1. Intro
   Whatever is on my mind this week.

2. Things I enjoyed reading
   Ten-ish articles I found worth reading.

3. Things I didn't know last Tuesday
   Ten-ish facts I didn't know when I wrote the previous edition.

4. Book of the week
   Some thoughts on the latest book I've read.

On heading back to the South

As you probably noticed from the previous newsletter, I've spent these weeks exploring more northern parts of the UK, and then taking my time to get back to the capital.

Most of my travels revolve around food in some form, whether it's talking to people who make it, or visiting restaurants famous for serving it, and this trip wasn't an exception.

The results are hundreds of memories and photos but that would be a story for a different post in a different blog, so for now, in no particular order, a few highlights.

This is a sweetbread with some black garlic sauce from an Edinburgh restaurant Aizle:

And that's a flatbread with Jersey Royals, lardo, green garlic and yogurt at Timberyard in Edinburgh as well:

A mind-blowing blood pudding with Charcuterie sauce at Trakol in Newcastle:

We also came back to the Newcastle-based Cook House and tried among many other dishes this salt beef sourdough with English mustard aioli and swet cucumber pickle:

Last but not least, upon our return back home we hosted a small sharing plates dinner for friends from one of our favourite London bars, and I must say, stirring drinks for bartenders is both harder and more rewarding than for the others.

What a week!

Things I enjoyed reading

1. Fine dining faces its dark truths in Copenhagen by Imogen West-Knights

As guests of fancy restaurants we never see the majority of hard work that goes into making the dining experience so special. We probably are aware of certain difficulties, from suppliers to prep to cleaning, but these are just words until you start dealing with them yourself.

In fine-dining restaurants, two stories are being told. The first is in the dining room, a perfectly choreographed show of luxury and excellence, a performance so fine-tuned, down to the decor, the staff uniforms, the music, the crockery, that in some ways the food itself is the least important element. And then there is the story that you, as a diner, are never supposed to hear. The story of what happens on the other side of the kitchen wall. In Copenhagen, at last, someone is trying to make us listen.

As someone who never worked at a commercial kitchen, I spent the last few years trying to understand the hospitality industry better, but given that for me that's a hobby, not the way to earn for a living, I probably will never fully comprehend how hard it is.

2. Continuous Glucose Monitoring on the Apple Watch by @hturan

This week is the WWDC week, which is for us mobile developers like a proper Christmas but mid-way through the year. I was lucky enough to receive an Apple WWDC scholarship in 2015, and that was a great way to meet the community, but these days I was mostly staying up-to-date by reading rumours and news, some of which reported possible glucose monitoring included in watchOS 9.

So far there are no confirmations of that, but someone decided to skip the wait and did it themselves:

To get current blood glucose readings showing up on an Apple Watch face, most apps today make use of the calendar, placing blood glucose readings as calendar events and then encouraging the use of one of the calendar complications to provide glanceable data. Obviously this is not ideal, as we’re limited to complications designed for calendar events, and the syncing mechanisms are unreliable.

To me, the most impressive part in the whole process is how smooth the interaction between the device and the watch screen complication is, given how unreliable Watch Connectivity might be.

3. Installing a payphone in my house by @bertrandom

I barely rememeber paying for the Internet via a phone, and even then, in my hometown you probably couldn't easily call a payphone on a street, so while this part of the story doesn't really bring any nostalgic memories I definitely appreciate the rest of it.

For the next few months, this became a bit of a cat-and-mouse game with me and the ISP. I printed out a list of credit card numbers that I had generated and would carry them around with me. Whenever I saw a payphone, I would either call them to set up a new account or write down its location for future use. Sometimes I would get a representative that I had talked to before that would recognize my voice, other times they would insist on calling back the next day, which meant camping out at a payphone hoping it would ring. If I was with a friend, I’d have them do it for me, writing down what I wanted them to say.

This also reminds me a lot about Kevin Mitnick, who's history of hacking was more or less based on using phones and social engineering.

4. The man who built his own cathedral by Matthew Bremner

Your views of religion might be different, but this article is worth it if just for the photos of the most contemporary cathedral I've ever seen:

The rest of the cathedral was an architectural Frankenstein’s monster propped up on mismatched bricks, tires, wheels, food cans, plastic and excessive quantities of concrete. Large chunks of the building were already in decay, invaded by moss and rising damp. In the aisles dusty cement bags were piled as high as the first-floor gallery. Other rooms erupted with broken tiles, dismantled cement mixers, motorbikes, rotten wood, oxidised saws, festering ropes, chicken carcasses and plastic bags fossilised in pigeon shit. It sprawled over an area the size of a football pitch.

If I ever make it to the Camino de Santiago, I'll have to make it through Spain to visit it.

5. On stretch wrap by Anna & Kelly Pendergrast

The dark side of a mere cling film, the stretch wrap: this post explains in great details how important it is to the logistics of pretty much any company that ships something, from luggage to cargo.

Some elements of the shipping process have been almost fully automated or mechanized, for example the loading of containers on and off ships. But the act of consolidating products into cargo for transit, and deconsolidating that cargo back into goods, is often too eclectic to be fully automated. During these critical points of transition, stretch wrap plays a vital role in helping workers turn products into cargo. With stretch wrap, like things can be combined into a single concise unit, and unlike things can be forced together into a palletized bundle.

The same could be said about the film used in the kitchen, and even though the plastic it is made of is not always recycable, it helps to save way more food than any glass container.

6. How to pick the least wrong colors by @ilikescience

I never thought I would enjoy a post on colours and algorithms so much, but it ended up not being strictly about algorithms, and only partly about colours:

The first criteria was one of the most challenging to translate into an algorithmic score. What does it mean for a color to be “nice-looking?” I knew that I wanted the colors to look similar to Stripe’s brand colors because I thought Stripe’s brand colors look nice; but what makes Stripe’s brand colors look nice? I quickly realized that, in the face of hundreds of years of color theory and art history, I was way out of my depth.

Would it help me the next time I pick up a colour palette? Probably not, but it was really interesting to read nonetheless.

7. 3,134 miles, 18 pairs of sneakers, multiple cartel checkpoints: A run across Mexico by @ksieff

An inspiring and to some extent visually interactive story about running through Mexico:

In an era of energy gels and endurance drinks, he’s consuming mostly mineral water, cacao and a traditional ground maize called pinole. He accepts dinner invitations from strangers, even when it means eating questionable seafood. He gets sick — a lot.

Instead of following a direct route through the country, Silva is running deep into rural Mexico, along dirt paths that disappear into the mountains. He logs his runs on Strava, but the global mapping software doesn’t recognize many of the unmarked trails. The mileage registers as an orange line slicing randomly through the wilderness, like the flight path of a hijacked airplane.

As it happens with interactive stories, reading from a phone might be less exciting.

8. Shakespeare's Latin and Greek by Tom Moran

A really interesting essay on attempts to learn more about Shakespeare.

While there are many things we either don't know for sure, or can't learn from diaries of the author or his relatives and friends, apparently we can at least agree on the languages he spoke:

The two speeches are radically different, yet their respective rhetorical structures can be argued to be remarkably similar. I believe it demonstrates how Shakespeare was able to take a Classical model and make use of it in his own way. By closely studying Sophocles, very possibly in Greek, Shakespeare was able to elaborate on his model and embroider on the same general structure while crafting something significantly different yet equally effective.

It's also quite cool to read about the logic behind those claims: from comparing his writing with Greek authors to quoting certain lines.

9. My students cheated... A lot by @MattCrumpLab

A proper detective story about a teacher who was added to their students' group chat and eventually exposed dozens of cheaters by applying data science and R.

Some of the students in the chat could be identified from the names they use on WhatsApp, and other students could be identified from their phone numbers. I wrote a program to cross-reference phone numbers, and voila, I had identified 97% of the users on the WhatsApp chat. Then, I wrote a script to split the chat by user and time. I could see what each student wrote/posted and when they sent it.

Looking back at my university years, when presented with an opportunity to cheat I probably wouldn't hesitate much given that the subject wasn't interesting to me, but discussing quiz answers in a chat with a teacher just doesn't sound right.

10. A Crime Beyond Belief by Katia Savchuk

Another almost detective but also quite sad story about a man who was an aspiring lawyer but due to a bipolar disorder started to do weird things:

He especially didn’t want anyone finding out about the time a delusion took hold of him. It happened while he was working at Harvard, in an office on the fourth floor of Pound Hall, a concrete building at the edge of campus. He began to suspect that the government was tapping his phone and hacking his computer. Officials were after him, he decided, because some of his clients had been accused of having links to terrorists. Nothing specific triggered his paranoia—it began as a feeling and his mind filled in the gaps.

The main takeaway from the article for me is that talking with a specialist is always the key, as well as the family support. Once any of that is missing, the things rarely go well.

Things I didn't know last Tuesday

1. Bees are legally fish in California

Right, here me out:

The 1970 act explicitly protected “fish,” which were initially defined as invertebrates. And because the act has protected snails and other invertebrates that live on land since, Tuesday’s ruling said it interpreted the legislation to also include bees.

That doesn't make any sense and shouldn't be.

2. Grimace from McDonald's

I hardly remember this character from Happy Meals, mainly because growing up I haven't been to a McDonald's that often, but now it makes sense:

Bates also unofficially revealed that Grimace, one of the McDonald's happy meal characters, is in fact, a taste-bud.

"He is an enormous taste bud, but a taste bud nonetheless," Bates said.

That's an odd name for something meant to help to enjoy the food though:

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