Engineering as cool as ice cream!

This according to a story I just came across from the Salt Lake Tribune.

More than 500 students at Salt Lake City’s Bryant Middle School learned Monday that chemistry can be both delicious and fun. Aided by a team of engineers, the middle schoolers mixed up their own batches of vanilla ice cream and Silly Putty.

“I never knew you had to use so many ingredients to make ice cream,” said 12-year-old Alexis Mahana. “Being an engineer looks hard but it sounds cool.”

Nearly 20 chemical engineers from New York to Puerto Rico visited Bryant on Monday as part of the annual convention of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), which is in Salt Lake City this week. They hope to inspire the next generation of engineers.

“In our lifetime, the issues of renewable energy, clean water and clean air [will require] new and novel solutions,” said Rodney Dotson, a professor at City College of New York and chairman of AIChe’s minority affairs committee. “That is what the world will look to [new engineers] to do.”

Engineers, he said, help to solve a variety of human problems and their innovations spur economic growth.

Inspiring the next generation of engineering by teaching them how to make ice cream. For a guy who left a career in engineering to make ice cream, I can't help but find this story ironic. Very cool, but ironic.

At Bryant, seventh-grader Lauren Watkins could not decide which part of making ice cream was the “funnest.” She and a partner placed milk, sugar and vanilla inside a small, sealed plastic bag and then placed that bag inside a larger one with ice and rock salt. She loved shaking the bag to remove the heat from the milk and cause it to freeze. It also was exciting when the bag exploded. But perhaps the best part, she said, was eating the end product.

“I learned about the chemical reaction between ice and salt,” she said. “It was really fun.”

I'm not sure how many chemical engineers get to eat their end product, so that may not be the 'funnest' part for them, but I admire their creativity in finding ways to engage kids in the scientific process. The article doesn't talk much about making Silly Putty, which I'm sure was 'really fun' (wicked fun to you and me) too, but it just didn't stand a chance against the highly favored ice cream.

Well, maybe if they'd had an old Sunday comic section lying around..

Fend off Tough Times with Small Comforts.

While rummaging thru the bad news of the day, I came across this little bright spot. It's especially bright if you make ice cream or rent DVD's for a living...

Americans Reach for Small Luxuries amid Sour Economy


"In hard times, chocolate is comforting and affordable," says Fabrizio Parini, senior vice president of marketing at Ghirardelli, where 2009 sales are projected to surpass 2008.

The need to fend off tough times with small comforts — whether laced with sugar or blanketed by fur — runs deep in human beings.

"It's a basic human trait to have indulgences in one's life, things that reinforce your identity and keep you moving forward," says Eric Almquist, head of global consumer insights at Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Company, which recently produced a study called The Consumer of the Future.

And my personal favorite..

"Ice cream, music, DVDs all will persist," he says, noting that the Bain study found that "vice" purchases are still popular.

Of course, I'm still pulling for a rebound. And Spring.

From the Health & Science Desk.

There's an interesting article called Twins and Aging: How Not To Look Old by John Cloud in this week's Time magazine. It discusses the oft-talked about topic of how to turn back, or at least hasten, the effects of father time on your face. It's based on a study just released from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland that compared the faces of 186 sets of identical twins (from the annual Twins Days Festival event in, of course, Twinburg, OH). Doctors who conducted the study compared the effects of aging on each set of twins, then looked at each twin's respective lifestyle, essentially their behavioral choices and the environments in which they lived. Each twin filled out extensive surveys covering questions ranging from sunscreen use to diet to marital status.

Out of all that data, what did they discover? The not-so-surprising...

The paper also makes clear that, weight aside, healthy living is crucial for keeping a youthful face. The siblings who smoked and didn't wear sunscreen looked significantly older than those who avoided cigarettes and tanning. Those twins who had been divorced also looked older (by about 1.7 years) than the twins who didn't divorce. (They also looked older than those who had stayed single, which reinforces a point I made in this article: you are better off staying single than getting into a bad relationship.)

That's all well and good, but here's the good stuff, and of course, the reason I wanted to post about it...

The bottom line is that if you care mostly about a young-looking face, don't smoke, don't go into the sun without protection, and try not to get into a bad relationship that will make you depressed. Instead, this summer at the beach, stay inside and have an ice cream. Make it a double scoop.

Ice cream, your ticket to the fountain of youth.

That's what I'm talking about.

Serving-ice-cream dot com.

The folks at slick, new (at least new to me) ice cream website, http://www.serving-ice-cream.com/, recently wandered into my Ice Cream Diaries blog. After perusing it with interest (they are all about serving ice cream after all), they asked if I'd be interested in answering a few questions for a profile on their site. How could I say no. So here it is... MT.Toms on Serving-ice-cream.com

Feel free to leave a comment about your favorite local ice cream shop ;)...

The site seems geared toward anyone who enjoys ice cream, from shopkeep to ice cream customer to home kitchen ice cream maker. You can find links to buy all kinds of ice cream gear, read articles about all things ice cream (japanese ice cream anyone?), and gather recipes to use for your home ice cream maker (although I recommend you just come to Mt. Tom's ;). Check it out.

And if spending a little time there leaves you hankerin' for a sundae, I'm open until 8...

Only Hanging Sprinkles in this Contest.

Don't worry, the last thing I want to talk about here is politics. We biz owners figure out fast and early that little good can come from talking politics in the shop. It's not that we don't have political ideologies and opinions on the political state of things, particularly now when the most anticipated election perhaps in our lifetimes is less than two weeks away. It's just that, in terms of business, it's just too risky, because no matter which way you lean, there's bound to be someone on the other side of the counter who leans the other way. And the last thing you want to do is have someone take their ice cream craving elsewhere because they didn't agree with your politics.

Having said that, it is without spin or bias that I pass along the results of one somewhat unscientific poll, conducted by Dunkin Donuts corporate ice cream sister Baskin-Robbins. They just announced the results of a contest they recently ran to predict our next president. Using admirable ice cream logic, BR created two special flavors, one for each presidential candidate, and let their customers decide with their palates. For Obama, the 'dessert scientists at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream skunk works' created 'Whirl of Change'- peanut-nougat ice cream whirled with chunks of chocolate-covered peanut brittle and a caramel ribbon.

And for John McCain, it was the 'Straight Talk Crunch' -an intriguing melange whose ingredients include caramel ribbon, chocolate pieces, candy red states, and crunchy mixed nuts swirled into white chocolate ice cream.

After 500,000 votes, the envelope please...

Obama and his Whirl of Change, by a nose. 51% to 49.

There you have it. 'Dessert Scientist'...might have to put that one on my next set of business cards...

Got Bees?

Gas prices, heating costs, dairy cost. Those you might expect to have an impact on the cost of an ice cream cone. Now you can add bees to that list. Who would have thunk...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Haagen-Dazs is warning that a creature as small as a honeybee could become a big problem for the premium ice cream maker's business. At issue is the disappearing bee colonies in the United States, a situation that continues to mystify scientists and frighten foodmakers. That's because, according to Haagen-Dazs, one-third of the U.S. food supply - including a variety of fruits, vegetables and even nuts - depends on pollination from bees.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/17/news/companies/bees_icecream/?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331532,00.html

Fear not, I'm doing my best to keep my prices from 'beeing' affected.