The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Kitchen Report: Tortillas

    The little locally-owned supermarket up in Greenfield has a good selection of Mexican items — I don't mean Mission brand tortillas or Paul Newman salsa, I mean stuff like masa flour, corn husks for making tamales, and big bags of dried beans. This probably has something to do with the fact that this is farm…

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  • Kitchen Report: The Elvis

    If you suddenly went from poverty to vast wealth, and could have more or less anything you wanted, what would you eat? Well, if you were Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, you'd have a sandwich. Specifically, a peanut butter-banana-and-bacon sandwich, sometimes on an entire loaf of bread cut lengthwise.  Today for brunch…

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  • Kitchen Report: Bucatini Alla Flamande

    These weeks of enforced leisure have inspired me to go ahead and do some cooking projects I've long put off. I did the first of them this past Saturday, a dish called Bucatini Alla Flamande. It's a molded pasta dish — you line a pudding basin or a rounded double boiler with semi-cooked bucatini, line…

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  • New Story at the Decameron Project

    Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron. In the present era, our plague isn't quite…

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  • Astronomical Notes

    The big stargazing news this spring is Comet ATLAS (it's in all caps because it's named for the acronym-titled instrument which discovered it, not the ancient Greek Titan). It's been getting some attention in the skywatching and pop-science press because it has been brightening much faster than expected as it has approached the Sun. Right…

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  • Big Podcast News!

    My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here. There's even a nifty trailer video! This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions…

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  • Non-Political Coronavirus Post

    As an SF writer my thoughts naturally turn to the future. What will be the long-term effects of this pandemic? Telecommuting: This may be the tipping point for telecommuting and working from home. A lot of businesses have resisted the idea much longer than they should have — chiefly, I think, from a nagging sense…

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  • How Risky Is Your Gathering?

    In a time of alarm over virus transmission, how dangerous is a gathering of people? This post from Tyler Cowan's blog features a risk assessment calculator, giving the probability that someone at an event is carrying the Wuhan Coronavirus, based on the size of the event and the number of carriers nationwide. It's reassuring to…

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  • Hamiltonian Musings

    A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton. Quick summary: it's good. Just…

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  • Very Sad News

    Freeman Dyson has died. He had a long, productive, and apparently happy life, so it's not really sad news for him. It's sad news for the rest of the species, which will have to get by without one of the modern era's foremost intellects. He was one of those scientists who are better science fiction…

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