odds and ends

I figured out what my ideal form of humor is, and it's computers writing nonsense:

a computer-generated list of new My Little Pony names via artificial neural network
We start at Sprinkle Cherry Bolt and rapidly descend to Deader Pony, Dunder Dort, and Tracklewock Packin. It's GREAT.

a Harry Potter chapter written with predictive text
I tried to pick a few lines to excerpt, but it's just all too good. You have to read it in full.

I made some food I liked recently:

These salted butter chocolate chunk shortbread cookies are really weird, but they're also delicious. Very similar to these chocolate sable cookies (and similar potential pitfall with crumbliness-don't despair, just use a sharp knife when cutting and smoosh it back together).

I also made this chocolate babka wreath over Christmas break, and it turned out just as beautiful as the website pictures for once (and so delicious people ate it stale the next day).

Here are some science-y things I recommend reading:

Most of my scientific expertise is knowing how to make and work with proteins. This was a cool article that explains why proteins are cool and how scientists are designing new ones not found in nature.

I also really liked this article, on keeping a cosmic perspective + the Voyager golden record:

"I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us."

Not really science-y but I've been thinking about this, too: preserving white space in your daily routine (found via CoJ). Almost all of my dead time is full of looking at my phone (waiting for/riding in the elevator, waiting for an experiment to finish up, standing in line at the store, eating lunch, etc.), and I don't think that's a good thing.

I'll add that to my list of things to work on in 2018, joining learn basic Italian phrases (we're going to Europe this summer!!!!) and bake more cakes. Only appropriate, given that zucchero is inexplicably one of the first words Duolingo taught me.