Just when you thought you knew everything there is to know about the current craze for focaccia and all its pizzalike variants, along comes focaccia di Recco: a bubbly ooze of tart and fruity stracchino cheese barely contained by 2 supersize rounds of paper-thin dough. To make focaccia di Recco, you take a simple ball of unleavened dough larded with olive oil, divide it in 2, then roll and stretch the doughballs until you can read a newspaper through them. Then you line a pan with one of the dough rounds, top it with scoops of cheese, cover and seal it with the second round of dough like an apple pie, drizzle with more olive oil, sprinkle with sea salt, and bake for ~10 minutes.
Month: July 2019
Quark Matter
Experimenters in Germany have glimpsed the kind of strange, non-atomic matter thought to fill the cores of merging neutron stars.
Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
taking down lazy thinkpieces that are entirely about mood affiliation:
The Gates Foundation plausibly saved 10M lives. Moskovitz and Tuna saved a 100M animals from excruciatingly painful conditions. Norman Borlaug’s agricultural research (supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) plausibly saved one billion people. These accomplishments – and other similar victories over famine, disease, and misery – are plausibly the best things that have happened in the past century. All the hot-button issues we usually care about pale before them. Think of how valuable 1 person’s life is – a friend, a family member, yourself – then try multiplying that by 10M or 1B or whatever, it doesn’t matter, our minds can’t represent those kinds of quantities anyway. Anything that makes these kinds of victories even a little less likely would be a disaster for human welfare. The main argument against against billionaire philanthropy is that the lives and welfare of millions of the neediest people matter more than whatever point you can make by risking them. Criticize the existence of billionaires in general, criticize billionaires’ spending on yachts or mansions. But if you only criticize billionaires when they’re trying to save lives, you risk collateral damage to everything we care about.
Motion Smoothing
fails to make a credible case that high frame rate displays are somehow destroying movies.
Instafish
usually cats make all the youtube money, but it can be fish too.
HOA Surveillance
The “everyone” may now include the near-fascist organizations turning neighborhoods into glittering shrines of conformity. I’m talking about homeowners’ associations — the anal-retentive busybodies who want to make sure your grass is cut to the correct length and that no one’s offending passersby with creative mailboxes.
Pimp my TV Dinner
Taylor Jackson challenged himself to photograph cheap pre-packaged frozen dinners so the look like a fancy food photo of a dish from a posh restaurant. To get it done, he sought the help of a professional chef pal who is a master at plating.
Car sharing
Unless we can get Uber and Lyft and the rest to stop calling their services “rideshare,” it seems that the use of the word sharing is doomed to be ambiguous and confusing. Those I propose we just use terms like “taxi,” “ride-hail” or TNC for one, and pooling or ride pooling (and carpooling) for the other.
Emotional reasoning
People are often unmoved by dispassionate logic, peer-reviewed research and statistics, but in fact are swayed by ego, emotion, self-interest and identity. If we want our public discourse to succeed in changing attitudes, Gordon-Smith insists, we have to ditch our idealized, sterile picture of persuasion and be more sensitive to how people behave in real life. Gordon-Smith’s silence on what rationality requires of us – might seem like a shortcoming, but in the end it is strategic. She debunks easy answers while shrewdly adopting a position of intellectual humility. She thinks we are ignorant of rationality’s demands, and “very close to the edge of what we know how to talk about at all sensibly”. It is sometimes held that rationality defines us as human, a claim written into our species name, Homo sapiens. If this is right, it follows from Gordon-Smith’s witty, intelligent book that, like the people she profiles, we do not really know who, or even what, we are.
Selfdriving risk budgets
Their plan involves a risk-based analysis, aiming for “better than human” but not perfection. With this approach, you measure the acceptable risk, and you calculate the uncertainties in the various components of your system, such as perception, motion planning, mapping, and others. Each system has some extra capability to make up for uncertainties at other levels.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 