A couple of days ago, I pointed out that a better name for climate change might be “Global Drenching”.
However, it’s clear that I’m not the only one who is thinking that way.
An article on the BBC website tells me that, in England & Wales, the most popular boy’s name for babies is now, apparently, Noah!
Coincidence? Ha! I think not!
Yesterday, I asked:
Here’s a question, O Internet:
If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?
And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?
Now, the quick answer, as I understand it, is ‘no’: milk contains a variety of nutrients, and several of these are water-soluble. So the process of ‘skimming’ to reduce the fat content doesn’t dilute these nutrients in the way that you would by just adding water: you still get them at approximately the same concentration when you buy semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.
But I learned a couple of interesting different things from asking!
The first thing is this wonderful diagram, found and posted in the comments by Spencer:
(click for full size)
It looks like something explaining the petrochemical industry, but much, much more yummy.
His comment: “I wonder how many of these I can have with my breakfast today?”
And the second thing is that, as well as beginning “Here’s a question, O Internet”, I could have asked “Here’s a question, O Artificial Intelligence”.
My friend Keshav did that, submitting my question verbatim to Perplexity, a system I hadn’t previously tried. Here’s the rather good result (and here as a screenshot in case that live link goes away).
I then went on to ask “Which nutrients in milk are water-soluble?”, and it told me, with good citations, with the comment that “maintaining adequate levels of these water-soluble vitamins in breast milk is important for the health and development of the breastfed infant”. So I asked a follow-up question: “Is this different in cows’ milk?”, and again, got a useful, detailed response with references for all the facts.
This stuff really is getting better… at least until the Internet is completely overrun by AI spam and the AIs have to start citing themselves. But for now, I think Perplexity is worth exploring further.
Thanks to Spencer, Keshav and other respondents!
Here’s a question, O Internet:
If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?
And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?
I’m fond of both milk and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is yummy kiddy comfort food. Dark chocolate is more sophisticated, more bitter, more ‘adult’. It’s also less likely to melt at inconvenient times, so helping you preserve that more sophisticated appearance.
But the problem, I find, is that dark chocolate often has too little taste. Even the better brands can be hard, waxy, slightly bitter slabs that don’t actually give much enjoyment, especially when you get to the higher-cocoa-content variants. More ‘fix’ than ‘fun’. Espresso vs latte. (But espresso, I think, has more flavour. Certainly more variety of flavour.)
And so I often think back nostalgically to the days of my youth, when Marks & Spencer sold what was, in my mind, the perfect Swiss chocolate bar.
It was a simple bar of dark chocolate, with a milk chocolate centre.
Bitter and yet sweet. Soft and yet crunchy. Non-melty, and yet easy to bite. Sophisticated and yet yummy. Yin and yet yang.
It seems so obvious: the ‘flat white’ of chocolate. And, as is generally the case with M&S food, it was very good. It could certainly have turned its nose up at anything made Mr Cadbury, and as for Mr Hershey… well, let’s not go there.
Now, we didn’t have anything as smart as an M&S Food store in the little town where I grew up, so this was a special treat which occasionally appeared after my mother returned from shopping in a larger metropolis. Perhaps its rarity, combined with rosy nostalgia, has elevated it to an unwarranted state of perfection in my mind… but there was no doubt it was pretty good!
And yet, at about the time when I graduated from having chocolate bought for me to buying it myself… they stopped selling it! I don’t know why. Perhaps it was marketing: are most customers actually purists who demand either black or white? Or perhaps there were manufacturing challenges of which I am unaware. Not only did Marks and Spencer stop selling it, I haven’t really seen its equivalent anywhere else in the intervening decades.
But if anybody out there knows of a good combination of high-quality dark and milk chocolate, I’d like to return to my childhood, so please let me know…
I was delighted to meet my great-nephew Jonathan — my brother’s daughter’s son — for the first time at the weekend.
I remember, in my childhood, meeting my Great-Aunt Grace. (She deserved that degree of capitalisation.) Though always kind, I remember her as a rather formidable woman from a different world. She lived in central London (which she knew like the back of her hand), was born in the 19th century, and had lived through the reign of several monarchs of whom, at the time, I was only very dimly aware. She died just before the advent of the personal computer.
And I guess that, in a few years, that’s how Jonathan may think of me.
“Great-uncle Q”, he will say, “was a relic of a bygone era. He used to write code himself, rather than getting a machine to do it! He even, can you believe, used a QWERTY keyboard! Have you ever seen one of those things? Wait – I have a photo of him somewhere, but it’s only two-dimensional…”
Spotted these recently and thought they looked good:
AirGradient – “We design professional, accurate and long-lasting air quality monitors that are open-source and open-hardware so that you have full control on how you want to use the monitor.”
Meshtastic – long-range, low-power, low-bandwidth, off-grid, decentralised mesh networks, based on LoRa radios.
Plausible – an alternative to Google Analytics – “Plausible is intuitive, lightweight and open source web analytics. No cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR. Made and hosted in the EU, powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure”
Today, online, I saw one unsavoury character described as “so bad that even Meta blocked him”.
In the past, one might have said something similar of Twitter, but it doesn’t really work now… and not because Twitter has started being responsible about blocking people!
The problem of large numbers of asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel in small boats is one, I confess, that I have avoided thinking about too much — and I therefore understand few of the subtleties involved.
So I was particularly taken by this BBC piece, which follows one 14-year-old boy, Obada, who died a couple of weeks ago on the Normandy coastline.
How did he get there? Why was he trying to get to the UK, rather than some other country?
The authors have done a lot of research to make it a personal story, rather than another abstract statistic.
Well worth a read.
On Wednesday I was part of a group that visited Thalia Waste Management, a substantial local domestic-waste-processing and recycling facility, and it was most interesting.
Quite apart from seeing some of the machinery and getting a feel for what actually happens to the stuff in those bins you leave on the kerb, we heard some humorous stories. They told us, for example, about how the machinery which processes food and garden waste from our green bins is sometime brought to a grinding halt because somebody has used them to dispose of old garden tools and machinery. It’s garden waste, after all…!
I wrote last year about ‘The Recycler’s Confession‘:
We have left unrecycled those things
which we ought to have recycled;
and we have recycled those things
which we ought not to have recycled.
and wondered which was the greater sin.
Well it turns out that the residents of most of Cambridgeshire can recycle much more than I realised.
In the past, we couldn’t recycle black plastic containers, for example (because the optical systems used to distinguish plastic types couldn’t cope with it), but that’s less of an issue now, mostly because there’s a lot less black plastic used in packaging (for this reason). Also, in the past we were told not to recycle cellophane film, so for 20 years or so I have been carefully tearing it off the front of my Parma Ham packaging. This, I discover, is no longer needed.
But in the UK the rules do vary widely from place to place. This is partly because of the different recycling facilities available now, and partly because of the availability of, or economic viability of, those facilities available when the contracts were signed with the local authorities. In my local area, the rules for Cambridge city and South Cambridgeshire are different from East Cambridgeshire, even though the waste is processed in the same location. Peterborough is different again.
So the chap who was showing us around recommended RecycleNow, a handy site which lets you type in your postcode and search for exactly what can and can’t be recycled in your area. Most useful.
Overall, the visit was an encouraging experience, but I was considering the waste which still goes to landfill, despite the impressive efforts of Thalia and others. I wondered whether perhaps, one day, it will be economic to go back process some of the materials that aren’t economic now, in the same way that the slag heaps from mines can yield up new treasures today when we discover that demand for some element suddenly makes them worth re-processing.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that, one day, someone will invent a car battery for which polystyrene is a vital component!
Google has just announced the launch of the Bard chatbot, its competitor to ChatGPT, and I, no doubt like many others, immediately went to compare their performance when asked some of the key questions of our age:
ChatGPT 3.5
Mmm.
OK, well, let’s try…
Bard
Bard gets my vote.
Now, having done that important test, I can return to my career as a filmmaker who has been exploring the nature of reality, consciousness, and the meaning of life.
‘Gift’ is generally a noun. ‘Give’ is a verb.
When did we start using ‘gifted’ to mean ‘gave’? As in, “A friend gifted me this radio.” I seem to hear it all the time now, and not just from Americans, though I think it was a transatlantic trend initially. Perhaps people feel the need to have a different word for ‘gave without expecting payment’… but surely, if you expected payment, the word would in any case be ‘sold’?
So I turned to my OED, and it does allow ‘gift’ as a transitive verb, but meaning ‘to endow with gifts’. So you could say, “I gifted the Sultan”, meaning that you showered him with presents. If you want to be more specific, it insists, you need to use ‘with’. I gifted the Sultan with roses of every hue. Poetic, but perhaps too poetic for the situation where my pal gave me his old USB drive. I suspect it’s more appropriate when saying that The Almighty had gifted the Sultan with great wisdom.
I know they say that in American English there is no noun that cannot be verbed, but I would strongly lobby for sticking to the concise and precise ‘gave’, and reserving ‘gifted’ for its correct use as an adjective, to describe, perhaps, one who writes erudite blog posts.
John Naughton linked to a splendid post by my friend and erstwhile colleague Alan Blackwell, entitled “Oops! We Automated Bullshit.“
I won’t try to summarise it here, or even discuss the topics he raises, because you should cetainly go and read the article. But I did like the aside where he questions his own use of the word “literally”:
Do I mean “literally”? My friends complain that I take everything literally, but I’m not a kleptomaniac.
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