Audio – Page 57 – Chris Aldrich

🎧 Literal Farm To Table: Here’s The Dirt On Chefs Cooking With Dirt | The Salt (NPR)

Listened to Literal Farm To Table: Here's The Dirt On Chefs Cooking With Dirt from The Salt (NPR)

What's the next big foodie enthusiasm? Robust flavors, earthy scents and lusty textures from the very soil that nourishes life. It's called Veritable Cuisine du Terroir — literally, Food from the Earth Really — and in their copper-clad kitchen in the Marais district of Paris, chefs Solange and Gael Gregoire run one of the hottest bistros in a city long celebrated for its culinary prowess. Their restaurant, Le Plat Sal — which translates to The Dirty Plate — prepares four-star signature dishes, like Roche Dans la Croute, a rock from Mont Lachat folded into a pastry crust, and Boue Ragout, a stew simmered from the mud of the Seine River, washed down with a surprisingly delicate vintage of Du Vin d'Egout, a smoky gray wine distilled from Paris sewer water.

Coprophagia is so yesterday already.

🎧 Police Videos: Cincinnati, March 23, 2017 | Embedded (NPR)

Listened to Police Videos: Cincinnati, March 23, 2017 by Kelly McEvers and producer Tom Dreisbach from Embedded | NPR

On April 16, 2015, police officer Jesse Kidder encountered a murder suspect named Michael Wilcox in a suburb outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. What happened next was caught on video and surprised a lot of people, including police. And the incident tells us a lot about how these videos have changed us.

Follow us on Twitter @nprembedded, follow Kelly McEvers @kellymcevers, and producer Tom Dreisbach @TomDreisbach. Email us at embedded@npr.org

An interesting piece with some pressing questions. Though they set the race issue aside (and cleverly try to hide it at the beginning), I wonder what drastically different training might produce in these situations?

🎧 Frame of Reference | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Frame of Reference from Invisibilia (NPR)

What shapes the way we perceive the world around us? A lot of it has to do with invisible frames of reference that filter our experiences and determine how we feel. Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin interview a woman who gets a glimpse of what she's been missing all her life – and then loses it. And they talk to Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj about which frame of reference is better – his or his dad's.

I often think about frames of reference having grown up in poor, rural Appalachia and then living in affluent areas of Connecticut and later Los Angeles. I’m sure it’s had more of an effect on me than I could verbalize.

The closest I’ve come to having as significant a frame of reference change as the physician who realized she had Asperger syndrome (and how she came to know), was when I worked my way through David Christian’s Big History concept. In some sense I had some background in both science and history which helped, but I cannot possibly go back to seeing the world (and the Universe we live in) the same way again.

Incidentally, the fact that this treatment seemed so effective for this woman hopefully means that some really heavy and interesting research is continuing in these areas.

The final segment was interesting from the perspective of gradations in change of reference. I was blown down by the idea of the “skin lamp.” Just the phrase and it’s horrific meaning is enough to drastically change anyone’s frame of reference.

🎧 Outside In | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Outside In from Invisibilia (NPR)

There's a popular idea out there that you can change from the outside in. Power posing. Fake it 'til you make it. If you just assume the pose, inner transformation will follow. We examine to what extent this is true, by following the first all-female debate team in Rwanda, a country that has legislated gender equality. We also see how an app reshaped the relationship of twin sisters. And we end our season at the beach, with a man whose life was transformed by a seagull named Mac Daddy.

The last episode of season 2. Somehow the first long segment of this episode doesn’t quite fit into the broader theme of the rest of the episodes. It felt like the producers needed to fill in the space or took a pitch from outside. The story of the twin sisters, one with diabetes, was interesting, but not exceptional.

The final piece about animals brings it all back home though.

This may be my least favorite of all of the episodes thus far, but I’m excited to hear what comes in season 3.

🎧 Sacha Baron Cohen interview on WTF with Marc Maron

Listened to Sacha Baron Cohen by Marc Maron from WTF, Episode 683

You know Borat. You know Bruno. You know Ali G. But you probably don’t know much about Sacha Baron Cohen. The man himself sits down with Marc in the garage to talk about what goes into bringing such rich comedic characters to life, why he was drawn to comedy in the first place, and what’s next, with his new movie The Brothers Grimsby on the horizon.

I haven’t heard or seen any extended interviews with Sacha Baron Cohen. While this one goes a bit overboard on some of the making of his antics and films, there is some great personal background about how he got into comedy. Interestingly, he gets into an extended conversation about the theory of bouffon and clowning. It would have been nice if they detoured into 16th century commedia dell’arte, but you can’t have everything now can you?

🎧 Flip the Script | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Flip the Script from Invisibilia (NPR)

Psychology has a golden rule: If I am warm, you are usually warm. If I am hostile, you are too. But what happens if you flip the script and meet hostility with warmth? It's called "noncomplementary behavior" — a mouthful, but a powerful concept, and very hard to execute. Alix and Hanna examine three attempts to pull it off: during a robbery, a terrorism crisis and a dating dry spell.

Wow! Just wow! This concept is certainly worth thinking about in greater depth.

I loved the story of police and harassment; it is particularly interesting given the possible changes we could make in the world using these techniques. It shows what some kindness and consideration can do to reshape the world.

🎧 Industrial strength craft beer | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Industrial strength craft beer from Eat This Podcast

Italy, land of fabled wines, has seen an astonishing craft beer renaissance. Or perhaps naissance would be more accurate, as Italy has never had that great a reputation for beers. Starting in the early 1990s, with Teo Musso at Le Baladin, there are now more than 500 craft breweries in operation up and down the peninsula. Specialist beer shops are popping up like mushrooms all over Rome, and probably elsewhere, and even our local supermarket carries quite a range of unusual beers. Among them four absolutely scrummy offerings from Mastri Birai Umbri – Master Brewers of Umbria. And then it turns out that my friend Dan Etherington, who blogs (mostly) at Bread, cakes and ale, knows the Head Brewer, Michele Sensidoni. A couple of emails later and there we were, ready for Michele to give us a guided tour of the brewery.

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I’m sure there was audio all the way through the tour, but portions of it were cut out, likely for time editing, but I kind of wish the whole thing was there… I could probably listen to this kind of beer talk all day long. I would also appreciate a more chemistry-based technical approach to the topic as well.

The question of the definition of craft beer versus industrial beer is a very good, yet subtle one.

I’m actually curious to try a beer that’s based on legumes to see what the increased protein percentages do to the flavor. It’s also interesting to hear about the potential creation of a signature Italian style beer.

🎧 A computer learns about ingredients and recipes | Eat This Podcast

Listened to A computer learns about ingredients and recipes by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Perhaps you've heard about IBM's giant Watson computer, which dispenses ingredient advice and novel recipes. Jaan Altosaar, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, is working on a recipe recommendation engine that anyone can use.

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Back in February I had retweeted something interesting from physicist and information theorist Michael Nielsen:

“Augmented cooking with machine intelligence”, with interesting remarks on generating food analogies… https://t.co/UluYk6p8TV

— michael_nielsen (@michael_nielsen) February 2, 2017

I found the article in it so interesting, there was some brief conversation around it and I thought to recommend it to my then new friend Jeremy Cherfas, whose Eat This Podcast I had just recently started to enjoy. Mostly I thought he would find it as interesting as I, though I hardly expected he’d turn it into a podcast episode. Though I’ve been plowing through back episodes in his catalog, fortunately this morning I ran out of downloaded episodes in the car so I started streaming the most recent one to find a lovely surprise: a podcast produced on a tip I made.

While he surely must have been producing the episode for some time before I started supporting the podcast on Patreon last week, I must say that having an episode made from one of my tips is the best backer thank you I’ve ever received from a crowd funded project.

Needless to say, I obviously found the subject fascinating. In part it did remind me of a section of Herve This’ book The Science of the Oven (eventually I’ll get around to posting a review with more thoughts) and some of his prior research which I was apparently reading on Christmas Day this past year. On page 118 of the text This discusses the classic French sauces of Escoffier’s students Louis Saulnier and Theodore Gringoire [1] and that a physical chemical analysis of them shows there to be only twenty-three kinds. He continues on:

A system that I introduced during the European Conference on Colloids and Interfaces in 2002 [2] offers a new classification, based on the physical chemical structure of the sauce. In it, G indicates a gas, E an aqueous solution, H a fat in the liquid state, and S a solid. These “phases” can be dispersed (symbol /), mixed (symbol +), superimposed (symbol θ), included (symbol @). Thus, veal stock is a solution, which is designated E. Bound veal stock, composed of starch granules swelled by the water they have absorbed, dispersed in an aqueous solution, is thus described by the formula (E/S)/E.

This goes on to describe in a bit more detail how the scientist-cook could then create a vector space of all combinations of foods from a physical state perspective. A classification system like this could be expanded and bolted on top of the database created by Jaan Altosaar and improved to provide even more actual realistic recipes of the type discussed in the podcast. The combinatorics of the problem are incredibly large, but my guess is that the constraints on the space of possible solutions is brought down incredibly in actual practice. It’s somewhat like the huge numbers of combinations the A, C, T, and Gs in our DNA that could be imagined, yet only an incredibly much smaller subset of that larger set could be found in a living human being.

Small World

The additional byproduct of catching this episode was that it finally reminded me why I had thought the name Jaan Altosaar was so familiar to me when I read his article. It turns out I know Jaan and some of his previous work. Sometime back in 2014 I had corresponded with him regarding his fantastic science news site Useful Science which was just then starting. While I was digging up the connection I realized that my old friend Sol Golomb had also referenced Jaan to me via Mark Wilde for some papers he suggested I read.

References

[1]

T. Gringoire and L. Saulnier, Le répertoire de la cuisine. Dupont et Malgat, 1914.

[2]

H. This, “La gastronomie moléculaire,” Sci Aliments, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 187–198, 2003 [Online]. Available: http://sda.revuesonline.com/article.jsp?articleId=2577 [Source]