Today I called 911. No, the apartment wasn’t burning down. My cell phone was actually in my pocket, and somehow, the keyguard was disengaged and 911 was dialed.

Now, what is the probability of this happening? This event implies that six keys needed to be hit in sequence: CALL, * (to shut down the keyguard), 9, 1, 1, CALL. There are no other sequences that can produce a call to 911. This event is highly unlikely. Probability and information theory states that under certain conditions two independent events occuring to produce a joint event of meaning is asymptotically small. This stems from the Asymptotic Equipartition Property. In this case, the two events were the random dialing of keys in my pocket and the dialing of 911. It’s safe to say that these two events are usually independent.

Obviously, I didn’t say anything to the 911 operator when my phone connected. The police department called me back asking if I was all right. It’s good to know they call you back even when all they hear is the shuffling of pants.

Last night, I finally had the chance to compare Heinz ketchup side by side to McDonald’s ketchup. I’ve always known that McDonald’s ketchup was different, but couldn’t accurately compare it to the nation’s favorite.

I have always advocated that there is something sultry and addicting about McDonald’s ketchup. I find myself smothering their breakfast sandwiches with it. As you can tell, I usually like ketchup on fast food.

I did a round of tastings between the two ketchups. I found that Heinz is better balanced, having all the flavors meld nicely. I found McDonald’s to be more salty, and have a less full tomato taste. I think the saltiness really does make it more addicting. When I crave fast food, I’m usually craving salt.

Actually, ketchup and sauce making is quite an art. I found a great piece about sauces. It goes through many of their origins, characteristics, and what makes them successful. It turns out that the main element of a good sauce is in the mix. You don’t want one flavor to overwhelm another:

The tasting began with a plastic spoon. Upon consideration, it was decided that the analysis would be helped if the ketchups were tasted on French fries, so a batch of fries were cooked up, and distributed around the table. Each tester, according to protocol, took the fries one by one, dipped them into the cup–all the way, right to the bottom–bit off the portion covered in ketchup, and then contemplated the evidence of their senses. For Heinz, the critical flavor components–vinegar, salt, tomato I.D. (over-all tomato-ness), sweet, and bitter–were judged to be present in roughly equal concentrations, and those elements, in turn, were judged to be well blended. The World’s Best, though, “had a completely different view, a different profile, from the Heinz,” Chambers said. It had a much stronger hit of sweet aromatics–4.0 to 2.5–and outstripped Heinz on tomato I.D. by a resounding 9 to 5.5. But there was less salt, and no discernible vinegar. “The other comment from the panel was that these elements were really not blended at all,” Chambers went on. “The World’s Best product had really low amplitude.” According to Joyce Buchholz, one of the panelists, when the group judged aftertaste, “it seemed like a certain flavor would hang over longer in the case of World’s Best–that cooked-tomatoey flavor.”

Interestingly enough, ketchup originated from Asia and Mexico. It’s just a mixture of tomatoes, vinegar, garlic, salt, pepper, and other savory spices. Although, I’ve never tasted a sauce from any other culture that is exactly like what we call ketchup. Perhaps Siricha would come close (some people even call it Vietnamese Ketchup, but that’s just wrong).

In the end, I believe it’s the sour notes from the vinegar that really draws us to ketchup. Sour tastes have an interesting property of savoriness that can’t be matched.

People are usually very sharp in graduate school. This is especially true at Stanford. I really felt the heat once I came here, and had to make adjustments in how I approached classwork and projects. Basically, I’m in overdrive.

However, the classes are interesting. Usually the people are interesting too. But some are just annoying and arrogant. Actually, there are quite a few arrogant people here at Stanford. Most notable are the ones that take courses that they already have a good background on. Then, they proceed to ask piercing questions to the professor that go beyond the basic material presented. Sometimes this is interesting, but many other times I feel like it’s purely showmanship.

But there are some people that annoy me even more than the showmanship breed of students. It’s those people that say “mmhmm” and “yes” and nod when the professor is making a crucial point. Sure, we all do the head nod once in a while. I even admit to this, especially if the professor is making a basic point. But there are just some people who audibly confirm the speaker all the time. I’m actually thinking about this particular person in one of my classes that confirms the professor after EVERY single point, as if it were all trivial. This annoys the hell out of me.

If I become a professor one day and hear these people incessantly confirming my points, I’ll give them the chalk and make them derive the crucial points. Then, we’ll let them see how trivial it is. Bah!

I’ve always wondered about what famous chefs eat on their offtime. They’re always touting fancy food creations. But surely they can’t always be eating fancy; they’re only human. It turns out I was right.

Thomas Keller loves to eat an In N’ Out burger with fries and a shake. That’s just cool.

I came across a group called the World Jump Day. Their aim is to reduce the effects of global warming by shifting earth’s axis of rotation. Okay, I buy that. But how do they propose to do this?

Their proposal is to have 600 million people jump at different specified times around the world. Now this, my friends, is ridiculous and impossible due to our old friend called conservation of momentum.

Once we jump up, the earth is actually pushed away by a very tiny amount, and once you land the earth comes to meet you. Momentum is conserved. Another way of saying this is that the total mass x velocity of the system (you and the earth) remains constant. The earth and you go back to where everything began. The only way to really change the momentum is for you to jump high enough to escape earth’s gravity.

Even if we could do this, there would be no way you could get 600 million people organized to do anything worthwhile. The total tally of people signed up is around 60 million, but I suspect this number is inflated.