Scanning the Twitter this morning, I came across a post about this Wall Street Journal article: “How to Ace a Google Interview.”

It’s from the end of December, so I’m a little late to the game here, but it says that candidates for Google jobs are often asked weird interview questions designed to shed light on their personality and problem solving skills to see if they’d be a good fit. One such question:

“You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”

The author says a common – and unimpressive – answer is that you can hide below the whirring blades.

And I’m writing this post because I’m annoyed that it’s unimpressive. You *can* hang out below the blades and remain untouched. In fact, I just tried it with my own blender (Offspring is a bear in the morning until she gets her smoothie), and a nickel to be sure. Maybe there’s something wrong with your stupid question if there is such an easy, obvious solution.

And why are you throwing applicants into a blender anyway? Talk about a hostile work environment. That’s awfully supervillian-y of you, which is directly contrary to Google’s informal slogan of “Don’t be evil.” In fact, I’d call that a “Don’t Be Evil Fail,” and frankly expect better of you. Maybe I don’t want your stupid job after all.

It’s a rainy, raw, miserable day here in the D.C. metro area, and I think Spouse has too much free time out there in consultant-land. I quote – with permission – from an email he sent me this morning.

Albatross Necklace ™: a cross between a charm bracelet and a friendship bracelet! Buy, make, and trade with your friends these limited-edition artisanal Albatross Charms!

• The platinum-coated pure lead Budget Management Albatross charm!
• The porous sponge carbon-buckey-balls of Matrixed Organization Responsibility Coverage Albatross!
• The silly-putty Project Timeline Management Albatross!
• The poisonous-plastic-manufactured-by-third-world-children Coherent Message of Corporate Responsibility Albatross (Name creatively and uniquely misspelled on the package every time!)
• The empty charmless attachment clasp of Accountability Albatross!

These and many more coming soon to a friendly Etsy-pointed browser UI near you!

I love that man.

I’ve been threatening to do it for years. I’ve read accounts from foodies and chefs, from food writers, and non-food-related journalists. For all intents and purposes (does it also grate on you when people say “intensive purposes?”), making fresh pasta sounds like one of those kitchen things that isn’t actually all that hard, but that impresses the bejesus out of people and can make an otherwise unremarkable meal kind of freaking awesome. Like homemade bread (here’s a secret: The yeast does all the work).

But as I’ve been reading more about our food and where it comes from and what it does to people on the way (recommended reading: Tomatoland), and as I think a little bit about my own footprint on the earth and how many trucks belching smoke had to haul – for example – my pasta’s ingredients from one place to another, and make the box, and bring that along, and then ship the whole shebang to my grocer’s shelf, and what with the theme of Blog Action Day (#BAD2011) being “food,” what better time to give it a whirl.

How many micro steps like that would it take to have an impact on my ecological footprint?

Let’s ignore that last question, just because it is way too macro and makes my brains twitch a little even contemplating setting up the schema to understand it fully. I mean, even without the box, someone made a bag for the flour, and schlepped that all over tarnation, and the eggs still had to get laid and packed into their little cartony things, and what about economies of scale, anyway, and this is why I never get anything done.

Don’t worry, I fully comprehend that making my own pasta isn’t even like a drop in the ocean here. It’s more of a thought process than anything else. And also probably a symptom of my ongoing mental decline.

The Pasta

I looked around for the simplest recipe I could find. They’re all pretty simple, actually. The nuts and bolts are not rocket science. I used this recipe from Mario Batali partly because it was easy and partly because Mario Batali is the bees’ knees.

I cleaned the counter with Windex and then with water. I should clean the counter more often. Made my wee pile of flour (halved the recipe because who wants to mess up a pound of fresh pasta?), cracked the eggs into cups, which was a great idea because I always get shell bits in that I then have to squish around in the eggs trying to fish out, and then poured them into the crater of my little flour volcano.

I abandoned the “incorporate flour into the egg with a fork” direction almost immediately and switched to a dough scraper. It worked. In the end, I had to add about 2 tsp of water to make it pull together, and it was a raggedy mess when I set it aside, wrapped in plastic, to rest.

But when I unwrapped it? All of that lovely moisture had worked its way through to infuse the lumps, and I had a beautiful dough.

In the absence of one of those handy pasta rolling devices I should have had on hand before getting started, I beat the dough senseless with a rolling pin. It took forever to get it anywhere near thin-ish enough to call pasta. And it was still dreadfully thick. But because I’m really impatient, this is when I cut it with a knife to make a “rustic” pappardelle.

Dried it on a cookie sheet for a while,  and then threw it into boiling water. When I decided it was cooked, I drained the water and added some butter and pepper. Pretty tasty. Also extremely gummy.

Verdict: Not bad for a first pass. Will try again with a proper pasta roller.

_

I’ve been an avid follower of Punkin Chunkin since I first heard of it back in the 90s. The “sport” has grown, as has the annual championship which takes place in Delaware each November (right after Halloween, when pumpkins are cheap).

Why do I find Chunkin so captivating? Er, because it’s a sport that involves using massive air cannons to chuck pumpkins great distances. Why else? It’s real acts of mechanical development, tweaking, testing, calculating, and hitting things with a hammer when they either stick or don’t stick enough. It’s both the knowledge and application of physics done with a fantastic sense of humor. More please.

Here are a couple of links to my previous Punkin coverage:

• Competition Chunk
• Centrifugal machine – equal parts of bravery and insanity.

The other day, a good friend offered to take me out to see a couple of the big chunkers being filmed for, I think, the Discovery Channel. He promised that part of the afternoon was reserved for letting amateurs fire the cannons. A little quick work reorganization later, and we were off into deepest, darkest outer-burbia where they’ve got the land for this kind of thing.

We watched the filming, stood around, and commented extensively (the filming took a while) on how staged even reality-style television is. The people in the crew were real pros, and it was cool to see how much goes into what in the end will look like a pretty happy, fun, casual production. In the end, I determined that theirs is a job I don’t want.

Here also is a little video I put together of the proceedings. The last clip made my heart skip a beat. After 15 years of watching this with my mouth open, the very nice fellows of Chunkin Up let me fire their pneumatic cannon. This is not a euphemism. Scratch that bad boy off of my bucket list.

If you’d told me a year and a half ago that we’d have settled into a three diaper bag routine, and that I would have installed hooks by my front door so that the diaper bags are arrayed handily in a vertical manner, I wouldn’t have believed you. Actually, I probably would have believed you, but looked at you dolefully, sighed deeply and asked if you were going to finish those fries (I was extremely pregnant a year and a half ago).

We succumbed slowly to the need for three separate bags. And here they are, listed from bottom to top:

The Babushka Bag
This is one of our more complicated bag situations. Spouse takes this bag when he delivers the baby to his mother’s house one day or so per week. It was kind of an ordeal to settle on the actual bag involved here, since Spouse is incredibly annoying and has strong feelings about bags in general and how they should behave. He didn’t like the awesome Coach diaper bag I bought on Severe Sale, and substituted a messenger bag that he thought was more suitable. While it may have been more suitable for his trip to the car, it was a real pain in the butt for me or his mom to root around in, since it was full of exciting buckles and velcro’d in about twelve different places, flopping over so you couldn’t find anything. So, I did some research and took a chance on a $10 diaper bag from Amazon. A hit. It stands up, zips shut, is lightweight and meets everyone’s specifications.

Yes, we gave this WAY too much thought.

This bag contains: Baby Uggs (long story), assorted sweaters and changes of clothes to accommodate temperature fluctuations, random toys, and occasional small tasty gifts for Spouse’s mom so she knows that I appreciate her.

The Daycare Bag
This one goes with V to the daycare she frequents three days a week. She goes three days a week when it’s not snowing, when the power isn’t out, and when we don’t keep her out for some ailment or other that she probably contracts from Bella, the Daycare Dog, who I’ve taken to calling “Vector,” since I think she is the source of some of the plagues we’ve been getting in this house.

This bag contains the requisite change of clothes, some mittens, oragel, a spare binky or two, hair clips. It is supplemented with packets of wipes, astonishing monthly “tuition” checks, and various other ointments and foodstuffs for the enjoyment of V during her day.

The Actual Diaper Bag
This bag is the smallest and it is the one we use when we are out and about with the actual baby. It contains three diapers, a small packet of unscented wipes and a grocery bag for diaper disposal. You may have noticed that this is the only one that transports any actual diapers.

Are we insane? Scratch that. Are we unique?

Hi, my name’s Thea and I’m a nerd. Over time, I have used this blog to exercise some of my nerdular tendencies by conducting small, mostly foolish experiments such as the following:

• Lounge Off: Slanket Vs. Snuggie
• Plastic Six-pack Ring Decomposition
• And the best sparkling mineral water is…
• The soggy truth about Kinoki Detox Cleansing Foot Pads

And so it is with great excitement that I am participating in the #scimom blog project.

The funny part is that I married a self-described geek from a legitimately scientific family. He is responsible in one way or another for most of my “Nerd Alert” posts. One of my favorite things is when I go over to Spouse’s parents’ house and his dad – an accomplished researcher with a brain the size of a planet – says “let’s make an experiment.” Together we’ve explored cocktails, coins (did you ever notice how the head and tail sides are oriented top-to-bottom in different currencies? He did), tea, linoleum, canine intelligence and more.

I am truly happy that my daughter (currently 13 months old) may inherit this scientific legacy, and that it will be a regular and casual part of dinner and even pre-dinner conversation. It won’t come from my side of the family. As my own father said when I announced my intentions to procreate with Scientific Spouse, “maybe we’ll finally get someone in the family that’s good at math.”

I think the best thing I can teach her is “know your sources.” I want her to get her scientific information from scientists. People who have studied, conducted research, and had their conclusions adjudicated by their peers. This model works. It creates reliable data upon which one can make good decisions. Not, for example, hysterical vitriol spouted by people who’s primary professional qualification is the ability to get cameras to point at them. Yes, I’m talking to you, Hollywood. But don’t slink off so fast, Congress – you’re on my list, too.

I also want her to not be intimidated by those smartipants scientists. If I have my way, she’ll read the fine print, and not let anyone off the hook without examining their arguments, their data and – let’s be honest here – their funding.

Won’t someone invent a vaccine for bombast?

I sometimes almost forget that DC has such a rich scientific community. Popular wisdom has it that DC is a one-trick town or a one horse pony or whatever, and that politics is our only industry. As a DC native (yes, there is such a thing), I’ve been intrigued by how many industries and companies and legions of professionals are drawn to our little swamp on the Potomac like moths to a flame. Our primary product is – yes – bombast, with a side of bloviation, and every summer, like clockwork, just a pinch of seersucker.

The thing is, there is also a crapload of science here.

NIH is unraveling the mysteries of our bodies and health and disease, NASA is doing the same for our universe, NOAA for the planet, and the Smithsonian Institution has a hand in all of the research while fulfilling their mission “for the increase & diffusion of knowledge…” which means Just Giving It Away, making them the most incredible free resource know to man (in my humble opinion). Our area is also home to a burgeoning biotech industry, with TIGR, HGS… and I’m sure there are labs and facilities and all kinds of secret installations doing all sorts of wonderful things with aliens and tentacles and whatnot.

Some of the most exciting advances in medicine and technology are being developed within swabbing distance of the seat of political power. But the science keeps a comparatively low profile. I just love the idea that the people who are developing our bright future are living lives that are largely orthogonal to those who are making the rules.

Advances in science have already lengthened and improved our lives in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. And we’re facing some tough challenges – from climate change and energy needs, to space exploration, from HIV/AIDS and the myriad cancers (did I mention that cancer is an asshole yet in this post?) and other non-communicable diseases that plague us (btw, I work for Arogya World, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting non-communicable disease), to feats of engineering that will allow us to house and feed multitudes of those in need. It’s an incredible time in which we live, and it will only be eclipsed by our ever brighter future.

Somewhere nearby people are thinking about these issues. They’re taking apart these questions and others – dismantling them piece by piece, and finding the solutions. It’s like watching the most important Lego kit in the world in action. And my family has a front row seat.

I took the baby on a trip to Florida to visit a bunch of relatives last weekend. Man, it’s hard not to really go off in this post on some of the craziness we encountered, but discretion being the better part of valor and all that… so I’ll just get on with my point.

Look what Spouse made while we were gone!

It’s our brand new media server! Features include:

• Some kind of major metalwork casing that took hours off of Spouse’s life cutting and filing.
• Ye olde huge on/off toggle switch on the back.
• Major grillwork on the front for maximum ventilation of your delicate personal computing components.
• It has a turbo button that used to to switch it from 12 MHz to 25 MHz

Any of you who can tell that it’s an old 286 case are probably of our approximate vintage and nerdularity. May heaven smile upon you, your fields bear fruit and your loins prosper.

This state of the art (if you like your art “rustic”) new creation boasts the following specifications:

• Blu-ray drive
• 1 terabyte mirrored drives
• Low-end Intel Core i3
• 4 gigs of RAM

This leaves rather a lot of room in the box, as you might imagine. I like it, though. The only thing I think it’s missing is some blinky lights. Maybe we can shove the FIOS box into it or something.

Spouse refuses to name it. He says that he doesn’t name computers, cars or pieces of anatomy as a matter of policy. Spouse is so no fun.

Full Frontal Disclosure:
My travel, accommodations and food (except for the bagel and an extremely necessary cup of tea) were covered by GlaxoSmithKline. They did not require me to write about the trip at all, nor did they pay me, review this post or dictate what I have to say. Which is a really impressive release of control for these folks.

Let me open with – I love vaccines because vaccines save lives. As an asthmatic, I get a flu shot each year because the flu SUCKS. One year I got sick and stayed with my mother. I was having so much trouble breathing that she gave me a baseball to sleep with so that when I woke up suffocating, I could throw it to break a window to wake her up. Flu shot? Yes please. Also, I read The Demon in the Freezer in grad school and found it to be TotallyOmigodTerrifying. Whenever there’s talk of smallpox on the news, I lurk extra close to my husband’s smallpox vaccination scar as if I could receive immunity by proximity.

And so I was super excited to be invited to visit the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) vaccine facility in Pennsylvania, and redonkulously thrilled to get a tour of the packaging plant that required the donning of paper lab coats, haircovers and goggles and a whole procedure where you put your dirty shoe into a clean cloth wrapper and then set it down on the “clean” side of a taped line on the floor. Squee! My inner nerd was plotzing. My outer nerd bemoaning how I look in goggles, and trying really hard not to scratch my itchy nose in their clean, clean room. I mean, it was incredibly spotlessly fresh and clean by my standards, but apparently pretty squalid by theirs. More on their housekeeping rituals in a bit.

Upon arrival, we all gathered in a conference room where our hosts explained what happens at the plant (which has been there since, get this, 1882 when it was the Lancaster County Vaccine Farm, which, if you believe the Internets, was once the world’s largest producer of smallpox vaccine). Here, the folks at GSK take the vaccine ingredients, mix ‘em up, and package them. Of course, it’s a much longer story than that, and I’m making it sound about one million times more slapdash than it is, but I’m a writer and no lives are hanging on whether I’m funny or not. This is totally not at all the case with the jobs of any of our hosts. It is IMPERATIVE that they’re funny. No, it’s imperative that they’re careful and accurate.

A couple of highlights from the presentation:

• There are more than 500 quality control steps in the packaging of the vaccines alone.
• It takes 10 months to produce a simple vaccine. That’s produce, not develop.
• More complex vaccines take up to 25 months to produce.
• Some amazing percent (that I didn’t write down) of adults aren’t fully vaccinated because we think of kids when we think of the vaccination schedule. Do you know when you had your last tetanus shot?

To paraphrase site director David Callaert, this job isn’t for everyone. People who don’t want to spend their day following strict protocols and carefully outlined procedures to the letter will probably be happier somewhere else. When you’re producing compounds to inject into healthy people, there is no margin for error or sloppiness. When you are developing a treatment for, say, heart disease, you’re dealing with a sick person. And a treatment that is effective most of the time is a great thing. But when you’re treating the well? You have to nail it every time. So why do we need to treat the well? If you’ve never had the flu, why should you get a flu shot? Well, I’ve never had HIV and if they had a vaccine for it, I’d be there. I haven’t had cancer yet, but would surely vaccinate against it if I could. Why? Because I watched my Rockstar Grandma suffer through kidney, bladder and lung cancer.

Neat Freaks

This place has an aseptic manufacturing area, which sounds So Freaking Cool. Wisely, we were not allowed within a couple of acres of it, but they did do a little demonstration of some of the gowning procedures that people who work there have to go through to get to their workstations. It begins with donning scrubs, moves on to a sterile outer layer, mouth-hole cover (with optional beard supplemental cover), eye-hole covering, comical hood and gloves. And space boots. All of which you have to put on without touching the outside, or you’ve contaminated them.

They discussed what I’m going to call (for dramatic effect) The Five Pillars of Sterility:

1. Facility design: The layout, HVAC and how people move through it.
2. Cleaning schedule, plans, materials and methods.
3. Gowning: Summary – God help you if you have to pee.
4. Aseptic simulation: Constant testing at all phases of the process.
5. Monitoring of normal processes: They mentioned that even the air pressure is carefully controlled. It’s higher when you’re in cleaner areas so that if a door opens or something contaminants aren’t sucked in.

How It’s Made

But the best part, of course, was the tour of the facility. Which I can’t show you. But, if you’ve ever seen “How It’s Made,” on the Science Channel you get the gist. Here’s my overview of the process:

Filled and sealed vials are brought into the packaging facility, where a guy in a blue paper dress loads them into a circly-whirly thing, where they spin around a little before moving single-file out and down the line to labeling, where the Most Complicated Label Extruder Ever applies labels and checks each to make sure it is perfect. Then, they go down a ramp (with an area that contains a backlog of vials in case something gets hung up in the label machine so that the line downstream can keep humming) and into another array that checks, lines up, boxes and shoves those informative inserts into the box, which is bound together into bundles of multiple boxes, and packed into bigger shipping boxes. There are more inspection steps than I can name, so I won’t risk spreading misinformation by trying to name any of them. There are lots.

I’ve done my reading and even written a site or two for clients about vaccines and I like ‘em. The benefits seem to me to far outweigh the risks, which are low when compared to such deathsports as driving an automobile or eating in restaurants. Far be it from me to tell anyone else what choices to make for their own families, and if I get on a rant about herd immunity and what I think about taking medical advice from Hollywood, we’ll be here all day.

The World According to Spouse

Spouse – who grew up in Soviet Russia, where everyone was considered to be property of the state and therefore routinely vaccinated without discussion – has strong opinions on vaccines. He has consented to letting me share them here. They are as follows:

1) People who decline vaccinations should also have to decline to avail themselves of other modern conveniences such as the Internet, clean drinking water and electricity. Why should they get to pick and choose, when this one actually impacts the health and well-being of others?

2) When people get their driver’s license, they should have to select one of two lines to get out of the DMV: Vaccination or sterilization.

Spouse is popular at cocktail parties. He also hails from a family with serious scientific cred, who’s very impressive qualifications I’d love to brag about here, but they’re private people. Suffice it to say, they know their shit.

In Good Company

It was a great trip – my first of its kind – and I was impressed by the other bloggers. They were personable, funny, and asked great questions. It was a pleasure to meet you all.

• The Thoughtful Animal
• Mayberry Mom
• Pundit Mom
• Fat Fighter TV
• Yumy Yucky
• Mom to the Screaming Masses
• Down to Earth Mama

Spouse and I have been planning to buy a new (to us) car for the last few months. Phase 1 has been recently completed – namely, selling our lesser car. Spouse met with success via eBay, where a lovely young man from Pennsylvania found himself the proud new owner of an 18-year-old convertible that has served us well and provided Spouse with countless hours of entertainment lying on his back in the driveway beneath it.

So we’ve been discussing our qualifications for the prospective new car, including an elaborate comparative feature hierarchy, and realized today – during an otherwise pleasant walk through the neighborhood – that I no longer knew precisely what models we’re looking at, or how we’d arrived there.

It turned out that he’d been having a series of conversations with me that were only hampered by the fact that I wasn’t actually there at the time. See, as he considered options, he also considered my possible responses to them and drew several conclusions, some of which were accurate, but none of which I knew about.

Warning: Do not try this at home. This is advanced projection and a great way to start a fight with your significant other. We are professionals.

As we are wont to do, Spouse and I broke it down way too far and got deeply involved in both of our product comparison mental mapping techniques.

Spouse: The Punch Card Model

Pretend you have a series of trays each marked into a grid. Each tray has holes in various positions on the grid. When you stack the trays, there will be just a few spots through which you can see daylight. In Spouse’s mind these are the “finalists,” or models that possess all of the attributes we’re seeking.

Me: The Calder Model

Alexander Calder was an accomplished sculptor known – at least in part – for his incredible mobiles. I see our decision-making process as an elaborate system of weights and counterweights. Each feature has a value relative to the others – and is weighted. For example, my price spectrum is directly correlated to the feature set, and within that feature set, items may have different values. All-wheel-drive may take my “acceptable mileage” range up 5k, but only if the model year is X.

To summarize, Spouse is a physics nerd and I’m all Liberal Arts. And no, we still don’t know precisely what car we’re zeroing in on. But it got me thinking about how weird it is when people understand one another at all. You never know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Which is why have to give one another the benefit of the doubt and not take mental shortcuts.

Though it’s way more fun to jump to conclusions.

Spouse started today with another winner.

“I had one of those moments when I was thinking: ‘If I were preserved in amber right now, I would be gravely misunderstood by scientists in a million years.’”

We all have moments when we really hope the spy cameras are looking elsewhere. If you’re a parent or host to animals in your home (though we all know that if you have cats you are merely a tenant in their home), you have these often due to the fact that you are intimately, unavoidably and frequently involved with their bodily functions.

But it made me think (and I do hate to think) about how that is totally right. Context is king. And the concept of cultural relativism – which we studied in anthropology 101 – is applicable all over our daily life.

• When someone overhears only part of your conversation.
• When you tell a story without enough background.
• When you assume someone else is starting from the same experience as yourself.
• When you write an e-mail that’s just a little bit too glib.

Would someone from Mars understand what’s going on from a snapshot of this scene? I’m going to start calling it The Amber Standard.

And then I had a long talk with a dear friend over the Intertubes using Skype. And she is kind of a High Profile Authority on Social Media in a lot of ways and we got to talking about how frustrating it would be if you had something big (and perhaps unpleasant) going on in your life and you just can’t tweet about it because then you’ll have all of your followers all up in your business trying to be helpful, or now knowing too much about you and feeling very free to comment on it.

And when did we have to tweet about things to validate our lives, anyway? What is up with that?

Some people, though, chose to let it all hang out – scars, scabs, snot and all. I’m not going to get into whether that’s brave, bold or needy (me? I think it’s a combo). But they also get some great encouragement from their audience, who get to watch, criticize and goad from the security of the other side of the screen.

But this was supposed to be a funny light post about cleaning poo and hoping that the aliens don’t come for me when I’ve got a pissed off cat under my arm and am holding her ass under the tap in the bathtub. Poor thing – she just never learns that spiders don’t agree with her.