the week in review

whenever deadlines loom, i become spectacularly creative in developing ways to do anything but the work that's due right now. this week i,

1. revisited the best lentils in the world: partly to prove replicability, partly to procrastinate, mostly as a contribution to the quantitative baker's intense middle eastern dinner tonight.
2. discovered the breakfast of champions: killer black beans made from rancho gordo's midnight black beans (steve sando, the founder, gives me constant life envy). tacos made of fresh corn tortillas, avocado, black beans, and cholula=magnificent.
3. procrastinated using food chemistry: to avoid writing the many papers i'm writing and use up the latest avalanche of lemons in the delivery box, tried an all whole-wheat flour lemon cake. flavour is excellent, texture dense. maybe next time with whole wheat pastry flour (does that even exist?) and more milk.
4. procrastinated using hoped-for construction opportunity: 3 hours in conversation with tw and someone who makes paraphernalia for aerial silks, talking about the aforementioned large dining table. it was neat, as always, to observe and participate in the multivariate optimisation process of iterating through construction problems and mediating between design and construction priorities. on the other hand, also a little disappointing to have an idea be realised by someone else with a different sense of priorities in construction or for someone else with a different sense of priorities in aesthetics. as an unintended consequence, i also
   
5. found good coffee and good espresso drinks: after my constant grousing (for example, here and here) about the absence of good espresso drinks in cambridge, i was surprised by simon's coffee shop. they made me an excellent latte, the better for being unexpected, using beans from barismo, a roaster in arlington that seems relatively obsessive. more taste testing is required before a more considered pronouncement can be made about either.
   
6. was thwarted by the ever-present minor failure of intersubjectivity: started reviewing this massive sourceforge association dataset; has many of the things i want but missing a few critical things for a full-on analysis. nathan, ever-obliging, is going to try and patch it next week.
7. had a flash of insight: frames and selective association might be the real-world functional equivalents of the d-dimensional lattice structures network theorists keep modeling but empirical researchers always fail to find. obviously, this bears more thought.

consequently: 0 down; 4 papers to go, 1 paper to review.