Chris Aldrich | Chris Aldrich

Checkin Ikea Burbank

Happy grand opening Ikea Burbank!

It took about an hour and fifteen minutes after officially opening for the entire line, which filled the front parking lot and snaked it’s way around the parking lot and the building, to all finally enter the store.

The Crowded Parking Lot on Opening Day

Presumably these three blue boards will eventually say IKEA?

People starting to file into the new store

Hoardes of people waiting in line to enter.

A view from the top of the escalator with employees cheering on incoming customers.

The store map with shortcuts for the massive ~450,000 square foot store.

The first customers sitting down to lunches of meatballs and toast with lingonberry jam.

🎧 Air-cured sausages | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Air-cured sausages from Eat This Podcast

Among the more miraculous edible transformations is the one that turns raw meat, salt and a few basic spices into some of the most delicious foods around.

Time was when curing meat, especially stuffed into a casing to make a sausage, was the only way both to use every part of an animal and to help make it last longer than raw meat. Done right, a sausage would stay good to the next slaughtering season and beyond.

The process relied on the skill of the sausage-maker, the help of beneficial bacteria and moulds, the right conditions, a great deal of patience, and sometimes luck. Luck is less of a factor now, because to keep up with demand the vast majority of cured meats are produced in artificial conditions of controlled precision. Here and there, though, the old ways survive. Jan Davison spent months touring the sausage high-spots of Europe looking for the genuine article, and shared some of her favourites at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking last year.

This tempts me greatly to consider decommissioning an incubator from science related use to food related use…

🎧 Bog Butter | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Bog Butter from Eat This Podcast, March 4, 2013

Peat diggers in Ireland and elsewhere have occasionally unearthed objects, usually made of wood, that contained some kind of greasy, fatty material with a “distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell”. Butter. Centuries-old butter.

Who buried it, and why, remain mysteries that motivated Ben Reade, an experimental chef at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, to make some himself. He brought some of his modern-day bog butter, still nestled in moss and wrapped in its birch-bark barrel, to share with the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery last year.

Notes:
Ben mentioned two plants that have been found around bog butter, hypnum moss (Hypnum cupressiforme) and bog cotton (Eriophorum angustifolium).
The Nordic Food Lab research blog details all of their astonishing edible experiments.
I found Seamus Heaney reading his poem Bogland at The Internet Poetry Archive.
Caroline Earwood (1997) Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History, The Journal of Irish Archaeology, 8: 25-42 is available at JStor, which has a new scheme allowing you to read up to three items at a time online for free.
Music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.

An awesome little podcast I found recently, so I’m going back to the beginning to catch up on all the past episodes. Science, food, heaps of technical expertise, great interviews, and spectacular production quality. Highly recommend it to everyone.

🎧 The Problem with the Solution | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to The Problem with the Solution from Invisibilia | NPR.org

We are naturally drawn to finding solutions. But are there ever problems we shouldn't try to solve? Lulu Miller visits a town in Belgium with a completely different approach to dealing with mental illness. Families in the town board people – strangers - with severe mental illnesses in their homes, sometimes for decades. And it works, because they are not looking to cure them.

A stunning idea, and one that could do well not only for the mentally ill among our friends and families, but some interesting psychology for parenting and expectations of parents for their children.

The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903) | Open Culture

Read The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903) by Ted Mills (openculture.com)

Once lost, this eight minute, very damaged, but very delightful silent version of Alice in Wonderland was restored several years ago by the British Film Institute. It is the first film adaptation of the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic. And at the time, the original length of 12 minutes (eight are all that’s left) made it the longest film coming out of the nascent British film industry. After about a minute, the eye ignores the damage of the film, like the ear ignores a scratched 78 rpm record. Viewers can expect several vignettes from the novel, not a flowing narrative. It starts with Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole, the “eat me” and “drink me” sequence, the squealing baby that turns into a piglet, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Party, and the Red Queen and her playing card minions. The coloring of the negative is a BFI reconstruction of the original colors, by the way. The film was produced and directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow out of their Hepworth Studios in Walton-on-the-Thames, near London. They show knowledge of the camera trickery pioneered only a few years earlier by Georges Méliès, like the shrinking and growing Alice and the appearance of the Cheshire Cat. That cat, by the way, was the Hepworth’s family pet. Hepworth himself plays the frog-headed footman, and his wife played the Red Queen. May Clark, who played Alice, was 18 at the time, and had already worked on several Hepworth productions, and not just acting. According to her bio at the Women Film Pioneers project, she did a bit of everything around the studio, “from special effects and set decoration to costume design and carpentry.” The early days of film have a real “student project” feel about them, no pigeonholed roles, just everybody chipping in. As for Cecil Hepworth, he appeared destined for a career in film, as his father ran magic lantern shows. Cecil worked for several companies before setting up his own and wrote one of the first books on the subject, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph. His company continued to make films in this early style through 1926, but eventually ran out of money. To pay off debts, the receivership company melted down his films to get the silver, which was the reason most scholars thought his films were lost. In 2008, one of his films was discovered, and then “Alice.” There may still be others out there. You can find Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. And the 1903 film listed in our other collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

🔖 The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization | Springer

Bookmarked The Hypercycle - A Principle of Natural Self-Organization | M. Eigen | Springer (Springer, 1979)

This book originated from a series of papers which were published in "Die Naturwissenschaften" in 1977178. Its division into three parts is the reflection of a logic structure, which may be abstracted in the form of three theses:

A. Hypercycles are a principle of natural self-organization allowing an integration and coherent evolution of a set of functionally coupled self-replicative entities.

B. Hypercycles are a novel class of nonlinear reaction networks with unique properties, amenable to a unified mathematical treatment.

C. Hypercycles are able to originate in the mutant distribution of a single Darwinian quasi-species through stabilization of its diverging mutant genes. Once nucleated hypercycles evolve to higher complexity by a process analogous to gene duplication and specialization. In order to outline the meaning of the first statement we may refer to another principle of material self organization, namely to Darwin's principle of natural selection. This principle as we see it today represents the only understood means for creating information, be it the blue print for a complex living organism which evolved from less complex ancestral forms, or be it a meaningful sequence of letters the selection of which can be simulated by evolutionary model games.

Part A in .pdf format.

🔖 Cognition and biology: perspectives from information theory

Bookmarked Cognition and biology: perspectives from information theory (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The intimate relation between biology and cognition can be formally examined through statistical models constrained by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory, augmented by methods from statistical mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Cognition, often involving submodules that act as information sources, is ubiquitous across the living state. Less metabolic free energy is consumed by permitting crosstalk between biological information sources than by isolating them, leading to evolutionary exaptations that assemble shifting, tunable cognitive arrays at multiple scales, and levels of organization to meet dynamic patterns of threat and opportunity. Cognition is thus necessary for life, but it is not sufficient: An organism represents a highly patterned outcome of path-dependent, blind, variation, selection, interaction, and chance extinction in the context of an adequate flow of free energy and an environment fit for development. Complex, interacting cognitive processes within an organism both record and instantiate those evolutionary and developmental trajectories.

🔖 Thermodynamics of Prediction

Bookmarked Thermodynamics of Prediction (journals.aps.org Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 120604 (2012))

A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system’s state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining nonpredictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. We expose the fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation. Our results hold arbitrarily far from thermodynamic equilibrium and are applicable to a wide range of systems, including biomolecular machines. They highlight a profound connection between the effective use of information and efficient thermodynamic operation: any system constructed to keep memory about its environment and to operate with maximal energetic efficiency has to be predictive.

🔖 Statistical Physics of Adaptation

Bookmarked Statistical Physics of Adaptation (journals.aps.org Phys. Rev. X 6, 021036 (2016))

Whether by virtue of being prepared in a slowly relaxing, high-free energy initial condition, or because they are constantly dissipating energy absorbed from a strong external drive, many systems subject to thermal fluctuations are not expected to behave in the way they would at thermal equilibrium. Rather, the probability of finding such a system in a given microscopic arrangement may deviate strongly from the Boltzmann distribution, raising the question of whether thermodynamics still has anything to tell us about which arrangements are the most likely to be observed. In this work, we build on past results governing nonequilibrium thermodynamics and define a generalized Helmholtz free energy that exactly delineates the various factors that quantitatively contribute to the relative probabilities of different outcomes in far-from-equilibrium stochastic dynamics. By applying this expression to the analysis of two examples—namely, a particle hopping in an oscillating energy landscape and a population composed of two types of exponentially growing self-replicators—we illustrate a simple relationship between outcome-likelihood and dissipative history. In closing, we discuss the possible relevance of such a thermodynamic principle for our understanding of self-organization in complex systems, paying particular attention to a possible analogy to the way evolutionary adaptations emerge in living things.

🔖 Meaning = Information + Evolution by Carlo Rovelli

Bookmarked Meaning = Information + Evolution (arxiv.org)

Notions like meaning, signal, intentionality, are difficult to relate to a physical word. I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived. It is inspired by a model recently illustrated by Kolchinsky and Wolpert, and improves on Dretske classic work on the relation between knowledge and information. I discuss what makes a physical process into a "signal".