MIT Grad Blog

In case some of you out there didn’t get the memo, Wednesday is the day to be and be seen at graduate orientation. Today is packed to the gills with amazing activities, and I expect to see everyone out there reading this at some point today. Starting off in just about 30 mintues (2pm), I’ll be rocking the information booth again, spreading the word about SPICE (it’s ridiculously amazing and you should join) and coaxing people to blog about orientation.

Speaking of blogging about orientation, I’m implementing a new incentive system today. If you come by the information booth and do some blogging (computer and chair provided!), I will make a good-faith attempt to do anything you ask me to do (within the legal limits of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). Come give it a try!

The information booth is just the start though! 5pm tonight is the Reception Under the Dome, about which I can say only three words: Open. Wine. Bar.

And as if that wasn’t enough, at 7pm we’ll be heading across the Charles to the top of the Prudential Center for a fabulous 360 degree view of Boston/Cambridge, followed by a trip to J.P. Licks for the second-best ice cream in the area (Tosci’s is still the best).

Howdy all! The Orientation Information Booth is officially open, running from noon until 6pm today and tomorrow. Located in the lobby of Building 10 (right up the steps from Killian Court), the Information Booth is your one-stop shop for t-shirts, tickets, friendly faces, handshakes, hugs, and all the information you could ever want!

Seriously folks, all the information. Ask us anything! Need to know the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Done. The weight of a feather on one of Jupiter’s moons? Done. The golf club that Alan Shepard used on the moon? Done.

And if you stop by during one of my shifts (2pm to 4pm both days), you’ll probably end up doing some blogging in exchange for your t-shirt

So stop by and see us!

Hello friends! I hope everyone is having a fantastic time at orientation so far. I met a bunch of great new people at the Thirsty Ear BBQ tonight, and I’m looking forward to meeting many more of you in the coming weeks!

As with all parts of orientation, this blog isn’t just about us, it’s about you, the new students! And so I just want to take a moment to direct your attention to the top of this page, where you’ll find a green tab labeled “BLOG ABOUT ORIENTATION!!”. We want you to do just that! Tell us and your fellow students what you’re up to, give feedback on events, share awesome finds you’ve picked up in the Boston area, or just tell us what’s on your mind!

Remember friends, it’s about you, so post away!

Oh, and after you post, you’re absolutely required to come say hi to me!

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

If, without the aid of Google, you know who said this (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin), chances are you won’t find anything new in this post. If, without the aid of Wikipedia, you know who Brillat-Savarin was (an 18th century French lawyer and food author), chances are you could do a better job than I will. However, if you’re like many of my fellow grad students, then this maxim probably has you pegged as consisting mainly of Cup Noodles and free pizza. Sad, but too often true.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! Cooking doesn’t have to be a dreaded task or a mystery wrapped in an enigma that only your parents and friends with spouses and children understand. Cooking is part science, part art, all fun. Cooking is about exploring, experimenting, failing, failing again, succeeding! It’s just like doing research. Believe me, if you’re reading this, then you have all the personality traits necessary to enjoy and rock at cooking. To get you started, here are ten tips that I’ve picked up since my grandma first started teaching me when I was a child.

1. A good knife
One of the misconceptions propagated by late-night infomercials is that it takes a box full of gadgets, doo-dads, and items with the suffix “O-Matic” to make a good meal. Truth is, you need very few tools to make the vast majority of dishes. Most important of these is a good chef’s knife. The brand doesn’t matter, but the features do. The blade should be about 8″ long, a good length for accomplishing most tasks. Shorter blades will be hard to use with large cuts of meat or thick vegetables, and longer blades will be unwieldy. If 8″ seems too long, remember that you don’t have to use the full length. Precision work can be accomplished by pinching the spine of the blade just behind the tip. It should not be serrated, as serrated blades are more specialized and harder to sharpen. A good knife of this size should cost between $30 and $50; you can find ones for much more, but there’s really no need to go that top-of-the-line. Treated properly (don’t put it in the dishwasher!) and sharpened regularly (Kitchen Arts on Newbury St. will do this for $4!), a good knife can easily last more than a decade.

2. A cast iron skillet
The only other piece of hardware I’m going to recommend, the cast iron skillet is an American classic that no longer gets the publicity it deserves. The best ones are made by Lodge, a family-owned manufacturer based in Tennessee. Dirt-cheap raw materials (they literally smelt scrap iron) keep prices around $20 for a 10.25″ model, which strikes the right balance between size (the 9″ can’t hold 2 decent sized steaks at once, for example) and weight (the 12″ has a couple of weeks in the gym as a prereq). Speaking of weight, shipping will kill you if you order online (you can literally pay more for shipping than for the skillet), so head over to Target for this purchase. Cast iron is the original nonstick surface, and if you follow the instructions for curing and caring for the skillet, you’ll be amazed. Cast iron is perfect for pancakes, eggs, steaks (any cut of meat really), fried chicken, cornbread, “hash”-style meals, fajitas, and just about anything else.

3. Herbs and spices
I hate to be stereotypical, but in general as one travels from South to North in the USA, the prevalence of herbs and spices in food diminishes rapidly. Note that I’m not just talking about “spiciness” in the sense of food tasting hot. I’m talking about herbs/spices in general, whose flavors run the gamut from floral and fruity to earthy and grassy to pungent and fiery. Whenever someone talks about a dish having “depth” or a “complex flavor”, you can bet that herbs and spices were there in force. For people whose parents didn’t cook with spices, learning to use them can be truly daunting; just look at the “spice wall” at Shaws to get an idea of the number of options. The trick is to not let yourself get overwhelmed, and slowly build up a knowledge. One great way to do this is to find a premade spice blend that you enjoy, then read the ingredients and try them individually. In addition, here’s a quick primer on the most common spices you’ll encounter:

• Paprika: made from a crushed red (not hot) pepper, brick red in color, the base spice for the majority of blends, often used for its color
• Cumin: dull brown in color, very common in Mexican/Tex-Mex food (the smell when you walk into a fajita place is usually cumin)
• Tumeric: organgey-yellow in color, very common in Mexican/Tex-Mex food, often used for its color (a little can turn things bright yellow)
• Cayenne: made from a crushed red (hot) pepper, lighter in color than paprika, hot, very common in cajun/creole food, a little goes a long way
• Rosemary: resembles small needles, complex aroma, woodsy and floral flavor, goes great with red meat and chicken
• Thyme: small leaves, similar in some ways to rosemary but more woodsy, especially good with mushrooms
• Oregano: usually found powdered, light green in color, common in Italian food, especially good with pasta

Obviously this list is nowhere near comprehensive, but it should at least be a start. Seriously, the only way to learn to use herbs/spices is to be willing to try and fail. It’s worth it!

4. Garlic
This is closely related to 3, but deserves its own point. If you don’t learn anything else from this post, learn about garlic. No other ingredient can do so much single-handedly. Garlic is bright, complex, deep, earthy, pungent. It wakes up the taste buds, it opens up the nasal passages. It’s eminently controllable. Left in big chunks, it adds a hint of flavor. Chopped fine or crushed into a paste, it adds a clear flavor in the front. Added early in a recipe and allowed to cook thoroughly, it becomes sweet with hints of caramel. Added late and kept mostly raw, it’s pungent and spicy, with a sharp burn like fresh black pepper. Please, use more garlic. Don’t have time to skin and chop it? Prechopped garlic is a fantastic time saver. The flavor won’t be quite as good as fresh, but it will still be better than not having garlic. As for what to use it with, anything but dessert is a good place to start.

5. Pasta
One of the most daunting parts of cooking is coming up with recipes, and there are a few kitchen staples that can make that process easier. Dried pasta is dirt cheap, quick to cook (10 minutes in boiling water), nutritious if you buy the 100% whole wheat variety, and easy to work with. To steal a phrase from Food Network star Alton Brown, pasta is “kitchen velcro”. In a hurry and feeling like something light? Spaghetti noodles, lemon juice, olive oil, and a little salt and pepper. Done. Want to make it more substantial? Add artichoke hearts, olives, a can of crushed tomatoes, and maybe a package of frozen, pre-cooked shrimp. Done and delicious!

6. Good bread
This one gets overlooked a lot, but great bread can turn an ordinary meal into something special, can make a 5 minute sandwich a delicacy, and can be used as part of a snack/appetizer tray if you’re cooking for more than one. Bread on the side is especially important with pasta dishes or anything that comes with a sauce. Flavored breads are especially great for taking simple dishes up a notch. Use a sweet bread like cinnamon raisin to make killer French toast, or a tangy garlic bread for the best grilled cheese. Here’s today’s shameless plug: When Pigs Fly Bakery in Somerville, just down Highland from the Davis T station, sells the best bread I’ve ever had in my life. Do yourself a favor and go one day. There’s unlimited free tasting; need I say more?

7. Boneless skinless chicken breasts
The last ingredient on this list, and one you should always have on hand. Chicken breasts are like a Swiss Army knife for the kitchen. Quick and easy to prepare, high in protein and low in fat, and cheap to boot. Chicken breast is like a blank canvas. Feeling like Mexican? Slice it thin and throw some peppers and onions into the skillet (see #2) and you’ve got fajitas. Italian? Cook it with a jar of prepared sauce and mix it with the recipe from #5.The possibilities are endless!

8. Breakfast for dinner
This is another answer to the “what do I cook?” question. Traditional breakfast foods — eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, etc. — are quick and nutritious, and can make a great option for dinner.

9. Ask your mom/grandma
One complaint I hear fairly often is that most recipes you can find online or in magazines are too long, too complicated, too involved, etc. The best solution I’ve found for this is to ask your family. It’s different for every family, but I guarantee you can find someone in your family that had to cook full meals for a large group of people with limited time and funds. In my family, it was my grandmother that raised 4 girls and made dinner every night. People like this won’t give you 3-page recipes to make food artwork, but they will give you recipes that work in the real world.

10. Experiment!
In the end, that’s all cooking is about. Don’t be afraid to screw up! The worst that can happen is you fill up your trash can and order pizza that night. Go, cook, eat!

Determine the actual concentration of hydrogen peroxide by diluting 1:1000 and measuring the optical density at 240nm

That’s a piece of cake, I thought to myself. I’m an organic chemist; I’ve used a UV-vis spectrophotometer more times than I can counts! And the step makes perfect sense. Peroxides are unstable, and even under the best conditions they degrade over time to water and oxygen. The bottle I was working with was nearly a year old, so this step was essential to get accurate data about the antibacterial properties of the hydrogen peroxide.

I collected my reagents and equipment, did some quick math in my head. 1:1000 dilution, so that’s 1000 uL for every 1 uL, so that’s 1 mL for every 1 uL, so that’s 10 uL H₂O₂ diluted up to 10 mL total volume. Simple!

Pipetman in hand, I transfered 10 uL of H₂O₂ to a conical tube, then added 9,990 uL of distilled water. Just like I was taught in undergrad, make mixtures starting with the smallest volume so that you get more thorough mixing. No shortcuts here, no adding 10 mL and saying the final volume was close enough. I wanted this data to be good.

I turned on the spec, programmed 240nm, and threw in a cuvette with distilled water for my blank reading. Swapped it out and replace it with my sample, hit the read button. The machine paused, made the high-pitched whine that signaled it was analyzing, and popped the result on the LCD dispaly.

- 0.053

What?!? Absorbance values can’t be negative!

Alright, fine, no big deal. Something must’ve gone wrong. I know! Maybe the distilled water from the tap was relatively impure, and that threw off my reading. I’ll just try it again using distilled, deionized water for the dilution and the blank reading.

- 0.048

Damn! Ok, ok… maybe this H₂O₂ is old and a 1:1000 dilution is too much, so I’m out of the linear range. I’ll try using a 1:100 dilution, still using the distilled deonized water.

- 0.051

Huh…. ok… maybe this H₂O₂ is really old, so I’ll try a 1:10 dilution.

- 0.042

…what the hell, I’ll try it undiluted.

- 0.055

What the hell!?! I was at my wit’s end. I was ready to sue Fisher Scientific for selling me negative molarity H₂O₂. Why didn’t this work?!?

Ok, ok, calm down… maybe… hm, maybe my math is messed up in my dilutions? Maybe I’ve forgotten how to use a spectrophotometer? Maybe this isn’t actually H₂O₂? I ordered a fresh bottle of ACS certified, Baker analyzed, reagent grade H2O2. I asked one of the postdocs in my lab to sit and let me talk through the math with her, to make sure I was doing it right.

Me: An X% weight/weight solution means X grams of solute in 100 mL of total solution, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And I can convert from grams of solution to volume of solution with the density, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And the density of a 30% H₂O₂ solution is 1.2, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And I can convert from grams of H₂O₂ to moles using the molar mass, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And the molar mass of H₂O₂ is around 34, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: So a 30% solution of H₂O₂ should be around 9M, right?
Her: Yep.
Me: And a 1:1000 dilution means 1 uL for every 1 mL, right?
Her: Yep
Me: And…
Her: Brandon, why are you asking me questions I know you learned in high school?
Me: Because this damn step won’t work! It should’ve taken 5 minutes, and I’ve been trying for a week now!

She smiled a little, then looked curious. Then she stood up.

Her: Come on, let’s go do it right now and see if we can figure this out.

I happily followed her, confident that the problem had nothing to do with my technique.

Her: What wavelength are you doing your readings at?
Me: 240 nanometers.
Her: Hm, and which cuvettes are you using?
Me: Oh just the disposable plastic ones.

She raised an eyebrow at me, and I stared at her like she had a second head.

Her: Plastic?
Me: Yeah, I don’t…

And then it hit me.

Our disposable cuvettes are made of polystyrene. Polystyrene is a highly conjugated organic compound. Highly conjugated organic compounds absorb light in the 200-300 nanometer range. I knew that. I’d used UV-vis to identify conjugated compounds in my undergrad organic chem lab. So why had I been trying to take readings using cuvettes that absorbed at the wavelength I was analyzing?!?

I popped in a quartz cuvette and tried everything again. The result? 9M, right on the nose.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lock my door before some thugs from my alma mater show up to take my degree away.

I’ve been accused of being a variety of things in my life, both good (rarely) and bad (frequently). However, “shy about sharing his opinion” is a phrase that has never been contemplated, let alone uttered with regard to me. In fact, phrases like “utterly convinced that his opinion is divine mandate” are much more likely to occur. The accuracy of such accusations is a matter for another post, but for the time being just trust me. Unless your weekend plans consist of marrying the love of your life while the two of you ride cyborg velociraptors through a magnificently appointed Mediterranean resort, I can say for certain (p < 10^-100) that my recommendation is more awesome.

Step 0: Optional step; both versions of this agenda are recommended. Become inebriated the night prior to the remaining steps.

Step 1: Skip the meal immediately prior to undertaking the following steps.

Step 2: Go to The Friendly Toast at One Kendall Square.

Step 3a: Order anything from their extensive menu.

Step 3b: For those of you who like more explicit recommendations, order a strawberry frappe (thick enough to stand a spoon up) to start off. For your meal, go for the Ole Miss (named after my alma mater), a heaping pile of fluffy scrambled eggs drizzled with mango sour cream, topping a grilled sausage patty resting on a smear of creamy chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, all atop a thick toasted slice of anadama bread. If you’re not contemplating leaving your computer right now, I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.

Step 4: Walk waddle (no really, waddle) over to the Kendall Cinema to see The Hurt Locker. Seriously. You know how normally when a friend recommends a movie to you, you ask about the Metacritic and/or Rotten Tomatoes score, and anything above ~70 is good to go? 97 on RT and 93 on Metacritic.

Everyone out there catch that? Let’s recap just in case:

97% on Rotten Tomatoes; 93% on Metacritic

Do you know what kinds of movies get scores like that? Schindler’s List, The Godfather, Wall-E (the fact that that movie is on this list is an entirely different matter that I’m sure I’ll rant about at some point). The Hurt Locker is the kind of movie that makes you leave the theater with your eyes hurting because you didn’t want to blink. And please, don’t go with the old standby response of “I’ll wait until it’s out on DVD”. It’s just not the same. Trust me.

In case you’ve been living under a rock encased in lead inside the Fortress of Solitude on the far side of Borneo, the sixth film in J.K. Rowling’s inconceivably lucrative series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, came out this week. I saw it at a midnight premier on Tuesday, and as a person who did not read the books but is following the movies, I was unimpressed.

The movie suffered from what one friend called Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-2-Syndrome, a condition in which a movie lacks sufficient self-contained action and functions chiefly as a bridge between two other movies. Put simply, not very much happened in the movie.

“But Brandon!” you exclaim, “this is the movie where [spoiler] Snape kills Dumbledore! How could you say not much happened?!?”

Easy there fanboy. Yes, something major happens late in the movie, but it’s like getting one notecard on your third try at passing quals; it’s too little too late.

The same is true of the time spent on Voldemort’s back story, showing glimpses of his childhood when he was probably called Tommy and enjoyed wholesome activities like quidditch and pulling the limbs off of small animals. As played out as the whole “he-had-a-rough-childhood-and-was-an-orphan-and-nobody-hugged-him-so-now-he-kills-people” shtick is, it can still work if it’s done right. At its best, it adds nuance and depth to the villain and encourages asking tough questions about the nature of mankind and morality and other topics that seem oddly pertinent at 1am in The Thirsty Ear while playing Connect Four (or maybe that’s just me). At its worst, which it pretty much is in HP6, this sort of thing is just annoying. You’ve spent 5 movies and >3000 pages convincing everyone that Voldemort is more evil than Hitler mind-melded with Cthulu and drinking a smoothie of newborn tears, and now you’d like me to understand him? No thanks, I’d rather just see him impaled on a quidditch broom.

Sometimes a website comes along that makes you run your laptop battery empty while hunched over at your bed/cubicle/lab bench, cackling like a reject extra from Young Frankenstein: The Musical. This hallowed honor in my life has previously been held by such memes as LOLcatz, FailBlog, FML, and Moronail. But this one tops them all.

A little background on me first, to appreciate this website. I text a lot, especially when I’m drinking. There used to be a beautiful self-limiting relationship in which BAC and texting ability were inversely correlated, so nothing bad ever came from texting at a less-than-sober moment except for a string of consonants. Then the iPhone came along, and its ridiculously accurate predictive text fully decoupled my texting ability from my general level of awareness of reality.

All of that to say: I’m 99% certain that I’m quoted somewhere on http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/

And no, I’m not telling you my area code.

A while back I was cooking dinner with some friends. We were casually chatting about labs and research and such as I was shucking corn to make chili-lime corn on the cob (fantastic and ridiculously easy, BTW).

Friend 1: What’d you do in lab today?

Me: I’m playing with Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers. It’s cool, but it’s been a while since I’ve been in a bio lab so my technique is still kinda sloppy.

Friend 2: That’s… comforting…

I wonder why no one ate my corn…

I recently moved into a snazzy new corner room in Edgerton House, which is one of the unfurnished options on campus. So like many budget-conscious grad students before me, I made the trek to IKEA in Stoughton to pickup the necessities (bed, dresser, desk, bookcase, etc.). So far so good.

About halfway through assembling the dresser, my roommate and I discovered that I was missing 3 plastic “nails” (essentially plastic dowels with ridges) to hold the final drawer together. For those of you keeping score at home, yes the instructions told me to go through all the parts beforehand and no I didn’t do that. Ahem.

Now, anyone who’s purchased something from IKEA before knows that missing parts are an understood hazard of DIY furniture. So understood, in fact, that the instruction manual tells you precisely what to do, in the form of an adorable graphic featuring an androgynous stickperson looking forlorn because he/she can’t find his/her nuts. Said tragedy is swiftly rectified in the following panel by a simple phone call to the nearest IKEA showroom. So that’s what I did. Here’s a rough transcript of the ensuing conversation:

Menu: “For assistance assembling your purchase or to request replacement parts, press 5.”

Me: 5

Operator: “Thank you for calling IKEA,  how may I help you today?”

Me: “Hi, I need to order a replacement part.”

Operator: “You’ll need to come into our store because we do not currently have a system for ordering replacement parts over the phone.”

Everybody out there catch that? Just in case, let me replay the pertinent part: we do not currently have a system for ordering replacement parts over the phone. What an amazing business model. I think I’m going to open a bar with the same theme: our special will be Jagerbombs, but you have to walk to the 7-11 to get the Red Bull. Seriously IKEA? That’s like Billy Mays not having a system to double your order if you call now (too soon?).

Perturbed but determined to have a place to put my socks that night, I took a trip to Economy Hardware in Central Square, partially assembled drawer in hand. Ten minutes later, the gentleman from the key grinding booth emerged from the stock room and dumped a pound of nuts, screws, anchors, nails, dowels, and doo-dads into my hands. “Something there should do the trick.” Total charge? $0.

One inch plastic nails are for pansies anyway. My socks are safe and sound, supported by 3″ masonry screws. Booyah.