Sunday 10 May 2015

Chocolate

Chocolate

Ninety percent of British chocolate comes from cocoa beans grown in West Africa. The main cocoa harvest is in March. Cocoa beans are dried in the sun for a week before being shipped.

When the beans arrive, they are mixed with grit, bits of string, and sometimes even shoes and snakes! They are passed through sieves to separate out the junk from the beans.

The cocoa beans are broken open to release the so called nib. The nibs are roasted and then processed to form a thick brown liquid called cocoa liquor.

Saturday 9 May 2015

Crush Syndrome, Ebola and Eyes, Sommardojorna

Crush Syndrome

In response to a massive injuries, the body releases toxins which can cause the kidneys to shut down as they try to filter them out of the blood.

Ebola and Eyes

It's possible for Ebola to remain in the eye even though the person is clear of it in their blood. For the case mentioned in the linked report, it was not present in tears or other external bodily fluid so it would not be spread by casual contact.

Sommardojorna

Today I learnt some Swedish slang which my mother-in-law used when changed her winter tyres to summer tyres. The word she used was sommardojorna. Sommar is summer. Dojor is slang for shoes and it comes from a language used by chimney sweeps to communicate while inside someone's house.

Friday 8 May 2015

ex Unit, Commercial bread, Deleting a GitHub Repo

Ex Unit

As well as the units px and em there is also ex which the height of the X in that typeface.

Commercial Bread

Instead of just plopping the dough into the tin, it's rolled and then cut into four pieces which are placed in the tin. This makes the bread less likely to rip when being buttered.

Deleting a GitHub Repo

I needed to test some code today, and in order to do so I needed to put up a pull request and then delete the repo the branch was in. Fortunately the GitHub instructions were nice and easy to follow, and even though I have nothing of interest in any of my repos on GitHub it was still slightly scary to do!

Preventing Curling in Tunisian Crochet, Reverse Stitch, Yeast

Preventing Curling and Reverse Stitch

Continuing with Tunisian crochet, I found some tips to prevent rolling. You can work into the back of the chain, do some rows in reverse stitch at the beginning and end of the sample, and use a hook two or more sizes bigger than recommended for knit/crochet. This worked quite well on the small sample I did of reverse stitch. I'm working my way through this play list by Kim Guzman

Yeast

Yeast is all around us. A particularly good source is oak bark.

In a commercial environment, it takes four days to produce 30,000 kg from just 0.1g of yeast and huge quantities of sugar! The yeast doubles its numbers every three hours.

Dried yeast keeps for two years. Live yeast in a block keeps for about a month.

Memory, Flour Dust, Soya in bread

Memory

We remember pictures far better than we remember things we read so it's more effective to produce information in pictures than in words. The brain has to convert the words to meanings and the meanings to pictures in order for us to remember them. I have a great deal of trouble remembering formulae so when I think of Pythagoras' Theorem, I see a triangle and I think of the two shorter sides coming together to give the longer side. The only word involved it "squaring" and I don't think of that as an image of a square, just squaring and then arrows bringing the sides together.

Similarly, to remember how to calculate sine, cosine and tan of an angle in a right angled triangle I have a visual relationship of the sides. Cosine is like a snapping jaw where the angle is between the jaws, sine is that side way over there (opposite) divided by the longest side (hypotenuse), and tangent is that side over there divided by this close one here. At some point, I tried to learn SOH CAH TOA but I can't work out the letters so to type that I had to think what sides were involved so I knew which letters they were. I do however remember that tan = sin/cos and sin/cos looks right but cos/sin doesn't.

Flour Dust

Flour dust is combustable and a spark can ignite it. Trucks carrying flour have to be earthed to prevent static build up and thus explosions in the confined environment. A truck load of flour (twenty-eight tonnes) will produce about sixty thousand loaves of bread!

Soya in Bread

Soya is added to bread to make it whiter.

Thursday 7 May 2015

Nepal, Tunisian Crochet

Nepal Earthquake

I was classifying damage in Nepal today at the Tomnod site. I've seen pictures and new reports and read what has happened to people but seeing the before and after pictures and actively doing something brought the reality of it crashing home to me. By taking part in clicking on damaged buildings, seeing rubble where once a house stood, tents where people have now found shelter, it ceased to be something distant and incomprehensible. What I learnt is that the simple act of clicking images makes me involved, makes it part of my life, makes it real.

Tunisian Crochet

I've continued with the series of videos mentioned in an earlier post and learnt the twisted purl and honeycomb stitches.

Wednesday 6 May 2015

Every Sperm is Sacred, Marriage and the Church, Internal Personas

Every Sperm is Sacred

I've always thought the Monty Python sketch "Every Sperm is Sacred" was taking things too far. That was until I watched a BBC series about Sex and the Church and it makes sense why things have developed as they have. In Old Testament times, the Jews needed to increase their population. They also believed that the whole child was contained within the sperm, and that the woman only provided an incubator. No wonder they didn't want to waste those potential children!

Marriage and the Church

For the first thousand years of the Church, marriage was purely a civic concern and the Church kept away from it. When the first marriages were conducted by the Church, they were conducted in the porch of the Church and only after the couple were married did they move inside. This wasn't very practical and eventually it was moved inside.

Internal Personas

We all have multiple internal personas which are the way we see ourselves in different situations. We try to be consistent according to these personas. If we don't see ourselves in a particular way, then we won't do something. However, we may do small things which are only slightly outside our persona. When we do these small things we adjust our persona to stay consistent. This means that something that we previously would not have done because it was not consistent with our persona then becomes consistent with it. I guess that's why small steps work in moving us from one habit or behaviour to another.

Tuesday 5 May 2015

Tunisian Crochet - Preventing Curl, Reverse Stitch and Knit Stitch

Preventing Curling and Reverse Stitch

Continuing with Tunisian crochet, I found some tips to prevent rolling. You can work into the back of the chain, do some rows in reverse stitch at the beginning and end of the sample, and use a hook two or more sizes bigger than recommended for knit/crochet. This worked quite well on the small sample I did of reverse stitch.

I'm currently working my way through this play list by Kim Guzman. There is also a left hand version on her YouTube channel.

Monday 4 May 2015

Tunisian Crochet

Basic Stitch, Crossed Stitch, Lace Stitch

I learnt three Tunisian Crochet stitches today. There were the basic stitch, crossed stitch, and lace stitch. I'm crocheting too tightly at the moment so I'm finding it difficult to crochet the loops of the hook on the return row. The first cross over row of the crossed stitch was hard and I ended up using a stitch holder throw all the loops so I could find them as the crossing over action tended to hide the skipped stitch. Lace stitch is pretty and surprisingly easy for its elegance.

The basic and crossed stitch samples, both very firm, are rolling horribly but the less dense lace is staying reasonably flat.

Helicopters in Vietnam, TypeScript and Generics, Type Definition Files in TypeScript

Helicopters in the Vietnam War

At the end of the Vietnam War, unneeded helicopters were pushed overboard so that the ships would have more room to take rescued troops.

TypeScript and Generics

You can use generics in TypeScript. They're code templates. They're re-useable and flexible. You can use them instead of using the type `any`. The type is supplied when it is used and thus type checking can be enforced for the particular type supplied and wherever that particular thing is used elsewhere in the code.

Type Definition Files

There are type definition files available at the site Definitely Typed for most of the major JavaScript libraries so that you can check whether you are using the library correctly at compile time.

Friday 1 May 2015

Kelp, Organisation, Messenger

Organisation

It's surprising how quickly things get tidy or sorted out with just a small fixed amount of time per day. It's also a lot easier to deal with throwing things out when you're happy and feel secure.

Messenger

Messenger crashed into Mercury today. Even though it had solar panels, it also had to use fuel to keep positioned correctly to protect the scientific equipment protected from solar radiation.