25 Fun Facts About Food from Gastropod

Dhillon cricket at Kensington oval filled with Andrew Boy Charlton pool sea water 26 degrees warm .... 

Iffy Naked Bowl of Bronte is filled with truism of the ways the  quality of a cafe food is inversely proportional to its views ... in other words do not order coffee if you are close to sea...

Bookmarket reveals marketing jargon and other BS on the current page
Bullshit.js is a javascript bookmarklet that replaces all the managerial and marketing jargon and other buzzwords on the page with the word "bullshit." For example, if I were to write that it was a "keyword-driven synergy of empowered innovation and .dynamic content" it might replace that with "bullshit bullshit bullshit of bullshit bullshit and bullshit bullshit bullshit

In Why Every CEO Needs to Think Like a Hacker, Stalker, or White Nationalist, Rob Walker argues that products should be designed with their worst potential users in mind.

“Red teaming” (creating a group with an explicitly adversarial role, to challenge an organization’s strategy or structures) happens in military and intelligence contexts, and even in tech design, when the underlying issue is security or fending off hackers. Maybe big digital-centric companies, and small ones that aspire to scale, need a variation that’s not about fending off direct adversaries. Imagine instead a sort of Black Mirror Department, devoted to nothing but figuring out how the product can be abused — and thus how to minimize malign misuse.

Organised  Amazon Warehouse Workers Just Got Two Fired Co-Workers Rehired Vice 

Sesame Street to reveal muppet’s mom suffered from addiction The Hill. UserFriendly: “Everything is going according to plan. 

Closing libraries means abandoning society’s most isolated and vulnerable

The UK Guardian- Dawn Fitch: “For most of us, the library is a source of books and information. The core factor of the work of a librarian is absolutely vital and should never be forgotten. But something else is happening in our libraries, with repercussions for library workers. I worked for a long time in public libraries and most of my day was not spent shelving books (or reading them). As much of my time was spent dealing with human beings as printed volumes. A passion for books and reading first drew me to library work, but empathy, belief in human rights and the importance of social activism kept me working in them. I’ve worked in libraries of all sizes, from large city ones to tiny mobile ones, but what they all had in common was how much they meant to the most vulnerable in their communities…”

The Guardian recently compiled a list of the best books of the century (with a British bent). Here are a few of the picks that caught my eye:

87. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood — “This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind.”

82. Coraline by Neil Gaiman — “From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children’s novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her “Other Mother” is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires.”

78. The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin — “Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. ‘As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,’ she said in her acceptance speech, ‘so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)’”

25 Fun Facts About Food from Gastropod

The Gastropod podcast turns five years old this month and to celebrate they’vecompiled a list of 25 of their favorite fun food facts from the show’s archives. Here’s the entire list with links to each of the shows (shared with permission):

1. The Mafia got its start in the 1860s, in the lemon groves of Sicily. At the time, growing lemons was the most lucrative form of agriculture in Europe, thanks to scurvy and the British Navy. (Museums and the Mafia: The Secret History of Citrus)

2. Using gold (or gold-plated) cutlery makes food taste sweeter. (Episode 1: The Golden Spoon)

3. Olive oil is fruit juice. (Green Gold: Our Love Affair with Olive Oil)

4. Saliva is filtered blood. (Guts and Glory)

5. The enamel on our teeth is the hardest tissue in our entire bodies — at 95 percent mineral, it’s basically a rock. (The Truth is in the Tooth: Braces, Cavities, and the Paleo Diet)

6. The invention of forks changed the shape of our jaws. (Episode 1: The Golden Spoon)

7. Medieval nuns used to get high on saffron, to help them get through their prayer marathons. (Meet Saffron: The World’s Most Expensive Spice)

8. In the absence of kitchen timers or affordable clocks, recipes in the earliest cookbooks gave timings in the form of prayers, like two Lord’s Prayers or four Hail Marys. (Cooking the Books with Yotam and Nigella)