Vanilla was probably the most successful one (matcha got too runny to stay in the shells, and chestnuts had a very mellow flavour). I also froze some dough to see how it'd behave in a month or so.
Things I enjoyed reading
A fascinating read into the myths and stories behind one of the most signature Scottish dishes.
We should, however, be careful of reading too much into these texts. That they all come from England does not necessarily mean that haggis was invented in England – or that it was unknown elsewhere in the British Isles. Given that a further recipe is found in the Liber cure cocorum, produced in Lancashire at some point in the mid-15th century, there can be no doubt that it was eaten in the north of England; and since the ‘border’ with Scotland was then rather fluid, it is not inconceivable that it was also enjoyed north of the Tweed.
I still hope to making haggis myself one day, but now looking at its history I might as well start with some variations on the topic.
A research into the science behind paper folding and its potential uses for pretty much anything, from new materials to building houses.
But in origami design, we usually wish to find the particular parameterization that actually describes the origami structure, which we often fold from a flat sheet with a crease pattern. Ideally, we want the full recipe for the sheet’s continuous folding—a homotopy, if it exists—to guarantee that the structure is deployable. A Lagrangian approach is therefore fruitful, especially if we also seek to calculate the forces and moments that contribute to the folding.
I am pretty sure that I understood only the main concepts of the article but there are plenty of references for those more well-versed than I am.
I always suspected that an environment is as important for one's development as anything else, and this article pretty much confirms it by the example of people adjusting their parenting approaches based on the world around.
The earmarking process takes several weeks and is only carried out at night, when it is still bright but cooler than during the day. This makes it less stressful for the reindeer and their calves. To be able to carry out the work together, the entire family switches sleep cycles, reversing night and day. Children are up and awake working and playing all night, for weeks at a time, together with their extended families and fellow herders. They nap during the day, curling up and dozing off whenever they feel like it.
There are quite a few ideas in there, most of them seem applicable even if you don't live in the Arctic.
Ulysses is one of the very few books I didn't finish despite really willing to. It's just I still don't believe I have what it takes to understand the references.
I am also not a huge fan of editions with someone's references: that's an offence to the writer in my mind, unless you are an Oxford scholar writing a thesis.
One year, being busy, I forgot it was Bloomsday. I found myself outside a city-centre supermarket with two bags of groceries being accosted by a large group of Joyceans, all dressed up. They asked me what character in the book I was playing. I told them I was no one at all, just an ordinary man in a city on an ordinary day. And we agreed finally that this was fully in the spirit of Joyce’s great novel.
Maybe one day I will relate to that too.
If you were to design the most convenient desk for yourself, how would it look like? Mine probably would be virtual, but there are other options:
On it, laptop obviously. A few books I need at hand propped up on one end. Maybe a vase with flowers and some postcards standing against it, and a couple of display objects. Maybe some old nineteenth-century building tools, like a tape measure and a couple of moulds. Ideally it would be kept nice and neat, but in reality I would have printouts, books and papers all over the place. And coffee cups.
Would be nice to see a similar series but on other things. Chefs talking about their dream ovens, bartenders dreaming of barspoons, programmers imagining perfect debugging ducks...
I had my share of courgette pancakes in my childhood, and apparently the British alternative would be a parsnip cake:
I love parsnips. Needless to say, I was thrilled when I saw a recipe for “Parsnip Cakes to Fry” in Margarett Greene’s recipe book (f MS.1980.004), dated 1701, now held in the Clark Library collections. Somewhere between a starchy pancake and a fritter, these make a wonderful side for any roast dinner or hearty vegetarian meal.
The recipe is actually reconstructed, so as authentic as it gets. I've been casually looking for some old cooking book to add to my collection, and being able to see the orginal recipes is one of the main reasons (even if they end up to be imperfect, they still tell a story).
An unusual way to prevent a photo from being printed, and a great research into some of those photographs that didn't make it to the public:
Yet despite the File’s colossal scope, there were still images that Stryker deemed unfit for inclusion. These photographs had to be, in his parlance, “killed” — marked for exclusion, usually with a merciless hole-punch through the middle. By the time the project came to a close, the FSA’s photographers had captured some 270,000 images, of which a staggering 100,000 were killed.
Probably a few more years, and neural networks would be capable of filling the void by whatever is missing. Must be a simple task when it comes to landscapes (I know that it's not only landscapes)?
I really like this counterintuitive argument against meaningless brainstorming sessions.
Brainstorming has become a heuristic, an attempted shortcut, a lossy substitution for psychological safety. Osborn’s encouragement during the brainstorm signaled psychological safety, giving his team what they needed to be creative even after they left the room. But simply putting a bunch of people on a Zoom call and saying “there are no bad ideas” won’t create a sense of safety where none existed before.
It's very easy to abuse the very concept of sharing ideas without moderation, and yet so many people try to put constraints on those sessions and kill whatever sense of safety was present.
A moment of nostalgia for those who dealt (or is dealing) with Xcode:
This was another groundbreaking step for Apple: No other company offered an IDE that would allow developers to create apps for both their main platform and a mobile platform using the same toolchain. Desktop-class mobile software had never even been thought about before due to software and hardware limitations, but Apple had done it, and soon the floodgates would open.
I quite enjoyed skimming through photos: my first exposure to Xcode was after dealing with pretty much everything, from vim to Notepad++ to Eclipse to PyCharm, so I couldn't really complain.
A look behind the curtains of one of the biggest restoration projects out there.
One unexpected finding was the use of massive iron staples. Concealed behind the stonework’s facade, these staples connected stones in the vault of the cathedral, reinforcing and strengthening the roof. Longer bands of iron were discovered at the tops of the cathedral’s walls and elsewhere. This revelation provoked a detailed scan of other structures. Using sophisticated metal detectors, scientists gradually identified an elaborate skeleton of iron buried within the walls and columns of Notre Dame.
I was lucky enough to see the cathedral before the fire, and understanding how it is actually constructed is a really interesting way to appreciate all the efforts put into it through the centuries.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
A long time ago, in the 90s, Monty Widenius wrote the first version of MySQL.
He called it "My" not because it was his, but because it was the name of his first daughter.
The DB became very popular and eventually was sold for one billion dollars. At some point Monty forked the product (as it was open source) and decided to create a different version.
I just learnt that this different version is called MariaDB (yeah, guess how's his second daughter called) and it is heading to the market.
MariaDB Corporation Ab (“MariaDB”), one of the fastest growing and most popular open source database software companies in the world, announced today its intention to become a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) [...]
I don't know any other billionare who made (and sold) something based on the same open source product twice, so that's pretty cool.
Didn't know about that piece of the Japanese culture before:
Wakashu were, broadly speaking, male youths transitioning between being a child and an adult. But they were also more than just young men, occupying their own singular space with unique rules, conventions and, most crucially, their own style.
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