Sun City

SUN DAY: All day Saturday we worked around the house and yard, except for an hour or so in the morning when we went for a nice long walk and spotted our first blackberry of the season! There are thousands to come, no doubt. 

Come Sunday, I was itching to go to the Mariners' game. I kept my eye on Craigslist and Stubhub, but couldn't find tickets at my 'give' point  ($15 apiece, half face value), until about 2 hours and 5 minutes before first pitch, a trio popped up on Stubhub. We jumped on them (only $12.83 apiece!) and then bought our fourth from a scalper at the same price point. Sweet! 

It was a LOVELY day at the park. Heaven on Earth, really.

A foul pole never looked so lovely, right? ;)

FUZZY WUZZY: This weekend, a Facebook friend turned me us on to some live bear cams. First, was a cam trained on Alaska's Brooks River in Katmai National Park. There, each year, over a hundred brown bears descend on a mile long stretch of Brooks River to chow down on the largest Sockeye Salmon run in the world. It's very entertaining to watch. I find myself switching between rooting for the bears and the salmon.

From the site above, I noticed the site had lots of other wildlife live cam links. For instance, one of polar bear Ilka and her twin cubs at Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Denmark. 

TASTY: This evening, we completed week 1 of "The Science of Gastronomy," a Coursera course via The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Here's our campus. ...

Well, at least virtually. But isn't it LOVELY? Maybe we can see it for ourselves some day...In the meantime, our professor's name is King, which you have to love. :) So far, so good - we've already learned lots!

For instance, we've learned about how energy can be transferred through conduction, comparing heat capacity and heat conductance, cooking by convection, increasing the boiling point of water with salt or sugar, cooking by radiation and more. 

One of the lectures we watched demonstrated how different materials conduct heat, which speaks to choices when it comes to cooking vessels. The charts and examples showed us that metals conduct heat significantly better than ceramics and plastics. 

We decided to replicate the experiment on our own. 

We put two ice cubes in small plastic bags, and set them on four different surfaces: ceramic, plastic, foil and copper. After five minutes, it was clear to see the copper and foil samples were melting more quickly.

Afer 10 minutes they looked like this. They are from left to right ceramic, plastic, foil and copper. As you can see, the copper cubes were completely melted. Amazing! Science! Woot!

This first weeks' lessons also touched upon hunger and satiety. The lectures covered why we need food, how we determine whether we're full or not, how we determine if food is good, and how sound, texture and the other senses play into our eating experiences. Interesting stuff that we can use every darn day.

One of our assignments this week had to do with sensory specific satiety. It involved eating a 'meal' of chocolate. Ten bites of chocolate, spread out over 30 minutes. Pure torture. ;)"I think this is my favorite quiz ever," Annabelle remarked after 'having' to eat and rate her second piece.

The exercise involved rating the level of "pleasantness of item one after eating," and then the pleasantness" of pieces 2-10. Won't surprise \you to learn the 'pleasantness' went down with successive pieces. Chocolate is good, but it turns out there *is* such a thing as too much of a good thing.