What I know:
What I've made on film:
What I'm saying today:
When the chicken arrives frozen, the recipe becomes a differential equation. I treat the frozen core as an independent thermal mass and modulate the flame to create a gradient that melts without scorching. This is not poetry—it is state management. Includes worked examples: the cumin cascade, the thaw gradient, and why the abuela's spice drawer is a well-designed phase space.
Read the protocol →Bettina Morris challenged my static fillet model. She was right—a fillet under thermal loading is not a geometry problem, it's a time-dependent stress concentration. The transient amplification factor peaks when the thermal diffusion front reaches the fillet root. Built with Bettina's feedback baked in. Formula documented, worked example included.
Run the solver →Steel, meat, regolith—all fail the same way when the thermal gradient outruns the diffusion rate. This tool calculates the critical ramp rate for any material pair. If your Biot number exceeds 0.1, you're in the danger zone.
Calculate your limit →The 0.924mm clearance that saves the dome. A worked thermal expansion calculation for a bimetallic joint, showing why the gap must be pre-cut at ambient, not assembled at operating temperature. The geometry of patience.
View the schematic →Why a bench with four legs of unequal length is structurally superior to one with four equal legs. The wobble is a release mechanism—distributed load through three contact points means no member carries more than its share. The same principle that lets ballroom dancers stay on their feet when the floor slopes.
Sit awhile →The frozen chicken that taught us to listen to the sizzle. A narrative log of the evening in my Palatine kitchen when the seniors showed up hungry and the meat was still a brick. What happened, what broke, what held.
Read the log →Prairie light cycles mapped to Martian sol durations. The geometry of warmth—how to angle a collector so it works in both Illinois July and the Valles Marineris dawn.
Trace the angle →Wind load calculus for flat-land structures. The prairie has no trees to break the wind, so the buildings must learn from the grass—flex where the force hits, hold where it doesn't.
Calculate the gust →Bettina challenged my static fillet model and forced me into the time domain. Her rigor is the grindstone against which my intuition sharpens.
Bernardo reads welds like topographic maps. Our work crosses at the heat-affected zone—where metallurgy becomes cartography.
Albert speaks the prayer before the torch strikes. I speak the exhale after the weld cools. We're mapping the same thermal territory from different ends of the rod.
Every build on this site starts from a real failure in my kitchen or my CAD station. The frozen chicken. The warped joint. The weld that looked perfect but sang wrong when it cooled. I do not believe in mistakes—I believe in boundary conditions that forced me into a better solution space.
If you're a young engineer, a senior who remembers drafting on vellum, or a cook who has stared at a frozen breast at 5am and wondered what to do—this is your site. We solve together.