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Jeremy Cherfas

Excellent Conversations with Tyler episode talking to David Deutsch (apart from the whole multiverse thing about which I am not competent to judge, and nor do I care).

Jeremy Cherfas

Made a start on the annual tweakage of the automatic watering system for the terrace, but the main enemy remains lack of pressure. It fluctuates through the day so need to try and find the maximum.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

Never having had to deal with prescriptions and refilling them in the same way, I thought I had it bad, needing to send a fax to cancel my account with my internet service provider! This reminds me of a movie where the entire plot hinges on a fax that fell behind the machine and so was never seen. Not that I can remember the movie.

There surely has to be a better way.

Jeremy Cherfas

Currently reading: The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster



-fiction


Jeremy Cherfas

Currently reading: The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem, ISBN: 9780062938787

Jeremy Cherfas

Fun to see @racheleats photo of Bonci Pizza illustrating this article, although that seems to me as far from ordinary pizza al taglio as that is from Mr Go’s pizza vendining machine.

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/07/dough-to-go-romes-first-pizza-vending-machine-gets-mixe...

Jeremy Cherfas

If I were a winemaker in Salento, I think I'd support change to ensure that I wasn't cutting myself off from customers.

Jeremy Parzen with some rival etymologies for Negroamaro grapes and why, whichever one is "true" it might be wise to rethink.

https://dobianchi.com/2021/05/05/negroamaro-racial-slur-racist/

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

USDA says there were about 2,019,000 farms in the US in 2020. But how many were actually farms in the usual sense of the word, growing food for sale as their primary business. I'm sure @rosenblawg said something about this recently, but I can't now find it. Help, please.

Jeremy Cherfas

"Scotland is a colossus in native breeds."

That's all you really need to know, but if you want to read about the "six big asks" (yuck) it is all here https://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/news/19213969.vote-native-breeds/

Jeremy Cherfas

TIL that dumdum bullets were made originally in Dumdum. By design?

Jeremy Cherfas

I have an hour or so to myself, so, Moom or Johnny.Decimal, that is the question.

Jeremy Cherfas

Let joy be unconfined: farm share of food dollar up from 14.2 cents in 2018 to 14.3 cents in 2019. Farmers get an even lower share of eating out dollars, and eating out dollars plunged during the pandemic.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=100802

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

I've always wanted to try a sensory deprivation tank, though deprivation seems like entirely the wrong word. Floating in the Dead Sea is all well and good, but those salts sting. I would expect a proper tank to be much nicer.

Jeremy Cherfas

"Decellularized spinach serves as an edible platform for laboratory-grown meat"

A less mouth-watering headline, you're unlikely to read.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/bc-dss033021.php

Jeremy Cherfas

I agree that people should learn to protect themselves against pseudoscience, especially medical quackery. But before you ask "How is this supposed to work?" it might be even more worthwhile to ask "Does this even work?"

Without evidence of an effect, a mechanism is worthless.

Jeremy Cherfas

Of course I am going to resurrect my podcast episode about Celebrating Passover and Easter. Maybe a bit late for tonight's seder, but plenty of time for a little didactic baking next week.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/passover/

Jeremy Cherfas

I really enjoy using from @RogueAmoeba for more complex things, but I cannot seem to fathom the simplest thing. If I'm on a straightforward Zoom call using an outboard mic though a USB mixer, how can I get my mic into my headphones with zero latency?

Jeremy Cherfas

As noted in the latest Eat This Newsletter, the new Plant Humanities Lab website is absolutely terrific, and would be even better with some sort of feed of new items. How about it, @DumbartonOaks ?

https://lab.plant-humanities.org/

Jeremy Cherfas

I'm not mad keen on subscription services myself, though I do pay for a few because they keep on delivering. Another twist to the story, though: when an app I am happy to pay offers a discount on a new version that my OS won't be able to handle until I get a new machine.

Jeremy Cherfas

Fine episode of Gravy from @southfoodways, all about horchata. A little disappointed that @rachellaudan didn't bring English barley water into the story. Or if she did, that they cut it.

https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy/horchata-podcast/

Jeremy Cherfas

Currently reading: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple






Jeremy Cherfas

That was a couple of hours well spent, fixing up the PESOS from Instagram to here, via Bibliogram. Of course, it shouldn't have taken nearly that long, but I had to go slowly. And I haven't tested it from the cron job yet, only locally.

Jeremy Cherfas

Today was a very appropriate day to learn about Grace Murray Hopper in my ongoing attempt to become a better dilettante programmer.

Jeremy Cherfas

This deserves mention. An industry-funded study that doesn't entirely find what the industry would like. Whole grain oat flakes reduce blood glucose and insulin responses, but thin or instant oats do not. Funded by PepsiCo, owner of Quaker Oats.

https://www.foodpolitics.com/2021/02/industry-funded-study-of-the-week-a-rare-exception-to-the-rule/

Jeremy Cherfas

TIL “people believed an ice cream named “Frosh” was creamier than an ice cream called “Frish”. Makes me wonder whether whiff might be a better name than Cornish Sole.

More in Eat This Newsletter later today. Sign up now at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

Peter Rukavina asks: "What category of Judaism would you self-identify with?"

And I can think only of Jonathan Miller's "Jew ... ish", which appears to be a line from the original Beyond the Fringe.

Jeremy Cherfas

"[T]he University of Plymouth has found that managing the density of crab and lobster pots ... increases the quality of catch, benefits the marine environment and makes the industry more sustainable in the long term." Great. Now, how to export the catch.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-02/uop-mca021221.php

Jeremy Cherfas

It has been both salutary and disappointing to go back to original material from the late sixties, early seventies and 1994 and realise that we have basically squandered the gift of the Green Revolution. Not that tomorrow's episode is pessimistic or anything.

Jeremy Cherfas

Thanks for the link to the video. I've done a few workflows and, like Ton, had some difficulty really understanding how they work, so I am going to find time for this. I don't think Automators.fm has ever done an episode on Alfred; I wish they would.

Jeremy Cherfas

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke's Third Law.

This morning, sitting outside a cafe that was actually closed because of the lockdown here, Syncthing made a believer of me.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

I enjoyed, if that's the right word, giving blood and then plasma regularly in the UK. Since moving to Italy, I have tried a couple of times to donate, but they won't have me, on the grounds that I lived in the UK during BSE. I know I shouldn't, but I take it personally.

Jeremy Cherfas

I rant often about podcast web pages that hide their audio behind layers of obfuscation. It makes trialling an episode in huffduffer.com impossible. But ones I subscribe to, like @5x15stories, that can't even supply a decent feed are beyond my understanding.

Jeremy Cherfas

Tidiness certainly can be over-rated, although less so in the physical space than in digital space where searching is so much fast. Or, as I used to say of one long-term partner:

"A place for everything, and everything in a place."

Jeremy Cherfas

Absolutely fascinating, and just a teeny bit disquieting. I love the idea of a fish-filled moat to keep them in. I'll probably stick this in the next newsletter.

Jeremy Cherfas

Noted.

Jeremy Cherfas

Please Sir,

What does hypeisis mean?

The internet does not know and keeps thinking I mean hypnosis, which I do not.

Thanks

Jeremy

Jeremy Cherfas

Is there no way to stop the idiocy of having to prove I am a human when I try to use my phone to access a site “protected” by @cloudflare?

Jeremy Cherfas

I went to your site at https://simulacrum.party/, as advertised in your profile, to see what your interests might be, with a view to making a sensible suggestion. It returned a 404. So, you know, maybe tech is hard?

Jeremy Cherfas

I have Chrome installed for one reason only: to chat with a good friend who won't use anything else. I used to use Adium, but it won't do it any more. What are my alternatives to interact with Google Hangouts?





Jeremy Cherfas

I too have been ignoring Spotify's apparently magical Discover Weekly these past several weeks, not because I was feeling algorithmicly manipulated, but because I've just had more of a hankering to listen to whole albums. Unfortunately, unlike Phil Gyford, even when I was doing Discover Weekly regularly, it didn't seem to surface anyone in particular for me. Maybe I should try again.

Jeremy Cherfas

Watched The Right Stuff, which I had never seen, for the obvious reason, and was very pleased to have done so. 🎥

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

I was tempted by a fully electric car earlier this summer, but the cruel fact is that in a city or apartments, in which we have no access to a garage (or "box" as they are known here) there just wouldn't be any way to re-fuel. So I got a hybrid. Then, over the past few weeks, the city has been hard at work installing two charging stations on the corner. Currently they are not yet functional, and occupied by gas-guzzling SUVs.

When they are functional, I wonder how the city plans to keep other cars from occupying the spaces. I suspect they won't.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on ruk.ca :

I have not yet been bitten by this particular version of helpfulness gone awry, but I am aware it could happen, and I agree with Peter that there really ought to be a simple way to indicate that someone is no longer available to be shared with.

Jeremy Cherfas

The past month of micro posts served to reinforce my belief in my need for extrinsic motivation.

Jeremy Cherfas

Crossing pedestrian off my list.

Jeremy Cherfas

I absolutely refuse to be bullied by a “random” word generator into using a word like mask. is a hoax.

Jeremy Cherfas

Dilemma is one of those words that never looks correctly spelled to me. I dither between dilemma and dilemna for reasons that escape me.

Jeremy Cherfas

It seems I’ve done nothing but adjust for the past nine months.

Jeremy Cherfas

Call me the breeze?