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.