Prof. Sam Lawler
Prof. Sam LawlerOk the #page42 exercise is going to make me cry.
I picked up "Losing the Sky" by Andy Lawrence, because it's been sitting on my desk as I slowly force myself to read this book about the environmental crisis happening in orbit, but written 5 years ago before it was really bad. Perfect example of how painful this is:
"Satellite pass within a few km of each other every day."
...it's actually more like every few minutes now.
Prof. Sam LawlerRemember kids, always check for planets before taking a 5 minute exposure with a 4 meter telescope to look for Kuiper Belt Objects!
Background: My collaborator running the processing for our survey is now wading through that hilarious/super annoying mistake I made, but was able to be utilized by other members of my team to add to another ongoing survey and help find even more moons of Saturn https://news.ubc.ca/2025/03/saturn-128-new-moons/
Prof. Sam LawlerAnd here's the real downer... AST SpaceMobile plans to launch a few hundred satellites that are as bright as Saturn when sunlit. So. A lot more research images will look like this in the near future.
Thanks, direct-to-cell gigantic satellites.
Prof. Sam LawlerRemember kids, always check for planets before taking a 5 minute exposure with a 4 meter telescope to look for Kuiper Belt Objects!
Background: My collaborator running the processing for our survey is now wading through that hilarious/super annoying mistake I made, but was able to be utilized by other members of my team to add to another ongoing survey and help find even more moons of Saturn https://news.ubc.ca/2025/03/saturn-128-new-moons/
Prof. Sam LawlerHilariously, I found out about the #Cloudflare outage by trying to use a goat gestation calculator from the American Goat Society after breeding the first goat of the year this morning.
Prof. Sam LawlerI don't know why it's so funny to me that the American Goat Society website is down but Overleaf and Zoom are still up, so my workday can pretty much continue as planned, but I'm not 100% sure when my goat babies are coming next spring.
(Ok that last part is totally an exaggeration, it's not that hard math, just nice to have a double check on it)
Prof. Sam LawlerHilariously, I found out about the #Cloudflare outage by trying to use a goat gestation calculator from the American Goat Society after breeding the first goat of the year this morning.
Prof. Sam LawlerThe curds and whey never really went back together (maybe I was supposed to stir it more thoroughly after adding culture?) After sitting in a warm place for a few hours, I decided to put the curd into a cheesecloth and hang it for a while to turn it into a yogurt cheese kind of thing. It smells amazing! Like a toasted caramel dessert of some kind!
Prof. Sam LawlerOk, it looks absolutely disgusting. But it smells and tastes amazing after draining off the whey and salting it! Like caramelized chevre! Maybe I should make a cheesecake with it?
I added some of the yummy-smelling caramelized whey to sourdough pancake batter for dinner (yes dinner, I already know that today is going to be Quite A Day so we're having pancakes for dinner. Sidenote: I almost never plan dinner at the beginning of the day, hoping this will make everything go better)
Prof. Sam LawlerToday's milk experiment: ryazhenka, a Ukrainian baked milk yogurt. I left a pot of milk in the oven at ~200F for 24 hours. It got...super weird. But delicious! It's caramelized, but not really sweet. (I ate some warm on cereal for breakfast - amazing).
Step 2 is to culture it into yogurt. It's got a bizarre, jello-y consistency (recipe is for cow milk, so I'm not sure if it's weird b/c goat milk?) We will see what it turns into...
Recipe from Milk into Cheese by David Asher
Prof. Sam LawlerThe curds and whey never really went back together (maybe I was supposed to stir it more thoroughly after adding culture?) After sitting in a warm place for a few hours, I decided to put the curd into a cheesecloth and hang it for a while to turn it into a yogurt cheese kind of thing. It smells amazing! Like a toasted caramel dessert of some kind!
Prof. Sam LawlerI just got cold-called by a reporter in Saskatoon asking if the Riders' Grey Cup feed could have been glitching a lot because of satellite issues/solar activity.
That is the most Saskatchewan question I have ever been asked. What an honour, I guess?
Prof. Sam LawlerI'm famous in Ituna!
Prof. Sam LawlerToday's milk experiment: ryazhenka, a Ukrainian baked milk yogurt. I left a pot of milk in the oven at ~200F for 24 hours. It got...super weird. But delicious! It's caramelized, but not really sweet. (I ate some warm on cereal for breakfast - amazing).
Step 2 is to culture it into yogurt. It's got a bizarre, jello-y consistency (recipe is for cow milk, so I'm not sure if it's weird b/c goat milk?) We will see what it turns into...
Recipe from Milk into Cheese by David Asher