you'll want to stop eating before too long, and you will be thankful you did.

I'm sorry my adventures in eating have been such a disappointment so far.  I'm sorry for you, my dear reader, that I haven't lead you all to some delicious new treat, but mostly I'm sorry for myself that I keep wasting my calories on mediocrity.

Adventures in Eating: Happy Hippos

It's the holidays, which means that there's some unhealthy, tempting piece of food waiting around every corner.   You certainly don't need to buy junk food at your local corner store.  Unless, of course, you see something irresistibly quirky and interesting like......HAPPY HIPPOS!

Yeah, I paid $6.20 for 5 "biscuits".  Not exactly a bargain, but it's from Belgium so you have to expect to spend a little extra scratch.  So what the hell are they?  Here's what the box says: "crispy wafer biscuit(s) with milky and fat-reduced cocoa filling"...this description neglects the fact that these biscuits are shaped like hippos.  Are they cute?  Hell yeah they're cute!  But how do they taste?  The biscuit part is a lot like any other wafer cookie.  It's crispy.  It's light.  By itself, it wouldn't be much of a snack.  But, fill it with some milky cocoa cream and you've got something.  Something tasty.  It's not really worth the money, but I will finish the package.

I don't know what inspired the makers of Happy Hippo biscuits to make a hippo shaped cookie and stuff it with cocoa creamy goodness.  Maybe it was Hank Azaria's story in "Along Came Polly".  It was certainly an interesting idea.  If they were just trying to get someone's attention so that might just maybe buy their expensive Belgian treat....well....it worked at least once.

Schadenfreude Sports Fan

Since I started this blog I've been sitting on the idea of spending a post ranting about how much I hate the New York Yankees.  I've just been biding my time waiting for the MFY (Y stands for Yankees, MF stands for exactly what you think it stands for) to make some off-season move that would stoke my ire enough to send me into a bile-spewing rage.  They made a good run at Cliff Lee, but couldn't land him.  They haven't really made any other big moves.  In fact, they just looked clumsy and a little ungrateful as they re-signed their highly overpaid, possibly over-the-hill shortstop, Derek Jeter, and their old (but still awesome) closer Mariano Rivera.  Right now, the 2011 Yankees look like the same team that wasn't good enough to get past the Rangers in the ALCS in 2010 except that a bunch of the older marquee players (Jeter, A-Rod, Posada, and Rivera) are another year closer to dropping off the performance cliff.  How am I supposed to get worked up over that?  I almost feel sorry for them.  Almost.

You see, I've been in this situation before, and I learned my lesson.  Back in 1989 the Dallas Cowboys (another one of my least favorite teams) went 1-15 on the season, and I legitimately felt bad for them.  I wanted them to do better.  Three seasons later they beat my favorite NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, in the Super Bowl.  Then they did it again the next year.  Those bastards!  They used my sympathy against me!  Oooooooooo, it makes me mad just thinking about it.  I changed my approach to my anti-fandom.  I now have a no mercy rule.  I want the Dallas Cowboys to lose every single game they play until Jerry Jones is forced to shut down the franchise.  I have become a true schadenfreude sports fan.  I relish seeing the teams and players I dislike fail at least as much, if not more, than I enjoy seeing my favorite teams win.

Most of us who follow sports are schadenfreude fans to some degree, I'm sure.  But if you support perennial losers (the Buffalo Bills and the post-2006 Oakland A's for me), all you really have during most seasons is the pleasure of watching your enemy teams fail.

I learned in a psychology class in college that losing feels worse than winning feels good.  Does that make sense?  What if I said that the absolute value of the emotional content of losing is greater than the absolute value of the emotional content of winning?  Is that better?  Eh, I tried.  So maybe being a schadenfreude sports fan is as satisfying as sports fanaticism gets.  Maybe we shouldn't even bother picking teams to support.  We should just focus our energy on teams to hate.  In that vein, I'd like to encourage the MFY, the Cowboys, the LA Lakers, and any Notre Dame or Duke sports team to go out there and lose one for me.  It makes me happy.

Lab-Art: A Retrospective

Scientists have a reputation of being stoic, artless, even robotic.  Not so!  We're always looking for opportunities to express ourselves creatively.  For example, Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann has expressed himself by creating some of the worst poetry ever written. 

Over my years in chemistry I have had a number of particularly expressive lab-mates. Unfortunately, I didn't make any effort to document or collect any of their work...until now.  Since the Exelixis Chemistry Department is in its death throes (cough...gasp..."Rosebud!"), I thought it was time to reveal some of the amazing art that has sprung up in our lab over the years.  Unfortunately, I feel it inappropriate to share some of the most elaborate Photoshop work on display.  Some of my current and former colleagues will be pounding the pavement in search of new work soon, and they might not appreciate being confronted in interviews with images of their faces superimposed onto babies' bodies or characters from 'Napoleon Dynamite'.  Even so, prepare to have your minds blown!

Let us begin with an abstract sculpture by Kat.  The work may just appear to be a smoothed and rounded ball of used aluminum foil, but I think the discerning eye will recognize that it is much more that.  It's poignant, sublime, avant garde and any number of other artsy-fartsy words all at the same time.  The piece is maybe 5 inches in diameter and weighs 636 grams (1.4 lbs).  The mass and dimensions are awe-inspiring.

Next let us to move to a piece of graffiti art by Anagha (well, it's on her fume hood, anyway).  The orange sharpie drawing on safety glass is evocative of something else similarly pretty...let's say a wave made out of swirly doodles with a plant growing out of it.  Van Gogh never made a piece as profound.  The blue sharpie sun in upper left is just parasitic vandalism by some anonymous tagger.

Our next piece, might be best described satirical pop art.  No...scratch that.  The piece would best be described as a joke submission by Steve to the 'Exelixis Chemistry Slogan and Logo' competition.  Still I like it.  It's sassy.  Very, very sassy.  (FYI, the winning slogan was 'Exelixis: Chemistry Evolved'.  Yeah, that probably paints our department in a better light).

The final piece in this series speaks for itself.  Again this work is by Steve, and it says "Yoda vomiting tissues (Kimwipes actually)".  It's awesome....and practical.

The Dangers of Words on Magnets

For reasons that I may explain in a later post, I found myself in a nostalgic mood at work Friday.   I developed an urge to document the magnets and other random decorations that adorn my hood at Exelixis before they were lost to history (that's a little hint to the pending events in my lab).

Years ago, American Express used to include magnetic fake credit cards in all the junk mail they sent to me.  Their potential functional value was too high to just toss them in the trash, but they were too tacky for my fridge at home.  But the lab --  they were perfect for the lab.  So I started sticking them to my fume hood (Note to AmEx advertisers: I've been looking at those things every day for probably 5 or 6 years, and they never led me to get one of your cards.  Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me, you rebel scum!).

Eventually, AmEx switched from fake magnetic credit cards to fake cardboard credit cards which have no aesthetic or functional value whatsoever.  So I expanded my lab magnet collection to include pretty much anything I could get my hands on.  I have magnets from China given to me by a friend.  I have magnetic major league baseball schedules from season long since completed.  I have magnetic reminders for Cornell Reunions that have come and gone.  I even have magnets that I spent my own hard-earned money on.   I may get to those in this blog some day, but this post is about the magnetic poetry set.

In December 2005 (I made the year up.  I have no idea which year this really happened), I acquired a magnetic poetry set at an Exelixis Chemistry Department White Elephant Christmas gift exchange.  My friend Owen contributed the set to the gift exchange with express hope that I would end up with it. He knew full well that if it ended up in my hands he would have an opportunity to humiliate me with it.  Mission Accomplished.  Of course I had to share the set with my lab-mates by putting it up on my fume hood.  Since I learned at my State Mandated Biannual Sensitivity Training (thank you, Arnold Schwarzeneggar) that it is my responsibility not to create a hostile work environment I had to edit my list of available words.  Shown below are the magnets I chose to leave in the box in a drawer at my bench.  I think you'll agree they needed to be isolated and kept under surveillance.

Despite my best efforts, I still ended up with poems like the following:

and....

You would have thought 'apparatus' would end up in some nerdy haiku about distillation or something.  This is a chemistry lab, for heaven's sake, not a harlequin novel publishing office.  Sheesh.

One more thing: At 6'4" my head protrudes above the sash to my fume hood by a few inches.  Most of the 'poems' shown above are at about eye level for me.  On occasion (rather frequently in the past few weeks), I'll lean my forehead against my fume hood while developing a TLC plate (if you don't understand, you don't need to know).  A few minutes later, I'll find myself on the receiving end of quizzical looks as my colleagues try to determine why I have little black rectangles stuck to my head.  After a little prompting, I'll reach up and peel one off to find the word 'puppy' or 'froth' staring back at me.  Not only is this a little embarrassing, it also messes up the poems.

The poetry set may be coming down soon, but at least it served its purpose -- to entertain others at my expense.

Chemical light-weights

Today in lab, I needed a chemical for an experiment I wanted to run.  So I ambled to my office where I looked up the chemical in our in house database, and I wrote down the location code for where I might find said chemical ('might' is an operative word when it comes to the reliability of finding a chemical in our inventory).  And I ambled to the bin where the chemical was supposed to be residing.  Lo and behold!  It was there.  A 100 gram bottle of nice white crystalline material.

As I was ambling to my bench (I was tired today, so I ambled a lot), I realized that chemical in my hand had a molecular weight of 68.08.  That's a pretty low molecular weight (mw) for an organic molecule that exists as a solid at standard temperature and pressure (STP).  This got me thinking, "What is the lowest molecular weight pure material that exists as a solid at STP?"  But I think that one is a little too easy, so I changed the question, "What is the lowest weight non-ionic organic compound that exists as a solid at STP?"  That's a little trickier.  I thought maybe it was the compound I had just taken out of the inventory.  It's not.

So how do you think about this problem?  If you're not a chemist, you don't.  You recognize that this is a pointless exercise, and you let it go.  But if you're a chemist....not so fast.  You're bound to get hung up in a combination of curiosity and knowitall-ism, and you'll spend decidedly too much time thinking about until you have an answer you're satisfied with.  You need to think of a molecule that maximizes intermolecular attraction while minimizing molecular weight.  Since I eliminated ionic bonding as an option, that means hydrogen bonding.  I'd bet good money that water is the lowest molecular weight (a measly 18 atomic mass units) pure substance to exist as a liquid at STP.  Why?  Hydrogen-bonding, dammit!  We'll play the same game to get the lowest mw organic solid.  We can maximize hydrogen-bonding by choosing compounds dense in low molecular weight hydrogen bond making heteroatoms (ie. oxygen and nitrogen).

My labmate Jason and I were pretty satisfied that imidazole (the inventory compound) would be the winner, but when I posed the question to another one of our colleagues, Adam, in mere seconds, he outdid us.  Urea (mw = 60.06).  That bastard out smarty-pantsed us.  But Jason doesn't give up that easily.  Employing a classic kindergarten maneuver, he changed the rules mid-game.  You see, urea doesn't possess a single carbon-hydrogen bond.  Can a compound without a carbon-hydrogen bond really be organic?  No way! (actual answer: of course!)  So we were able to recover our dignity by cheating.  Once again, imidazole was the best choice.

UNTIL.... I realized on my drive home that swapping one nitrogen in urea for a carbon and adjusting the hydrogen count appropriately would give us acetamide (mw = 59.07) which saved us one atomic mass unit.  Hoo-Ray!  Acetamide is also a solid at room temperature.  On top of that, it has (count 'em) three carbon-hydrogen bonds.  I even found a compound that followed the new rule.  I totally win.  I emailed my new suggestion to Jason from home.  He presumably won't see me message until tomorrow morning.  I will rule the night. 

...Of course, someone may find a better answer tomorrow.  At that point, I will change the rules again.