read | Chris Aldrich

👓 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?

🎧 Bread as it ought to be: Seylou Bakery in Washington DC | EatThisPodcast

Listened to Bread as it ought to be: Seylou Bakery in Washington DC by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Jonathan Bethony is one of the leading artisanal bakers in America, but he goes further than most, milling his own flour and baking everything with a hundred percent of the whole grain. He’s also going beyond wheat, incorporating other cereals such as millet and sorghum in the goodies Seylou is producing. I happened to be in Washington DC just a couple of weeks after his new bakery had opened, and despite all the work that goes into getting a new bakery up and running, Jonathan graciously agreed to sit down and chat.

And almost as if to prove my point after writing about Modernist BreadCrumbs the other day, Jeremy’s latest episode is a stunning example of love and care in a podcast dedicated to food. I’m really so pleased that he can take a holiday, have so much fun with bread, and simultaneously turn it into something like this.

Even the title reads as if he were trying to out-do the entirety of eight episodes of Modernist BreadCrumbs in one short interview. I think he’s succeeded handily.

There’s so much great to unpack here, and simultaneously I wish there was more. I found myself wishing he’d had time to travel to some of the farms and done a whole series. With any luck he actually has–I wouldn’t put it past him–and we’ll be delighted in a week or two when they’re released.

👓 Sexual harassment allegations roil Princeton University | WHYY

Read Sexual harassment allegations roil Princeton University by Avi Wolfman-Arent (WHYY)

Another high-profile instance of sexual harassment has rocked a major institution — this time Princeton University in New Jersey. And students say administrators didn’t act transparently or strongly enough when disciplining the alleged perpetrator, a decorated professor.

Once you start reaching Sergio Verdu’s age, and particularly with his achievements, your value to the University becomes more geared toward service. How much service can a professor do with an albatross like this hanging around their neck?

It would be nice if Universities were required to register offenders like this so that applicants to programs would be aware of them prior to applying–a sort of Megan’s Law for the professoriate. Naturally they don’t do this because it goes against their interests, but by the same token this is how a lot of issues run out of control within their sports programs as well. If someone did create such a website, I imagine the chilling effects on colleges and universities would be such that they might change their tunes about how these cases are handled. Immediately recent cases like Michigan State’s athletics problem, USC’s Medical School Dean issues, Christian Ott at Caltech come to mind, but I’m sure there must be hundreds if not thousands of others.

Maybe we need a mashup site that’s a cross between RateMyProfessors.com and California’s Megan’s Law site, but which specifically targeted Universities?

Fortunately even given Sergio’s accomplishments and profile, it will probably take forever for web searches for his name to not surface the story within the top couple of links, but this is sad consolation, particularly in a field like Information Theory which is heavily underrepresented already.

👓 Read Professor Verdu’s emails to student where he invites her over to watch explicit film before sexually harassing her | The Tab

Read Read Professor Verdu’s emails to student where he invites her over to watch explicit film before sexually harassing her (Princeton University)

‘P.S. Please call me Sergio ☺️’

I was just wondering why Sergio Verdu was so quiet on Twitter. Then I wondered why his Twitter account had disappeared.

Now I know the sad and painfully disappointing answer.

🎧 Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 8: Breadbox

Listened to Modernist BreadCrumbs | Episode 8: Breadbox from Heritage Radio Network

Bread is immeasurable, no longer bound by precepts. The new dictum of baking bread is built on shapes and sizes we haven’t even dreamt of. This episode, the proverbial breadbox of the series, will hold all the bits of bread we haven’t gotten to yet, or have yet to be made.

This episode did a bit too much waxing poetic on bread. As a result, it probably would have done a far better job of having been episode one of the series instead of the last and instead edited to provide an introduction to bread and its importance. Even more so when I recall how dreadfully put together episode one of the series was.

On the science/tech front there were only one or two vignette’s here that were worth catching. The rest was just bread poetry.

One interesting aside was a short discussion about the “free” bread that restaurants often put out. Sadly, while still all-too-common, most places really put out bad bread instead of good bread. I often think how much I’d rather actually pay for such a product at a restaurant, particularly if it’s good. Perhaps I just need to leave more restaurants when they put out bad bread knowing that things probably aren’t going to improve?

Summary of the series: It wasn’t horrible, but it also wasn’t as great as I would have hoped. The primary hosts always sounded a bit too commercial and I felt like anytime I heard them I was about to hear a bumper commercial instead of the next part of the story. Somehow it always felt like the interviewer and the interviewee were never in the same room together and that it was all just cut together in post. It was painful to follow the first episode, but things smoothed out quickly thereafter and the production quality was generally very high. Sadly the editorial didn’t seem to be as good as the production value. I almost wonder if the book went out and hired a network to produce this for them, but just found the wrong team to do the execution.

Too often I found myself wishing that Jeremy Cherfas had been picked up to give the subject a proper 10+ episode treatment. I suspect he’d have done a more interesting in-depth bunch of interviews and managed to weave a more coherent story out of the whole. Alas, twas never thus.