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Probably worth replicating at home, even though the bread and cheese version is a dish to die for too.
Things I enjoyed reading
I really enjoyed reading about this pasta pop-up and the people behind it, for both the idea and the execution are wonderful.
I mean that in the best way possible. Sure the idea is to disrupt your ideas of pasta but also using and expanding on the various “pasta” dishes from different cultures. The green curry biang biang combines Chinese noodles with creamy, herby, and slightly spicy Thai curry. The tortellini en pozole verde packs the entire pozole experience into chewy dumplings housing a rich and savory mixture of pork shoulder, hominy, and chicken feet. The black metal Maruchan is like if jjajangmyeon and menudo had a goth child, noodles covered in a squid ink sauce with extremely beefy honeycomb tripe. The beef tongue llapingacho, a seared potato pancake reinforced with cheese, comes from Argoti’s Ecuadorian heritage.
Which reminds me that we need more stories about street food chefs. People talk about chefs in restaurants, but the number of plates food trucks and stalls serve these days is enormous, and the expertise of those cooking them is as good (if not better).
Most people know about the hacking legends of the last century, like Kevin Mitnick, but almost no one heard of Susy Thunder who was playing in the same league.
As she sweet-talked security guards, triangulated rock stars’ whereabouts, and pulled phone scams for backstage passes, Susan was following an instinct she’d had since childhood. When she was just a little kid, she’d beaten a polygraph test. It didn’t matter that her stepfather was a Navy man. It didn’t matter that her own mother didn’t believe her. It didn’t even matter that the system was rigged against her, and other survivors of abuse, from the outset. Its bureaucracy was inflexible, inhuman, but that rigidity made it vulnerable, too. There were ways to use the rules to break the rules. The older she got, the more she saw the polygraph as a lesson, revealing, to her, the hidden truth of the world: that everything is a system, and every system can be cracked.
And this story is a great piece of nostalgia about the times when hacking was more about pushing the boundaries of technologies rather than stealing someone's social media account.
I pretty much grew up watching TED talks, and dreamt of giving one (up until I realised how many local TEDx events are really mediocre), and yet despite being very inspiration they didn't really do much, neither to myself nor to the people I know, and the author builds up on this point:
Of course, Gates’s popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn’t alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other “ideas worth spreading” (the organization’s tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky’s massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer’s talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year.
Let's just dream for a minute of how beautiful the world would be if those talks were actually changing people.
I guess a mandatory disclaimer would be to note that this is meant to be a satire, so the author is most likely not the Ethan Coen.
If the decision to take on Macbeth suggests that Mr. Coen is a sad wannabe flailing for credibility, the choice to film in black-and-white proves the case beyond any reasonable doubt. In a move that would get you kicked out Film 101 at the DeVry Institute of Mediocrity, Mr. Coen renders the Bard’s tale in black-and-white using a 4:3 aspect ratio, as if that alone makes you Akira fucking Kurosawa. Though black-and-white can occasionally be an inspired choice — 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There comes to mind — the only way in which this gambit might have been anything other than a desperately pretentious ploy is that it’s possible that Mr. Coen was simply too dumb to know that color film exists. Or, perhaps he thought “Hmm — Shakespeare’s old, black-and-white is old…I’ll film in black-and-white, just like they did back in Shakespeare times!”
Fucking moron.
However, stylistically it looks plausable, and that's pretty much how I would imagine the real tete-a-tete review.
There is a very long trail in Hungary and people dream of walking it to get badges, but apparently that's complicated because bureaucracy. A hilarious story about a complex system of hiking gamification:
It sounds like fun. In reality, however, aspirants need to be prepared for all eventualities: unannounced hunting parties and road closures on the trail, missing stamps, or new ones added to the route, but not to the booklet. There are colourful stories about railway clerks who refuse to hand over the stamps kept inside their stations unless a hiker agrees to buy a train ticket home. One Romani chief keeps a stamp in his family home, fed up with its repeated theft. Some stamps lie forgotten in pubs, seemingly closed forever. Which begs the obvious question: Why do people take such hardships on themselves to obtain a badge at the end if it all?
Probably that's not much different from various scouts organisations? Hard to tell as I've never been to one.
I didn't really play most of the video games people remember even after decades, and my favourites were pretty much limited by the ones I could get from my friends or PC magazines.
But what we don’t have is a complete set of slides, printouts from stages two or three, the source code, and any cassette tape audio. It appears that even IBM no longer has copies, unless they’re hidden in some archive no one alive is aware of.
The Sumerian Game might forever remain one of those obscure Holy Grails that only fans of history are aware of. But the least we can do is remember Mabel Addis.
This one sounds quite interesting though, despite being pretty much lost in history.
The whole article is pretty entertaining but also I never thought that no one beleived in meteorites until the last few centuries:
Although a growing body of evidence, including chemical analyses, persuaded some members of Europe’s scientific community that meteorites may have come from space, theories that they were formed in Earth’s atmosphere or produced by lunar volcanoes persisted. But meteorites had finally passed from fable to fact. The 1824 edition of the French Dictionary of Natural History boasted a 46-page entry for pierres météoritiques marvelling how ‘…there was [recently] even some sort of stubbornness from savants to support the refutation (of meteoritic stones) and to ridicule those who were defending their existence.’
Even the first theories were way more complicated than an idea that it might have fallen from another planet.
The last time I had to deal with a fax machine was a few years ago, and this experience left me quite traumatised, but seems like there are countries where it became some kind of the national idea:
And nowhere is this better symbolised than in the country’s ongoing love affair with the fax machine. The 20th-century technology is still a fixture in many Japanese offices, where there remains an insistence on paper documents bearing personal seals. But rather than asking why Japanese businesses have patiently stood by their buzzing fax machines, perhaps we should really be asking: why do we find it so surprising? Why do representations equating Japan to high technologies persist so tenaciously, despite evidence to the contrary?
Many questions, but luckily the author gives us some answers.
I don't know how LinkedIn works for non-IT candidates, but being from the software engineering bubble I can confirm pretty much everything mentioned in the post:
Most people are different personalities at work vs. home vs. happy hour. People wear these different masks to impress or avoid embarrassment with different audiences.
Back to LinkedIn. It’s your online resume and directly tied to your identity.
The setup forces everyone on the site to basically wear the professional “CV mask” of their personality.
It also mostly focuses on ridiculous examples which I didn't quote, but they're worthy a look.
A pretty cool weekend project: disassembling a LED light strip to understand how it is built and how to control it:
Some more experimentation revealed that the communication is based on messages consisting of an address field and a data field. The data transmission is initiated with a single pulse. The count of following pulses indicates the value that is being transmitted using simple linear encoding (Which seems to be similar to what ChayD observed in his string, so possibly the devices are indeeed the same). No binary encoding is used.
I am quite far from the actual engineering (software is less hardcore, that's for sure) but maybe one day would gain enough courage to try it out myself.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
Might be oddly specific, but as someone who spent terrifying amounts of both fresh and powdered egg white to make sours, I am really excited to give a try to the milk powder as well:
But there’s another option that Nightmoves bar director Orlando Franklin McCray believes deserves a little more attention: milk powder. The shelf-stable ingredient offers an unorthodox way to add a creamy froth to cocktails without extra dilution.
It also must introduce way less smell than an egg white.
My knowledge of American history is quite limited, so I know only a bare minimum (thanks to Hamilton the Musical and South park). And yet, this comes as a no surprise:
Because legend has it that George Washington once swore he would never set foot on British soil ever again, the erectors of the Trafalgar Square statue laid it on a foundation of Virginia soil to ensure that Washington did not tell a lie.
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