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Jeremy Cherfas

2022-03-15

1 min read

I find it strange, and deeply ironic, that a year on, an otherwise fine article still boasts an obviously doctored photograph of NI Vavilov. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? See Nikolai Vavilov as he never was: A true scientist does not deserve a fake photo.

Jeremy Cherfas

I hadn't realised one of the bloggers I used to follow had suddenly died a while ago (because I stopped following him). Today, though, I was reminded of something he wrote not 6 but 16 years ago that is remarkably prescient. RIP @LanceMannion

Jeremy Cherfas

TIL there are far-infrared mirrors. Can't wait for next winter in the bathroom.

Jeremy Cherfas

The value of the Gender Pay Gap bot, explained, withe link to the marvellous collection of organisations that felt it necessary to hide their shame.

Jeremy Cherfas

Just finished putting together the latest Eat This Newsletter, looking at label as a form of truth, ruined bread as a metaphor, tree-planting as a menace, crop-modelling as a pipe-dream and cheese as surplus.

If you want to know more, subscribe at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

In the nick of time, I wrote up my celebration of Fornacalia 2022. Looking forward to another year of unburnt grain, and more besides.

Jeremy Cherfas

I don't judge a book by its cover, but I do prefer to decide based on other factors. If they have a free-return policy, I would maybe buy, but otherwise, no way.

Jeremy Cherfas

Today is the five year anniversary of installing WithKnown here. We’ve had our ups and downs, and it has been generally positive. Not sure about the future though, I must be honest.

Jeremy Cherfas

I don't know what you mean by “cross” but I know for sure that nobody has ever crossed a strawberry with a pineapple.

Jeremy Cherfas

Case in point: the Deep in the Weeds podcast network at https://deepintheweeds.com.au/ @deepintheweeds with some excellent shows and episodes that could easily interest a wider audience.

Jeremy Cherfas

There's plenty that is interesting in @emilyjwils article, but given that podcasting is global in scope, I do think it is a pity that the focus is entirely on the US -- apart from one ex-pat thrillingly discovering banana biodiversity.

Jeremy Cherfas

20/25 on Adactio's Font or Food? quiz. Not too shabby.

Jeremy Cherfas

Hear me, O @tavolamed, As a foolish person, who knows not my ward, I await the set form of words with which Curio Maximus will proclaim the time for holding the , so that I may celebrate on the last day to which it can be postponed.

Jeremy Cherfas

Trying to use OCR in iOS is really tricky unless you can mask off the bits of the page you really don’t want. Unless I am failing to find a better selection tool. Maybe crop first?

Jeremy Cherfas

Agreed, kefir is a total doddle (though I don't do any of the variations that other people do). I do feel bad when I don't have anyone to give surplus grains to. Although yoghurt is more of a faff, it isn't that difficult, especially with a good thermometer and a vacuum flask.

Jeremy Cherfas

If mussels are “the oyster of the poor,” what were they when oysters were the oysters of the poor?

Jeremy Cherfas

Perhaps I'm old fashioned (no perhaps about it) but I am having a hard time seeing the value (to me) of Research Rabbit. As Ton says, it would just feed my inner collector.

Jeremy Cherfas

It may be Monday, it may even be Veganuary, but Eat This Newsletter happens not to be meatless today.

In this issue, nourishment from @JLewisStempel, @JSTOR_Daily, @ModFarm and @OurWorldInData.

Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-173-januarys-point/

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on werd.io :

Ah, serendipity. To read, almost one after the other, David Sparks and Ben Werdmüller saying very similar things about the purpose of work. David had a great Walt Disney quote: “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”

Jeremy Cherfas

A little late with the first Eat This Newsletter of the New Year, but my boss says that's OK.

Read it at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-172-policy-potato-and/ for thoughts on FOPLs, ag and food policy in the US and the UK, potato bread etc

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on werd.io :

Happy Birthday Ben. Such an interesting list. On a quick read, some of those things are already here (though perhaps not polished enough), some of them will never be here, and some of them ought to be here already. Thought-provoking.

Jeremy Cherfas

Maybe you really want to build your own, but if not, Newsblur is an RSS reader has an excellent ability to include email newsletters.

Jeremy Cherfas

When a human-powered transcript flows seamlessly from "tide disputes" to "Thai disputes" without once taking on board that "tides are these ecclesiastical taxes ...".

Jeremy Cherfas

I realise it is absurd to take to Twitter to wonder where are the blog carnivals of today, but ...

... where are the blog carnivals of today?

https://jeremycherfas.net/blog/weeding-mendels-garden-and-other-blog-carnivals

Jeremy Cherfas

This:

For all the talk about how the internet isn’t as interesting as in the “Good Old Days”, there are so many places I would happily spend time reading and contributing to if each day was at least twice as long. So many chats, so many forums, so many blogs, so much social media.

Jeremy Cherfas

Thanks, Ton, for your post linking to Alan Levine's Google-taming post. With your guidance, it was easy to knock up a few Alfred workflows. I should note, too, that DuckDuckGo has a !bangsearch for !flickrcc (which gives slightly different results, because it uses a different CC code) and possibly others

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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

Jeremy Cherfas

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

Jeremy Cherfas

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

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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?

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

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/

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-10-01

International Coffee Day

1 min read

 

 

It's , 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/

 

Jeremy Cherfas

Giving up on Defeated on Netflix after two episodes. Too dark, too violent, too one-dimensional.

Jeremy Cherfas

Looking back through some posts On This Day, I came across one about a book and CD called Jane Austen Sings the Blues. The book is still around, but I can find no trace of a recording of the accompanying interview. Maybe @GrantStovel at @ckuaradio knows where I can find one

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-09-09

1 min read

Correctly attired for editing next weeks episode with @dianaegarvin on some fascinating aspects of coffee history. 
Wearing a T-shirt from tazza d’oro