This website, à la carte, started in 1999 as what was then know as an ‘e-zine’, an online magazine. It’s subject was French food and the French culinary experience. After nine years of posting a new, lengthy article each month, I found my interests broadening to a wider view of food, and my time available to write for the site reduced.
I wanted to spend more time producing general food interest videos, and by 2011, I was also posting a new, mostly original small-dish recipe each week. These posts came to an end in 2015. All 235 were gathered into a single, long (≈250,000 words) article.
In the future, expect to see the occasional new article or video as time allows. Rest assured, à la carte is alive and well, and its creator is busy expanding his knowledge to produce more content.
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🔖 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot by Peter Hertzmann
Peter Hertzmann's mission is simple - to make as many people as possible realise that if you can manage 50 ways of cooking one simple ingredient - the carrot - you can cook almost any dish, and cook it to perfection.
Every method presented in this book is approachable for both novice cooks and those with many years’ experience. He gives prescriptive advice, such as the salt concentration for pickling a carrot should be 3%, but his book is easy to put into action in the kitchen.
Some of the methods:
Simple slices — Matchsticks, julienne, or bâtonnets — Dicing — Roll cut — Grating carrots — Mandolins — Juicing carrots — Blending carrots — Immersion blenders — Processing carrots —
Making sauerkraut — A new-fangled pickling container — Salt fermented carrots — Miso-pickled carrots — Acid fermentation — Keeping pickles crisp — Acid fermented carrot pickles — Determining liquid quantity — Salt for acid pickling — Sugar for pickling — Pickling spices — Processing acid-fermented carrots
Modern, sous-vide cooking — Why sous-vide cooking works— Set-up your equipment — Choose your bag — Prepare your carrots — Cook your carrots
Peter Hertzmann is a passionate cook, and educator on food cooking, with years of teaching to his name. He is a professionally trained cook, completing ‘stage’ placements in several high end restaurants in France, then worked in restaurants, and produced complicated seven course menus as part of a team over many years. He has taught in prisons and colleges of further education. Peter lives in the USA and is a regular contributor to the Oxford Symposium on Food.
🔖 GLTR (glitter) v0.5
This demo enables forensic inspection of the visual footprint of a language model on input text to detect whether a text could be real or fake.
🔖 GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text | Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
The rapid improvement of language models has raised the specter of abuse of text generation systems. This progress motivates the development of simple methods for detecting generated text that can be used by and explained to non-experts. We develop GLTR, a tool to support humans in detecting whether a text was generated by a model. GLTR applies a suite of baseline statistical methods that can detect generation artifacts across common sampling schemes. In a human-subjects study, we show that the annotation scheme provided by GLTR improves the human detection-rate of fake text from 54% to 72% without any prior training. GLTR is open-source and publicly deployed, and has already been widely used to detect generated outputs.
From pages 111–116; Florence, Italy, July 28 - August 2, 2019. Association for Computational Linguistics
🔖 Notes from the quest factory | Robin Sloan
Tools and techniques related to AI text generation. I wrote this for like twelve people. Recently, I used an AI trained on fantasy novels to generate custom stories for about a thousand readers. The stories were appealingly strange, they came with maps (MAPS!), and they looked like this:
🔖 The Resurrection of Flinders Petrie | electricarchaeology.ca
The following is an extended excerpt from my book-in-progress, “An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology: Raising the Dead with Agent Based Models, Archaeogaming, and Artificial Intelligence”, which is under contract with Berghahn Books, New York, and is to see the light of day in the summer of 2020. I welcome your thoughts. The final form of this section will no doubt change by the time I get through the entire process. I use the term ‘golems’ earlier in the book to describe the agents of agent based modeling, which I then translate into archaeogames, which then I muse might be powered by neural network models of language like GPT-2.
👓 When You Give A Mouse A Domain | Greg McVerry
She'll want a wesbite to go with it
🔖 Democratic Ideas Fall 2019 | John Zumbrunnen
🔖 Automate.io
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🔖 Integromat – The glue of the internet
Integromat is an easy to use, powerful tool with unique features for automating manual processes. Connect your favorite apps, services and devices with each other without having any programming skills.
🔖 Speakers: Round Two | WordCamp Riverside 2019
This group will join our other speakers for 3 days of sessions on November 8th – 10th. We hope you’ll join us for their sessions. View the Full Schedule Here & Get your ticket today!
🔖 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
🔖 The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. | Beineke Library
Call Number: Creator: Descartes, René, 1596-1650 Language: Date: 1697. Publisher: Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwicklane, Subjects: Genre: Type of Resource: Description: Signatures: [A]¹B-F⁸G³.The wrapper for the cards has title: Geometre and the mechanick powers represented in a pack of playing cards, made and sold by J Moxon att the Attlas in Warwick lane London.First part (p. 1-53) probably written by Joseph Moxon.BEIN K8 D44 Rg697: Imperfect: t.p. and p. 85 badly mutilated and mounted; wrapper frayed and mounted.Physical Description: 1 p.l., 85 p. ; 17 cm. and 52 cards (in engr. wrapper) 9 x 6 cm.Rights: More about permissions and copyrightThe use of this image may be subject to the copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) or to site license or other rights management terms and conditions. The person using the image is liable for any infringement.Curatorial Area: Beinecke Library Catalog Record: Source Digital Format: High Resolution (image/tiff)Object ID: 11529500 Download: Cite this | Text this | Report this
This was probably a great memory exercise for Monsi. Des-Cartes in simply making these. But on first blush, I have to think that he’s also creating a memory palace of sorts for the information itself! Because the deck of cards can be a predetermined path of sorts, going through the deck in the prescribed order he’s laid out allows it to be a journey to which he’s attaching the images on the cards as well as encoding the information within the text by which to memorize it. To me this is very reminiscent of the “Sermon on the Six Wings of the Seraph” described as:
The earliest of the four preachers’ arts is the so-called sermon on the six wings of the seraph, using as the organizing figure the six-winged creature described in Isaiah 6. Ascribed to the late twelfth-century Parisian master Alan of Lille, it became quickly popular as one of the model sermons of his ‘‘art of preaching.’’ But it is not a sermon. It is instead an art for preachers needing to invent sermons. It describes how to use sets of five themes on each of six basic subjects, or res, all keyed to a memorable organizing ‘‘picture.’’ Only the first of these themes is developed as an actual sermon might be, evidently to serve as a model. The work as a whole provides a fine example of memoria rerum and is related, through centuries of (mostly orally disseminated) classroom tradition, to the picture-like example of the technique of memoria rerum used in a courtroom setting, which is described at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.20.33).
— The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)