Brewing Update!

While I was visiting my family in Massachusetts for the holidays, and Coley was back at home in Tucson, he bottled our beer! Here it is the the closet, with our cleaning supplies and recycling.

Then last night, we popped on in the fridge. In preparation for the Patriots' game, we made fake BBQ chicken sandwiches and tried our first bit of our Alaskan amber.....

It was WICKED AWESOME!!!!!! Totally delicious and deserving of this pint glass. Even our playah-hatin' brewer friend Andy said, "yeah, this is good beer." Score! Only thing is it could use a little more fizz. But the beer gurus tell us that it will only get more delicious as it ages in the closet, and maybe a little fizzier too. Wahooo!

A Homebrewin' Xmas To Us!

Last year, Coley and I made an anti-consumerist pact to never buy unwanted, expensive crap for eachother for Xmas. Last year, we simply took eachother out to nice dinners. This year we really upped the ante. We gave ourselves the gift of homebrew!

We sampled a bunch of yummy darker brews last weekend to try to decide what to make for our first batch. My advanced brewing friend Andy recommended darker beers as "easier not to f*!$ up on your first try." We settled on an Alaskan Amber. Then yesterday, Andy accompanied Coley and I to Brew Your Own Brew to help us pick out our equipment. (More like, to dictate exactly what to put in our pile. When the employees saw us with Andy, a regular at the store, they totally backed off and went back to their internet porn searches.)

On this lazy-pajama Sunday, we started the actual brewing process. So far, so good. So far, so FUN! You start by just boiling a giant pot of water on your stove, with your chosen grains bobbling around in there in a net. It looks like you're steeping tea for a giant. After it's steeped enough, you add in the yummy, yummy malt powder (tastes just like the malt sugar in Whoppers). Then you bring it to a boil. Andy started to warn me on the phone about the pot boiling over when I added the hops. But then he just said, "well, you'll see," like it was just inevitable the first time anyway. Inevitable indeed. After cleaning off the stove-top and boiling some more, the next step is to pour it into a big fermenter (glorified plastic bucket) and add some water, and then wait for it to cool before adding yeast. We just did that, and put it in a dark closet now for a few days. I think all that's left is transferring it at some point to another bucket, and then waiting a few more weeks, and then bottling it, and then waiting some more. And then the drinking part!!! I can't wait to taste our home-made beer.

That Annoying Science vs. Religion Debate Rages On...

I found "Taking Science on Faith," a recent op-ed in the NY Times really annoying. Paul Davies, a cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University (U of A's rival!) argues in that column that science is ultimately faith-based just like religion. All of scientists' research endeavors, Davies says, are based on a faith that the universe is an ordered place, and is "governed by immutable... mathematical laws of unspecified origin." Without the belief that such order exists to be discovered, he argues, one could not be a scientist.

I strongly disagree with Davies' implicit characterization of the mathematical laws of physics, on which he bases much of his argument. Perhaps the problem is with the literal way he seems to understand the word "law." In a social context, social activity unfolds according to some pre-existing set of laws, with the result of social order. For example, I drive my car on the right side of the road in the U.S.A. because it is the law to do so, and I stop at red lights, because of the law, and as a result, I've never been in any messy, disordered car crashes. Thank goodness for the law. But in physics, the mathematical relationships we call laws are simply descriptions of the order we observe existing in nature all around us. The heavenly bodies form and gravitate the way that they do, and mathematics is just a convenient shorthand to describe their motions in a concise and general fashion. Davies takes an essentialist viewpoint of science, in which mathematical laws somehow precede the invention of the universe and at which point they are "plugged in" to the universal machine to make it run.

Believing in order does not require a leap of faith on the part of the scientist. Order is an observational fact, which rigorous science describes in a unified framework we colloquially call "laws". Perhaps most importantly, it certainly doesn't require any leaps of faith to appreciate the majesty and beauty of nature around us, and to be amazed by existence.

Settling for Starbucks?

Whether over lunch, the phone or just g-chat, catching up with old friends these days inevitably turns into a discussion of how the hell to carve out a meaningful and satisfying professional life. We're all just a few stints into the career game that we'll keep playing until we're 65 (or much older, considering how social security doesn't look likely to pan out for us these days). But even with so little time elapsed since college graduation, it seems like my friends and I have all flip-flopped at least once between idealistic visions of healing the world and feeding ourselves solely on our passion for our work, versus the simpler, perhaps more jaded aim of making a good buck to maintain the Starbucks habit and live in trendy lofts.

I think that there are only very few freaks with an intense driving passion that directs their career path and makes choices along the way easy. And yet all of my overachiever friends and I feel like we should be one of these (lucky!) freaks on a straight fast track to exactly where we want to go. But it takes work to even bring the ultimate destination into view, let alone focus. And it's hard to remember to value the process of trying out multiple experiences and learning, especially about oneself, from each.

The only way to keep it fun along the way is to continue making time for friends and such excellent events as Sausagefest.

I Finally Take Advantage of Where I Live

A few days ago, I went on a road trip with two good friends to defray some post-qualifying exam stress. (No, I haven't heard the results of the test yet.) We drove about 6 hours, hung-over after a celebratory kegger, from Tucson to Lake Powell, which is smack in the center of the border between Arizona and Utah. It's a cool drive; you get to watch desert turn into pine forest as you drive up a mountain through Flagstaff on the way and the temperature drops 30 degrees. Then it gets friggen hot again as you come back down and drive through the Painted Desert, which consists of blobby dunes that look like some little kid's crayon set melted into the sand.

Lake Powell used to be Glen Canyon, yet another magnificent geological feature of the area carved out by the Colorado River. In the early 1950's, the Bureau of Reclamation build the Glen Canyon Dam under Eisenhower, which flooded the canyon for the purpose of creating a reservoir for the southwestern states. Environmentalists of the time strongly opposed the whole dam construction, but Lake Powell is still a very beautiful spot to visit. The water is a caribbean turquoise blue against the canyon walls-- totally unnatural looking, but gorgeous nonetheless. I have to say it's nice too that there's a body of water for desert dwellers to go in the summer to motor boat around, go swimming, and escape the heat.

Megan, Lori and I rented kayaks for a day, and did some awesome canyon exploring by water and our own arm power! We found some cool canyon walls to jump off of into the water below for an adrenaline rush.

On our way back toward civilization, we stopped in Page, AZ to hook up with a tour of Antelope Canyon with Navajo guides (access to this canyon is restricted to the Navajo tribe). This narrow canyon, carved out of sandstone by rushing floods, is gorgeous for the vibrant color of its walls, and for the smooth, awesome shapes of the walls. Some of the "rooms" of the canyon are shaped like a corkscrew from a whirlpool effect. We took some pictures of the canyon, but here are a couple taken by professionals, since ours don't really do the experience justice.

How cool is it that all of this was just a car ride away?

I'm Waiting for the Locusts....

A dust storm rolling in on Phoenix (see Chase Field at right).
Just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with here.

I just experienced my first Southwestern dust storm.

I was driving back to the math department this evening after dinner, and noticed as I was pulling out of my parking spot that the sky was a really strange dark orange color. It's officially been monsoon season for a few weeks now, and the sky often looks pretty crazy before a monsoon, so I thought we were only about to get hit with a ton of rain.

But as I rounded a corner and pointed my car south down the street, I saw a wall of thick yellow fog a few blocks ahead moving toward me head-on. God, I thought, how bizarre to have such thick fog in the middle of the dry desert. I have only even seen fog this heavy roll in on the harbors of Cape Cod a few times.

Curious, I drove out of my way a few blocks south to investigate. The way it blotted out the ever-present mountains was absolutely ominous. Even apocalyptic, I thought, as the wind now picked up to scary speeds. The palm trees started bending like you see in footage of hurricanes in Florida. Metal construction signs on the side of the road rippled like pieces of paper. I had to drive around an industrial strength, rock-sided trash can that got toppled over into the street, and I heard the sound of glass smashing around me. I felt like I was driving through a scene from War of the Worlds.

I finally realized it was dust, and not fog, when a big gust of it picked up off the road in front of my car, temporarily blinding me as my headlights reflected off of it. Lightning slashed through the pea-soup sky as I parked and hurried into the math department for safety.

I've been waiting excitedly for the dramatic storms of monsoon season ever since I moved to Tucson. I have not been dissapointed. Arizona delivers a caliber of storm I never could have imagined!

Season of Love (and Civil Rights) in Massachusetts

Last Thursday, June 14th, the legislators in Massachusetts voted not to put an amendment that would ban gay marriage on the ballot for public vote. (Translation of confusing double negatives: gay couples in MA continue to have the right to marry and have the same legal rights as every other married couple in the state. Conservative hicks in the state will not be given the opportunity to vote to change those rights.)

Last Friday, June 15th, my best friend Megan (left in the pictures) and her fiancee Lori (right) were married in a beautiful ceremony at scenic Harrington Farms in Princeton, MA. The day was a wonderful celebration of their lifelong commitment to one another among close friends and family from all over the country. It is hard for me to imagine two people not having the opportunity to say their vows before all their other loved ones, especially when they have loved and supported each other through as much as Megan and Lori have. I feel simultaneously grateful that Massachusetts allows them this opportunity, and indignant that this right is something anyone should have to feel grateful for.

At any rate, politics played absolutely no role in Megan and Lori's wedding day. It was a lovely and memorable experience for guests and brides alike. Congratulations, Megan and Lori, and best wishes for your future together!