February, 2018 | Chris Aldrich - Part 2

👓 Losing Count | The Paris Review

Read Losing Count by Adrienne Raphel (The Paris Review)

How do nonsensical counting-out rhymes like these enter the lexicon?

I’d read this a year or two ago for a specific purpose and revisited it again today just for entertainment. There’s some interesting history hiding in this sort of exercise.

I also considered these rhymes as simple counting games, but the’re not really used to count up as if they were ordinals. Most people couldn’t even come close to saying how many things they’d have counted if they sang such a song. I also find that while watching children sing these while “counting” they typically do so with a choice for each syllable, but this often fails in the very young so that they can make their own “mental” choice known while still making things seem random. For older kids, with a little forethought and some basic division one can make something seemingly random and turn it into a specific choice as well.

So what are these really and what purpose did they originally serve?

📖 Read pages 127-162 of Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

📖 Read pages 127-162, Part 3: Meat: Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios, of Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman (Scribner, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-4165-661-3)

I like the idea of considering the traditional American hamburger as a special kind of sausage. This general abstraction appeals to the mathematician in me. It also encourages one to be geared toward the closer end of 70/30 meat/fat ratio when making hamburgers! Too often I’ve had people’s homemade burgers made with 92/8 ratios and they’re just dreadful. However, he does stop short and doesn’t encourage one to use pork fat in their burgers…

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Part 3: Meat: Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios

There is no such thing as a good, lean sausage.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 132

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

The fat of choice is pork back fat, […] it’s better for you than the more saturated fat from beef or lamb.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Indeed, the word sausage derives from the Latin for salt.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Never use iodized salt, which adds an acrid chemical flavor to food. Use kosher or sea salt only.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Morton’s kosher is the closest to an even volume-to-weight ratio (a cup of Morton’s weighs about 8 ounces).

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Pork sausages should be cooked to 150 deg F before being removed from the heat, and poultry-based sausages should be cooked to 160 deg F.

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 134

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

I make sausage in 5-pound batches, since that’s the maximum that will fit in the 5- or 6-quart mixing bowl standard for most standing mixers;

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 135

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

[When making] Fry a bit-sized portion of the sausage and taste…

Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 136

Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

One secondary and salutary effect of a brine is that it can actually carry flavors into muscle, …

Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 154

For those watching closely, he’s made a pun on the word salutary whose Latin root is also the word for salt.
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

Sodium nitrite, often simply referred to as pink salt (it’s dyed pink), is a curing salt that’s inexpensive and available from www.butcher-packer.com, which sells pink salt under the name DQ Cure.

Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 158

Oddly this line is repeated twice in the footnotes on opposite pages, but provides a useful link for ordering supplies for making Canadian bacon and Corned Beef
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018

👓 02/02/2018, 12:41 | Colin Walker

Read There has to be a better way to subscribe to sites. by Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)

There has to be a better way to subscribe to sites. While RSS readers are making a bit of a comeback in certain quarters there's no doubt that, as Sameer puts it, "subscribing to feeds definitely has fallen out of parlance." It's not just that sites need subscribe buttons again, but that using them should not be akin to a dark art. As Dave initially said, echoed by Frank, the social networks have made following easy - reading, writing, following, it's all within the same UI. That's what makes micro.blog unique, it has that familiar social feel but you are actually invisibly subscribing to people's RSS/JSON feeds when following them. The timeline is a glorified feed reader with integrated posting and social elements. That's fine within the confines of a service like micro.blog but what about on the open web when hitting "follow" isn't handled for you? "Remember when all the apps supported RSS? Browsers, email clients, everything!" It used to be so much better but, even then, implementation differed. Chrome just shows us the XML, Safari lost its "subscribe" feature, Firefox seems more feed aware but it's all still unintuitive. Some platforms allow you to set your default feed reader to "open in" - others don't - but this still needs you to understand what feeds are, how they are consumed and choose a reader. There needs to be a way to handle subscriptions on the open web like following a person on a social network. But how? Any solution would require everyone to get on board with compatible options for what most see as an antiquated technology. Perhaps it needs something new. But what? Are browser developers going to reintroduce native subscription options? Doubtful.

I’ve got some thoughts on this forthcoming. Need to get over my head cold soon.

🔖 ScholarlyHub sounds like IndieWeb for Education

Bookmarked Scholarly Hub (ScholarlyHub)

At ScholarlyHub we believe that a critical attitude does not stop with the platforms we use. Growing threats to open science have made it more crucial than before to develop a sustainable, not-for-profit environment. One that allows you to publish, share, and access quality work without financial constraints; find and work with colleagues in fields you’re interested in; develop research and teaching projects; store datasets securely, and mentor and be mentored in order to improve your work and help others. Above all, we want to foster an environment that meets our needs as individuals and scholarly communities and where we are in control, not myopic political agendas, greedy publishers, or data merchants. We believe that scholarship does little good behind pay walls, that metrified rankings rarely promote innovative research, and that transparent communication is vital to quality scholarship and healthy societies. Therefore we’re taking the best of the new and the best of the tried to create a truly open-access repository, publishing service, and scholarly social networking site, with large scope for members' initiatives. And it will be run by scholars: not for profit, greater market share, or political kudos, but for their own growth and everyone’s benefit.

It looks to me like a lot of what ScholarlyHub is doing sounds very similar to the principles behind the IndieWeb. They’re just applying them to the education and research sector.

Most of their manifesto sounds very familiar to me. Because of a lack of plurality, I’m guessing they’re generation 1 creators concentrating on building an inexpensive platform for generations 2 and on.