A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
After years of using it for spices, I put my coffee grinder to work grinding, er, coffee because a friend gave me some French Roast beans from The Philippines. The coffee is good, with more than a hint of cumin.
Long reads from Eat This Newsletter. Modern industrial production for better and worse. A review on dietetics so you don't need to read the book. UK farmers sharpening their pitchforks; I'm not convinced. And more.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-256-lengthy/
Very cool. A new website dedicated to taking your bicycle on a train (in Europe). Sort of The Person with a Saddle in Seat 61. There's mention of it being crowd-sourced, which would be interesting. Instant follow.
https://cycling-on-rails.com/blog/2024/11/05/train-bicycle-guide-started.html
Eat This Newsletter today ranges from big stories in India and Europe to little gems about candy floss (aka cotton candy) and asparagus.
Oh, and a titan of industrial food calls for mandatory nutrition labels.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-255-gamut/ and while you are there, consider subscribing.
Almost identical to my own journey, although I haven't scoured ALL the places I might have left a bookmark. I should watch the tagging video, because I know I am too lax about tags, and have too many tags with only a single item. AI could fix that, right?
I've often dreamed of handing headphones to people playing their shitty phone-based noises out loud, but never taken it beyond a dream. Terence Eden could be living the dream with his two quid shitty earphones.
Current me thanks past me for due diligence.
[Unable to login to Monocle](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/unable-to-login-to-monocle)
New episode: How the Spanish learned to love anchovies
For hundreds of years, the people of Spain wanted nothing to do with anchovies, except perhaps as fertiliser for their fields. Today, they eat more anchovies than anyone else. How did that happen?
https://eatthispodcast.com/anchovies-spain
After a week away seeing family and mostly ignoring the online, it is very good to be back home and online.
Last week was National School Lunch Week in the US. The latest Eat This Newsletter wonders why there is still no such thing as a universal free school lunch.
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-254-deja-vu/ and think about subscribing there.
Truly baffled by someone who has a kind of About page that links to their various online presences, and the one labelled “blog” takes me to a Substack signup. Whatever else you may think it is, a newsletter is not, on its own, a weblog. At least, not for me.
#IndieWeb
For some reason, we both woke at our normal time and then slept on for another 90 minutes. TGIS
I knew most of this history, as a relatively long-time user of Known, and I contribute to the project via Open Collective. A new version of Known would be even better than a functional exporter, but I would settle for that if I have to.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter
- Nutrition experts who feed off big food
- The tomato in India
- Tainted turmeric
- Cloves, with a hitch
- 陈麻婆豆腐: is the story true?
Read it at https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-253-conflict/ and please consider subscribing.
Yet another plea for proper micropayments that don't gouge payer or payee. Even Patreon has been going down the tubes in this regard. I still fondly remember the original flattr. Couldn't someone, somewhere, please reinvent that.
Eat This Podcast latest episode: Crunch Time — Insects Are Not Going to Save Us
Dustin Crummett, executive director of The Insect Institute, tells me why he thinks the puffery about eating insects to save the planet is largely hot air inflating a bubble.
https://eatthispodcast.com/no-insects
I find it odd that anyone who found the Gutenberg editor in WordPress “deeply frustrating “ would not switch to ClassicPress. Maybe they looked and decided it wasn’t for them; if so, I would love to know why.
I've long known that the sky is polarised, but today I discovered while waking along the beach that rainbows are too. I happened to tilt my head to one side and a rainbow that had been faint and short became much brighter and extended across more of the sky. Strange.
I wish there were some kind of tool that would do a diff between two audio files so I could string together all the ums and ers and I means I've cut out and send them to the person that others praise for being so eloquent and fluent.
Ayjay and lots of other good people wish Word would die in a fire. Me too.
Eat This Newsletter points the finger at
* alt-protein energetics: the sums don't add up
* breastfeeding: formula looks "less like brain damage and more like a really bad kindergarten teacher", and
* food allergies and intolerance: the immune system loses its mind.
https://buttondown.com/jeremycherfas/archive/eat-this-newsletter-251-relevant/
Is it possible, in my wildest dreams, that the latest XKCD from Randall was inspired by a recent episode of Eat This Podcast?
https://xkcd.com/2982/
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/water/
Twenty years ago today, I was impressed with WordPress, the new kid on my block. https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/getting-to-grips-with-wordpress
It is still pretty impressive, if it gives you what you want.
A lot of Mark Nottingham's post about improving feeds is plumbing and protocols I scarcely understand. The thing that disrupts my feed reading most is feeds that resend the latest 20 posts each time there's something new. Might be related to doubled images. Whatever, I dislike it a lot.
Rain at last, and it smells … like victory.
Seven years ago I wrote a generally depressing piece about “science communication” and how little it seems to achieve. Someone please tell me how things have changed in the interim.
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/scicomm-what-is-it-good-for
Maybe everybody who needs to has already seen this sound advice for Patreon — and Ernie is not the only one — but I still think it bears sharing more widely.
https://tedium.co/2024/08/13/patreon-apple-platform-risks/
ETN 248: Slow
Even the internet firehose seems to have slowed to a trickle in this northern heat. Still, one or two good dribbles to share, on new chocolate species, culture and cultured meat, and the man who ate all the UPFs he could in a day.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn248-slow/
The ending of Apple TV's version of Presumed Innocent is what we in the IANAL profession call "A Swizz". Nothing short of preposterous and vastly inferior to the book. Made me feel cheated after 7 3/4 fine episodes.
I can write Eat This Newsletter while on holiday. Promoting it, however, is another story entirely. BLTN, the latest offers food-borne illness, conspicuous fruit consumption, and plant-based meat ... for pets.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-245-fruity/
One of the questions not raised by the latest Eat This Newsletter, which drops tomorrow, is why people who clearly want to subscribe, and are real people, don't activate their accounts? Am I justified in doing it for them? Do people really not check their spam?
In the latest Eat This Newsletter, the surprisingly rapid recovery of Pacific Bluefin Tuna, more than 10 years ahead of schedule. Naturally Japan now wants to increase the quotas that enabled that recovery.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-244-tuna/
My first thought was “false flag”. That’s what these times have done to me.
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240709-W-B0O8O3
Described in more detail at https://jeremycherfas.net/blog/rabbit-quest-20240709wb0o8o3/
* On foot
* 42.759728, 12.353907
* Tuesday 9 july 2024
* 421.44 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=42.759728&mlon=12.353907#map=14/42.7597/12.3539
Interesting article on whether LLMs are writing PubMed articles, that seems to conclude that on balance they aren’t. Yet. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a linguistic analysis, says nothing about the quality of the articles, no matter who might be writing them.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=64877
I wouldn’t be sad if all the mosquitoes in the world went extinct. Does that make me a bad person?
Is this the most interesting newsletter ever?
No, of course not. But it does give me the opportunity to pour scorn on sub-editors who question everything.
Say Yes to ETN 242: Ontological uncertainty.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/ETN-242-ontological-uncertainty/
A nice article extolling the virtues of do-less gardening, both in the garden and on the planet, which I definitely appreciate. I will just say that all this is much more difficult with pots on a terrace, circumstances even less natural than a garden.
First time in my puttering I think I have a need to normalise my CSS. Any hints as to the best of the many options out there gratefully received.
Tragically, Emeritus Professor Robert Eric Frykenberg has still not seen fit to correct the egregious howler he perpetrated in 2008, to which I drew attention back then. Talk about being a non-influencer.
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/a-snaffle-bridle-on-a-17th-century-pit-pony
Latest episode: Palatable is not Potable
Whatever you think about bottled waters, the story of supplying clean, safe water that people actually want to drink is a fascinating one. Christy Spackman talked to me about her new book, The Taste of Water.
https://eatthispodcast.com/water
Roman roads visualised as a tube map. I cannot see any possible use for this in my own life, but I am thrilled beyond words that someone saw fit to make it.
https://sashamaps.net/docs/maps/roman-roads-original/
Back in 2008, I asked why organisations don't get rid of people at random when they have to downsize. "Management would not be required to make difficult decisions that are almost certainly wrong in at least some cases". Has any one tried, and if not, why not?
https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/let-go-at-random
Latest episode: Women Butchers.
Cheap supermarket meat has made life hard for butchers. At the same time, a few younger people are taking an interest in butchery. I shouldn’t have been surprised that many of them are women, some of whom agreed to tell me their stories. https://eatthispodcast.com/butchery
Illuminating talk by Banu Özden about the contribution of minority cultures - Rums, Armenians from Anatolia, and Sephardic Jews - to the food of Istanbul, an amalgamation of so many cuisines, she said, “the name of the city defines the cuisine”.
TIL you and shops ought to keep tinned anchovies in the fridge, even before opening. Who knew? Marcela Garcés knew, in her talk partially about how the anchovy is “misunderstood, underestimated or, worse, discounted entirely” in the US.
Excellent keynote at Dublin Gastronomy Symposium from Brendan Dunford of the Burren Trust about the long history of farming in the Burren and how the landscape is “a book written in stone”. Farming there is now being reimagined to deliver “ nature-based opportunities”.
Binged Rebus on the iPlayer because I had to. Brilliant.
🛫 on my way, eventually, to Dublin and DGS2024. Looking forward to all the talks and friends old and new.
Eat This Newsletter 238 is out, with some pre-history for Rome's decline and fall and a bunch of stuff on nutrition, good, bad and ultra-processed.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-238-history-nutrition/