The Best Food Movie Ever Made?

Michael Ruhlman in his eponymous blog:

RataatouilleRatatouille does get the ethos of the kitchen and the strange strivings of the cook exactly right (mainly embodied and described by Colette).  There’s a single error that I can see, one noted in an email to me by bob del grosso: the little rat chef reveals himself as a talented cook not just by fixing a soup completely ruined by the main human character, Linguini, but by making it somehow ethereal.  An impossibility as any cook knows, especially as over salting appears to have been one of the problems.  But that single glitch aside, the movie is a paean to passionate cooking and a moving description of the professional kitchen…

[Anthony] Bourdain was sequestered in a darkened theater a couple years ago and grilled for insider dope on the cook’s life, for which he was paid a few hundred bucks.  He saw it [Ratatouille] last week:

Mainpage_01“I think it’s quite simply the best food movie ever made,” Tony wrote today in an email.  “The best restaurant movie ever made–the best chef movie.  The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks’ wrists. The “personal histories” of the cooks…the attention paid to the food…And the Anton Ego ratatouille epiphany hit me like a punch in the chest–literally breathtaking. I saw it in a theater entirely full with adults–and the reaction to that moment was what movie making was once–a long time ago–all about: Audible surprise, delight, awe and even a measure of enlightenment. I am hugely and disproportionately proud that my miniscule contribution (if any) early early in the project’s development led to a “thank you” in the credits.  Amazing how much they got “right.”

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]  And here’s a bonus video:

Tennis Nonwhites

Toure in the New York Times Book Review:

Screenhunter_23_jul_22_2312From the start of their professional tennis careers, Venus and Serena Williams seemed totally certain they were champions; they marched through the tennis world with the ferocity of the young Mike Tyson. James Blake was No. 9 in the world at the conclusion of Wimbledon this month; late last year he was No. 4. But only twice in his career has he reached a Grand Slam quarterfinal, and many have long sensed that his potential has been limited because he doesn’t truly believe he belongs in big-time tennis. He’s cursed with the unsureness of Dave Chappelle. Blake confirms this in his memoir, “Breaking Back” (written with Andrew Friedman), when, early in his career, he drops a winnable match to the great Patrick Rafter. “After the match, as we shook hands at the net, he leaned in close, the zinc oxide he smeared under his eyes like war paint runny with sweat: ‘You could have beaten me today,’ he said, surprising me, ‘but I had the sense that maybe you didn’t believe it yourself.’ He paused, then said, ‘Now do you believe?’ … He perceived something about me that I wasn’t even admitting to myself: I didn’t really believe that I belonged out there with the best players in the world. I didn’t feel like I deserved to win.”

More here.

Hey, Look

Simon Rich in The New Yorker:

What I imagined the people around me were saying when I was . . .

Eleven:

“Oh, man, I can’t believe that kid Simon missed that ground ball! How pathetic!”
“Wait. He’s staring at his baseball glove with a confused expression on his face. Maybe there’s something wrong with his glove and that’s why he messed up.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what happened.”

                    ————

Twelve:

“Did that kid sitting behind us on the bus just get an erection?”
“I don’t know. For a while, I thought that was the case, but now that he’s holding a book on his lap it’s impossible to tell.”
“I guess we’ll never know what the situation was.”

                    ————

Thirteen:

“Hey, look, that thirteen-year-old is walking around with his mom!”
“Where?”
“There—in front of the supermarket!”
“Oh, my God! That kid is way too old to be hanging out with his mom. Even though I’ve never met him, I can tell he’s a complete loser.”
“Wait a minute. He’s scowling at her and rolling his eyes.”
“Oh, yeah . . . and I think I just heard him curse at her, for no reason.”
“I guess he’s cool after all.”

More here.

How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?

The always brilliantly interesting Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Screenhunter_21_jul_22_1732What’s most remarkable about the question posed in my title is that I probably don’t need to explain it. If you have checked your e-mail anytime in the past few years, you know all about “V.i.a.g.r.a” and “V!A6RA” and  “/lagra,” not to mention “C1aL|$” and “Rrol,x Rep,ica” and—let’s not be bashful about this—”pen1s en1argement.” As spam has been proliferating in everyone’s inbox, it has also been mutating madly, presumably in an effort to evade the filters that most of us now have in place.

I wrote a column on spam four years ago, when the plague was still in its early stages. I reported then, in breathless amazement, that I was getting as many as 300 spams a month! Now, if the tally ever dropped that low, I would worry that something had gone wrong with my Internet connection. Spam has become one of modern life’s little assaults on our patience and dignity, like traffic jams and cell-phone ringtones and getting wanded at the airport. We all hope it will just go away, but in the meantime we learn to live with it. One way of coping is to set your emotions aside and look upon the irritant as an object of dispassionate study.

At the deepest level, spam is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one. The senders and the intended recipients are people, not computers. Nevertheless, there’s the potential for some interesting computation in the making of the stuff, and even moreso in the defenses that help keep it in check. Cre@tive spe11ing is part of this story, and so is the automated production of meaningless drivel. On the defensive side, tools from statistics, pattern analysis and machine intelligence have been brought to bear. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the most widely deployed application of computational linguistics and computational learning theory would be fending off nuisance e-mail?

More here.

What people with autism can tell us about honesty

Simon Baron-Cohen in InCharacter:

AutismIn moral terms, honesty is without doubt a virtue, and dishonesty is a vice. But in social terms, absolute honesty can lead to trouble, risking causing offense to others who may not want or need to hear the complete truth. White lies may be desirable. And in biological terms, dishonesty is a sign of typical brain development, whereas someone who is incapable of dishonesty may be neurologically atypical. Dishonesty is one defining characteristic of what it is to be human. It is not the only defining characteristic, but it does separate us from other animals. Some nonhuman species may have a limited capacity for deception, but humans have a flexible, unlimited capacity for deception. And since anything that is uniquely human is likely to be part of our genetic makeup, it stands to reason that we are, in a sense, built for dishonesty — and those incapable of dishonesty, like people with autism, have a uniquely human disability. Beyond having deficits in social interaction, they live with a different relationship to morality. Their experience is a unique window into the typical human mind.

We’ll return to this point in just a moment. But before we can see what honesty means for being human, and what we can learn about it from autism, we need to take an unexpected detour and examine first what other species can and can’t do when it comes to deception. To understand how humans lie, it profits us to begin by looking at monkeys.

More here.

Universcale

From Nikon’s website:

Screenhunter_20_jul_22_1659

We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes?

See our Universcale and experience the sizes of various objects.

More here.  [Flash animation.]

All the mistakes of the godly are merely metaphor

PZ Meyers in Pharyngula:

250pxpz_myersYou guessed it, once again someone was aggravated that I have dared to call adherence to religious belief a case of being “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed.” This time our indignant contestant is Mark A. R. Kleiman, who considers it atheistic bigotry to enumerate the reasons why people might come to absurd and erroneous conclusions. That 80-90% of this population, which is not hypothetical at all but is the entire US, believes that chanting their wishes into the sky might get them granted by a magic being, or that over half use the excuse of their religious dogma to reject the basic facts of modern biology, is something we must not question and especially must not criticize. Because it is religion, it must be respected.

Except, well, Kleiman has an out. There is a “childish” religion that can be criticized, but then there’s this mature, adult religion that is “always metaphorical.” He’s not really defending those ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed religious kooks that believe the earth is 6000 years old or that we go to war in the Middle East to smite the wicked brown-skinned Muslims, oh no — those are the negligible, unrepresentative fringe elements. True Religious People™ know that everything in their religion is a metaphor.

More here.

What’s the evolutionary advantage of laughing when someone strokes our belly with a feather?

Steven Johnson in Discover Magazine:

LaughterkidsWe take it for granted that tickling causes laughter and that one person’s laughter will easily “infect” other people within earshot. Even a child knows these things. (Tickling and contagious laughter are two of the distinguishing characteristics of childhood.) But when you think about them from a distance, they are strange conventions. We can understand readily enough why natural selection would have implanted the fight-or-flight response in us or endowed us with a sex drive. But the tendency to laugh when others laugh in our presence or to laugh when someone strokes our belly with a feather—what’s the evolutionary advantage of that?

There is a long, semi-illustrious history of scholarly investigation into the nature of humor, from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which may well be the least funny book about humor ever written, to a British research group who claimed they had determined the world’s funniest joke. Despite the fact that the researchers sampled a massive international audience in making this judgment, the winning joke revolved around New Jersey residents: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “OK, now what?”

This joke illustrates the notion of controlled incongruity: You’re expecting x, and you get y.

More here.

heliostats tap sunlight for lighting outdoor and, increasingly, indoor spaces

Michael Dumiak in the Architectural Record:

Screenhunter_17_jul_22_1604A sunny morning at the new Haus der Forschung in Vienna brings more than another day’s work. Through a system of mirrors, prisms, and fiber cables, sunlight itself is funneled into the foyer. Snaking through the Forschung ceiling is the latest experiment in heliostatic lighting—bringing the sun inside the building.

Heliostats are mirror arrays that track the sun, following preprogrammed sequencing directions from software or responding to exterior-mounted sensors. Sunlight can be reflected from a large, high-quality, žroof-mounted circular tracking mirror to a secondary mirror or mirrors, and then directed inside a building, letting sunshine appear as if it were provided by electrical sources.

The mirrors have been around for decades. However, only recently, with increased interest in green energy and CNC cutting processes, which have reduced the costs of machining specialty optics, have architects begun to seriously consider using the mirrors for light and energy sources.

More here.  [Incidentally, I thought of the same idea to pipe sunlight from the roof of my building into my too-dark apartment last year, and even researched the prices of fiber optic cable bundles, but abandoned the project after calculating that the concentrated sunlight would melt the cables–I couldn’t afford too large a bundle–and be a fire hazard.]

Getting to obesity’s bottom line

From The Harvard Gazette:

Waste Hunter-gatherer instincts set loose in a world of modern food abundance are at the root of today’s obesity crisis, according to a Harvard psychologist. Deirdre Barrett, psychologist with the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and assistant clinical professor of psychology in Harvard Medical School’s Psychiatry Department, says food manufacturers and advertising campaigns play to our Paleolithic instincts.

Our bodies evolved in a world where salt, sugar, and fat were scarce and desirable. We live, however, in a word where those substances are not only plentiful, but in which images of them in different forms are beamed at us constantly. “You really can’t just trust your instincts or listen to your body unquestioningly in today’s environment,” Barrett said. Barrett, who has treated many cases of eating disorder over her years in the field, said she advocates radical change for those seeking to eat healthier and lose weight. Simply cutting down on unhealthy french fries or sugary snacks requires more willpower, she said, than does eliminating them entirely: more painful in the first few days but ultimately easier to maintain. Barrett’s advice comes in her latest book, “Waistland,” published in July. Barrett said in an interview Tuesday (June 26) in her Cambridge home that for years she looked for a book that said what she felt needed to be said. Finally, she wrote it herself.

More here.

There may be trouble ahead

From The Guardian:

Billclintonmtp In episode two of Nigel Hamilton’s scintillating biography, our hero has left behind the hick town of Hope, Arkansas – and his humble roots – and travelled, with his lady, to Pennsylvania Avenue. It has not been a journey without incident (or other ladies strewn in various states of undress across his path). But Mrs C, as ever, has stood by her man – which is when she enjoys most traction over this slovenly, sheepish political genius. So here we are in the White House, sorting out office space. That’s the Vice-President’s room over there. Oh no it’s not! says Hillary angrily. That’s the office you said was mine, ‘you motherfucker’. Whereupon, before stunned witnesses, the 42nd President of the United States calls his wife a ‘fucking bitch’. Yes: we have transition … The shambles begins.

Hamilton’s speciality, with a few nods to psychoanalysis, lies not just in telling us what happened but why and how it happened. As he follows William Jefferson Clinton from straitened beginnings to glorious success, he tries to burrow inside the man, to think as he thought, to see through his eyes the decisions that had to be made. But, frankly, the first hundred rotten days were, and remain, an almost inexplicable mess.

Clinton has huge charm, great gifts and high intelligence.

More here.

Border tales

Tyche Hendricks in The San Francisco Chronicle:

Mn_border_ph02 As night fell and migrants at the shelter behind the Holy Family Catholic Church prepared to bed down, Roberto Valenzuela threw his powerful baritone into the old folk song “Cielito Lindo.”

“Ay, ay, ay, ay!”

The other men — most of whom had landed at the shelter after being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol as they tried to cross into the United States — paused to listen: “Canta y no llores!” Valenzuela sang. “Sing and don’t cry!”

Valenzuela, 47, had made his living for years as a mariachi in Phoenix and Los Angeles. He would head north illegally for a few months and be set for the rest of the year. But by late fall, the Border Patrol had caught him twice and he planned to try crossing once more before heading home to Huachinera, two hours south.

More here.

Hot real estate

Steve Rose in The Guardian:

Why are so many architects snapping up ‘land’ in Second Life, the virtual world with almost eight million residents?

Second_life It is a boom-town like no other in history. In less than four years, Second Life, the virtual metropolis where anyone can become a “cyber citizen” simply by logging on, has grown from nothing to a city four times the area of Manhattan, frequented by nearly eight million people. Its population is spiralling and real-estate prices are going through the roof as its virtual land is sold to users for Linden dollars, which can now actually be exchanged for US dollars.

It is one of the web’s most extraordinary creations. At first glance, SL, as most residents call it, resembles a computer game – a 3D landscape you navigate with your own customised character or “avatar” – but there are no dragons to slay or points to score. In fact, it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do at all. Most citizens engage in decidedly first-life activities: socialising, shopping, gambling, even sex. One thing SL is well primed for, however, is building: anyone can make anything, from teapots to skyscrapers.

The essential building blocks are “prims”, short for primitives. These are geometric solids – cubes, spheres, cones – that can be dragged off a template then stretched, positioned, sized, textured and combined to form anything imaginable. Unlike the real world, there’s no gravity, weather, site preparation, sloppy workmanship, or planning committees to worry about. It should be an architect’s paradise.

More here.

An Unbeatable Checkers Program

A dominant strategy for checkers, in news@nature:

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Long-time world checkers champion Marion Tinsley consistently bested all comers, losing only nine games in the 40 years following his 1954 crowning. He lost his world championship title to a computer program in 1994 and now that same program has become unbeatable; its creators have proved that even a perfectly played game against it will end in a draw.

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts.

The team directed Chinook so it didn’t have to go through every one of the 500 billion billion (5 * 10^20) possible moves. Not all losing plays needed to be analysed; instead, for each game position, Chinook needed to work out only a move that would allow it to win. In the end, only 1/5,000,000 of the moves were computed.

Worker-run Production in Argentina, 6-years On

In Argentina, echoes of LIP? Production for Use? kibbutzim? or Mondragon? Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis in The Nation:

There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighborhood assemblies and barter clubs, to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in “recovered companies.” Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It’s an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: “We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale–some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country’s other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country’s deeply unequal “recovery.” Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: This is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

when dealing with the history of philosophy, she is super

Books160

Arendt might have fucked a philosopher, but she didn’t want to be registered as one. That was her final position. But what her work on Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Marx (the main subject of the first half of her book) offers is a philosophy that has what she in her teens brought to Heidegger’s stale world: fresh air. The essays in The Promise of Politics are not musty or suffocating from dread—but very much alive, affirmative, and, at times, as easy on the mind as a breeze on the skin. Nietzsche once spoke of philosophizing with a hammer; Arendt philosophized with an open window.

more from The Stranger here (via Bookforum).

the whole sound coming towards us, all of it

Dm1a

Among the collected letters of Patrick White, the sole Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, is a 1977 note to the editorial director of the Viking Press. “There’s an Australian writer at last who I think has it,” White wrote. “His name is David Malouf, his origins mostly Lebanese, part London-Jewish. He was born and grew up in Queensland. He is a poet, who wrote a kind of autobiographical novel called ‘Johnno,’ which to me is one of the best books about Australia. He has now written another very imaginative novel based on Ovid in exile. It will not be the big money-spinner, but it is literature and perhaps Viking can still afford that.”

more from the LA Times here.