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I like words, and organising things, and photographing other things, and being silly and laughing heaps, and you know... stuff
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Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia
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> Taxes
[Feels sorry for the Americans in Swedish]
[Feels sorry for the Americans in Swedish]
I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.
Melbourne
Melbourne
Biocubes is a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass). From a piece in the Times about the visualization:
“The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,” he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (“In my experience, most people expect the opposite.”) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.
Update: As noted in the comments and in my inbox, it should probably be “humans outweigh wild mammals 10 to 1”.
Tags: infoviz
Exercise is “the single most potent medical intervention ever known”. “People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps.”
Melbourne
In this excerpt from Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, author Eliot Stein travels to a city in Sardinia to learn how to make the world’s rarest pasta, su filindeu.
As much as I would hate to see su filindeu fade away, I understand why Abraini doesn’t want to teach it to any Canadian or Greek chef who calls her out of the blue. Sure, after several years, she may succeed in passing on the skill, but as she told me, when you take something that is so intertwined with a specific place, a specific event, and a specific pastoral code, and you present it in a different context, “it’s no longer the threads of God; it’s just pulled pasta.”
Only a few people in the world know how to make this pasta properly, and they all belong to the same family.
“There are only three ingredients: semolina wheat, water and salt,” Abraini said, vigorously kneading the dough back and forth. “But since everything is done by hand, the most important ingredient is elbow grease.”
Abraini patiently explained how you work the pasta thoroughly until it reaches a consistency reminiscent of modelling clay, then divide the dough into smaller sections and continue working it into a rolled-cylindrical shape.
Then comes the hardest part, a process she calls, “understanding the dough with your hands.” When she feels that it needs to be more elastic, she dips her fingers into a bowl of salt water. When it needs more moisture, she dips them into a separate bowl of regular water. “It can take years to understand,” she beamed. “It’s like a game with your hands. But once you achieve it, then the magic happens.”
Here’s a 30-minute video on how su filindeu is prepared — there are a couple of shorter videos as well.
Tags: books · Custodians of Wonder · Eliot Stein · food · how to · Italy · video
Melbourne
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