Fall Flavors

Sadly, I don't have nearly as much time to churn during the semester, but I do have a few memorable creations:

XOReo: Peppermint ice cream made exclusively with real Oreos and heavy cream. Featured at the CS51 TA staff Doctor Who night.

Man Go: What happens when you type go into a terminal? Let's find out! A mango sorbet with a hint of lime.

P: The long-awaited dramatic foil of No-Pumpkin Complete. I included the pumpkin this time, not only to make this a delicious fall-themed ice cream, but also because you need to be efficient during the semester! (Well, polynomial, at any rate.)

Cream-eleh: As rich and complex as the CS17 project, but worlds tastier. I can't help but use a diminutives when expressing affection for this creme brulee ice cream.

Flavor of the Day: fu(ji)bar

This is a twist on my regular dough-while: a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with pecan pralines. (If you don't know what those are, imagine cooking pecans in butter and sugar until they are as fubar as the name of this ice cream.) This is a special 21st birthday creation for a girl who does not drink, but has an affinity for cookie dough and candied pecans.

Public Key Encryption, Biotch

While teaching CS to middle school girls this summer, I came to the fabulous realization that girls at this age will learn anything as long as you turn it into a competitive game. This allows them to take the full power of their fabulous teen-girl attitudes and apply it to learning computer science. It sounds unlikely, but it is miraculously so.

When we were teaching the different areas of cryptography, we played a game where each team would send a representative up to the buzzer, the teachers would read a scenario, and the representatives would ring the buzzer and state whether this scenario was an example of symmetric key encryption, public key encryption, digital signatures, or multi-party computation and give the reason why. In a beautiful moment of attitude, our most z-snapping girl faked a slap at a teammate after a wrong answer, shouting, "Oh my god, that was so public key encryption!"

I hope that in four years this generation of girls will be entering the field of CS at top schools all over the country, kicking ass and taking names in cryptography while wearing oversized hoop earrings.

America, the Nerdical

This was another forgotten ice cream adventure, and yet how could I have forgotten? This was not a flavor, but a cake, constructed by me and Jeremy for the 4th of July. And what I cake it was! It was probably the best thing I've eaten in my life. On the bottom was a large chocolate chip cookie. This was followed by homemade Vanilla Basic ice cream. On top of this was a layer of crush oreos, followed by C ice cream, then fresh whipped cream. Finally we made the traditional American flag out of strawberries and blueberries. Oh, the fireworks!

A Celebration of Nerdy Boys

A beautiful moment at Artemis this summer:

(Note: Artemis is the free computer science summer program at Brown for middle school girls, for which I was a coordinator this summer)

At the end of the program our students gave presentations to the faculty, staff and students of the CS department. I invited a number of my friends who were doing research here over the summer. My students knew that I had some pretty nerdy friends. One student with an especially powerful attitude asked if the people she saw standing around were my friends. I said that they were, and she uttered four very powerful words: "Nerds can be hot."

Flavor of the Day: C

Pure chocolate. Simple and unpretentious. Also pairs well with Bananas and ROM, probably because it's a low-level flavor.

Flavor of the Day: Bananas and ROM

Last night was the (first) cast party for Twelfth Night, and I created two flavors for our celebrations. We were all dancing in the overwhelming heat and humidity, and ice cream tasted amazing. My first flavor was this banana custard ice cream with a hint of rum. After GCD (ginger custard dessert), I'm really into custard ice creams. This is not surprising, considering they are even richer than normal ones. You heat the cream and milk and mix in egg yolks and sugar to form a custard before churning. Quite delicious.

Flavor of the Day: MSB: Melon Sorbet Bliss

This was my first attempt at a sorbet, and it was most delicious. The recipe was fascinating. The only ingredients were honeydew, sugar and white wine. I suppose the wine helps to inhibit the freezing so that the sorbet doesn't become one large popsicle. I wondered, however, whether you could get drunk off of sorbet. After all, normally food that contains wine is cooked but for this you only needed to heat the wine until all the sugar dissolved. Well, it certainly was interesting, but perhaps not my most significant bit of summer cooking as the name suggests.

Flavor of the Day: GCD: Ginger Custard Dessert

This is a ginger custard ice cream made with freshly grated ginger. Could Euclid taste it, he would be begging for the algorithm.

A Forgotten Flavor: ML

This flavor was created on July 3rd, but I somehow forgot to report it. When my friends have birthdays, I ask them to put in flavor requests. This flavor was a special birthday request for my friend ML-y. In a classic case of ML pattern-matching, I made her this delicious chocolate raspberry ice cream and a chocolate cake with fresh strawberries.

(chocolate, (_, berry))

How could I forget such a memorable creation? Well despite it's elegance, ML is often overlooked.

Flavor of the Day: The Greeny Approach

It's true, the greeny approach is not the best in most cases. But in ice cream, it is provably optimal. This is a green tea flavor, simple and elegant. And it runs out in O(1/n) time, where n is the number of spoons.

Flavor of the Day: Banana-ed

This flavor is for all those squatters of the Sunlab, those residents of Row Nine, those blameless computer science students who have been banana-ed. This is for the banana-ed, the perma-banana-ed, the banana-ed from banana-ing, and the banana-ed from being banana-ed. To you, my creatures of the CIT, I offer my take on the banana split: a strawberry-vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries and bananas, pieces of home-made fudge, and a sprinkling of walnuts. I'll see you in TA camp.

Flavor of the day: chai-catch

All the flavor of a vanilla chai, with none of the danger of an uncaught exception. Won't you chai it?

Flavor of the Day: Mascarpwn

This is my greatest cream creation. Inspired by the Italian dessert, it is a mascarpone honey ice cream with fig jam and walnuts. Even the 1337-est ice cream connoisseurs have to admit: they have just been mascarpwned.

Feat of Nerdiness: Text on the Beach

Another reason I haven't written much lately is because I recently spent a week on the Outer Banks in North Carolina with my boyfriend and his family. They are a wonderfully nerdy family but they were still rather surprised by the book I had brought for some light beach reading. It was Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation. In my defense, I told them that it was to prepare for the course I am to head-TA in the fall. Apparently, this is no excuse for mixing nondeterminism and sand into a delicious cocktail I call text on the beach.

Flavor of the Day: Dough-rie

This is another non-CS flavor (but don't despair! there is more CS to come). Dough-rie is a peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookie dough flavor with a vanilla base. My friend came to visit me at Brown and wanted to try out my ice cream maker. Not only did we make a delectable doughy dessert, we also had enough dough left over for a batch of peanut-butter cookies.

Flavor of the Day: Not All Who Wander

This flavor does not have a CS-themed name. This summer, my friends and I participated in the Providence 48-hour film festival. We received a genre (horror), a character (Sonya, an addict), a prop (a coffee pot), and a line of dialogue ("I'm pretty sure that's not right."). We then had 48 hours to create a 4-7 minute film. All of the Providence films were screened in a local movie theater, and ours was recently chosen for the screening of the best films from the festival, which will happen this Saturday. I can't wait to go!

Our film is titled "Not All Who Wander", and can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pImhkZ0shts.

If you watch the film, you will see why Not All Who Wander is a coffee ice cream. I tried to find red hots to blend in for the effect of blood droplets swirling into coffee, but I was unable to find them, so I used a different cinnamon candy. It wasn't perfection, but it was pretty good for a creation made after 48 hours of film production.

(De)Feat of Nerdiness: An Ice Dream Deferred

As one of my (few) readers recently reminded me, I have rather neglected this blog of late. Perhaps it is because I experienced a tragic setback in my ice cream production.

Just as I'd promised, I held a sale of my homemade ice cream on Wriston Quad. In the five days before my sale, I prepared ten flavors of ice cream:
Chip Improve-mint
Java
Dough-while
Three-colorability
Peaches and Scheme
Strawberry Seed of Randomness
Secret Key Lime Pie
No-Pumpkin Complete
Bayes-elnut
Big-O

I dressed in my blue dress with the polka-dots and put on my candy cane earrings. I even had my friend Ethan there to juggle with me. Sadly, I had very few customers. I think a lot of the reason was that I didn't advertise very much among people here this summer. I relied mainly on the summer@brown kids, but it happened to be their move-out day. Perhaps I also looked sketchy with all of my mismatched containers. However, I think the solution is really to just make less ice cream. The people who bought it were really astounded, so I suppose I can just shrink my operation.

Luckily, my house had no problem with several left-over quarts. The abundance of ice cream also gave me time to rest up. After this endeavor, I was a bit churned out and didn't create new flavors for a few weeks. However, there were a few that were created since my last post. See above and salivate.

Flavors of the Week...and a plan for putting them in action

Big-O: Chocolate orange ice cream with pieces of homemade fudge. Unbounded richness.

dough-while: Smooth vanilla ice cream with a swirl of homemade chocolate chip cookie dough. (No raw eggs, please!)

Secret Key Lime Pie: Lime ice cream with graham cracker pieces and 3072 bits of homemade sugared limes.

While my ice cream maker was churning, I also signed up to be in the Providence 48-hour film competition. This is how I developed my latest plan for getting my ice cream out into the world. We needed some funds for our short film, and what better way to do that than by selling ice cream? A friend is going to help me design order forms for standard and custom flavors of homemade ice cream, which I'll distribute among the food-adoring Brown CS students. Hopefully this will popularize my ice cream enough so that I can continue selling during the school year. At the very least, I hope our film can include a shot of ice cream churning.

Flavors of the Week

So I've gotten a bit behind on my blog, as one of my approximately five readers was kind enough to point out. I'm currently back at Brown getting ready to teach computer science to a group of 13-year-old girls (AAAAAAAHHH!!!), so I've been a bit busy. We're trying to figure out how to things like teach crypto, AI and theory to middle school girls with no computer experience. Using plastic cups. It will be epic.

The downside of being so busy is that I haven't had time to record the four ice cream flavors I've created since being back. The best thing about living in a house with 11 other people is that I can make a quart and a half of ice cream every day, and it doesn't feel excessive. In fact, it's just barely enough. Ice cream is usually served between 11 and 12 at night. When it's ready, I run up and down the stairs, shouting "ICE CREAM! ICE CREAM!", until everyone comes up to the third floor kitchen. I feel like the pied piper. House business is usually taken care of after ice cream because it's one of the few things that brings us all to the same room. I love bringing the "family" together. (You can "awww" if you feel like it.)

So what creations have I made since I've been back?

C: Pure, simple chocolate.

Chip Improve-mint: I integrated chocolate chips into creamy mint ice cream on a very large scale.

Markoffee Chip: Coffee ice cream with chocolate chips. Artificially intelligent, but made naturally made from fresh coffee grounds.

I also recreated Strawberry Seed of Randomness for the people in my house, since they had never tasted randomness before.

Stay tuned, bh. There will be more to come in a couple days. In the mean time, you should come over for ice cream, though we might make you pay for it since you're not part of our food co-op.

Feat of Nerdiness: Doodles

One day in 11th grade, when my dad first started teaching me CS, I found myself doodling in my Calc BC notes. The prom was approaching (two months away), and everyone in the cast of Les Miserables had started frantically asking each other to go. Desperate that I wouldn't find a date, I planned to ask a boy in my year that I had a little crush on. However, I had never asked anyone on a date in my life, let alone THE date, and I grew more and more nervous as Les Mis rehearsal grew closer. Here is an approximation of what I wrote:

Girl tess = new Girl();
Boy stefan = new Boy();

tess.happy_ = tess.askToProm(stefan);

Flavor of the Day: Java 2.0

This stunning creation is an espresso-cinnamon ice cream (made from freshly ground espresso beans) with chunks of home-made fudge, dark chocolate wafer cookies, and a home-made caramel swirl. It's not conducive to functional programming techniques, but it has very extensive libraries. I expect it will be quite popular.

Feat of Nerdiness: The Wall of xkcd

I'm going to miss my suite from last year. I was living with two CS concentrators (yes, Brown is too pretentious to call it a major), an applied math/econ concentrator, and an applied math concentrator (the only other girl in the suite; she also happened to move out half-way through the year, ensuring the toilet seat would ALWAYS be up). I myself am a math/CS concentrator. In short, I was living in an excess of math.

Our greatest expression of geekdom was the wall of xkcd in our common room. This was already a nerdy wall. Josh had brought a white board back after Thanksgiving break, and it was being used regularly for illustrating reductions or the Ballmer peak. While we were watching the election, I got bored of watching results come in and writing sonnets to the boy I was about to get back together with only to break up again in May. I decided the white board wall needed to be covered in xkcd. We had already talked about having an xkcd wall and had recorded the numbers of our favorite comics. I printed out all of these comics, added the title and alt-text in a purple pen, and attached them to the wall with copious amounts of packing tape.

Finally, Obama was declared the next president of the United States, and all of Brown campus marched, ran and danced their way to the capitol building. It was only when I got up the next morning for CS51 that I realized it said PENISES in giant letters on our wall.

Flavor of the Day: Strawberry Seed of Randomness

This is a home-made strawberry ice cream made with fresh, local strawberries from the farmers' market. Heavenly.

Flavor of the Day: The Professor

The Professor: chocolate ice cream base with pieces of homemade fudge, fresh cherries and cherry brandy

I named this one for my Dad because it's made with his favorite flavors, and he professes the science of computers at a college called St. Rose. (I swear, this stuff runs in families.) It came out a little soft, but for the first creation in my new ice cream maker, I would say it was a success. Such rich chocolate ice cream! And the fudge pieces make it almost too intense. I'm on my way to being an ice cream chef!

Why do I call myself TM?

I am meant to be a theory student. My initials are TMA. Last fall, I discovered that this means I can go by TM (for Turing machine) or TA (for teaching assistant). Destiny? I think so.

Feat of Nerdiness: The Zero-Knowledge Drinking Game

Last semester in Models of Computation and then again in Cryptography, Anna showed us the zero-knowledge proof for 3-Colorability.

(Informal Definition: A graph is 3-Colorable if you can assign each of the vertices one of 3 different colors such that no two vertices connected by an edge have the same color.)

(Informal Definition: A zero-knowledge proof occurs when a Prover wants to demonstrate to a Verifier that she knows some piece of information without the Verifier learning anything about that piece of information.)

She eloquently describes the proof at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=anonymous-authorization,
but I will do my best to describe it here:

In this situation, the Prover knows a 3-coloring for a given graph and wants to prove to the Verifier that she knows the 3-coloring without the Verifier learning anything about the 3-coloring. The Prover 3-colors the graph, then covers all of the vertices with paper cups so that only the edges show. The Verifier then gets to choose an edge. The Prover then reveals the vertices on that edge, demonstrating that they are indeed different colors.

Well. Naturally, when my friend and I saw this, we HAD to turn it into a drinking game (not with alcohol, of course, since we're not 21). We planned a party, and I drew 6 graphs on poster board, half of which were 3-colorable.

The question remained: what's the best way to 3-color a giant graph? With jello shots! (not containing alcohol, of course, since we're not 21) I made a grand total of 90 jello shots in red, green and yellow. We labeled the 3-colorable graphs with directions for coloring them and the non-3-colorable graphs with suggested colorings containing only one bad edge.

Once the party had a critical mass of people, I used my excessively loud voice to make everyone be quiet and listen to the rules. I'll put them here because I highly suggest trying the game for yourself:

Choose two Provers and two Verifiers. The Verifiers leave the room. The Provers color the vertices using jello shots, then cover the jello shots with solo cups. The Verifiers come back into the room. They can choose up to 3 edges to reveal, but for each edge they must drink the jello shots they reveal. Then they make their guess: 3-Colorable or no? If they guess correctly, the Provers must match all of the jello shots they took, and the Verifiers become the Provers. If they guess incorrectly, the Provers remain.

SUCH a fun night. All of the CS people at the party didn't know whether to be excited at playing the game or exasperated at the extent of our nerdiness. A great moment was when a team of non-CS people got really into the game and solved the graph while revealing very few jello shots. Another team decided to divide up the roles into "thinker" and "drinker". Conclusion? Computer science drinking games make for very fun parties, and I plan to come up with more in the future. The only question now is whether to tell the professor about our abuse of the material...

Reflections of a CS girl: Conservation of Hair

Being a theory person, I have a theory as to why there are so many boys with long hair in computer science. My theory is the Conservation of Hair between academic disciplines. Typically, it is the female gender that has long hair, but since there are so few female specimens in computer science, the males have to sport longer hair in order to achieve Conservation of Hair. Maybe this is why there are so many short-haired women in Brown's Gender Studies program...

Feat of Nerdiness: I am Turing machine girl.

Seeing as I only just started this blog but have been an active nerd for over four years, I have a lot of nerdy adventures to catch up on. The first took place around Halloween of 2008. After rejecting my skanky high school costumes (a French maid and a belly dancer), I was in need of something to wear. Finally, after reading the xkcd comic "Candy Button Paper", I landed on the perfect costume: a Turing machine. I dressed in black leggings and a black sweater and wrapped myself from head to foot in candy button paper. I then drew a state transition diagram and pinned it to my back. I already have a head, so I didn't need to create one of those.

My costume created quite a stir. One grad student asked if he could "traverse my states". A professor said he wouldn't speak to me because I wasn't dressed as the lambda-calculus. But the best part of all was the department costume contest. I wasn't aware that there was one at all, but a tiger, a zebra, a male slutty nurse and countless others apparently knew. I decided to try my luck and told all my friends to vote for me.

A few days later I received an email from someone in the CS department. They wanted to know, was I the girl who had dressed up as a Turing machine? I had won the costume contest by an overwhelming margin, but no one seemed to know my name. Everyone had just written "Turing machine girl" on the ballot. I had a new identity. And $20 on amazon.com.

I have only one disappointment from that Halloween. If you send Randall Munroe a picture of yourself dressed as one of his comics, shouldn't he write back?

Ice Dream

I have a secret wish. As a Brown CS student, I'm supposed to want to work for a company like Google or Pixar or become a professor and solve P vs. NP. But I have a better plan. After college is done, I'll get a master's and work for a company for a few years to save up some money. Then I can start my life's true work. I will found the world's first CS-themed ice cream parlor: Silly-cone. Every flavor will be a pun on some concept, person or company in computer science. Cones will come in size "base case" or "inductive step". With negligible probability, your cone will be free. When companies invite me to come sell at their events, I will bring my portable ice cream freezer, or "Touring Machine". In this way, I will make my dream of uniting ice cream and computer science (NP) complete. And who knows? Maybe I'll even have time to prove the quadratic residuosity assumption.

Hello, world!

This is me, Tess. In my picture, I'm blowing out 19 candles on a Ben and Jerry's ice cream cake in my dorm at Brown University. I find this picture to be pretty emblematic of my life.

You see, I am an amateur flavorist and self-proclaimed nerd. I thrive on theory courses, spout puns that make even the CS boys cringe, and design new and beautiful ice cream flavors in my free time. My favorite quote of all time was made by my cryptography professor, the enigmatic Anna Lysyanskaya: "This reduction comes in two flavors."

This blog is the place where I will record my flavorful adventures, jot my observations of the CS world through female eyes, and hopefully re-establish the connection between ice cream and computer science.