And this is a wrap for now, although I somehow managed to cook a bit more this week.
See you in 2022?
Things I enjoyed reading
As someone almost equally curious about both cooking and modern technologies, I couldn't pass by the recently published paper on problems of cooking the food printed layer-by-layer.
We fully cooked two separate samples of printed chicken using a blue laser and an electric range for taste-testing. Two taste-testers were given two plates: (Sample 1) printed chicken cooked using a blue laser, and (Sample 2) printed chicken cooked on an electric range. We did not tell the testers how each sample was cooked but they were aware that one sample was laser-cooked and one sample was range-cooked. Each tester was instructed to taste each sample and describe all sensory reactions.
You see, printing food on its own is not a novelty today: even my 3D-printer supports attachements that turn it into something capable of turning chocolate into objects of all possible shapes. But once you try layering something more complex, like raw chicken, you might as well consider cooking it for a bunch of reasons, e.g to prevent bacteria from staying between the layers. And that seems to be still hard to solve.
I somewhat expected this article to be about something completely different, but in fact it is about jamon and people who use their noses to spot the meat that goes wrong, which is really cool.
Mr. Vega’s boss, cellar quality-control chief Cristina Sánchez Blanco, 44, detailed the test required to become a sniffer. Aspirants must detect minute, varying concentrations of five liquids in water—ammonia, gin, wine (usually fino sherry), rubbing alcohol and vinegar.
The ratio can be, at maximum, 5 milliliters per liter or as infinitesimal as 0.8 milliliter, a range of roughly 75 to 12 drops in a standard 750 milliliter wine bottle.
Also seems like I am not going to pass their entrance exams any time soon.
I wrote about my endless fight with home automation a few times (the latest is, I discontinued by smart heating as it was too unrelyable, and also in the process of resetting the network setup which is painful as hell), but there are also success stories:
In the UK, rubbish and recycling is collected on the same day each week. Bank holidays usually move our collection day back by a day. My smart home keeps track of public holidays and provides a reminder the day before collection. The bins are generally collected before I am awake and need to be out on the edge of the property before morning.
There is a bunch of other ways to solve the problem in the quote, but this one pretty much turns the home assistant into a source of truth which I bet is very convenient.
I couldn't get away from at least one true to the season article in this week's newsfeeds, so here is a story of Santa Claus:
In 1875, Louis Prang, the father of the American Christmas card, printed a series of postcards with a Santa Claus in a red costume. Did he invent the costume’s red color? Probably not, but he is the one remembered in history. In 1931, Coca-Cola decided to broaden its market to children. The Atlanta-based company asked Haddon Sundblom, an illustrator of Swedish descent, to depict a paunchy, smiling Santa Claus, dressed in red, with ruddy cheeks and an elfish look.
As someone who grew up in a country without a jolly Santa Claus but with a stern and rough Father Frost, I always thought Coca-Cola ads make him wear the red costume to look better with their bottles, but apparently these two things are at least somewhat related.
There are not that many painters whose works I enjoy, and Kandinsky never was among them, but this article at least gave me some background, which in turn slightly shifted my perspective.
Unusually at such a retrospective, viewers can place the works in some sort of visually obvious chronological order. But it’s not easy to reconstruct the development of Kandinsky’s career, or understand the significance of the individual paintings. Until fairly recently, the works of Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and the other pioneering Soviet abstractionists were relatively inaccessible, and the important Swedish painter Hilma af Klint was totally unknown.
Learning about art is pretty hard because it is very subjective. Even music has more logic to it (think harmonies and so on).
So for me the only way to get at least a glimpse of it is to listen to people who have a very strong opinion about specific painters, but I do wonder if there is more to it.
It's been a while since I played chess competitively, but reading about competitions never gets boring, and the most recent world championship proves it (despite the majority of games being by-the-books-boring).
The endgame was a complicated setup: Nepomniachtchi had his powerful queen, and Carlsen had a rook, a knight, and two pawns. With perfectly correct play, the contest would result in a draw. But, in practice, it was a difficult position for the queen to hold—particularly against Carlsen, who was moving his pieces in harmony. Nepomniachtchi made one inaccurate move, and, after nearly eight hours and a hundred and thirty-six moves, that was all that Carlsen needed to win what had become the longest game in World Championship history.
I am not very surprise Carlsen won again, but I am surprised a bit, as this is his 8th year in a row of holding the title.
Here is a selection of some very good advice about looking for a new role. Someone I respect said once, that engineers never stop looking for their new adventure, which is partly true, but looking actively is a completely different story, and having a few independent but well-versed headhunters on your side might be handy.
When I started in this industry, headhunter meant something specific: a recruiter for senior and/or hard-to-find positions. These days we use the term to refer to any independent recruiter that gets paid handsomely when they fill a position. Even when I am not looking for a new job, I try to at least skim over every recruiter email I get. As you undoubtedly have experienced first-hand, the vast majority of unsolicited messages from recruiters is irrelevant, and badly automated spam. Still, now and then, a recruiter seems to have invested five seconds trying to research you and really thinks the position would be a good fit. These you want to build a relationship with, even if you are not looking for a job yet.
I also really like how the author kept track of all interactions with companies in an Excel spreadsheet: such data might be handy even a few years later during the next move.
As with chess, it's been a while since I last played HoM&M, and when I did it was their 3rd edition: the last one before they ruined it with "modern" graphics, but also modern enough to run smoothly on most screens.
This is a very joyful read anyway:
But instead of merely increasing all of the computer players’ relevant numbers by 50 percent or more, as so many strategy games of the 1990s did, Heroes cheats in a way that isn’t so obviously egregious: its computer players suffer from no fog of war, meaning they know where every resource and castle is on the map from the start and can react accordingly. The resulting competition remains decidedly asymmetrical, but it feels like a struggle against deviously clever opponents rather than blatantly cheating ones. And at the end of the day, the subjective feel of the experience is all that matters.
Given the holidays are still going on, I might as well spend a day (or two) giving it another try. Also maybe Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.
Good games never age.
When I graduated with a thesis on DNA reconstruction, sequencing it at home was a very expensive and inaccurate adventure. These days it is as straightforward as buying a kit and throwing money at non-reusable parts: so still expensive, but not inaccurate anymore.
However, seems like there is also a way to make it way less expensive:
In fact, during a normal sequence, you are likely to want to sequence the genome more than once, since any sample you take has a random collection of DNA molecules, and may not contain the parts you are most interested in. With the ability to select, you can winnow down what you’re looking for faster and avoid sequencing other areas over and over again.
I am probably not ready yet to get a nanopore sequencer yet, but maybe by the next December it will be even cheaper?
Checking out charity shops (which is what we call thrift- and second-hand stores here in the UK) is a fun activity, especially given the variety of unexpectedly good books you could find there, but I never consider it to be profitable as well (expect that one time when we found one of the very first Harry Potter prints).
The declaration that the drawing was the work of Dürer — an assessment that is not universally shared among researchers — came about as a result of a chance meeting and the efforts of a dogged art dealer who amassed thousands of frequent-flier miles tracking down an answer.
This lucky fella might have an even better deal though.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
I didn't even question the thought that here in the UK children greet Santa Claus the same way as the kids across the pond.
I was wrong: they just leave some booze for the dude, and it raises concerns across doctors:
Father Christmas could be doing serious harm to his health by overloading with mince pies and sherry, a leading doctor has warned.
Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, head of the Royal College of GPs, said Santa could face a raft of health issues because of his diet and busy schedule.
I must say, a mince pie is a great replacement for a mere cookie, but sherry is definitely way better than milk, so I can't really blame kids' parents.
My collection of bizzare dishes is growing:
Blodplättar (in Swedish; veriohukainen, verilätty or verilettu in Finnish; verikäkk in Estonian), or blood pancakes in English are a dish served in Finland, Estonia, Sweden and Norway made of whipped blood (typically reindeer blood), water or pilsner, flour and eggs.
I am quite disappointed that these are not really pancakes, just a type of a black pudding. Could be even more bizzare:
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