Chris Aldrich Blog: BoffoSocko.com

🔖 Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Bookmarked Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel (University of Chicago Press)

Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you’d better believe there’s an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city’s population had grown to more than one million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States. Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City’s food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.

Came across this excellent sounding history of food in New York via the author’s obituary in the New York Times.

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👓 Learning How to Learn Math | Math3ma | Tai-Danae Bradley

Read Learning How to Learn Math by

Tai-Danae Bradley (math3ma.com)

Once upon a time, while in college, I decided to take my first intro-to-proofs class. I was so excited. "This is it!" I thought, "now I get to learn how to think like a mathematician." You see, for the longest time, my mathematical upbringing was very... not mathematical. As a student in high school and well into college, I was very good at being a robot. Memorize this formula? No problem. Plug in these numbers? You got it. Think critically and deeply about the ideas being conveyed by the mathematics? Nope. It wasn't because I didn't want to think deeply. I just wasn't aware there was anything to think about. I thought math was the art of symbol-manipulation and speedy arithmetic computations. I'm not good at either of those things, and I never understood why people did them anyway. But I was excellent at following directions. So when teachers would say "Do this computation," I would do it, and I would do it well. I just didn't know what I was doing. By the time I signed up for that intro-to-proofs class, though, I was fully aware of the robot-symptoms and their harmful side effects. By then, I knew that math not just fancy hieroglyphics and that even people who aren't super-computers can still be mathematicians because—would you believe it?—"mathematician" is not synonymous with "human calculator." There are even—get this—ideas in mathematics, which is something I could relate to. ("I know how to have ideas," I surmised one day, "so maybe I can do math, too!") One of my instructors in college was instrumental in helping to rid me of robot-syndrome. One day he told me, "To fully understand a piece of mathematics, you have to grapple with it. You have to work hard to fully understand every aspect of it." Then he pulled out his cell phone, started rotating it about, and said, "It's like this phone. If you want to understand everything about it, you have to analyze it from all angles. You have to know where each button is, where each ridge is, where each port is. You have to open it up and see how it the circuitry works. You have to study it—really study it—to develop a deep understanding." "And that" he went on to say, "is what studying math is like."

A nice little essay on mathematics for old and young alike–and particularly for those who think they don’t understand or “get” math. It’s ultimately not what you think it is, there’s something beautiful lurking underneath.

In fact, I might say that unless you can honestly describe mathematics as “beautiful”, you should read this essay and delve a bit deeper until you get the understanding that’s typically not taught in mathematics until far too late in most people’s academic lives.

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👓 Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot | Hypothesis

Read Who says neuroscientists don’t need more brains? Annotation with SciBot by Maryann Martone (web.hypothes.is/blog/)

You might think that neuroscientists already have enough brains, but apparently not. Over 100 neuroscientists attending the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), took part in an annotation challenge: modifying scientific papers to add simple references that automatically generate and attach Hypothesis annotations, filled with key related information. To sweeten the pot, our friends at Gigascience gave researchers who annotated their own papers their very own brain hats.

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👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum

Replied to Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning by

Clint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)

Been spending a bit of time in the past 2 days adding some new functionality to the blog. I am making more of an effort to write more, thanks in no small part to the 9x9x25 blog challenge I am doin…

Right now, I just want to write. ❧

You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. ❧

Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM

Grant Potter ❧

Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM

the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were ❧

a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM

I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used. ❧

It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM

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Following local Altadena and Pasadena News

I’ve been thinking more about local news lately, so I’ve taken some time to aggregate some of my local news sources. While I live in the Los Angeles area, it’s not like I’m eschewing the Los Angeles Times, but I wanted to go even more uber-local than this. Thus I’m looking more closely at my local Altadena and Pasadena news outlets. I’m a bit surprised to see just how many small outlets and options I’ve got! People say local news is dying or dead, so I thought I would only find two or three options–how wrong could I have been?

In addition to some straightforward journalistic related news sources, I’ve also included some additional local flavor news which includes town councils, the chamber of commerce, historical societies, etc. which have websites that produce feeds with occasional news items.

Going forward you can see these sources aggregated on my following page.

For those who are interested I’ve created an OPML file which contains the RSS feeds of all these sources if they’d like to follow them as well. Naturally most have other social media presences, but there’s usually no guarantee that if you followed them that way that you’ll actually see the news you wanted.

If anyone is aware of other sources, I’m happy to add them to the list.

Here’s the initial list of sources:

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👓 Riding the Locals’ Favorite: El Prieto, Altadena, California | Singletracks Mountain Bike News

Read Riding the Locals’ Favorite: El Prieto, Altadena, California by Greg Heil (Singletracks.com)

El Prieto has been hailed by many as one of the best singletrack rides in the Los Angeles area. After hearing such accolades, I just had to check it out! And let me tell you: the reputation is not unfounded. To start the ride, park at the lot and head past the upper yellow gate on the paved road. Af...

It’s been a few years since I’ve ridden this trail, and I remember the trail itself being excellent, but don’t remember the ride up being as nice as described here–at least not in the open fire roads during the high heat of the day.

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