Halle's

With the beginning of the recipes in the blog, I published mexican food and showed how to make tacos. Now it’s time to make some chinese food, in this opportunity: Chow Mein.

Chow Mein means, literally, fried noodles in chinese.

Ingredients to make 4 portions:

• Oil.
• Garlic: 2 cloves.
• Chicken: 1 breast. (It could be optional for vegetarians, or more, for carnivors. Also could be other meat.)
• Carrots: 1 big, or 2 smalls.
• Red Pepper: 1.
• Onions: 2.
• Leek: 1 big or 2.
• Pumpkin: 1 piece, in proportion wih the other vegetables.
• Soy sprouts: 1 handful.
• Soy sauce.
• Noodles: 1/2 kg.

The vegetables and amounts are only ideas, I didn’t get soy sprouts, for example, and the pumpkin ended up in the recipe by chance. Depends of each one’s taste, you can add more of the vegetables you like, and less of that you don’t.

First we should put the noodles to boil, they don’t require too much work, and we’ll need them cooked at the end.

While the noodles boil, let’s start the hard work: Cut ALL the vegetables!

The secret is to cut everything in fine strips, vegetables and meat, specialy the carrot, or else it will take too long to cook. You can cut it in cubes o pyramids, but it looks better and is easier to eat with chinese sticks if it’s in strips.

Besides the vegetables, it’s time to chop the garlic.

With everything ready, let’s start cooking.

Put some oil in a wok, and start cooking the onions for a while. Then add the garlic and the chicken. Moving continuosly with a wood spoon. Until the chicken is sealed.

Once the chicken is white from the outside, let’s add the rest of the vegetables. The order is important, we don’t want raw vegetables or overcooked. First the carrots and the pumpkin. After the carrots soften, the pepper. And for last, the leek.

Once everything is cooked, we add salt, peppermint, and a lot of soy sauce.

In the same wok, to finish, we add the noodles already cooked, to mix them with the vegetables and the soy sauce. And we serve it right away.

Leer este post en Español.

Lately, I’ve reading a lot about relativity and speed of light, mainly because this afternoon I’m having a special class about Modern Physics and I don’t want to miss anything.

Some things about speed of light blew my mind, like the fact that it’s an invariant. That means that the speed (3·10⁸ m/s) is the same for every reference system, moving or not. And that explains why some texts say that when traveling near the speed of light the time slows down and you can travel in time.

I don’t want to extend this post with concepts that I don’t even understand completely, but I recommend this documentary I found yesterday: Faster than the speed of light?

It explains the importance of the recent discovery of posible faster than light neutrinos, and how Albert Einstein’s relativity would be worng if it were true.

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Some people want supercomputer to run the latest games, with the coolest graphics. I want a fucking supercomputer just to do things like this one:

This animations are made with the Mathematica software, varying a parameter in time.

The code for the first one is:

Animate[
    Graphics[
        Table[
            Circle[
                {.25*Cos[i*2Pi/23], .25*Sin[i*2Pi/23]},
                t + (100 - n) (1 + Sign[100 - n])/2
            ],
            {n, 0, 100, 1}, {i, 0, 7, 1}
        ],
        PlotRange -> 1, ImageSize -> 500
    ],
    {t, 0, 1, .1}
]

And the second one:

Manipulate[
    Graphics[
        Line[
            Table[
                {-r^n*Sin[n*a], r^n*Cos[n*a]}, {n, 0, s}
            ]
        ],
        PlotRange -> .01
    ],
    {r, .1, 1}, {a, .001, 4*Pi, .001}, {s, 1, 800, 1}
]

There are more drawings (animated or statics) in this Tumblr: achery. Including a video in this post: The post.

My notebook can render the graphics, even move manually the parameters (The Manipulate command of Mathematica), but can’t hold the animation.

By the way, the first graph reminds me a toy that I had when I was little and, thanks to the internet, I found it’s called Spirograph. (Picture in the right).

I’d kill anybody to play again with it. If it was fun when I was 8, now with 16 more years of mathematics, I could spends hours drawing.

Leer este post en español

Well, it seems like I’m gonna post recipes, too. In order to have them placed somewhere where I can find’em when I need them and I don’t remember an ingredient.
Today’s recipe is an improvised version of mexican tacos, tortilla included (Not-home-made tortillas are for pussies).

Ingredients for the tortilla in Internacional System units:

• Flour: ~0,5 kg
• Butter: ~0,125 kg
• Water: ~0,25 m³
• Salt: ~0,003 kg

Ingredients for the stuffing:

• Red pepper: 1
• Onions: 5
• Meat: *
• Salt
• Peppermint
• Oregano
• Ground pepper
• Soy sauce

* I don’t know how much meat to put. I took some steaks and chopped them, but I run short of stuffing. Next time I make tacos I’l fix this.

There’s no magic making the fill, chop everything, put the onions and the pepper onto the fire till the onions are transparents, add the meat and condiments and let it finish. Be careful with the ground pepper, they come out spicy.

Atention! Mandatory: Serve with beer of good quality throughout the process, besides food.

Optional: If you have problems calculating portions, like me, dulce de leche tacos are great!

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I can’t understand the modern spam. During the time that the blog was abandoned I’ve received notification mails about new comments every 2 or 3 days. But I didn’t give a fuck about them. But between 3:00 AM and now (10 AM) I’ve received 40 new comments.

First, only 29 visits entered the blog since yesterday. Seems like bots doesn’t count as visitors. but taking a close look to the new comments, they’re all short, they haven’t any link, use people names, and the website is something like Google, Yahoo, Facebook.

I’d probably accept them if they were more related to the post topic.

Am I the only one receiving this kind of comments? Is there an unselfish bot maker making bad bloggers feel better?

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It’s a little late to start practicing my English now, tomorrow is gonna be the last exam, and it’s oral. But I want to write in English and it’s my blog and I do whatever I want with it.

Ok, no, the actual reason is that writing in English will catch more visitors and more clicks on the ads. But don’t tell that to Google. I’m near U$S 100 and it’s been 2 year since the last time I get paid by Adsense.

I used a WordPress Plugin to separate post in english from the others in spanish. It’s called qTranslate, and it’s very simple to configure. Actually you don’t need to configure a lot, just choosing the languages you want to support. And when you create a new post there will be as many title boxes as languages you chose, and tabs in the main editor for the posts.