Steve and Judy's Travels!

 

I decided to slow cook some food on the grill instead of the smoker.  Food from the smoker is fine, it doesn’t need to be any better than that, but sometimes I like to change things up.  I’ve mastered the technique on the grill.  I know how to set it and how long each step of the process will take.

 

So Friday, on goes the food; on goes the timer.  First check in an hour and wow, this is cooking fast.  I slowed the cooker down as much as I could, but by the end of two hours I was way ahead of where I should be.  It was supposed to cook for five hours.  I pulled it at three and it was overdone and dry.  What the heck happened?

 

Ambient temperature.  It was hot; blazing 100 degree hot.  And sunny.  Not a cloud in the sky.  Before I even lit the fire, with the lid closed, in the full sun, it was probably 150 degrees inside the grill.  Usually grilling is a matter of applying a lot of heat to food.  This time, with the lid closed, the heat was already there.  The least amount of heat I could apply was too much.

 

There won’t be any cooler weather here for the rest of the summer.  For the next time I’m going to slow cook on the grill with the lid closed, I’ve backed the Mazda part way out of the car port and I’ve rolled the grill into that spot in front of it.  From now on, I’ll be grilling in the shade.

 

 

We’re cruising along, safe in The Valley.  Hardly anybody else in the country even knows we’re down here.  Sheltering in place for the pandemic, but no real problem, just a few hundred cases.

 

Lately though, we’ve been hearing more about it.  And yesterday, we get a reverse 911 Emergency Public Safety Alert on our telephones, like when there is a child abduction or severe weather coming.

 

Hospitals are at capacity!  They’re already shipping sick people to other parts of Texas because there is nowhere left to put them here.  Soon the rest of Texas might be full as well.  Houston already is.  It was risky to go out before.  We’re even less likely to go anywhere now.

 

 

Meanwhile, a smokin hot fourth of July! 

 

 

We’ll enjoy it from our air conditioning.  Enjoy safely everybody!

 

We just made our hummingbirds’ lives a little easier.  We trimmed the Firebush.  It was getting so big we couldn’t walk past it in our little yard, so I cut back about a third of it.  There are still plenty of flowers all over the top, but way less for the little birds to remember.  The little birdbrains can remember every feeder along their migration route and even recognize individual people who refill the feeders too.  Maybe as we welcome back the flood of hummingbirds in the fall on their migration south to Central America, some of them will be glad to see us as well.

 

 

 

Just when we thought Jeffrey Epstein’s secrets about the rich and powerful died with him when he committed suicide, here in today’s news comes the arrest of his partner-in-crime for recruiting, using, and sharing underage girls, Ghislain Maxwell.  Guess one more person will have to commit an unattended suicide for the secrets to stay safe.

 

 

 

Tonight at 5:30 Mountain Time.  A discussion on black holes and the information paradox!

 

It’s there just for the clicking on the link below.

 

 

2020 Heinz R. Pagels Physics Talks Please join us LIVE ONLINE TONIGHT 5:30 Aspen time (11:30 UTC) followed by an interactive Q&A     Netta Engelhardt MIT   The Black Hole Information Paradox: A Resolution on the Horizon?   Can information escape from a black hole? General Relativity, which describes the behavior of black holes, and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of information, do not agree on the answer. This disagreement is the essence of the famous 45-year-old Black Hole Information Paradox. Understanding the resolution of this problem is a central pillar in the quest for quantum gravity, a theory that describes the universe at the smallest scales by unifying General Relativity and quantum mechanics. In the past year, there has been an unprecedented amount of progress towards a resolution. I will describe the origin of the paradox and the current status in light of the new developments.     Netta Engelhardt grew up in Jerusalem, Israel and Boston, MA. She received her BSc in physics and mathematics from Brandeis University and her PhD in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a member of the Princeton Gravity Initiative prior to joining the physics faculty at MIT in July 2019.   Professor Engelhardt works on gravitational aspects of quantum gravity with an emphasis on string theory. Her research focuses on understanding the predictions of quantum gravity in the vicinity of gravitational singularities. These include phenomena such as the thermodynamic behavior of black holes as well as cosmic censorship, the hypothesis that singularities are always hidden behind event horizons. She approaches these problems from the perspective of semiclassical gravity, leveraging insights from the interplay between gravity and quantum information via gauge/gravity duality.   Introducer and Co-host: Hong Liu, MIT     Zoom Registration Link   Please register in advance by clicking the Zoom button above. You’ll be able to ask questions during the Q&A by clicking on the hand at the bottom of your screen.   Join us next Thursday for Darkly Charged Dark Matter with Lisa Randall, Harvard University   Aspen Center for Physics | 970-925-2585 | patty@aspenphys.org   Donate       Connect with us ‌ ‌ ‌   Talks will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.

 

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