Floblogg

It’s the time to be thankful. The ultimate US American holiday that allows everyone to get together and eat too much while bypassing the whole Christmas / Hanukkah issue.

Miriam is 4 and learns in school about being thankful, makes collages what she is thankful for and overall extensively discusses the topic with everyone. I asked her what she is thankful for and she tells me: “Chicken, dead chicken”. She has a point. As Greek philosophers always emphasized name the object for what it is and you can recognize its qualities.

As everything in America is has to be big - and so we get “really big”, “humongous” chicken for really low prices and if you not careful then the supermarket gives you a second one free. The biggest chicken in the whole wide world. Miriam just passed the Thanksgiving Chicken in weight.

We will have a Brazilian-style Thanksgiving and I will provide an Austrian-style cake - albeit after a US recipe. Details to follow.

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Madeleines

Turns out, there is a demand for Madeleines in my office and as Plug and Play Tech Center in Redwood City is probably the only high-tech incubator West of the Mississippi with a Samovar, this is a good undertaking. I tried a receipe from

Essentials of Baking (Williams-Sonoma) that has the benefit of being simple and avoiding baking powder but I am not sure if I want to give up my trusted version from the Patisserie Familiale, a definitive French pastry book in which nothing is familiar, especially not the French professional cooking terminology.

The silicone molds worked best with no butter at all, yet the 375F / 8 min are way to much - at least in my oven. I was always a fan of the small size but am now switching to larger shapes that create more volume and a better differentiation between the outside and the softer inside. And above all - are easier to dip in tea.

Lemon (or Orange) Madeleines
2 eggs
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. almond extract
1/2 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp. grated lemon zest
4 Tbs. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
Confectioners’ sugar for dusting (optional)

Tags:   Baking · Cooking · Madeleines · memory · Proust1 Comment

Mitch Ratcliffe posted a status analysis on eBooks - The first step of a long change on his ZD Net column. I read most of it immediately after I received Mitch’s email with the URL in the afternoon. We have been talking about eBooks longer than most people know they exist, so I owe him a response. I read the first seven comments on the ZD Net blog and started to ponder on the medium / technology / platform question as well as the longlevity of the printed word, commented on by a certain Yagotta B. Kidding (nomen est omen). Books had their long-term and short-term survival problems, mostly from fire and acid in the paper. Many books from the “modern phase” of the 70s when the IBM Selectric together with Copiers became the publishing technology of choice together with most of the stuff created on laser printers will be gone within 100 years. The glue that keeps the carbon particles of the Xerographic process on the paper lets go and the content falls off the page.

Torah Scroll

Maybe eBooks are not books in a similar way Scrolls are not books as we know them today. Scrolls were abandoned over 1000 years ago as they were not practical to use and paper was hard to produce in long rolls. Also page consistency - the fact that a certain word is always on the same page to be read and remembered [add a reference to the ars memorativa here] - was not part of scrolls. Now we’re back to scrolling, soft scrolling, fast scrolling and computer mice with one or more scroll wheels with click-wheel capabilities. Scolls have their place, today mostly in Schul, the Jewish Synagoge, as Sefer Torah, a copy of the Five Books of Moses created under extremely strict rules and written by hand.

eBooks have to repeat the same steps handwritten and printed books had to go through and get out of the early stage of scrolls. In 1989 when we started to work on the Expanded Books Project, page consitency as well as a means to help the reader understand where she is in the book were essential elements, They are still disregarded in today’s eBook attempts.

With no way to take notes on the Web site and mark up passages, I gave in and printed Mitch’s text to fully digest and respond.

Come back and read the next installment in the next few days. And definitely read Mitch’s text.

Tags:   ebook · memory · reading · scrollNo Comments.

The eternal question “does size matter” always gets a strange perspective when you compare storage size, processor speed and the raw size of the plastic or metal case of the device. Apple just released the newest version of their phone software (iPhone 2.1) and while watching the 231 MB update slowly download over my 6 MBit DSL I made a quick calculation how many of the “big” 1.4 MB floppy disks I would have needed in 1991 to update my cell phone. Update my phone? Who would update a diswasher, a microwave, let a lone a phone? May be repaint the black phone pink but update? It’s not a phone it’s a computer and it crashes, needs lots of power and continuous updates. Consider it an improvement.

Western Electric Model 500

Anyone who has ever fed some 20 of these plastic things into the slot of the drive just to install a word processor knows how it feels when after 147 disks the update process stalls and you have to reboot. Next time you - correctly - think that the iPhone backup is way to slow (apparently fixed in new release), meditate on the floppy disks. How about 32 GB Compact Flash for $299 (MSRP, Oct. 2008). Sounds like a lot? A box of 1.4 MB floppy disks initially sold for up to $100.

There’s always a next release and always a smaller storage device that holds more data.

Based on reader requests: “Why is there an image of a telephone and not a floppy disk” and my response “I like phones”, I’m also including an image of a 3.5″ floppy disk courtesy of Wikipedia.

Tags:   hardware · memory · size · storageNo Comments.

Et bientôt, machinalement, accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d’un triste lendemain, je portai à mes lèvres une cuillerée du thé où j’avais laissé s’amollir un morceau de madeleine. Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. Il m’avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une essence précieuse: ou plutôt cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi. J’avais cessé de me sentire médiocre, contingent, mortel. D’où avait pu me venir cette puissante joie? Je sentais q’elle était liée au goût du thé et du gâteau, mais qu’elle le dépassait infiniment, ne devait pas être de même nature. [source] [Marcel Proust: Combray. p.44].

Oculus Imaginationis

The smell, the taste because we have such a hard time to reproduce a memory before our inner nose, our inner tongue, much in the same way we recall an image that in turn allows us to memorize an element of a story, create much stronger memories when recalled.

There is no ars memorativa of smell, only the sudden flash when you open a drawer and find yourself back home.

Baking a cake or creating perfumes are possible ways to recreate the memory of smell. The Madeleine recipe: Baking Memories II

Tags:   memory · ProustNo Comments.