3/19 Moment of Zen: Advanced Theoretical Paper-Folding

My calculus teacher in high school, a fascinating character unto himself, once had us calculate how many times you would theoretically have to fold a piece of newspaper to get it to reach to the moon, based on the following information:

1. The moon is an average distance of about 384 403 km from the Earth.
2. The average sheet of newsprint is about 0.1 mm thick.

You can amuse yourself by trying to riddle this one through, or you can click the picture above and read more geekery at Toothpaste for Dinner comics. Then again, why choose?

3/17 Moment of Zen: Irish Soda Bread Recipe

Fancy Irish Soda Bread

Our Family Recipe Secret is that we don't keep secrets about recipes. This is the way I make it, this is the way my mama makes it, and this is how her mama made it. Happy St. Patty's, folks.

Preheat oven to 375°F

Dry Mix:
4 cups flour (I used half all-purpose flour and half whole-wheat pastry flour today)
1⁄4 cup sugar
1 Tblsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Cut in 1⁄4 cup (1⁄2 stick) cold butter to tiny pea size or smaller (I usually do this in the food processor, but you can use a pastry cutter or butterknives, too),
then add:
1 Tblsp caraway seeds
1 cup currants or raisins

Wet Mix:
1 3⁄4 – 2 cups buttermilk (if you split the recipe in half, use 1⁄2 - 3⁄4 cups buttermilk and 1 egg)
1 egg

For optional egg wash, beat together:
1 egg
2-3 Tblsp water

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately (they can actually be stored in the fridge separately for up to two weeks – longer in the case of the dry mix), then add the wet to the dry and mix just until it forms a ball.

You can bake it as one large loaf or split it into two smaller loaves. Form the dough into roundish lumps and place on baking sheet lined with parchment or greased.

Brushing with egg wash provides a pretty, glossy crust, but isn't essential. I didn't use one today.

Bake at 375°F: 45-50 min for 1 large loaf or 30-40 min for two smaller loaves.

3/15 Moment of Zen: Compost Cookies

Compost Cookies?

Would you put potato chips in a cookie? Christina Tosi, the ringleader at Momofuku Milk Bar in New York City, adds potato chips and more to what she calls "Compost Cookies." Tosi recently revealed her recipe and varying food writers have been posting about their attempts and what combinations of crunch and melt they add to the base. Some conservatively keep to known combinations like pretzels and chocolate, while others like David Lebovitz, who calls his "Amnesty Cookies," see it as an opportunity to rifle through the cabinets and get rid of leftovers (Lebovitz's cookies included everything from chocolate-covered marshmallow bears to corn chips). Other ingredients have ranged from bacon to Goldfish to coffee grounds. Continually, people have been surprised with the alchemy that takes place in the cookie and turns it into whatever the baking equivalent of gold is.

Click the photos above to visit the recipe if you want to try it yourself. I also have it on high authority that different versions of these have been turning up for sale at Outlook Farm pretty regularly (this would be the same authority that shared the recipe with me and makes all the cookies at Outlook).

Speaking of round baked goods, if you missed out on π day yesterday, since we weren't in school to do anything, you have another chance to celebrate π this summer on European π day on July 22nd.

3/11 Moment of Zen: DJ Mamy Rock

What Was That You Said About Old Dogs?

Like many contemporary dance DJs, British DJ Mamy Rock (aka Ruth Flowers) sprinkles sets of contemporary electrodance tunes with a little vintage flavor, layering in tunes from sources like ABBA and the Rolling Stones. Unlike most of her DJ peers, she was already an adult when those songs came out. Flowers first became interested in DJing when already in her 60s after a birthday party for her grandson. Now nearly 70, she has become quite in demand on the European club scene, with trademark rhinestone-studded headphones and big sunglasses. She says that although she initally puzzles many people, she's been largely very well supported by her younger peers, several of whom she credits with helping her build her skills.

Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!

3/10 Moment of Zen: Urban Golf in India

Third-World Golf

Golf is a pastime that is traditionally associated with the wealthy and powerful, sometimes used as a metaphor for that. This association is not abstract: shelling out money for equipment and greens fees adds up. It's an interesting upset of that to find a golf subculture in the middle of some of the poorer cities in the world, hitting golf balls off of rooftops at abandoned buildings with precisely placed holes along an improvised course. It works a little like frisbee golf borrowed back to golf equipment.

While urban golf is not limited to poor areas, golfers elsewhere have had more difficulty finding suitable courses. Click the picture above to see more pictures from a series by Polish photojournalist Tomasz Gudzowaty.

• Read more about Urban Golf

3/9 Moment of Zen: Darwin Meets Dogdson in the Parlour

In the Victorian Era, cartes de visite (lit. "visiting cards" - think of them like baseball cards for tea drinking) were quite the thing. Ladies would display them, showing off all the guests they'd had at their house. Then, they started cutting up their friends' pictures and pasting them into strange contexts, onto the bodies of animals or into the middle of some kind of geometric maze, decades before surrealism and photomontage had been officially discovered. It's not entirely clear what started this fashion. Likely, it was a combination of things. One speculation is that as cartes de visite became more widely available to people outside the upper class, rich ladies felt the need to distinguish theirs further. Another deals with two books that came out within a few years of each other and which have both had a profound influence on the intellectual landscape. One was Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the other was Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Both caused quite a stir, in very different ways, but both changed the image of what creatures could look like.

Follow the link above to see a gallery of more odd and interesting visiting card collages, along with more history and interpretation to go with it.

Moment of Zen 3/8: Alice on Film, 1903

Although last night's Academy Awards ceremony probably accounts for this weekend's Big Deal in Movies, I know many of you went to see the most recent cinematic take on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, as imagined by Tim Burton, which opened on Friday. However, many others have tried to bring Alice and her adventures in Wonderland to film since the very beginnings of the medium. A cursory search turns up more than a dozen attempts, the first of which was made in 1903 - 37 years after the book's release and just 5 years after Lewis Carroll's death in 1898.

This 1903 silent film, directed in England by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, was the longest film ever made at the time, running almost 12 minutes (only 8 of which have survived). Hepworth was insistent about staying as faithful as possible to the book's original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. The cast included his wife as the White Rabbit and Red Queen, his secretary as Alice, and the family dog, Blair. The dog went on to star in 1905's Rescued by Rover.

The British Film Institute has made the surviving 8 minutes of the movie available online.

• Information on the 1903 film from the British Film Institute
• Detailed description from the silent-film focused blog Verdoux, including many more stills from the movie