Jeremy Cherfas

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

Physicists are more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists—partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics. They are the poets of the scientific world.

Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain—as the title of one recent book has it—“why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could.

$241,633 was lost to fraud this year — that’s about what we expect | GiveDirectly

Does the value recovered outweigh the cost of investigating these cases? From a simple dollar-for-dollar amount, certainly not. However, the existence of a rigorous investigations team helps deter staff and partner fraud.

Great insights into the botany of the pine nut via @BitKblog. The botany would be the same for Araucaria araucana seeds, but I wonder why they aren't marketed -- too rare? -- or how the flavour profile compares.

https://botanistinthekitchen.blog/2021/12/19/the-adoration-of-the-pine-nut/

Chuffed to learn that @scotlandbread won @bbcfoodprog award for Food Innovation. If I were in Scotland, I'd be sourcing from Flour to the People. Instead, I gave a donation to the crowdfunder campaign at https://crowdfunder.co.uk/scotlandthebread

It’s Research, But Still Very Wrong – Interdependent Thoughts

I wasn't affected by the somewhat scuzzy email sent out by chumps at Princeton to "research" internet privacy regulations, but I was prompted by Ton's investigation to take a look at Tranco. And blow me if I'm not also in there. One of the compensations of being an old blogger.

How The Politics Of White Liberals And White Conservatives Are Shaped By Whiteness | FiveThirtyEight

Among the many fascinating charts that 538 selected from this year, this is the one I found most informative.

Old Web, New Web, Indie Web - petermolnar.net

Eat This Newsletter 171 is out, with Canadian chickens, proletarian food systems, sweetness and dark, and a tribute to NI Vavilov. All connected, even if somewhat tenuously. Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-171-proletarian/

Relaxing with a peppermint tea and some Lester Young, having put tomorrow’s Eat This Newsletter to bed, or whatever one does in this digital age.

2021-12-09

On Wikipedia

1 min read

John Naughton's online diary contains a good piece on Wikipedia.

Me: “So you’ve found a glaring error on a subject you know about?”
Critic: “Yes. Elementary mistake”.
Me: “So why haven’t you corrected it?”
Critic: Flustered (sometimes), irritated (often), defensive (much too busy)

But there's another aspect to this, which is the wiki-zealots, who are all-too-ready to block the Critic who does have expertise on a topic precisely because they are not members of the Wikitribe.

Eventually, those people give up and keep their expertise to themselves, doing Wikipedia and the world a disservice.. Well, Wikipedia is doing itself a disservice, but let's not quibble.

Why carbon taxes really work | Tim Harford

TFW you forget to Start a Workout when you start a workout -- and you feel somehow you‘ve cheated yourself even tough, of course, you haven‘t.

We saw The French Dispatch this afternoon and it was a total delight, if you are into that kind of thing. Want to watch it again immediately as there were so many visual treats that went flying by. Probably not for everyone, but for me a solid 5/5.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Mac

This morning, I had occasion to revisit this post from 2005. Never mind about Google Base, I'm still tickled by Paul Ford's account of his encounter with Business 2.0. Never mind about Business 2.0 too.

##IndieWeb

Why butter chicken, why not tomato chicken? @KanjiSuch explains:

If I had to guess, it would be that butter makes it sound fancier and nicer than just saying tomato chicken, because tomatoes are in many other chicken dishes, too.

From the transcript, now available.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Blah, Blah, Blah, Boom

I'm still, at heart, both a coward and a pessimist.

Replied to a post on www.explodingcomma.com :

There is, in my mind at least, some confusion between discoverability and promotion. That is, I want people to be able to find my podcast, which means I both need to promote it where the ears are and, if possible, make sure the ears can find it.

The Close of the 2021 Cycle-Canoe Season

Replied to a post on www.zylstra.org :

I've lost track, Ton. What are you using now as your feed reader?

Revisiting My Ideal Feed Reader – Interdependent Thoughts

Making tentative steps towards implementing an IndieWeb social reader and so reading up what other people have done and how they are using these ideas.

This year, for the first time, I have a fine harvest of makrut, Thai lime (Citrus hystrix) and I don’t really know what to do with them. Suggestions welcome.

Can anyone tell me which template I need to edit to add an extra link to <head> in @withknown CMS?

Created an account at alltogethernow.io. It's a start.

I can't believe my luck. This is the perfect visual tease for Monday's episode of Eat This Podcast. Get ready to hear about gods dethroned.

Property ownership in a small farm future | Small Farm Future

[S]o many people in the world today lack the opportunity, knowledge and skill to provide even the most basic perquisites of daily life, and I believe this is a silent pathology that eats at contemporary society.

Yup.

J-School Confidential

I'm pretty sure nothing much has changed in the intervening 28 years.

Thomas P.M. Barnett - Blog - As a Writer, What Would It Be Worth to You to Be Able to Instantly Mine Everything You’ve Ever Written?

Thomas PM Barnett seems to be building a combination personal search engine and Zettelkasten called InfoSquirrel and plans to sell it as a service. I doubt I will ever be able to afford it, but it does look interesting and I certainly wish him well.

I had a whole extra hour this morning to work on tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter, with small family farms, food and GHGs, Sumerian legends, palm oil parasitism, a cookbook writer's memoirs and a bunch of loose ends. To make sure you get it, subscribe.

Subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas

If you were thinking of becoming a supporter of Eat This Podcast, today would be a good day to do that, because then I'll send you my newsletter on garlic noodles and you will be fully prepared for #WorldPastaDay 2022 https://eatthispodcast.com/supporters

Intrigued by a new role-playing board game called Rulal Commerce, based on China's demand for tea and what it is doing to Laos. Can't find any explanation of the significance of the name, though. Does it, I wonder, mean anything?

https://pim.cgiar.org/2021/10/25/rulal-commerce-boardgame/

Part 1: It will think you are crunching bones

Always readable.

Strangeness for #WorldPastaDay

TIL

1. You can buy broken bits of leftover pasta.

2. It costs exactly the same as uniform, whole pasta.

3. Why?

Step aside 75%, which achieved mythic status as the amount of genetic diversity lost since ~1903. The new not number is "almost 80%", the proportion of studies in a global meta-analysis that found evidence of some genetic erosion. I hope that's clear.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2021/10/almost-80-is-the-new-75/

Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/

19.10.40 | Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

Thought for the Day

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective | Small Farm Future

[W]hile it’s feasible to wander around a smallholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two pigs, it probably isn’t feasible to wander around a largeholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two hundred or two thousand pigs. So there are diseconomies of large scale to the ecological efficiency of the farm’s unbidden bounty.

That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile

Ghostwriting – Study Hall

Very interesting long essay about what it is to be unseen, unheard and yet vital. But that professional podcast world? Awful.

15 years ago today I wrote enthusiastically about @Mann_Library @Cornell gathering up great graphics to share and inspire.

The old website remains at https://web.archive.org/web/20170719024829/http://martha.mannlib.cornell.edu/charts/ but where are the original submissions and what happened to the project?

On this day in 2009, I never thought I would be directing this post to @danielpunkass https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/the-software-ate-my-homework-honest.

Long may it continue.

Hey @marcoarment Overcast.fm still giving errors: ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed when I try file_get_contents(overcast_url)

Is this a relic of the big certificate fail a while ago? If not, I wonder what I can do about it.

Podcasts aren’t podcasts if you can’t choose ...

Very nice idea. @croptrust is offering to help seedbanks in less well-off countries financial help to duplicate their collections and store them safely in Svalbard.

What are you waiting for? Apply now. https://www.croptrust.org/svalbard-grant-call-for-proposals/

How to help someone use a computer

I just rediscovered this page, which I first linked to on this day in 2004. Timeless advice that I try to follow when I give and appreciate when I receive.

In my ignorance, I didn't know who Phil Agre was; now that I want to know more, it is hard to do so.

Hey @marcoarment Has something changed in Overcast back end? I am getting errors like `file_get_contents(): Failed to enable crypto` from my all data XML file. Maybe part of that root certificate thing, which I confess I do not fully understand. #indieweb

2021-10-01

International Coffee Day

1 min read

It's #InternationalCoffeeDay2021, the whole point of which is promotion, right? So here's a link to all previous episodes of Eat This Podcast on coffee https://www.eatthispodcast.com/coffee/