I remember Marvin… who lived his adult live in a house surrounded by a quiet forest of tall pine trees.  Until-I-15 came through right next to him.  When asked about how horrible his lot (no pun) was, he simply replied that he was happy for the many years he had enjoyed in the quiet.

This about sums it up.

I expect you have noticed the new “Photo Memories” box that appear in the upper right-hand side of Facebook’s interface — basically a photo including you and one of your friends. Although I rarely click on them, I kind of like the addition. I had not, however, realized that this addition might be making scores of Facebook users depressed by showing them painful photos including their exs.

So Facebook has fixed this, and its all well and good. But it did give me chuckle given my propensity to rant about attempts to turn our social lives into algorithms.

The day before I read this post, I gave a lecture on “Remembering, Forgetting and the Challenges of Representing Humans” in Social Implications of Information Systems. During  this lecture I talked to students about the ways in which the design of a site like Facebook can help us share details from our lives, but in doing so it also restrains what can be shared.  When talking about Facebook’s Relationship Status I made the point that a drop-down box of values is probably too limited to capture the full range of our relationship experiences (something I have blogged about before).

One of my students explained that even when we do use the system Facebook designs, sometimes the information we provide is an outright lie. On her Facebook profile, apparently, she is married to her “best gay friend.”

So back to the photos. It’s great that Facebook is no longer making people depressed. Also, I kind of like the new feature. But it seems that Facebook is once again relying on the data people provide in ways that might be problematic. After all, I suspect my student will eventually meet the man of her dreams, and when the time is right they’ll update their Facebook and let the world know. However, this also means she’ll have to break up with her best friend, and Facebook will no longer remind them of the fun times they have had over the years.

From the site, Greg found this note in a middle school:

This was left in class one day as I was getting ready to go. I student-teach at the middle school for 5th and 6th graders. I’m glad to know that even in the Bible Belt South love of any gender can exist. I’m going to keep it.

Alright, I didn’t really shove a bird in a cookie, but I thought I should share a fun new dessert that I tried for the first time last night. Technically, they are called “pillow cookies.” However, given that the basic idea is to shovel a brownie inside of a chocolate chip cookie, I think “turducken” is more appropriate.

I learned about them when my colleague David challenged me to take my cookies to a new level last Friday, and produced a blog post by Bakerella. I think “new level” might have meant more layers (David kept suggesting we find a way to deep fry them as well), but I decided to surprise them with an invitation to turducken-it up.

More pictures after the jump…

Basically the idea is to wrap a brownie in cookie dough. (Lego guy here for perspective — these dough balls were huge.)

We baked them…

…and they  turned out kind of amazing. Don’t worry, our Lego guy survived. However this is a lot of cookie and I’m not sure if I will.

Sent by Judy… it is so true.
(From Jeffro’s Anatomy of a Hipster series.)

I just sat down in LUCI for a few minutes to take a break from today’s schedule, only to have Meg remark: “They must be exhausted.” I suspect she meant the prospective students, but I think it could apply to any of us.

Visiting student days are always intense and there is just too much information to process. It is just impossible to describe the immensity of choosing your PhD program. That said, these students look great, and I certainly hope they all choose to come play with us in Irvine. In just a few minutes, they will get to relax as well: We are all piling in cars and heading to the beach.

For today, I leave you with this picture in honor of our prospectives. A baby anteater — fresh-eyed, full of ideas, and ready to do some research! (You can see it, right?)

So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis.

It was with a fond appreciation of our sweet buttery friends that I began my PhD education at UC Irvine, as well as culinary education focused on cookies (albiet more ad-hoc). It started when one of our admin staff had to do a variety of bizarre tasks to sort out the behind-the-scenes details of my fellowship. I am still not clear on what happened, but as I understand it had a lot to do with too many pockets of money with too many random restrictions. The point is that something was screwed up, and someone worked extra hard to unscrew it. And for this, I decided to make them cookies.

Emboldened by a KitchenAid mixer, somehow the recipe was doubled, and before I knew it I was taking cookies to all kinds of admin staff. Surely it was only a matter of time before they each would do something deserving of edible thank-yous, and so I figured it couldn’t hurt to bank some karma (Tip for grad students: Eating cookies with admin staff actually gives you time to learn a little about them. I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but it is nice to have so many cookie-filled smiles around).

When I told my friend Gabe about the cookies, he excitedly sent me off to try a recipe from the New York Times. I suppose that was the beginning of the end. The recipe, however, while completely fantastic, was not nearly as interesting as the attached article, evocatively entitled “Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret.”

Interspersed in a cookie-fan-boy narrative were fantastic tips with explanations that made my engineering heart quicken. For example, did you know that it is important to let your dough refrigerate? It turns out that when you mix your ingredients, you are basically wrapping your flour in butter, preventing the eggs from getting through and working their magic. The solution? 24-36 hours in the fridge gives eggs time to work through the butter and work their magic! Of course they say the “proof is in the <cookie-based alternative to pudding>”, and after making a batch (double, of course), I was stunned at how good they were.

Since the NYT episode, I have moved on to other varieties, scouring the web for the same kind of technical explanations of what is actually happening during the cooking process. This UCI oven has popped out peanut butter, chocolate mint, ginger, and most recently, biscotti — cranberry, pistachio, pine nut biscotti, to be precise — and most of them aren’t half bad. I, meanwhile, have learned about letting ingredients come to room temperature before mixing, the awesome power of parchment paper, letting your cookie sheet cool between batches, and (sadly) the horror of doubling everything in a recipe except the flour (cooked butter anyone?).

At this rate “to cookies” may end up earning my dissertation dedication (that, or “the gym”), but until then I am amazed at how amenable cookies are to my geekiness. I am presenting in class today, so I figured I would whip up a batch of cookies for everyone. I thought about the biscotti, and was momentarily tempted by the ginger cookies — but man, those NYT cookies are just amazing.

Check them out for yourself: The recipe, and the play by play. (Oh, and be sure to send me your favorites too!)