Search Results for: tech

An Abstract Symphony of Flavors

As much as [Hervé] This has spent his career chiselling deductions down to the molecular bone of physical chemistry, he is still entranced by the art involved in making something delicious. He talked volumes, veering between the intricacies of the chemistry of emulsions and the delights of a meal prepared with care and served with love. One moment he was frustrated at French chefs who were slow to embrace his Note By Note ideas—“In France people have to move! It is a pity I introduced molecular gastronomy and it was done in Spain; the French chefs said, we don’t need these gesticulations”—at another he described a dish by a chef friend in Paris, “a very simple dish of endive, chestnuts, rosemary and butter and it was perfect.”

With Note by Note cuisine This is attempting to jump (and to get chefs and the rest of us to jump) from the figurative to the abstract, from Rembrandt to Kandinsky. It shouldn’t matter if a flavour is unrecognisable, This argues, you only have to like it or dislike it. This told me that most people cannot differentiate more than seven chemical compounds in a mouthful. Taste is perceived as a chord. After 30 compounds, the mouthful becomes “a white taste, almost like a white noise. In fact, if you have a wine sauce, like my Wöhler sauce, it can be more pure, it is like a single flute or an orchestra. One is pure, the other is richer and harmonic. In my point of view both are beautiful.” His new continent is vast and relatively unexplored. For some time, technicians in flavour companies that create new syntheses of fruit and citrus compounds for shampoo or soft drinks have been working on “white space” flavours, flavours that did not exist before they were manufactured. This pointed out that Coca-Cola and Schweppes tonic water were probably perfect examples of Note by Note that are happily consumed by millions every day. But the food industry is conservative and their confections tend to be marketed as facsimiles of the familiar—lemon-lime, kiwi-strawberry. This believes he must convince chefs—the ultimate arbiters of taste—before the public can widely embrace Note by Note.

Wendell Steavenson, writing in Prospect Magazine about french chemist and molecular gastronomy pioneer Hervé This.

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Photo: Exploratorium, Flickr

Awakening

Longreads Pick

The advent of anesthesia fundamentally altered modern medicine, and its technology is often seen as infallible. However tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. In working to eradicate this phenomenon, doctors have been forced to confront how little we know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. But their studies have also led to a question just as pertinent to philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 3, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,995 words)

‘The Rise of the Warrior Cop’

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

An excerpt from Radley Balko’s book Rise of the Warrior Cop.

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Photo: squirrel_brand, Flickr

Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List

When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to map a cartography of loneliness. Published in 2012, Laing writes, “What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal.” Four years into my New York experiment, the pang of loneliness has dulled and has been exchanged for a desire to retreat from an overstimulating city with my close friends and a bag of salted caramel.

This brief list takes a dive into the discussion about loneliness and solitude in our contemporary lives—what it is, how we cope, and how it affects our bodies. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, if you have them.

 

1. “American Loneliness” (Emma Healey, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2014)

I’ve been watching MTV’s reality show, Catfish in awe for the past two seasons. I vacillate between heavy feelings of eager empathy and awkward amusement. Healy explores what Catfish reveals about our common loneliness, longing and vulnerabilities as well as how easily we suspend logic in the pursuit of companionship.

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Working Anything But 9 to 5

Longreads Pick

Scheduling technology has made it easy for companies to automate employees’ schedules, but it leaves low-income parents with hours of chaos.

Published: Aug 13, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,435 words)

The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early

Longreads Pick

A snapshot of the current Bay Area tech and media scene, as told through the career of Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr who’s back with a new company, the workplace chat app Slack.

Author: Mat Honan
Source: Wired
Published: Aug 7, 2014
Length: 28 minutes (7,212 words)

The Hidden Truth About the Cold War Roomba

Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak looks back at the 1959 Cold War cultural exhibitions hosted by both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the United States, the Moscow exhibition was a chance to show off the newest products and technology from companies like IBM, Sears and Kodak—and perhaps the most important innovation of all when it came to highlighting America’s high-tech future:

Today the autonomous robot vacuum cleaner is passé. Or at the very least, no longer representative of something terribly futuristic. iRobot, the Boston-based company that makes the Roomba, has been churning those things out for over a decade. But in 1959, there was nothing more techno-utopian. The Exhibition had one, thanks to RCA/Whirlpool and a little bit of trickery.

The Exhibition had four demonstration kitchens, but the RCA/Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen was by far the most futuristic. It promised super-fast meal preparation, push-button everything, and automatic robot cleaners. There were even large TV monitors for monitoring different parts of the home, which reportedly impressed Khrushchev. But not everything worked exactly as the exhibitors claimed.

“They had a two-way mirror with a person sitting behind it that could see the room,” Joe Maxwell told me over the phone in his light southern drawl. “And they radio-controlled the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher.”

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Photo: Library of Congress, via Shorpy

The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s

Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

 

‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’

When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the crisis, but also due to the airlines’ intransigence. Having spent vast sums on Beltway lobbyists, the airlines had the political clout to nix any security measure that might inconvenience their customers. So whatever solutions the FAA proposed would have to be imperceptible to the vast majority of travelers. Read more…

How the Other Half Works: An Adventure in the Low Status of Software Engineers

Longreads Pick

Software engineers are paid well, but they still don’t seem to move into leadership roles. Church investigates what happened: “There was a time, perhaps 20 years gone by now, when the Valley was different. Engineers ran the show. Technologists helped each other. Programmers worked in R&D environments with high levels of autonomy and encouragement. To paraphrase from one R&D shop’s internal slogan, bad ideas were good and good ideas were great. Silicon Valley was an underdog, a sideshow, an Ellis Island for misfits and led by ‘sheepdogs’ intent on keeping mainstream MBA culture (which would destroy the creative capacity of that industry, for good) away. That period ended.”

Published: Jul 22, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,316 words)

When Your Kid Has a Disease No One’s Ever Heard About

The Mights couldn’t wait for the culture of scientific research to change: they had been told that Bertrand could have as little as a few months left to live. The same day that they learned about NGLY1, they began plotting ways to find more patients on their own. Several years earlier, Matt had written a blog post, called “The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.,” that became a worldwide phenomenon; it was eventually translated into dozens of languages, including Serbian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. The popularity of the post, combined with Matt’s rising profile among computer programmers, meant that almost anything he put online was quickly re-posted to Hacker News, the main social news site for computer scientists and entrepreneurs. He decided to use his online presence to create what he referred to as a “Google dragnet” for new patients.

For the next three weeks, Matt worked on an essay that described Bertrand’s medical history in clinical detail. Matt called the result, which was more than five thousand words long, “Hunting Down My Son’s Killer,” and on May 29, 2012, he posted it to his personal Web site. It began: “I found my son’s killer. It took three years. But we did it. I should clarify one point: my son is very much alive. Yet, my wife Cristina and I have been found responsible for his death.”

Half an hour after Matt hit “publish,” Twitter began to light up. By the end of the day, “Hunting Down My Son’s Killer” was the top story on Reddit. The next morning, an editor from Gizmodo, a tech blog owned by Gawker Media, asked Matt for permission to republish the essay. In less than twenty-four hours, the post had gone viral. The more it was shared and linked to, the higher it rose in search engines’ rankings, and the easier it would be for parents of other children to find.

In The New Yorker, Seth Mnookin reports about what one couple, Matt Might and Cristina Casanova, did when they discovered that their son had a rare condition that no doctor had ever heard about. We featured Might’s account of his family’s search to diagnose his son’s disease in 2012.

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Photo of Matt Might by: David Van Horn