Mastodawn

Terry Boon (moved)Apr 8, 2024

An online supermarket tells me "No results found for cricket powder, showing instead results for chicken powder", offering chicken gravy granules - a more traditional choice.

But Amazon does offer me Bugvita's "High Protein Cricket Powder". The AI review summary opens "Customers like the taste, quality and speed of the pet food" - but AI clearly isn't perfect, as the description says it is indeed "Edible insects for human consumption" (& explains its green credentials). #crickets #food

Terry Boon (moved)Apr 8, 2024

I dip into Heston Blumenthal's "Is This A Cookbook?" ("Every recipe is simple, straightforward, and totally do-able. This is Heston at his most accessible.")

"A Cricket Pho for Sharing (and Slurping)" sounds tasty, I've liked Vietnamese pho soup before... ingredients include "1 litre cricket stock (page 317)", I wonder what stock gets that whimsical name... it's a stock made from cricket powder. Sudenly I'm feeling less convinced.

#food #recipes #hestonblumenthal

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Terry Boon (moved)Jan 3, 2024

Coincidentally - I did recently see a video on the music from #Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" including how it quotes and adapts from the traditional Gregorian chant of the "Dies Irae" - https://youtu.be/a4K-9Ekzc2A?si=n_GBIGNCK1gPVxo0 . Despite having sung many requiems - Mozart, Faure, Rutter, Verdi, Brahms (auf Deutsch), maybe more - I hadn't come across that older setting before.

How the Music Spoils Sweeney Todd (and why that's a good thing!)

YouTube

Terry Boon (moved)Jan 3, 2024

I went to see "Old Friends" at London's Gielgud Theatre a few days ago - a revue of #StephenSondheim works, with plenty of longstanding #Sondheim favourites and a few which I'd never seen or heard before. (The only song which I wonder "Why did they miss *that* one?" was "Putting it Together" - but as there's a whole other Sondheim *revue* named after that - and, of course, a homage in "My Little Pony" - maybe the producers decided it wasn't missing out *too* much.)

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Terry Boon (moved)Dec 20, 2023

Older advent computing was the advent calendars on UK #teletext. Each day, the REVEAL button on your remote (usually for hidden answers to quizzes/jokes) would unveil a new bit of picture. Teletext graphics (also on the #BBCMicro MODE 7) were low-res and quirky (control characters switched on graphics for a line and set the colour - and took space on the screen themselves so you couldn't have many!) Kudos to those who assembled a Christmas picture of 25 elements within those tricky constraints!

Terry Boon (moved)Dec 20, 2023

#AdventOfCode is a December challenge with a new #programming puzzle each day - which I'm trying for the first time this year. (I'm tackling it in #Python, but you can use any programming language - the challenge asks only for an answer, it doesn't execute your code.) https://adventofcode.com/

Advent of Code 2025

Terry Boon (moved)Nov 5, 2023

Interest in #language #translation was piqued by "Le Ton beau de Marot" (1997) by Douglas Hofstadter (of "Gödel Escher Bach"). Today I enjoyed extract from @KeithKahnHarris "The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language" on similar themes (& reflecting on machine translation which has leaped forward more than I'd have imagined 25 years ago) - using as illustration not a French Renaissance poem but the polyglot safety message in Kinder Eggs. 😀 In Jonn Elledge's Newsletter: https://jonn.substack.com/p/book-club-some-notes-on-the-limits

Book Club: Some notes on the limits and pleasures of machine translation

An extract from Keith Kahn-Harris’s The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language.

The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything

Terry Boon (moved)Apr 19, 2023

"The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time." (Re-found when browsing Polya's classic and marvellous book on mathematical problem-solving, "How To Solve It".) #math #maths #mathstodon #WritingStyle

Terry Boon (moved)Apr 7, 2023

Our semi-regular pub quiz ends with the jackpot round - one team competes in a luck-driven “higher/lower” ("Play Your Cards Right"-style, but no Bruce Forsyth) card game to win a jackpot. I’d never seen anyone *win* the jackpot - so was curious to work out what the chances actually are and what the optimal strategy might be (to the extent that there *is* any useful strategy beyond the obvious) with some #MonteCarlo analysis in #Python. https://www.eclecticstacks.com/post/play-your-cards-right-jackpot-game-monte-carlo/

The pub quiz 'Play Your Cards Right' jackpot meets Monte Carlo analysis

How long *is* that long shot?

Eclectic Stacks

Terry Boon (moved)Mar 28, 2023

Going to #Fantasy Book Club helps in pub quizzes too... we were faced with a map, with a vast area stretching from China to eastern Europe shaded in to identify... happily I'd just read Shelley Parker-Chan's "She Who Became the Sun" ("Mulan meets The Song of Achilles; an accomplished, poetic debut of war and destiny, sweeping across an epic alternate China") so took a guess at the Mongol Empire... and we got the point :-) #fantasybooks #quiz

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