Happy Turkey Day!

I cooked all day yesterday, I have to grade a midterm all day today, and then cook all day tomorrow because it’s spouse’s birthday and there’s a labor-intensive dish he wants. Then on Sunday I grade the midterm for another class.

***

I finally picked a notes app and entered all the stuff I need to do in a checklist and then cackled like a helpless psychotic witch because of how long the list is. Reader, I am overcommitted.

***

I got a bite on my short-story collection. It’s a cross-genre collection organized around a cool theme and I think it works well, but, alas, the cross-genre-ness of it is a problem, as I suspected it might be, because most publishers are genre-specific. So this publisher wants to nix some stories and do some other stuff, and while what they ask is reasonable, most of what I feel is exhaustion. Like, can you just take it, OK? I wish there were one thing I could do and it was done, and I wouldn’t have to go back and endlessly tinker. Obviously, I am not communicating any of this to the publisher, and I will do the right thing eventually,  and in any case the book is with a few other publishers so we will see what comes out of it all, but the wave of exhaustion is real. Like—one more thing? I can’t just get an unqualified win?

***

Man, I’m whiny. I don’t like feeling whiny.

***

I’ve been thinking about the field of modeling and simulation, and about recipes, and about cranberry sauce in particular because it’s Thanksgiving. The base of the cranberry sauce is simple: you need cranberries, water, and sugar. The sugar and the pectin from the burst cranberries thicken into a sauce; that’s the sauce essence. Now, you can add orange zest or cinnamon or replace water with orange juice or whatever, and these certainly might make for a more interesting-tasting sauce, but the sauce essence is the same and it is simple. The small list of critical ingredients necessary to achieve the essence of a dish is something that experienced cooks understand, which is why they are able to throw together delicious meals from whatever they have on hand. They understand the chemistry of cooking, how ingredients interact, and what effects their interactions have. (Incidentally, the show Lessons in Chemistry, starring Brie Larson, is pretty awesome.) They don’t waste time or money on procuring 2 milligrams of powdered bat wings as per some random recipe because they understand it’s a completely optional element to the dish.

There is usually a small number of reasons why some physical phenomenon takes place. Being able to identify them requires intuition and experience and usually a pen and paper, or a relatively simple computational model. Yet we increasingly see very sophisticated simulation tools used as blunt instruments, simulating everything but explaining nothing. It’s not the simulation tools’ fault. Some people are focused on getting every detail right, presumably chasing perfect agreement with observations, so they  throw everything at the problem and thereby obscure the (few!) critical insights that would have alone explained the phenomenon with ~80-90% accuracy.

We need to go easy on powdered bat wings.