Our food is still largely looked on upon from the sidelines as a mysterious cuisine of antiquity. Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet.
Month: April 2017
Ectogenesis
I’m making the matrix reference so you don’t have to.
Fetal lambs lived for weeks in a fluid-filled bag. Tests to help premature babies could begin in 3 years. The device, eyed as an improvement over incubators, kept fetal animals alive using a sterile, temperature-controlled plastic bag filled with amniotic fluid.
2022-06-02: Given that most countries are now below replacement fertility rates, we should be strongly in favor of Ectogenesis, on top of many other good reasons.
Enhancing color vision
We present an approach that can enhance human color vision by breaking the inherent redundancy in binocular vision, providing different spectral content to each eye. This technique represents a significant enhancement of the spectral perception of typical humans, and may have applications ranging from camouflage detection and anti-counterfeiting to art and data visualization.
Moisture vaporators
The star wars moisture vaporator becomes reality.
The system Wang and her students designed consists of a kilogram of dust-sized MOF crystals pressed into a thin sheet of porous copper metal. That sheet is placed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate and positioned inside a chamber. At night the chamber is opened, allowing ambient air to diffuse through the porous MOF and water molecules to stick to its interior surfaces, gathering in groups of 8 to form tiny cubic droplets. In the morning, the chamber is closed, and sunlight entering through a window on top of the device then heats up the MOF, which liberates the water droplets and drives them—as vapor—toward the cooler condenser. The temperature difference, as well as the high humidity inside the chamber, causes the vapor to condense as liquid water, which drips into a collector. The setup works so well that it pulls 2.8 liters of water out of the air per day for every kilogram of MOF it contained, the Berkeley and MIT team reports today in Science.
Police cosplay
When an awful, amateurish show collaborates with some country bumpkin police
NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” arrived in Murphy, Texas, to conduct a sting operation. The only honest thing that followed was the gunshot.
Explaining the Unconscious
Cormac McCarthy published the first nonfiction piece of his career, a 3000-word essay titled “The Kekulé Problem”. It is studded with suggestive details about the anatomy of the human larynx, what happens to dolphins under anesthesia, and the origins of the click sounds in Khoisan languages, all marshalled to illuminate aspects of a profound pair of questions, Why did human language originate, and how is it related to the unconscious mind?
and a followup
We’ve little reason to assume that the common structure of language—which all human languages share—is either the most effective or indeed the only form which language can take. The fact that all languages can be translated one into the other should tell us something about the common nature of their histories. The structure of these languages—their syntax and grammar and their general form—more than suggests that they have a single origin. But it further elicits the question as to whether or not this is a structure which enjoys an independent standing. Or whether other forms might be not only possible but even preferable. If intelligent beings from other parts of the universe should attempt to converse with us would their language be translatable? Would it share enough of our notions of how to go about describing the world for us to correlate it? Our languages in their form and in their structure are a single language. They are the languages of this world but they are not—that we know of—languages of the universe. We’ve no reason to believe that there is, or could be, such a thing. We might further consider that the form of language and its usage have at once influenced our view of reality as indeed has our experience of the world continued to influence our language. There is little evidence for selection in the shaping of language. A good part of what we experience appears in the form of frozen accident. As indeed does a good part of human experience in general.
Spinal Tap’s $400M Lawsuit
As Shearer fully appreciates, he and his bandmates may be the perfect plaintiffs for a case like this. Their original deal with Embassy dates from the period before the Buchwald suit motivated studios to find ways to make their contracts more lawsuit-proof, such as adding the mandatory arbitration and confidentiality clauses. The creators may qualify for copyright recapture, giving them even more leverage. And Shearer, at least, has a war chest filled with all that Simpsons money—and is famous enough to get lots of publicity and start shaming the studios right away. They’re not the first to go after Hollywood accounting, but they could be the loudest.
Smallest coffee
When designer Lucas Zanotto was asked by Finnish coffee company Paulig to create an ad for them, this is what he came up with. To brew the smallest cup of joe in the world, he uses one bean of Kenya AA-plus Karindum coffee, “grinds” it with a nail file, drops the fine grounds into the tiniest coffee filter you’ll ever see, boils the water over a candle, and pours the dark brew into what looks like a vial.
Funniest stories
People who suggested comedy specials on Netflix — I didn’t watch those. I eliminated anything that seemed downright stupid, mean, or just not funny. And I probably dropped a few other links here and there because I closed the tab instead of saving it, or some other reason. This isn’t a scientific survey; this is a blog.
- “So You’ve Decided To Drink More Water,” by Mallory Ortberg. This is pre-Toast Mallory, and it has everything that made her a huge star in the years that followed. (Well, at least a huge star for us.)
- “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” by Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh. It’s true. They don’t.
- “Climb Aboard, Ye Who Seek the Truth!” by Bronwen Dickey. A cruise for conspiracy theorists. Or, if you will, a “Conspira-Sea Cruise.”
- “Downton Abbey With Cats,” by John Hodgman. It’s not a laugh a minute, but this story has a core of melancholy that just makes it deeper and funnier over time.
Unions are racist
there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for 2 reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 