Chef Ming Tsai
heads to Norway’s capital, Oslo, for his fourth and final stop to visit Geitmyra Culinary Center for Children, a
nonprofit organization committed to helping children make better food
choices. Andreas Viestad, Norwegian food
writer and TV chef, opened the culinary center in 2011 to teach children about
food. The children learn where their
food comes from, how to grow it and how to cook it, which in turn creates
better eating habits and expands their palate.
Chef Ming and Andreas tour
the culinary center, picking fresh ingredients like apples, which they will
utilize in a few different ways. Andreas
uses fresh-pressed apple juice to put a Nordic spin on a classic cocktail—Farm
Apple Kir Royale. Meanwhile, Chef
Ming decides the acidity of the apple will complement the oily richness of his
mackerel dish. Norwegian
Mackerel is a rich-tasting, succulent fish. Norwegian Mackerel has long been favored
around the world, especially in Asian countries, for its flavorful, firm meat
and high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids.
Mackerel has numerous health benefits—it’s
a good source of vitamins D and B12, protein, calcium,
potassium and iron. Also referred to as
saba, Norwegian Mackerel can be prepared in a variety of ways. http://news.fromnorway.com/ming-tsai/chef-ming-tsai-finds-inspiration-at-oslos-geitmyra-culinary-center-for-children/
July 20, 2018 A
replica of the Earth, showing how our planet looks from space, has been
created by an artist who made a giant Moon.
The 7m (23ft) diameter orb, covered in detailed NASA imagery of the
Earth's surface, is 1.8 million times smaller than the real thing. Moon artist Luke Jerram said it was "as
realistic as possible", and made by Cameron Balloons in his home city of
Bristol. The
Earth sculpture has been unveiled at the Bluedot music and science festival at
Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. Each
centimetre of the internally-lit sculpture represents 18km of the Earth's
surface. Read more and see many pictures
at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-44888354
Do you have a New York City library card? If so, you can
now go to the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim and 31 other prominent New York
cultural institutions for free. These
institutions, which also include the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic
Garden and MoMA PS1, have partnered with the New York City libraries to launch
Culture Pass, an initiative designed to encourage underserved communities to
take advantage of the city’s cultural bounty.
Library cardholders of the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public
Library and the Queens Library will be able to reserve passes to these venues
for free, albeit once a year. The participating venues cover all five boroughs and
also include the Noguchi Museum, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, the
Rubin Museum and Wave Hill. Library
cardholders can log onto culturepass.nyc and use their library card number and pin to make
reservations; some of the institutions, like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, allow
entry for up to four people. Library
cardholders can also watch some 30,000 movies for free through the streaming platform Kanopy. The initiative is funded
by several philanthropic foundations as well as the New York City Department of
Cultural Affairs. Andrew R. Chao
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/arts/design/library-card-culture-pass-new-york-museums-free.html Wave Hill
is a 28-acre public garden and cultural center in the Bronx overlooking the
Hudson River and Palisades. For more
information see https://www.wavehill.org/
July 23, 2018 Forbes
story suggests replacing libraries with Amazon by Marcus Gilmer It appears the story has been pulled from
Forbes without a note or any other reason. The story has also been removed from Mourdoukoutas' author page.
I've reached out to Forbes for details but, for now, you can read a
cached version of the story here https://web.archive.org/
and an updated version that was briefly on the site is here http://archive.is/mPceN (via Wonkette). There are bad takes, and then there's the
take by Forbes contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas (who also serves as Chair of the
Department of Economics at Long Island University) that local libraries should be replaced by Amazon book stores. Among the
reasons Mourdoukoutas offers are:
libraries don't have as many public events as they used to because of
school auditoriums; people go to places like Starbucks to hang out and work and
read now instead of their library; and because technology makes physical books
obsolete. These arguments are easy to
rebut. School auditoriums are hardly new
and libraries remain bedrocks of local communities, Starbucks locations don't
offer free loans of books, and libraries all over the country have
amassed huge ebook collections, meaning you can still check out books
in whatever format you want for free, which is way cheaper than any price on
Amazon. Also, since Mourdoukoutas brings up the demise of video rental
places for some reason, it's worth pointing out that plenty of libraries now offer streaming audio and video services. And many larger libraries, including New York City and Chicago, loan you free museum passes using your library card,
proving they're still mighty useful to the community. It's a poorly written and barely defended
take. The one cogent argument Mourdoukoutas does make is that such a move
would save residents in tax dollars and would help Amazon stock holders. https://mashable.com/2018/07/22/forbes-library-amazon/#uEKRHwEwgqqC
Thank you, Muse reader!
In 1913, a character in
Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon bitterly
complains, “We’re hornswoggled. We’re
backed to a standstill. We’re
double-crossed to a fare-you-well”. Seven
years later the young P.G. Wodehouse employed it in Little Warrior:
“Would she have the generosity to realize that a man ought not to be
held accountable for what he says in the moment when he discovers that he has
been cheated, deceived, robbed—in a word, hornswoggled?” By then, the word had been in the language
with that meaning for more than half a century, and even then it had been
around for some decades with an older sense of “embarrass, disconcert or
confuse”. People had long since turned
it into an exclamation of surprise or amazement: “Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!” Peter Watts argues in A Dictionary of the Old West that it comes from
cowpunching. A steer that has been
lassoed around the neck will “hornswoggle”, wag and twist its head around
frantically to try to slip free of the rope.
A cowboy who lets the animal get away with this is said to have been
“hornswoggled”. A nice idea, but nobody
seems to have heard of hornswoggle in the
cattle sense, and it may be a guess based on horn.
The meme
first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ first book, “The Selfish Gene” (1976), and
was an attempt to understand why some behaviours, from an evolutionary
perspective, seemed to make no sense but, somehow or other, were found to be
very common in human societies. As
Dawkins emphasised, natural selection is a ruthless judge of its subjects and
any frailty, physical or behavioural, is almost inevitably rewarded by a rapid
exit from the gene pool. It therefore
followed that any widespread behaviour, prevalent in a thriving population, no
matter how immediately inexplicable, should give some advantage in terms of
gene survival. Continued research aimed
to understand the reasons behind animal behaviours has yielded results that are
entirely consistent with this thesis. In
some cases, however, it is necessary to dig a little deeper and understand
exactly what is benefitting from particular behaviours. Daniel Dennett, in his wonderful book
“Breaking The Spell” (2006), gives the example of ants climbing to the top of
blades of grass, and staying there, from which exposed position they are
frequently devoured by grazing animals.
It is impossible to account for this behaviour until it is realised that
the beneficiary is not the ant and her genes but a tiny creature called a
lancet fluke which has taken over the brain of the ant and compelled it to
follow this course of action. It is part
of the lancet fluke’s reproductive cycle to be eaten by a sheep or cow, and
hitching a ride inside the ant is an excellent way to achieve this. Viruses also utilise the behaviour of their
hosts. They enter an organism and use
the body’s responses to their presence, such as sneezing or excreting, to
facilitate their passage to further unwilling hosts. There are numerous
other examples where one organism utilises or manipulates the behaviour of
another to further its own genetic agenda; often at the expense of the other. The lancet fluke, the virus, or any other
organism furthering the spread of its own genes, has no malign intentions
towards their hosts or, in fact, any intentions at all. What is being seen is a process that has
evolved through natural selection and favours the genes of lancet fluke or
virus, or whatever. Expanding on these
observations and discoveries, Dawkins wondered, when observing behaviours among
humans, whether any similar process could be at work to explain why some ideas,
which on the face of it seem injurious to those who hold them, continue to
persist and proliferate. Devoting
oneself to one’s art, impoverishing oneself in the pursuit of Truth, or
welcoming martyrdom for one’s cause do not, it seems, represent behaviours
which are obviously beneficial to the individual of for the spread of that
individual’s genes. So, given that this
kind of behaviour clearly exists, and is widespread, what is reaping the
benefit? Dawkins’ somewhat surprising
answer was the ideas themselves. Ideas
are clearly in competition with each other so perhaps there’s a selection
process going on, analogous to natural selection, through which some ideas
prove successful and spread whilst others die out. He concluded that there was such a selection
process and, to emphasise the parallel to natural selection, he coined the term
“meme” which come from an ancient Greek root, “mimeme”, meaning imitated
thing. Dawkins has also, perhaps a touch
mischievously, referred to memes as “mind viruses”, which has been met, predictably,
with howls of indignation from some circles.
The point he is trying to make is that memes, just like viruses, are
indifferent to the welfare or otherwise of their hosts and the only thing that
counts, from their perspective, is that they persist. https://www.richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1923
July 24, 2018
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