Eat the Menu: New Additions! (now with DeliBelly description)

This is part of a series about my quest to try all of the yumminess at local restaurant Tacodeli. See my eat the menu tag for the other parts of the series. Scores are summarized here.


Today was the independently organized Taco Tweetup that Tacodeli thought would make a good preview event for my week. Tacodeli was offering a special on three-item breakfast tacos, so I headed to the site to see what might make a good mix (I always get named stuff off the menu, so this mix-and-match thing was new to me). To my surprise and delight, I was greeted on the site by... me! Well, ok, not me, but the cartoon me created for Jon the Geek Week by Victory Dog Design. They also have a nice explanation of what this whole Jon the Geek Week thing is all about on their events page (at least at the time that I'm writing this they do; presumably that'll change eventually).

Once I got to Tacodeli, there was another surprise waiting: a new taco! I mean, not just mine, but another new taco! I still got the breakfast taco special (Chorizo, Egg, and Papas, aka Mexican mashed potatoes), but I just had to try the brand new DeliBelly, and of course the delicious Jon the Geek.

The Jon the Geek Special (aka Mole Portabella) is "Grilled portabella mushrooms smothered with our traditional, made-from-scratch mole and topped with avocado, cilantro, onion and crumbled queso fresco." That's a fancy way of saying YUM! I'm so glad we were able to find something I like even better than Mole Chicken and Scallops. I give it 1.2 moles. I also found out that this is really similar to a taco Roberto (the owner of Tacodeli) used to make sometimes when he'd open up the original Tacodeli for his friends after they went out for a night on the town. In other words, the Jon the Geek Special has its origin in drunk food. I wholeheartedly approve. This is extra funny, since my roommate has been known to make sure our fridge is stocked with breakfast taco fixings before we go to anything where I might imbibe alcoholic beverages, because more than once I've felt the overwhelming urge to make elaborate breakfast tacos when I get home.

I forgot to write down or photograph the full description of the DeliBelly: (hopefully I'll be able to edit that in soon), but it's locally raised pork belly, avocado, cilantro, onions, and some sort of honey salsa "Richardson farm's pork belly, roasted and served with a serrano-tomatillo-Goodflow-honey salsa and served with cilantro, onion, and avocado." I'm not a huge pork fan, but this was about as good as pork can get. I give it 0.9 moles, which means it edges out the Lomo Especial as my favorite pork taco.

However, the most awesome part may have been the introduction of the official Tacodeli Eat the Menu Card. Inside, all 24 lunch tacos, 6 breakfast tacos, and 9 lunch specials are listed, along with space for four "Super Specials," with the "Jon the Geek Week Special Portabella Mole" pre-filled. When you order, the cashiers punch out the dot next to the taco(s) you order. Punch them all by the end of 2010, and you get a special "I Ate the Menu" t-shirt (assuming nothing goes wrong with that plan; the shirts aren't actually printed yet). I started my second trip through the menu today. Let me know in the comments if you plan to try.

Today in Geek, 20091223

It's technology day among geeks today, apparently.

Technology

Video-stitched cellphone streams go widescreen. Microsoft has developed a system to stitch together cellphone videos of the same scene to create higher-resolution videos. I highly recommend the video. Neat idea!

Green

Body Heat Energy Generation. They say this is for "micropower devices," but I wonder how much power you could realistically harvest from non-intrusive devices. They say they can get about 100-600 microWatts for a wristwatch-sized generator. Is that getting close to something that could recharge my cellphone and/or run an mp3 player?

Awesome

Typing With Your Brain. Researchers presented a study at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Epilepsy Society in which they were able to consistently predict the desired letters of patients "at or near 100 percent accuracy." Other studies have had similar success, apparently, but this one promises much greater speed, more the "you think it, it happens" that we expect from mind-reading computers. Sure, it requires electrodes implanted in the brain, but that seems like a small price to pay.

Today in Geek, 20091222

I didn't see a lot of geekiness today, but some of what I saw was pretty awesome. These are the ones worth talking about.

Science
New DNA Analysis Method Drastically Cuts Time and Cost of Genome Sequencing. I think genetically tailored medicine is about to lead us to a medical revolution on the order of the discovery of vaccines or Lister's hand-washing campaign, and faster DNA sequencing will likely be useful for that.

Medicine Awesome
Robotic Knee Helps Perfectly Healthy Runners Run Even Better. Prosthetics aren't just for people who actually need them anymore. A Japanese team has developed a device that straps  to the leg and helps you run faster. Gentlereaders, we can rebuild us! We have the technology!

That's it for today. What did I miss? Certainly there's more out there!

Today in Geek, 20091218

This is the entirety of what geeks can think about today, rightfully so:

It was just so very, very beautiful. I loved everything about it. I could not possibly recommend it more. I've been trying to take it easy to avoid setting expectations too high, but I don't think expectations can be too high. I've often wondered what it would have been like to be an adult geek in 1977 when Star Wars came out. Now I know. Thank you, James Cameron.

Today in Geek, 20091217

Today was a good day to be a geek. There may have been a huge discovery in physics, there were at least two stories that seem too far fetched for science fiction but are actually happening, and I found a new hero. Let's start with the physics.

Science

Experiment Detects Particles of Dark Matter, Maybe. Researchers may have detected dark matter, the stuff that probably makes up about 80% of the universe, in a mine in Minnesota. The signal wasn't strong enough to say for sure yet, but the signal they got was the signal they expected if the stuff is real, so that's a good sign.

Medicine

First Commercial 3-D Bioprinter Fabricates Organs to Order. Ok, the printer is still in early testing, and the company that makes it says arteries and veins are five years off, with actual organs more like 10 (by their estimation), but if this thing works out, that'll simply be amazing. Theoretically, particularly combined with stem cell research, the printer could be used to print organs using your own cells, so they could build an organ that your body couldn't possibly reject. That's pretty darned awesome. Of course, I couldn't help thinking about how awesome the technology will be when combined with artificial meat. Mmmm, custom-designed meat.

Mad Engineering

Robotic Insects Could Pollinate Flowers and Find Disaster Victims. Some engineers want to design robobees to help pollinate flowers (since the real bees are still dying), and probably to find disaster victims, and, presumably, eventually to take over the world. I applaud your efforts, sirs.

Awesome

$300 Sci-Fi YouTube Video Lands $30m Movie Deal. The article originally put the amount at $300 million (and still mentions that amount as of right now, which would put the deal higher than the budget of Avatar). Regardless, the story is basically this: a guy made a 4-minute movies and posted it on YouTube, and Sam Raimi made a $30 million dollar deal with him to see what he can do with real money. I don't care if the resulting movie sucks, this guy is my hero. Here's the short that got him that contract:

Three days in a row. Wow. Maybe this is a thing again. As usual, let me know in the comments if I missed anything.

Today in Geek, 12/16/2009

Today's headlines were full of geeky medical news, but I have to start with the story that has me nearly giddy.

Awesome

Nearby "Super Earth" May Have Oceans, Thick Atmosphere. We found a planet that probably has a huge ocean of liquid water. It probably doesn't have life, but we're getting closer. As a researcher put it in another article on the subject, "This planet is a harbinger of what’s to come. It’s not just that we can study this one object in more detail. It’s the torch, telling us about this new thing that’s going to happen." This planet has astronomers talking about the likelihood that we'll find an inhabitable (and possibly inhabited) planet soon, and that's just awesome.

Astronomy

Dying Star Mimics Our Sun's Death. Have you ever wondered what our Sun will look like after it eats the inner Solar System? Ok, probably not, but I have, and now I know. Researchers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have released a video of a pulsating nearby star going through its red giant phase, the same phase our Sun will go through in about 5 billion years. Keep in mind that, at its largest, that star is roughly the size of the orbit of Mars.

Medicine

Synthetic Nano-Platelets Added to Blood Cut Healing Time in Half and Artificial Red Blood Cells To Aid Drug Delivery, Imaging. Two independent teams released news today about advances in fake blood. The first team produced "artificial red blood cells," essentially tiny packets that could be used to deliver drugs, dyes, etc deep into tissues (because they're small enough to fit through capillaries). It doesn't look like they could be targeted yet, but just getting them to fit into such small spaces is a big jump. The second team produced synthetic platelets to help stop bleeding faster. The nanoparticles work pretty much the same as platelets, crosslinking to clot the blood. Treating wounds with the nanoparticles—or injecting them to help with internal bleeding—cut bleeding time in half in rats. Assuming they can be mass produced and pass testing, I can imagine these being very useful to EMTs.

Scientists Decode Entire Genetic Code of Cancer. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what this one means. Cancers are caused by combinations of many, many mutations. No individual cancer patient has the same set of mutations as any other cancer patient. So I'm not sure yet exactly what they mean by this story, but scientists have apparently mapped the 30,000 mutations associated with melanoma (skin cancer), and the 23,000 mutations associated ith lung cancer. I'll have to dig deeper to figure out what that means, exactly, but it sounds like it's probably a big deal.

Nanotechnology

Crowds of Bacteria Turn Gears a Million Times Their Size. I love this video. The bacteria aren't really doing anything "useful," they're just swimming around randomly... but the shapes of the gears translate those random motions into work (turning the gears in the desired way). I love the idea of future devices being powered by the random motions of bacteria.

Today was a pretty big day in geek. Did I miss anything? If so, let me know in the comments.

Halleloumi!

On Iron Chef a few weeks ago, Michael Symon used something intriguing. Alton Brown explained that it was halloumi, a Cypriot cheese with a special distinction: it has a relatively high melting point, and can, therefore, be seared. You can throw this cheese (which, if authentic, is non-cow, so it's safe for people with casein allergies or light lactose intolerance) in a hot pan (or even on the grill), and the outside of it gets crispy and golden-brown, while the inside slightly softens. The result is a beautiful thing.

It took me a while to finally procure some halloumi; I think other people who saw the episode also made a run on Central Market to try it out. I finally got some last week, though, and got the chance to try it out today.

The halloumi that was left by the time I thought to take a photo of it.

OHMYGODTHATWASSOGODDAMGOOD. It's like a little grilled cheese sandwich, or maybe a cracker with cheese melted inside of it. Either way, it's yummy, and just so interesting.

If you track down some halloumi and decide to try it out yourself, I recommend this:

• Cut it into ~1 cm thick pieces. You should probably then cut those pieces diagonally (I didn't). Basically, make them roughly cracker-sized, but thicker (the thicker pieces had more gooey yummy cheese in the middle).
• Sear each side for a little under 2 minutes (about 1:45 seemed to be best, but I wasn't careful about it).

That's all. Top it with whatever you feel like topping it with. I used some leftover basil leaves and slivered almonds to make some pestoish stuff, which was good, but get creative. I think my next try will be to copy the Isaac Newton sandwich at B.D. Riley's, and top the cheese with bacon and green apple slices. I'll let you know how that goes, but I'm having a premonition that it'll be awesome.

Let me know in the comments if you try it out, or if you have any other ideas for what to do with it.

Shared Google Reader Items, 6/12/2009

Hey, remember when I used to post about the cool things I'd read in my RSS feeds from Google Reader? I miss that. I think I'm going to do that again. I'm picking my favorites for the week, rather than failing to post it daily. Let's see how that goes.

Since I'm only posting about my favorites, I'll try to say a little more about them. We start with a guy who's waaaaaaaaaay geekier than I am, which makes me very jealous.

Army Mechanic's Garage Tinkering Yields 18-Foot Mecha Exoskeleton [Popular Science]

I've mentioned my fascination with mecha (walking vehicles controlled by a pilot inside of them, often mimicing the pilot's motion) before, but this guy has me beat by a lot. It took him 4 years and $25,000, but this guy really built an 18-foot-tall robot vehicle. I'm just blown away that this thing is real. The scary part: he lives in Wasilla, Alaska. That is probably the last town I would like to have access to a mecha army.

DARPA's "Programmable Matter" Project Creating Shape-Shifting Materials [Popular Science]

DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka the government organization that funds all of the crazy cool research) is working on "programmable matter," materials that can change shape on command. Right now it's only "self-folding origami"--materials that fold along macroscopic-level, defined lines--but the idea is to eventually get it down to a molecular level. In other words, DARPA is funding creation of the T-1000. Assuming they don't combine it with a malevolent artificial intelligence, that's just awesome.

Speeding up brain networks might boost IQ [New Scientist]

I've seen poorly reported stories in New Scientist before (such as their story about SETI finding a signal from an alien civilization, to which the SETI researchers involved replied (paraphrasing) "We did what now?" (I think this is the story, but I also think they've toned it down from the original). That said, this story about research into the structural basis for intelligence is very interesting. If the story's true, we might not be far from pills that make us smarter. The pills won't fill up our better brains with information, but making everyone more capable to learn and reason seems very interesting.

Accoustic Black Hole Created in Bose-Einstein Condensate [arXiv, via Slashdot]

Bose-Einstein condensates are strange states of matter, made up of a very low temperature gas of bosons. Strange things can happen in Bose-Einstein condensates. A strange thing that had been predicted for a while but not yet observed was the ability to create an accoustic equivalent of a black hole--in other words, a thing that is to sound waves and "phonons" (the particle equivalents of sound waves) what black holes are to light waves and photons. A team in Israel has made one. Don't worry, this thing isn't going to suck the world into it or anything (not that normal black holes would do that, either). But it very possibly will allow us to observe Hawking radiation. That's the stuff predicted to be given off by black holes, the prediction that made Stephen Hawking famous enough among physicists that he could become famous to non-physicists. Confirming that prediction gets us another step toward understanding how the universe works. Neat.

Wireless Power Harvesting for Cell Phones [Technology Review via Slashdot]

Nokia is developing a wireless phone that can charge off of ambient electromagnetic fields--all of those waves broadcast all around us, such as the stuff the wireless phone itself runs off of, or television and radio transmissions. It isn't much yet, but it only needs to be a little. The goal is to make it produce more power while idling than it uses to idle. If it can do that, its charge will go up when it's sitting in your pocket, rather than draining. To me, that's unbelievably awesome. It's using power that's there already, that we currently waste. So very cool, and such an amazingly awesome idea.

A boy claims he was hit by a meteorite [the only skeptical version of this story on the interwebs, thanks to the Bad Astronomer]

There's a good chance a kid got injured by a meteorite. There is no chance he got hit by a meteorite traveling at 30,000 mph, though. If he did, 1) that meteorite would not be behaving like meteorites behave, and 2) he'd be dead. But on the assumption that he's just getting some facts wrong, and journalists are doing their regular bad job of finding out what actually happened. But hey, he probably at least got hit by shrapnel from a meteorite, and walked away with just a scratch. Neat. For his sake, I kinda hope it leaves a scar. That's a hell of a story.

Warp Drive Engine Could Suck Earth Into Black Hole [Discovery.com, via Holly on Facebook]

Let's hope 1 plus 1 equals 3. If the universe behaves like it seems to behave, some Italian researchers think a warp drive would incinerate the ship using it and suck observers into a black hole. Hmm, I should probably back up.

In the 90s, a physicist named Michael Alcubierre figured out, in theory, how to make what's now called an Alcubierre warp drive. Nothing can move faster than light. Well, no thing can move faster than light. But Alcubierre figured out that spacetime can move faster than light. So if we could move the spacetime around a ship, we could go faster than light. And there might even be ways to make that happen.

But now researchers in Italy have figured out that, once the ship ran out of energy, the bubble of fast-moving spacetime would rupture, the inside would rise to a temperature hotter than the temperature of the core of the Sun squared, and then squared again, and then multiplied by the temperature of the core of the Sun again for good measure. The warp drive might then collapse into a black hole. That might not be the most convenient mode of transportation.

However, if string theory is correct (described by the author of the article as "a universe where 1 plus 1 equals 3"), there might be a way to make a stable warp drive. We'd need to convert the entire mass of Jupiter into energy to power it, which might be a bit inconvenient, but maybe the Nokia guys can come up with something a bit less destructive by the time we work out all of the other details of how to make the thing.

That's it for this week. As always, leave any comments on these or any of my other shared items below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/14/2009

Darnit, it took me a week to get back to my shared items from Google Reader again. Here goes...

Science:

• Bacon cures hangovers. Thank you once again, science! Is there anything you can't do?
• Scientists in Australia have apparently found a way to stop the body from attacking (and rejecting) organ transplants. This might be even cooler than the bacon thing.
• I found it utterly unsurprising that chimps have to take their lady friends out to dinner to get laid.
• If you ever find yourself back in time, it would be useful to have this sheet. He promises to fix the H-2-zero typo in the next printing, too.

Technology:

• Slashdot points us to a tutorial on putting together a multitouch "Surface PC" for far less than the $10k Microsoft wants for theirs. I have to find some money to try this...
• My iFriend David comes up with cool ideas on his blog, and then people actually make them. That is cool.
• This almost makes me want a cat.
• It's getting close. Soon something will happen with 3d printers to revolutionize the world. This is a step in that direction.

Entertainment:

• My former coworker Amanda has a new collection of short stories out. Her previous books have been awesome, so I highly recommend this one. Whoot, I just noticed she has Kindle editions now. Very nice.
• Woody Harrelson defended himself after attacking a photographer by claiming that he thought the photographer was a zombie. I blame McCarron.
• Disney reuses dances. I'm not terribly surprised, but at least a little.

The Internets:

• Google has fully integrated search-by-color into image search. Neat!
• InfoChimps is a cool website. Go vote for them.
• Microsoft did something cool. Their live search can now solve algebra equations. So far it looks like it can only handle single-variable equalities, but it's still cool.
• Amazon has almost 800 free mp3s available from their library. It's a clever trick. I'm probably going to buy at least one album based on a very good sample I downloaded.

Politics:

• This has been all over the place in the almost-week since I originally shared it, but, in case you haven't seen it, the ad by the National Organization for Marriage about big bad scary gay marriage is unintentionally hilarious.
• Gov. Paterson of New York is going to introduce a same-sex marriage bill. It's about time, New York. Iowa beat you? Seriously??

Awesome:

• PG&E is going to get power beamed down from solar panels in space. I don't know how efficient or real it is, but the idea is awesome. And, if it works, it could even be useful.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/6/2009

Last time I posted my shared items from Google Reader, I said that maybe I'd get on a daily schedule. Oops.

Science:

• There may be a link between autism and vinyl floors. This is only an initial finding, but at least people switching from PVC floors won't doom their kids (and other kids) to die of measles.
• However, the correlation might not mean anything. Take, for example, this strong correlation between US highway fatalities and lemon imports from Mexico.
• What can happen when poorly characterized correlations are misidentified as causes: As of last week, Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers have killed 150 people.
• Looking to cut unhealthy foods out of your diet? It may be a bad idea to go to restaurants with healthy options, then. A new study found that having salad as an option for a side made people more likely to order a side of fries. Or for the more evil spin on that: If any of you own or plan to some day open a restaurant, take note. Put something cheap-but-healthy in the "extras" areas of your menus, and people are more likely to order one of those extras. I wonder if it'd also apply to other extras. Maybe we'll start seeing things that are actually useful in supermarket checkouts, to trick us into buying more candy bars.
• Want to boost your willpower? Lifehacker (and a Case Western study) says to brush your teeth with the wrong hand. Apparently this is also supposed to help you avoid Alzheimer's.
• Bad Astronomy included an announcement of a cool contest today: create a stick-figure cartoon that can be used to educate people about a false argument. Cool.
• I love this video of the Sun's surface. I mean, think about it for a minute. That's the surface of the Sun. When you watch that video, you're seeing the structure of that surface. People 100 years ago didn't even know if the surface of the Sun had structure, and now we can watch videos of it. Neat.

The Internets:

• PageZipper is a neat bookmarklet for stitching together long pages. It's particularly useful for The Big Picture. Now to learn user script coding, so I can make it auto-run for The Big Picture.
• I find it funny but unsurprising how many versions of the story about internet surfing increasing productivity showed up in various Google Reader shared lists.
• Worried that you might have the Conficker virus? Check this page to find out. I love how simple and clever that site is.
• If you use Gmail, I highly recommend turning on Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs. I can't think of a downside to it, and the upside is that it can teach you some neat search tricks. For example, type "has" after you turn it on.
• I shared a story about Google being in late-stage talks to acquire Twitter, but it now has an update saying it's not true. Darn, I thought that could be interesting.
• The Associated Press is going to try to stop web aggregators from using their stories. In other words, the AP doesn't want anybody to read their stories. I'm going to try to avoid doing so going forward. Pssst, AP: try to find a model that works, rather than trying to sue the model that people want out of existence.
• Lifehacker pointed me to a cool pair of bookmarklets to tag things to read later and then pull one off your list. A friend pointed me to one that does the same sorta thing, but allows you to read the stuff you put on your list from other devices (or, I just noticed, by pulling them into an aggregator as an RSS feed). I need to search around each to find which I actually recommend, but for the moment Instapaper wins just because Lifehacker's recommendation got smashed into oblivion by click-throughs, and this is the sorta thing that might continue to tax a server.

Geek Culture:

• Thinkgeek made an awesome Tauntaun sleeping bag as an April Fools' prank. Now demand is so high that they might actually make it. Please please please please please. Also, please sell it in adult sizes.
• Two geeks in New Jersey made fools out of a lot of people with a simple UFO hoax. Strong work.

Politics and Government:

• Sweden's Parliament voted last Wednesday to allow same-sex marriage (226 to 22). That's like Congress voting to allow it. That's awesome, I wish we could get to that point.
• But hey, at least Iowa's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Iowa. It's a start. According to 538, it might even survive.
• The US government will launch Data.gov in late May to provide a clearing house of government data. Very, very cool.
• I love Obama. "I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Green:

• Lifehacker had a video about a great trick to light things like workshops in sunny places: 2-liter bottles with water and a bit of bleach. Brilliant.
• Off-shore windpower might exceed US electricity demand. Holy crap. Let's get that figured out.

Technology:

• T-Mobile is going to launch an Android-powered tablet. I hope it's going to be actual touchscreen, like a G1 or iPhone, not stylus-based... but it'll be interesting to see how they solve screen-scratching potential in something as large as a laptop if that's the case.

Awesome:

• Sure, I could have put this in the Science block, but it really needed its own tag: a robot made a scientific discovery all by itself. To be clear, this wasn't a group of scientists deciding what the robot should investigate and using the device to test their hypothesis. The robot was given a pool of data, and software to analyze that data in order to make its own hypothesis. It then designed experiments to test that hypothesis, carried them out, and analyzed the results. That is unbelievably awesome. I, for one, welcome our new robot scientist overlords.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.