Pecan Pie

The art of pecan piery is a wild intersection of practice and passion, of ideology and indulgence. And yet, as with many of life’s fundamental pleasures, the basic principles are relatively straightforward.

For example, pecans are pecans. They are not, however, PEE-cans. A PEE-can is what, in Australia, we call a dunny. The most tasty and cultivated of the hickories, the pecan is a core ingredient, the presence of which defines this particular dessert. As a result, the only question when dealing with pecans is clast-supported vs. matrix supported. But I will leave that argument to diamictite and periglacial specialists.

A bit more variation is found in the caramelized substrate in which cements the pecans together. Here they are two independent binary choices, which yield a 2x2 matrix of sugary possibility. The first and defining choice is syrup: dark or light. The second choice is sugar: brown or white. Of the four possibilities generated, only two are widely used.

The light/white combination may only be consumed by pasty-lipped, precious Yankees, and has no place in the pantheon of pecan pie. If you want something that bland, move to Sweden, or replace the pecans with cashews. Or macadamias.

At the other extreme is the dark syrup, brown sugar pie. I’m sure that deep in the steamy bayous of the Mississippi Delta, there exists a testosterone-fuelled, hairy-chested John Henry of the pastry-rolling industry, who might just be man enough to bake such a dessert. But short of augmentation by an East German swimming doctor, my masculinity is nowhere near the level required to attempt such a pie.

This leads two possibilities: light syrup with brown sugar, and dark syrup with white sugar. My down-home, good ol’ boy and girl Southern friends and relatives tell me that the dark syrup is the more authentic of the two. But I prefer the light syrup for two reasons.

The first reason I prefer the light syrup is a matter of upbringing. My parents, who possess the professional drive and career development acumen that has thus far eluded me, chose my fate when I was born. Hoping I would grow up to be a classical hero, they bundled me up as a baby, put me in a chest, and cast it into the James River, hoping that it would be found by a fisherman with the capabilities of raising orphans into monster-slaying demigods.

The chest floated up the Chesapeake Bay, through the intracoastal waterway, and across the Delaware River, washing ashore on the Jersey shore, just north of the Mason-Dixon line. True to form, once ashore I was adopted by the wolves, mallrats, and members of the Gotti family that call New Jersey home.

As a result of this peculiar upbringing, I am not a real southerner. My palate sometimes reflects this high latitude upbringing, as my tastebuds have been ruined by overexposure to hoagies and bagels.

The second reason that I prefer light syrup is that dark Karo is hard to find in Australia. The light stuff is more widely available, and can be replaced with non-corn glucose syrup sourced from domestic sources. With Karo going for over $6 a bottle, this is not a bad thing.

My current recipe is a blend of book-pie, internet heresy, and old-time tradition passed down through several families not my own. Experimentation has warped the recipe beyond recognition, so I present the current version herewith.

Composite pecan pie

3/4 cup white corn syrup
Tablespoon maple syrup
Tablespoon honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups quartered pecans
Handful of unbroken pecans
4 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon each
ground cloves and allspice
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Boil sugar, honey, and syrups together for 3 minutes. Blend eggs with fork (not beater). Melt butter in syrup, and stir together over low heat for 30 seconds. Pour egg into syrup, stirring vigorously so the egg does not cook. Add vanilla, salt, spices and broken pecans. Pour into raw pie crust. Cover with surface layer of whole pecans. Bake at 180C for 45 minutes, or until steel skewer comes out gooless.

Neandertal ≠ Chauvinist

In their recent Current Anthropology article, Khun and Steiner suggest that one of the important behavioral differences between Neandertal and modern humans was the development of gender-based division of labour. While many of the implications and predictions of this theory are discussed in the comments and reply section, there is an important corollary which the research and debate neglected to mention:

Neandertals are not sexist.

This is an important point. In contemporary western society the (stereo)typical liberal feminist spokeswoman will often place herself at odds with those of us who are block-headed, flesh-eating primitives with a genome that is 50,000 years out of date.

Ladies Females, we are not the enemy. We possess neither the cultural sophistication nor the hierarchical mindset necessary to associate roles and gender. As far as we are concerned, anyone- man, woman, or child- can make a living spearing buffalo, working in a sweatshop, or building mass spectrometers. So cut us some slack.

The bigots you want to look out for are the hairless, gracile, anatomically modern boys; the ones with complexity and sophistication. Those males will gladly pigeonhole you into roles such as gatherer, secretary, or permanent adjunct. It is the natural consequence of their compartmentalized worldview, which includes such trivialities as artistic expression, a varied, vegetable-rich diet, and projectile weaponry. But you don’t have to put up with it; we Neandertals are far more egalitarian. As long as you don’t mind killing megafauna for a living, y’all are welcome to join our hunting party department on equal and unbiased terms.

One final point: Please cease comparing offensively primitive males to cavemen. Caveman is an imprecise term, as caves have been used for shelter throughout hominid evolution. Specifically, in the European context, it can refer to either a dinky-di, non-judgmental Neandertal, or a cave-painting, patriarchal Cro-magnon. We prefer not to be associated with such avant-garde Frenchmen.

Field identification of geologists

Linked without comment.

Shrill smokescreens and radioactive bananas

In a dashing blaze of opportunistic fear-mongering, the New York Times op-ed page is reporting that cigarettes, in addition to their usually toxins, also contain radioactive polonium-210. This is the same isotope used to assassinate Victor Litvinenko. The article, long on analogy and short on math, even goes so far to suggest that the total polonium dosage of second hand smoke in London could equal that which killed the former Russian spy. So, how much radiation is 0.04 picocuries?

Why, 1.48x10^-3 decays per second, of course. That’s about one decay every ten minutes. You’d have to be in a very deep, shielded room to detect that sort of signal above the cosmic ray background, and if your shielded room was made of cement, sandstone, or granite, the decays from naturally occurring radioactive minerals would also dwarf your polonium signal.

For analogy lovers, here’s a more correct one that what Professor Proctor has dished out: Potassium, which is a vital nutrient, has a slightly radioactive minor isotope, ⁴⁰K. With an isotopic abundance of .01% and a half-life of 1.25 billion years, a banana with 450 mg of K will kick out 14 decays every second. So a banana is over nine thousand times more radioactive than the polonium in a cigarette.

Now, how many cigarettes would it take to get a lethal dose? Well, the LD 50 for ingestion is around 8 million becquerels (decays/sec). So with 1.48x10^-3 Bq per fag, you would need about 5.4 billion of them to accumulate a lethal dose of polonium. I reckon the nicotine would get you first.

Professor Proctor writes, “London’s smokers (and those Londoners exposed to secondhand smoke), taken as a group, probably inhale more polonium 210 on any given day than the former spy ingested with his sushi.” Can this be true? Well, with a lethal dose 5.4 billion times greater than that of a fag, and assuming that 5.4 million Londoners smoke, they’d have to suck down a thousand cigs a day (50 packs) in order for the figures to be correct. Muscovites may think a 50 pack day is cold turkey, but Londoners? I doubt it.

Professor Proctor obviously thinks that the risk of smoking justifies incorrect arithmetic and easily refutable generalizations. Hopefully, my calculations will allow all my smoking readers to rest easy tonight, secure in the knowledge that it will be the tar and the nicotine that kills them, not the ²¹⁰Po.

p.s. As a geologist, I usually work in years, not seconds, so the first time I did the banana calculation, I instinctively calculated decays per year, and assumed I had seconds. However, I quickly decided that if 17 billion Bq was the dose from a typical banana, then I had bigger things to worry about than this blog.

Cricket

Curse those wiley English, and their ability to learn from, adapt to, and plan around our neolithic style of play.

A match made in heaven

I read a couple of interesting articles on the web last week, but didn’t see how they relate to each other until just now.

The first was an article by the New York Times, describing how Mythbusters is the best science show on television. I happen to agree with this sentiment. If fact, I know of no other TV show that demonstrates how to test and refine a hypothesis as well.

The second article was a blog at Arms Control Wonk about how a nuclear weapon could be built from surplus military equipment (and a whole pile of Uranium). What really caught my notice here was the number of people who commented on whether the method described would work, and how it could be improved.

Now, I don’t entirely understand the temptation to post recipes for nuclear weapons on the internet- I’ve personally never uploaded instructions for creating anything more dangerous than a chocolate chip cookie. But my scientifically trained eye did notice that this wide variety of opinions and unsubstantiated prognostication did indicate a glaring shortfall: The lack of experimental data. And that’s where Mythbusters comes in.

Adam and Jamie are the masters of refuting bombastic urban legends through experimentation. So instead of polluting the internet with untested ideas, perhaps we should just give the Mythbusters the following hypothesis:

Myth: Shooting two bits of highly enriched uranium together will cause a nuclear explosion

It would be a win-win episode. If the myth us busted, then we could all breathe easier at night, knowing that nuclear terrorism is more difficult than it appears.

If the myth is partially confirmed- say, by a North Korean-style fizzle that irradiates all of Petaluma, then we can emphasize the unpredictability and danger of playing with critical masses of fissile material.

And finally, if the myth is confirmed by vaporizing the entire San Francisco metropolitan area, then at least we have the sort of visual spectacle that is appropriate for a season finale. Such a prospect might even appeal to the ultra-conservative Republican base, a community that could use a bit of extra scientific education.

If it's a hit, we could even follow it up with a test of some similar myths. For example:
Myth: Anthrax can be passed through the mail.
Myth: Most of today's population has lost resistance to small pox.
and finally
Myth: A large scale nuclear war will offset global warming with nuclear winter.

210Po

Last week, the former Russian spymaster Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation poisoning after ingesting a dose of ²¹⁰Po. I am not qualified to comment on the political ramifications of this radiological attack, I can give the bare-bones information on ²¹⁰Po.

There are three basic ways to make short-lived radionuclides here on Earth. The first is to collect the short-lived intermediate decay products of Th or U isotopes, which undergo complex decay chains from the relatively stable initial isotopes, through increasingly unstable decay products, to Pb, which is stable. The second is to fission a heavy nuclide into unstable daughter products. The third is to irradiate a stable or long-lived nuclide such as ³⁹K, ²³⁸U or ⁵⁹Co in a reactor or particle accelerator to produce a less stable daughter, like ³⁹Ar, ²³⁹Pu, or ⁶⁰Co.

²¹⁰Po -> ²⁰⁶Pb is the final decay in the ²³⁸U -> ²⁰⁶Pb decay system. As such, it is present in natural uranium ore in concentrations that are inversely proportional to the ratio of the decay constants of ²¹⁰Po and ²³⁸U . This ratio is about 8.6x10^-11. So for every kg of U in natural ore, there is 86ng of ²¹⁰Po. (alternatively, that is 86ug/ton).

There have been reports that the soviets stockpiled ²¹⁰Po during the cold war. While this may be true, it is unlikely that this is the source for the poison used today. ²¹⁰Po has a half life of 138 days, and the cold war ended about 5800 days, or 14 ²¹⁰Po half-lives, ago. Thus essentially all of a cold war stockpile would have disappeared by now.

There are several options for ²¹⁰Po generators, including ²¹⁰Pb (half-life 22 years), and ²²⁶Ra (half-life 1600 years). In fact, polonium was originally discovered by Marie & Pierre Curie, after their isolation of Radium.

²¹⁰Po can also be formed by neutron irradiation of ²⁰⁹Bi, at least according to Wikipedia. It is not abundant in spent nuclear fuel.

Anyway, the point of all this is that whoever killed the guy must have had access to either a reactor, a supply of the highly radioactive isotopes ²²⁶Ra or ²¹⁰Pb, or an industrial scale U processing facility and a chemistry lab that can deal with serious amounts of radiation. It is way more sophisticated than stealing a spent fuel rod or a medical radiation source, and thus is considerably more worrisome than a mere dirty bomb. This radiological attack was obviously perpetrated by someone who knew what they were doing, and had access to some serious infrastructure.

Happy Thankgiving

I hope yours is as joyful, stress-free, and turkilicious as ours was.

From start.


To finish.