Random stuff that I find interesting
11-05-2018, 12:34 PM
#81
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Amusingly, these clocks will all stop working when WWV / WWVB are shut down, which is scheduled to happen next year.
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03-29-2019, 03:36 PM
#83
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For decades, Garfield telephones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved.
A plastic Garfield phone sits on the beach in Plouarzel, western France, after being collected by environmental activists, on Thursday. (Fred Tanneau/AFP)By Meagan FlynnMarch 29 at 7:16 AMFor more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from?
The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion.
From the stray curly wires and the occasional dial pad, it was clear that the pieces came from the once-popular Garfield telephone, which hit the shelves in the early 1980s, several years after Jim Davis first colored the famously lazy cat into his hit comic strip. The phone parts were in remarkable condition, considering they had been belched from the ocean, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told The Washington Post. Even Garfield’s black stripes were still painted onto his back, where the phone hooked.
She had been searching for the origin of Garfield for years, she said, out of concern for the damage the plastic phones may be doing to the ocean — and this month, after a chance encounter on the beach, she was about to get answers.
Simonin-Le Meur said the common belief among locals was that the phones came from a wayward shipping container that must have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, leaving environmentalists to fear Garfield’s plastic toxicity would continue to pollute the ocean indefinitely. In 2018 alone, at least 200 pieces of Garfield had been found on beaches in northwestern France, FranceInfo reported.
If they could just salvage the long lost shipping container, Simonin-Le Meur said, perhaps Garfield would stop coming.
“We were looking for it, but we had no precise idea of where it could be,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “We thought it was under the sea. We asked people who were divers to look for it. We get a lot of submarines in the area too — it’s a military area. But they said it was not possible the container could be there and nobody saw it.”
Pieces of the Garfield telephone discovered by Ar Viltansou. (Courtesy of Claire Simonin-Le Meur)
This year, however, something changed. Simonin-Le Meur got a tip.
It came from a local farmer named René Morvan.
All of FranceInfo’s recent publicity of the bizarre phenomenon and its environmental impact had apparently sparked his memory. One day last month, Simonin-Le Meur said she met Morvan on the beach while cleaning up debris — including a Garfield part.
“Are you looking for Garfield?” the man asked.
Simonin-Le Meur said yes, she was — she always was.
“Come with me,” the man told her. “I can show you.”
Morvan started from the beginning. Back when he was 19 or 20 years old in the mid-1980s, he told her, a storm blew through the area — and before residents knew it, Garfield telephones were scattered all over the beach, just as Simonin-Le Meur had always been told. He and his brother were curious, Morvan said, and they decided to go exploring, touring the rocky coastline until they found what they were seeking.
Wedged inside a cave, tucked into the seaside cliffs, there it was: a metal shipping container — and a cache of Garfield telephones, Morvan claimed he saw.
The story struck Simonin-Le Meur as too good to be true. The tide was too high to bring her to the cave that day, Morvan realized, and so she would have to wait to find out if he was telling the truth. The shipping container, Morvan told her, was lodged so deep in the cave that it was nearly submerged, making the trip a dangerous expedition.
But finally, last week, it was safe. The tide was low. And Morvan, Simonin-Le Meur said, ultimately was not kidding.
Filming the discovery, a group of journalists and environmentalists, Simonin-Le Meur included, climbed up the rocky shore to the cave’s narrow opening, finding snippets of a bright orange phone cord along the way. Garfield was scattered all about, just like on the beach.
But when the group entered the cave, ready for the big reveal, they didn’t find what they expected. It was clear the plastic cats had been there, Simonin-Le Meur said, but clearer still that most were already gone.
“Our preoccupation was to understand why we had so many Garfields everywhere. We thought it would be helpful to find the container so we can stop it. But that was unfortunately not the case,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “What we found was the remainder of the shipping container. And it was empty.”
It seemed the group had solved the mystery, she said, but not the problem.
The “Téléphone Garfield,” as it is known in an online catalogue for ubiquitous ocean debris, is just one plastic item among myriad others that litter the ocean and the shore every year. In the region of northwestern France, the Garfield phone has become like an unwitting Smokey Bear, the mascot for the importance of ocean cleanup and the dangers of microplastics polluting the ocean. Lionel Lucas, who developed the online Ocean Plastic Tracker that catalogues discoveries of Garfield, told FranceInfo the Garfield phone was a “symbol” for the movement.
“It is no longer garbage but evidence,” Lucas said.
Simonin-Le Meur said that she has tried to use Garfield particularly as a way to interest children in ocean pollution, given its allure compared to other pieces of plastic trash. And while the recent purported discovery of Garfield’s origins has drawn renewed interest, Simonin-Le Meur said, the discovery didn’t change much in her eyes.
“We found plastic last Friday and Saturday and Sunday, and we have found a lot of pieces of Garfield,” she said. “Things are just exactly the same.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...as-been-solved
A plastic Garfield phone sits on the beach in Plouarzel, western France, after being collected by environmental activists, on Thursday. (Fred Tanneau/AFP)By Meagan FlynnMarch 29 at 7:16 AMFor more than 30 years, pieces of Garfield telephones kept washing ashore on the beaches of northwestern France, and no one quite knew why. Where was the lasagna-loving cartoon cat coming from?
The mystery would puzzle the locals for years. His plastic body parts, first appearing in a crevice of the Brittany coast in the mid-1980s, kept returning no matter how many times beach cleaners recovered them. Sometimes they would find only his lazy bulging eyes, or just his smug face, or his entire fat-cat body, always splayed out in the sand in a very Garfield fashion.
From the stray curly wires and the occasional dial pad, it was clear that the pieces came from the once-popular Garfield telephone, which hit the shelves in the early 1980s, several years after Jim Davis first colored the famously lazy cat into his hit comic strip. The phone parts were in remarkable condition, considering they had been belched from the ocean, Claire Simonin-Le Meur, president of the environmental group Ar Viltansoù, told The Washington Post. Even Garfield’s black stripes were still painted onto his back, where the phone hooked.
She had been searching for the origin of Garfield for years, she said, out of concern for the damage the plastic phones may be doing to the ocean — and this month, after a chance encounter on the beach, she was about to get answers.
Simonin-Le Meur said the common belief among locals was that the phones came from a wayward shipping container that must have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, leaving environmentalists to fear Garfield’s plastic toxicity would continue to pollute the ocean indefinitely. In 2018 alone, at least 200 pieces of Garfield had been found on beaches in northwestern France, FranceInfo reported.
If they could just salvage the long lost shipping container, Simonin-Le Meur said, perhaps Garfield would stop coming.
“We were looking for it, but we had no precise idea of where it could be,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “We thought it was under the sea. We asked people who were divers to look for it. We get a lot of submarines in the area too — it’s a military area. But they said it was not possible the container could be there and nobody saw it.”
Pieces of the Garfield telephone discovered by Ar Viltansou. (Courtesy of Claire Simonin-Le Meur)
This year, however, something changed. Simonin-Le Meur got a tip.
It came from a local farmer named René Morvan.
All of FranceInfo’s recent publicity of the bizarre phenomenon and its environmental impact had apparently sparked his memory. One day last month, Simonin-Le Meur said she met Morvan on the beach while cleaning up debris — including a Garfield part.
“Are you looking for Garfield?” the man asked.
Simonin-Le Meur said yes, she was — she always was.
“Come with me,” the man told her. “I can show you.”
Morvan started from the beginning. Back when he was 19 or 20 years old in the mid-1980s, he told her, a storm blew through the area — and before residents knew it, Garfield telephones were scattered all over the beach, just as Simonin-Le Meur had always been told. He and his brother were curious, Morvan said, and they decided to go exploring, touring the rocky coastline until they found what they were seeking.
Wedged inside a cave, tucked into the seaside cliffs, there it was: a metal shipping container — and a cache of Garfield telephones, Morvan claimed he saw.
The story struck Simonin-Le Meur as too good to be true. The tide was too high to bring her to the cave that day, Morvan realized, and so she would have to wait to find out if he was telling the truth. The shipping container, Morvan told her, was lodged so deep in the cave that it was nearly submerged, making the trip a dangerous expedition.
But finally, last week, it was safe. The tide was low. And Morvan, Simonin-Le Meur said, ultimately was not kidding.
Filming the discovery, a group of journalists and environmentalists, Simonin-Le Meur included, climbed up the rocky shore to the cave’s narrow opening, finding snippets of a bright orange phone cord along the way. Garfield was scattered all about, just like on the beach.
But when the group entered the cave, ready for the big reveal, they didn’t find what they expected. It was clear the plastic cats had been there, Simonin-Le Meur said, but clearer still that most were already gone.
“Our preoccupation was to understand why we had so many Garfields everywhere. We thought it would be helpful to find the container so we can stop it. But that was unfortunately not the case,” Simonin-Le Meur said. “What we found was the remainder of the shipping container. And it was empty.”
It seemed the group had solved the mystery, she said, but not the problem.
The “Téléphone Garfield,” as it is known in an online catalogue for ubiquitous ocean debris, is just one plastic item among myriad others that litter the ocean and the shore every year. In the region of northwestern France, the Garfield phone has become like an unwitting Smokey Bear, the mascot for the importance of ocean cleanup and the dangers of microplastics polluting the ocean. Lionel Lucas, who developed the online Ocean Plastic Tracker that catalogues discoveries of Garfield, told FranceInfo the Garfield phone was a “symbol” for the movement.
“It is no longer garbage but evidence,” Lucas said.
Simonin-Le Meur said that she has tried to use Garfield particularly as a way to interest children in ocean pollution, given its allure compared to other pieces of plastic trash. And while the recent purported discovery of Garfield’s origins has drawn renewed interest, Simonin-Le Meur said, the discovery didn’t change much in her eyes.
“We found plastic last Friday and Saturday and Sunday, and we have found a lot of pieces of Garfield,” she said. “Things are just exactly the same.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...as-been-solved
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07-15-2019, 12:09 AM
#86
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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Posts: 173
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James Cameron used those floating ***** to fill a pool to film the Abyss simulating the lack of light in deep ocean.
This thread is full of awesome. The submarine photos are a great find, thanks for sharing.
This thread is full of awesome. The submarine photos are a great find, thanks for sharing.
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08-12-2019, 12:57 PM
#87
Boost Pope
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The Nordic Food Lab, which is part of the The Department of Food Science at The University of Copenhagen, has published a paper which, among other things, describes how you can substitute blood in place of eggs in baked goods, ice cream, etc., just in case you happen to be out of eggs but find yourself with a surplus of blood.
by Elisabeth Paul
OVERVIEW
Animal blood has a long culinary history throughout Europe, though recently has become neglected. We are interested in (re)valorising the despised and forgotten, so we had to look deeper into what blood is, how it should be handled, and what to use it for. Its coagulating properties led us to focus on blood as an egg-substitute in sweet products, since egg intolerance is one of the major food allergies affecting children in Europe.
In fact, eggs and blood show similar protein compositions, particularly with the albumin that gives both their coagulant properties. Based on these similarities, a substitution ratio of 65g of blood for one egg (approx. 58g), or 43g of blood for one egg white (approx. 33g) can be used in the kitchen. Using this method, we have developed recipes for sourdough-blood pancakes, blood ice cream, blood meringues, and ‘chocolate’ blood sponge cake.
A further benefit of blood is its ability to prevent anaemia – the most common micronutrient deficiency worldwide – due to the high bioavailability of its haeme-iron. This iron, of course, is often the challenging factor for taste, which in many cultures have traditionally alleviated by pairing with it strong flavours such as herbs and spices. We investigated some of these traditional pairings as well as some newer ones including woodruff and roasted koji.
During sensory evaluation, we were surprised at the variation in perception of the bloody aftertaste, which led us to an interesting discussion on the relationships between gender, age, and taste.
Blood for most is not a go-to ingredient. It has become somehow ‘edgy’, almost forbidden; yet it has been used as food for as long as animals have been killed and eaten. It is elemental, both mystical and mundane. And it makes us damn curious in the kitchen.
Blood is a brute fact of killing animals. A slaughtered pig can yield between 2.25 and 4.5 kg of the stuff,[1] which adds up quickly. We are always searching for deliciousness in the ignored and overlooked, so the question arose: how can we transmute this substance into an ingredient fit to celebrate? And then, more specifically: could blood be a substitute for eggs, especially in pastry, given that egg white intolerance is Europe’s second largest food allergy?[2]
Even just decades ago, blood was appreciated as a source of nutriment and unique taste – appearing in an indescribable variety of blood puddings, blood sausages, blood desserts and blood pancakes throughout the Europe and Asia. Why is the tradition of cooking with blood disappearing from our kitchen? One answer might be the disappearing knowledge on how to process it – and with this disappearing knowledge comes insecurity for those who are trying to preserve and rediscover it.
Where does it all go?
By far most blood from pigs (around 70%)[3] is separated into plasma and serum used in animal feed, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, and commercial products like cigarette filters. Dried blood is used as fish food or fertilizer. Red blood cells are used for mink feed. Meat glue, or transglutaminase, is used to make novel forms of meat, like imitation crab, or to bind cuts in hams[4] – and in fact is an enzyme extracted from blood, originally responsible for clotting by stabilizing the protein fibrin.[5]
Composition
Though the bloods of different mammal species are similar in composition, the amount of blood obtained per animal varies greatly. In pigs, for example, blood makes up around 3.3% of live weight, which generally yields about 2.5L per animal.
Blood is a homogenous mixture of blood cells and serum. The serum (55%) is mainly composed of water (80%) and proteins (17%) such as albumin, fibrinogen and globulin, as well as glucose, minerals and hormones.[6]
Serum albumin is the most abundant and important protein in the serum, at around 50% of total protein content. This places it at a similar level to ovalbumin in eggs, around 60% of total protein content – which means in the kitchen, it provides an optimal replacement due to its foaming ability.[5]
There are three types of blood cells suspended in the serum: white blood cells; platelets or thrombocytes; and red blood cells which contain most of the haemoglobin, a iron-bound protein that is responsible for the red colour. Colour changes depend on reactions of these iron ions, regulated by storage conditions, oxygen availability, and temperature, and are similar to the colour changes that happen with meat. Vacuum-packed, blood is dark, close to purple; left outside for a while or whipped into foam, it turns bright red; and heat treatment leading to protein denaturation gives it a dark-chocolate brown, nearly black appearance.
Blood Clotting
Once the animal is slaughtered, blood platelets and plasma come into contact with other animal tissue, causing blood clotting. Due to the enzyme thrombin, the fibrinogen in the serum is transformed into fibrin, an insoluble protein forming strands. In these strands, big red blood cells get predominantly trapped, giving the intense dark colour from the haemoglobin contained therein.[5]
There are several anticoagulants that can be added to prevent this process. Generally calcium ion binding salts such as citrates and phosphates are used in slaughterhouses to prevent clotting. Traditionally, a metal spoon would be used, with constant stirring. If calcium ions are bound, no available calcium means no clotting.
Important: shake blood regularly before use, and strain.
Blood as substitution for eggs
One great argument for blood as an egg-substitute is the increasing food allergy for egg proteins, nowadays second-most prevalent food allergy in Europe, affecting mainly children but also adults. In Germany, for example, 8% of children have temporary reactions to egg. Other sources estimate that 30-53% of children with food allergies in European countries like Spain and France are allergic to ovalbumin.[2]
Blood shows a similar protein composition to egg, yet with slightly different types of proteins. The serum albumin, as the main constituent of blood protein with 55%[4] is tolerated whereas ovalbumin in egg white leads to heavy allergic reactions. But perhaps the greatest argument for cooking more with blood is to alleviate iron deficiency, which causes anaemia -– the world’s most common micronutrient deficiency.[7] And the haeme-iron in blood, in turns out, is the best possible source for the human body, showing a 2- to 7-fold bioavailabilty in comparison to non-haeme iron.[8]
Cooking properties of blood
The texture in blood pastries in comparison to egg-pastries is intriguingly similar. When whipping blood, more time and stepwise increase in speed is required, similar to methods for producing a very stable, fine-beaten egg white.
Coagulation due to heat treatment occurs between 63°C - 75°C. Heat denaturation of serum albumin requires a temperature of 75°C – at this temperature batters with blood will thicken. Egg coagulation, due to ovalbumin on the other hand, does not happen until 84.5°C. So less heat and hence less time is required when cooking with blood.
General substitution ratios:
1 egg (approx. 58 g/unit) = 65 g of blood
1 egg white (approx. 33 g/unit) = 43 g of blood
We have also observed interesting leavening properties in baking sourdough bread when sourdough starter is fed with blood instead of water for its final feeding. Volume nearly doubled in less than 1 hour, turning the bread dough dark-chocolate brown and changing the flavour profile of the bread to a richer, mildly acidic, moist bread. This discovery is still preliminary, and more culinary research is needed on blood and sourdough.
Hiding the animal – masking aromatic agents
Eugenol and cinnamaldehyde are classic aromatic compounds that are found in traditional recipes in combination with blood. In tasting panels done with blood meringues (recipe below) cinnamon and clove expectedly scored low in bloody aftertaste, but new combinations involving roasted barley koji and woodruff also showed promise.
Another good combination appears to be blood and acid, as tried in the sourdough blood pancake recipe. One possible reason could be due to the similarity of stimuli for acidic and metallic receptors on the tongue, both being sensed through ion channels, but we have found no research on this subject.
Due to sometimes intense and unexpected responses from taste testers, the question arose whether metallic taste and/or animal notes would be perceived differently according to gender and age.
We discovered that taste perception in general differs between male and female tasters, and younger and more elderly, with women generally having an increased sensitivity towards metallic taste.[9] Perception thresholds for bitter and sweet compounds vary not only between the sexes, but also with monthly-changing hormone concentrations in women that influence their nervous system.[10] Decreasing thresholds during menstruation means that women will perceive bitter compounds more easily at these times. Unfortunately no research has been done on changes in metallic taste-perception during the menstrual cycle, since metallic taste via ion-channels is a rather young discovery. During our own tests of our blood pastry products, however, this difference became obvious to us.
Animal aromas exhibit similar properties. Olfactory stimuli are translated in the central nervous system, and stimulation can be altered with changing hormone concentrations.[8] Women are thus generally more sensitive to androstenone and skatole (two animalic odours occurring in entire male pigs) than men, and might therefore show lower preference for blood containing products from entire pigs.[11] This may be the case even though skatole and androstenone are ten times more concentrated in the fat than other tissues or blood. More research needs to be conducted on the subject.[12]
RECIPES
Using blood in the kitchen drove us to the edge:
blood with sourdough,
blood as sourdough feed,
blood in kefir-culture (not recommendable),
blood in alcohol creating the Red Russian (in vodka, after filtering the denatured fibrin clots – only sipped once).
Blood and egg
January 7, 2014by Elisabeth Paul
OVERVIEW
Animal blood has a long culinary history throughout Europe, though recently has become neglected. We are interested in (re)valorising the despised and forgotten, so we had to look deeper into what blood is, how it should be handled, and what to use it for. Its coagulating properties led us to focus on blood as an egg-substitute in sweet products, since egg intolerance is one of the major food allergies affecting children in Europe.
In fact, eggs and blood show similar protein compositions, particularly with the albumin that gives both their coagulant properties. Based on these similarities, a substitution ratio of 65g of blood for one egg (approx. 58g), or 43g of blood for one egg white (approx. 33g) can be used in the kitchen. Using this method, we have developed recipes for sourdough-blood pancakes, blood ice cream, blood meringues, and ‘chocolate’ blood sponge cake.
A further benefit of blood is its ability to prevent anaemia – the most common micronutrient deficiency worldwide – due to the high bioavailability of its haeme-iron. This iron, of course, is often the challenging factor for taste, which in many cultures have traditionally alleviated by pairing with it strong flavours such as herbs and spices. We investigated some of these traditional pairings as well as some newer ones including woodruff and roasted koji.
During sensory evaluation, we were surprised at the variation in perception of the bloody aftertaste, which led us to an interesting discussion on the relationships between gender, age, and taste.
Blood for most is not a go-to ingredient. It has become somehow ‘edgy’, almost forbidden; yet it has been used as food for as long as animals have been killed and eaten. It is elemental, both mystical and mundane. And it makes us damn curious in the kitchen.
Blood is a brute fact of killing animals. A slaughtered pig can yield between 2.25 and 4.5 kg of the stuff,[1] which adds up quickly. We are always searching for deliciousness in the ignored and overlooked, so the question arose: how can we transmute this substance into an ingredient fit to celebrate? And then, more specifically: could blood be a substitute for eggs, especially in pastry, given that egg white intolerance is Europe’s second largest food allergy?[2]
Even just decades ago, blood was appreciated as a source of nutriment and unique taste – appearing in an indescribable variety of blood puddings, blood sausages, blood desserts and blood pancakes throughout the Europe and Asia. Why is the tradition of cooking with blood disappearing from our kitchen? One answer might be the disappearing knowledge on how to process it – and with this disappearing knowledge comes insecurity for those who are trying to preserve and rediscover it.
Where does it all go?
By far most blood from pigs (around 70%)[3] is separated into plasma and serum used in animal feed, pharmaceutics, cosmetics, and commercial products like cigarette filters. Dried blood is used as fish food or fertilizer. Red blood cells are used for mink feed. Meat glue, or transglutaminase, is used to make novel forms of meat, like imitation crab, or to bind cuts in hams[4] – and in fact is an enzyme extracted from blood, originally responsible for clotting by stabilizing the protein fibrin.[5]
Composition
Though the bloods of different mammal species are similar in composition, the amount of blood obtained per animal varies greatly. In pigs, for example, blood makes up around 3.3% of live weight, which generally yields about 2.5L per animal.
Blood is a homogenous mixture of blood cells and serum. The serum (55%) is mainly composed of water (80%) and proteins (17%) such as albumin, fibrinogen and globulin, as well as glucose, minerals and hormones.[6]
Serum albumin is the most abundant and important protein in the serum, at around 50% of total protein content. This places it at a similar level to ovalbumin in eggs, around 60% of total protein content – which means in the kitchen, it provides an optimal replacement due to its foaming ability.[5]
There are three types of blood cells suspended in the serum: white blood cells; platelets or thrombocytes; and red blood cells which contain most of the haemoglobin, a iron-bound protein that is responsible for the red colour. Colour changes depend on reactions of these iron ions, regulated by storage conditions, oxygen availability, and temperature, and are similar to the colour changes that happen with meat. Vacuum-packed, blood is dark, close to purple; left outside for a while or whipped into foam, it turns bright red; and heat treatment leading to protein denaturation gives it a dark-chocolate brown, nearly black appearance.
Once the animal is slaughtered, blood platelets and plasma come into contact with other animal tissue, causing blood clotting. Due to the enzyme thrombin, the fibrinogen in the serum is transformed into fibrin, an insoluble protein forming strands. In these strands, big red blood cells get predominantly trapped, giving the intense dark colour from the haemoglobin contained therein.[5]
There are several anticoagulants that can be added to prevent this process. Generally calcium ion binding salts such as citrates and phosphates are used in slaughterhouses to prevent clotting. Traditionally, a metal spoon would be used, with constant stirring. If calcium ions are bound, no available calcium means no clotting.
Important: shake blood regularly before use, and strain.
Blood as substitution for eggs
One great argument for blood as an egg-substitute is the increasing food allergy for egg proteins, nowadays second-most prevalent food allergy in Europe, affecting mainly children but also adults. In Germany, for example, 8% of children have temporary reactions to egg. Other sources estimate that 30-53% of children with food allergies in European countries like Spain and France are allergic to ovalbumin.[2]
Blood shows a similar protein composition to egg, yet with slightly different types of proteins. The serum albumin, as the main constituent of blood protein with 55%[4] is tolerated whereas ovalbumin in egg white leads to heavy allergic reactions. But perhaps the greatest argument for cooking more with blood is to alleviate iron deficiency, which causes anaemia -– the world’s most common micronutrient deficiency.[7] And the haeme-iron in blood, in turns out, is the best possible source for the human body, showing a 2- to 7-fold bioavailabilty in comparison to non-haeme iron.[8]
Cooking properties of blood
The texture in blood pastries in comparison to egg-pastries is intriguingly similar. When whipping blood, more time and stepwise increase in speed is required, similar to methods for producing a very stable, fine-beaten egg white.
General substitution ratios:
1 egg (approx. 58 g/unit) = 65 g of blood
1 egg white (approx. 33 g/unit) = 43 g of blood
We have also observed interesting leavening properties in baking sourdough bread when sourdough starter is fed with blood instead of water for its final feeding. Volume nearly doubled in less than 1 hour, turning the bread dough dark-chocolate brown and changing the flavour profile of the bread to a richer, mildly acidic, moist bread. This discovery is still preliminary, and more culinary research is needed on blood and sourdough.
Hiding the animal – masking aromatic agents
Eugenol and cinnamaldehyde are classic aromatic compounds that are found in traditional recipes in combination with blood. In tasting panels done with blood meringues (recipe below) cinnamon and clove expectedly scored low in bloody aftertaste, but new combinations involving roasted barley koji and woodruff also showed promise.
Another good combination appears to be blood and acid, as tried in the sourdough blood pancake recipe. One possible reason could be due to the similarity of stimuli for acidic and metallic receptors on the tongue, both being sensed through ion channels, but we have found no research on this subject.
Due to sometimes intense and unexpected responses from taste testers, the question arose whether metallic taste and/or animal notes would be perceived differently according to gender and age.
We discovered that taste perception in general differs between male and female tasters, and younger and more elderly, with women generally having an increased sensitivity towards metallic taste.[9] Perception thresholds for bitter and sweet compounds vary not only between the sexes, but also with monthly-changing hormone concentrations in women that influence their nervous system.[10] Decreasing thresholds during menstruation means that women will perceive bitter compounds more easily at these times. Unfortunately no research has been done on changes in metallic taste-perception during the menstrual cycle, since metallic taste via ion-channels is a rather young discovery. During our own tests of our blood pastry products, however, this difference became obvious to us.
Animal aromas exhibit similar properties. Olfactory stimuli are translated in the central nervous system, and stimulation can be altered with changing hormone concentrations.[8] Women are thus generally more sensitive to androstenone and skatole (two animalic odours occurring in entire male pigs) than men, and might therefore show lower preference for blood containing products from entire pigs.[11] This may be the case even though skatole and androstenone are ten times more concentrated in the fat than other tissues or blood. More research needs to be conducted on the subject.[12]
RECIPES
Using blood in the kitchen drove us to the edge:
blood with sourdough,
blood as sourdough feed,
blood in kefir-culture (not recommendable),
blood in alcohol creating the Red Russian (in vodka, after filtering the denatured fibrin clots – only sipped once).
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08-12-2019, 12:57 PM
#88
Boost Pope
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Chicago. (The less-murder part.)
Posts: 33,036
Total Cats: 6,604
(Continued due to post length limitation)
Here are some recipes that can be and have been eaten with a clear conscience.
Blood ice cream (for 1 paco container – 12 servings)
This recipe is inspired by traditional Italian dessert variations called sanguinaccio.[13]Given that cocoa doesn’t grow here in the north, we have run our trials with roasted barley koji, which is a brilliant alternative and ingredient in its own right – especially in combination with blood, giving body, bittersweet complexity and increasing the malty notes of the moulded, toasted grain taste.
300 ml pig blood (318 g)
60 g roasted Koji
300 g milk 3.5% fat (it may need around 200 ml extra, depending on the fineness and absorption capacities of the grain)
200 g cream (38% fat)
88 g trimoline (or 11% of ice cream mixture)
2.8 g guar gum (or 0.3% of rest of ice cream mixture including trimoline)
The day before:
Grind roasted koji to fine powder and cold-infuse it into 300 ml of milk. Leave at 4°C for 24h.
Production day:
Pass cold infusion through a super bag and measure yield. Add more whole milk to reach weight of 300 g.
Strain pig blood to remove coagulated protein clumps.
Add cream, blood and trimoline to mixture and start to heat over water bath while stirring constantly. Once temperature reaches 50°C, add guar gum and continue stirring until mixture thickens to chocolate brown custard. Heat until 75°C and hold at temperature for 15 seconds. Fill pacojet container and freeze.
Once frozen, spin in pacojet and serve.
Sourdough blood pancakes
Swedish blodplättar and Finnish veriohukainen are traditional variations of blood pancakes, and provided an existing foundation to understand platelets’ culinary functionality. In fact, the name blodplättar itself translates directly as ‘platelets’. The acidity of the sourdough starter is a great aid to soften the metallic aftertaste of the blood.
Basic recipe for fluffy pancakes.
235 ml of rye sourdough starter
150 ml of pig blood
30 g of melted butter
50 g of granulated sugar
Strain pig blood to remove blood clots.
Add sugar to blood and whisk in Kmix/Kitchenaid. Increase speed gradually until mixture is stiff.
Mix sourdough starter with melted butter, fold in 1/3 of blood foam, and add the rest once it becomes a homogenous batter. Bake in pan in abundant butter until dark chocolate colour.
Caution: easy to burn due to similar colour range of batter and burned pancake.
Blood Meringue
Blood as egg substitute in meringue seems difficult texture-wise at first, but once the whipped blood and sugar form this magnificent foam, all doubts are cleared. Probably one of the strangest textures Nordic Food Lab has seen, and one of the most beautiful. Definitely room for further investigations. We also want to note that this one was inspired by the pig's blood macaron from
in Spain. So delicious.
Trials have been done with both the French and Italian meringue methods (Harold McGee divides them into uncooked and cooked)[14]. Preferable for blood seems to be the uncooked method, since the meringues are perceived as less animal in flavour to the tasting panel.
[font]70 g pig blood[/font]
30 g of granulated sugar
30 g of icing sugar
Flavour variations used:
[font]2 pinches of Long pepper and salt, ground[/font]
or
2 pinches of cinnamon, ground
or
3 pinches of woodruff, dried and ground
Pour blood and granulated sugar into a kmix/kitchenaid and start mixing at low speed. Gradually increase speed up to level 5-6 once sugar is dissolved. Add icing sugar to the whipping blood, and make sure nothing sticks to the wall. Season blood mixture when it is glossy, bright red, and very stiff.
Fill in piping bag, place meringue on baking mats and dry at 93°C at very low ventilation level (level 2 on Combi Rationale oven) until dry and dark chocolate brown.
Sponge Cake – Basic recipe without egg
How to bake a classic black forest cake without egg – an adaptation of the Larousse recipe.
[font]230 g pig blood[/font]
100 g granulated sugar
25 g wheat flour
25 g corn starch
25 g cocoa or roasted koji, ground (Koji recipe see blogpost je)
Sieve flour, starch and koji twice to obtain a homogenous mixture. Mix blood very slowly in Kmix/Kitchenaid gradually adding sugar. Once dissolved increase speed to level 6-7 and whip until stiff. Pour in flour-mixture and lower speed to minimum, incorporating flour into blood mixture without volume loss.
Fill in spring form and bake at 180°C for 25 minutes. Test the cake by touching the surface – when it makes a crackling sound the cake is ready.
If you make two, you can use them as the base for a classic black forest cake. Or in this case, a not-so-classic blood forest cake.
As with all the other recipes, taste testing was of utmost importance. I made two half-cakes: one with blood, the other a chocolate control. Both were delicious.
It may seem excessive, but I'm German and cake-making is in my blood.
Best Practices when handling blood
1. Best source is your butcher of confidence. Ask him where the blood is from, when the pig was killed and how the blood was treated (with anticoagulants)
2. Smell it! It should have a sweet, rich, metallic odour without strong animal flavours. Strong aromatic changes can occur in un-castrated pigs due to their production of skatole and androstenone.
3. Respect cold chain throughout the handling (2 – 4 degrees) and use within a week when refrigerated.
4. Shake and strain before use.
5. Freeze for longer storage. The colour becomes darker. Thaw blood on the same day as processing.
The approximately 8 L of pig blood that have been used during the experimentation came from 3 free-range pigs, raised and slaughtered at Grambogård Slagteri, a slaughterhouse with high animal welfare standards in Funen, Denmark.
Blood and egg ? Nordic Food Lab
Here are some recipes that can be and have been eaten with a clear conscience.
Blood ice cream (for 1 paco container – 12 servings)
This recipe is inspired by traditional Italian dessert variations called sanguinaccio.[13]Given that cocoa doesn’t grow here in the north, we have run our trials with roasted barley koji, which is a brilliant alternative and ingredient in its own right – especially in combination with blood, giving body, bittersweet complexity and increasing the malty notes of the moulded, toasted grain taste.
300 ml pig blood (318 g)
60 g roasted Koji
300 g milk 3.5% fat (it may need around 200 ml extra, depending on the fineness and absorption capacities of the grain)
200 g cream (38% fat)
88 g trimoline (or 11% of ice cream mixture)
2.8 g guar gum (or 0.3% of rest of ice cream mixture including trimoline)
The day before:
Grind roasted koji to fine powder and cold-infuse it into 300 ml of milk. Leave at 4°C for 24h.
Production day:
Pass cold infusion through a super bag and measure yield. Add more whole milk to reach weight of 300 g.
Strain pig blood to remove coagulated protein clumps.
Add cream, blood and trimoline to mixture and start to heat over water bath while stirring constantly. Once temperature reaches 50°C, add guar gum and continue stirring until mixture thickens to chocolate brown custard. Heat until 75°C and hold at temperature for 15 seconds. Fill pacojet container and freeze.
Once frozen, spin in pacojet and serve.
Sourdough blood pancakes
Swedish blodplättar and Finnish veriohukainen are traditional variations of blood pancakes, and provided an existing foundation to understand platelets’ culinary functionality. In fact, the name blodplättar itself translates directly as ‘platelets’. The acidity of the sourdough starter is a great aid to soften the metallic aftertaste of the blood.
Basic recipe for fluffy pancakes.
235 ml of rye sourdough starter
150 ml of pig blood
30 g of melted butter
50 g of granulated sugar
Strain pig blood to remove blood clots.
Add sugar to blood and whisk in Kmix/Kitchenaid. Increase speed gradually until mixture is stiff.
Mix sourdough starter with melted butter, fold in 1/3 of blood foam, and add the rest once it becomes a homogenous batter. Bake in pan in abundant butter until dark chocolate colour.
Blood Meringue
Blood as egg substitute in meringue seems difficult texture-wise at first, but once the whipped blood and sugar form this magnificent foam, all doubts are cleared. Probably one of the strangest textures Nordic Food Lab has seen, and one of the most beautiful. Definitely room for further investigations. We also want to note that this one was inspired by the pig's blood macaron from
[font]70 g pig blood[/font]
30 g of granulated sugar
30 g of icing sugar
Flavour variations used:
[font]2 pinches of Long pepper and salt, ground[/font]
or
2 pinches of cinnamon, ground
or
3 pinches of woodruff, dried and ground
Pour blood and granulated sugar into a kmix/kitchenaid and start mixing at low speed. Gradually increase speed up to level 5-6 once sugar is dissolved. Add icing sugar to the whipping blood, and make sure nothing sticks to the wall. Season blood mixture when it is glossy, bright red, and very stiff.
Fill in piping bag, place meringue on baking mats and dry at 93°C at very low ventilation level (level 2 on Combi Rationale oven) until dry and dark chocolate brown.
How to bake a classic black forest cake without egg – an adaptation of the Larousse recipe.
[font]230 g pig blood[/font]
100 g granulated sugar
25 g wheat flour
25 g corn starch
25 g cocoa or roasted koji, ground (Koji recipe see blogpost je)
Sieve flour, starch and koji twice to obtain a homogenous mixture. Mix blood very slowly in Kmix/Kitchenaid gradually adding sugar. Once dissolved increase speed to level 6-7 and whip until stiff. Pour in flour-mixture and lower speed to minimum, incorporating flour into blood mixture without volume loss.
Fill in spring form and bake at 180°C for 25 minutes. Test the cake by touching the surface – when it makes a crackling sound the cake is ready.
As with all the other recipes, taste testing was of utmost importance. I made two half-cakes: one with blood, the other a chocolate control. Both were delicious.
It may seem excessive, but I'm German and cake-making is in my blood.
Best Practices when handling blood
1. Best source is your butcher of confidence. Ask him where the blood is from, when the pig was killed and how the blood was treated (with anticoagulants)
2. Smell it! It should have a sweet, rich, metallic odour without strong animal flavours. Strong aromatic changes can occur in un-castrated pigs due to their production of skatole and androstenone.
3. Respect cold chain throughout the handling (2 – 4 degrees) and use within a week when refrigerated.
4. Shake and strain before use.
5. Freeze for longer storage. The colour becomes darker. Thaw blood on the same day as processing.
The approximately 8 L of pig blood that have been used during the experimentation came from 3 free-range pigs, raised and slaughtered at Grambogård Slagteri, a slaughterhouse with high animal welfare standards in Funen, Denmark.
Blood and egg ? Nordic Food Lab
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09-04-2019, 08:27 PM
#92
Moderator
iTrader: (12)
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Tampa, Florida
Posts: 20,660
Total Cats: 3,011
Full article here-
http://imbibemagazine.com/Old-Tom-Gin/
Follow the Black Cat
If the first question people ask about Old Tom is "What is it?," the second is usually about how it got its peculiar name. Again, there's no simple answer.
As with many lost liquors, the history behind Old Tom is a patchwork of partial facts, incomplete information, and the kind of yarns that provoke cocked eyebrows. Most of the tales involve a black cat--the tom in question. Hayman's reports that back in 1736, one Captain Dudley Bradstreet lucked into both a piece of London property and a stock of gin. Bradstreet hung a sign depicting a painted cat in the window and let it be known that doses of sweet mother's ruin could be had at the address. "Under the cat's paw sign was a slot and a lead pipe, which was attached to a funnel inside the house," reads a history put together by Hayman's. "Customers placed their money in the slot and duly received their gin. Bradstreet's idea was soon copied all over London. People would stand outside houses, call 'puss' and when the voice within said 'mew,' they would know that they could buy bootleg gin inside. Very soon Old Tom became an affectionate nickname for gin."
http://imbibemagazine.com/Old-Tom-Gin/
Follow the Black Cat
If the first question people ask about Old Tom is "What is it?," the second is usually about how it got its peculiar name. Again, there's no simple answer.
As with many lost liquors, the history behind Old Tom is a patchwork of partial facts, incomplete information, and the kind of yarns that provoke cocked eyebrows. Most of the tales involve a black cat--the tom in question. Hayman's reports that back in 1736, one Captain Dudley Bradstreet lucked into both a piece of London property and a stock of gin. Bradstreet hung a sign depicting a painted cat in the window and let it be known that doses of sweet mother's ruin could be had at the address. "Under the cat's paw sign was a slot and a lead pipe, which was attached to a funnel inside the house," reads a history put together by Hayman's. "Customers placed their money in the slot and duly received their gin. Bradstreet's idea was soon copied all over London. People would stand outside houses, call 'puss' and when the voice within said 'mew,' they would know that they could buy bootleg gin inside. Very soon Old Tom became an affectionate nickname for gin."
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09-24-2019, 01:45 PM
#93
Retired Mech Design Engr
iTrader: (3)
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Seneca, SC
Posts: 5,009
Total Cats: 857
I found this bit of lawyer-eez entertaining. (emphasis by me).
Whenever any complaint is made, as provided for in W.S. 37-2-118, that the heat units of the natural gas supplied by any utility to the users thereof in any town or municipality are below the standard thereof theretofore used as a factor in the basis for rates to be charged by the utility in that particular town or municipality, the public service commission shall notify the state chemist to make proper tests of the heating units of the gas furnished by such utility to the complaining municipality.
Whenever any complaint is made, as provided for in W.S. 37-2-118, that the heat units of the natural gas supplied by any utility to the users thereof in any town or municipality are below the standard thereof theretofore used as a factor in the basis for rates to be charged by the utility in that particular town or municipality, the public service commission shall notify the state chemist to make proper tests of the heating units of the gas furnished by such utility to the complaining municipality.
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10-24-2019, 10:56 AM
#96
Moderator
iTrader: (12)
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Tampa, Florida
Posts: 20,660
Total Cats: 3,011
Google claims breakthrough in quantum computing. Completed computation that would take the fastest super computer 10,000 years in under 4 minutes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/t...62tion=topNews
SAN FRANCISCO — Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today’s technology.
In a paper published in the science journal Nature, Google said its research lab in Santa Barbara, Calif., had reached a milestone that scientists had been working toward since the 1980s: Its quantum computer performed a task that isn’t possible with current technology.
In this case, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said in its paper.
Scientists likened Google’s announcement to the Wright brothers’ first plane flight in 1903 — proof that something is really possible even though it may be years before it can fulfill its potential.
“The original Wright flyer was not a useful airplane,” said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who reviewed Google’s paper before publication. “But it was designed to prove a point. And it proved the point.”
A quantum machine, the result of more than a century’s worth of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, operates in a completely different manner from regular computers. It relies on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside Google’s machine.
One day, researchers believe, these devices could power advances in artificial intelligence or easily overwhelm the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Because of that, the governments of the United States and China consider quantum computing a national security priority.
But first, scientists must prove such a machine can be built, and some researchers cautioned against getting too excited about Google’s milestone since so much more work needs to be done before quantum computers can migrate out of the research lab. Right now, a single quantum machine costs millions of dollars to build.
Many of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Microsoft, Intel and IBM as well as Google, are jockeying for a position in quantum computing. And venture capitalists have invested more than $450 million into start-ups exploring the technology, according to a recent study.
China is spending $400 million on a national quantum lab and has filled almost twice as many quantum patents as the United States in recent years. The Trump administration followed suit this year with its own National Quantum Initiative, promising to spend $1.2 billion on quantum research, including computers.
Traditional computers perform calculations by processing “bits” of information, with each bit holding either a 1 or a 0. That has been the case for decades.
Understanding how a quantum computer is different requires a philosophical leap: accepting the notion that a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold.
By harnessing that odd behavior, scientists can instead build a quantum bit, or qubit, which stores a combination of 1 and 0. Two qubits can hold four values at once. And as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful, making today’s supercomputers look like toys.
Scientists first described the idea in the 1980s, but qubits are fragile. Stringing even a few together can involve years of work. For the past several decades, labs in academia, industry and government have worked on quantum computing through a wide variety of techniques, including systems built around particles of light or electromagnetic fields that trap tiny charged particles.
About 20 years ago, researchers in Japan pioneered “superconducting qubits,” for which certain metals are chilled to extremely low temperatures.
This method has shown particular promise, sparking projects at IBM, Google and Intel. Their machines look nothing like a regular computer. They are large cylinders of metal and twisted wires that are dropped into stainless steel refrigerators. You send information to the machine, as you would to a traditional computer chip, and receive calculations in return.
Google’s paper became a bit of an internet mystery after it was published and then quickly unpublished online in late September. That brief appearance was enough to raise the hackles of researchers at competing companies who believe the Silicon Valley giant is inflating its accomplishment.
On Monday, IBM fired a pre-emptive shot with a blog post disputing Google’s claim that its quantum calculation could not be performed by a traditional computer. The calculation, IBM argued, could theoretically be run on a current computer in less than two and a half days — not 10,000 years.
“This is not about final and absolute dominance over classical computers,” said Dario Gil, who heads the IBM research lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where the company is building its own quantum computers.
Other researchers dismissed the milestone because the calculation was notably esoteric. It generated random numbers using a quantum experiment that can’t necessarily be applied to other things.
Though IBM disputed that Google had really accomplished all that much, Dr. Gil argued that quantum computers were indeed getting closer to reality. “By 2020, we will be able to use them for commercial and scientific advantage,” he said.
Like much of the cutting-edge work being done in corporate research labs, Google’s quantum effort has its roots in academia. In 2014, Google hired a team of physicists who had spent the previous several years working on quantum computing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The researchers were expected to discuss their work with reporters later on Wednesday.
As its paper was published, Google responded to IBM’s claims that its quantum calculation could be performed on a classical computer. “We’ve already peeled away from classical computers, onto a totally different trajectory,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “We welcome proposals to advance simulation techniques, though it’s crucial to test them on an actual supercomputer, as we have.”
The calculation performed by Google’s machine is a way of showing that a complex quantum system can be reliable. The company also believes the random numbers it generates could have practical uses.
As the machines get better over time, they could help improve cryptography, or even aid in the creation of new medicines or materials, said Daniel Lidar, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in quantum computing.
“This would be a big deal,” he said. “It has applications in many different places.”
Dr. Lidar said he expected that other scientists would try to disprove Google’s claims. But some see a broader benefit to all researchers working on this near-mythical device.
“Google’s result is a major achievement not just for Google but also for the broader scientific community,” said Chad Rigetti, who worked on IBM’s quantum computing project and now runs his own start-up. (Mr. Rigetti’s wife is an editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times.)
“It is just a short amount of time now before we have commercially relevant problems that quantum machines can solve,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/t...62tion=topNews
SAN FRANCISCO — Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called “quantum supremacy,” which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today’s technology.
In a paper published in the science journal Nature, Google said its research lab in Santa Barbara, Calif., had reached a milestone that scientists had been working toward since the 1980s: Its quantum computer performed a task that isn’t possible with current technology.
In this case, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said in its paper.
Scientists likened Google’s announcement to the Wright brothers’ first plane flight in 1903 — proof that something is really possible even though it may be years before it can fulfill its potential.
“The original Wright flyer was not a useful airplane,” said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who reviewed Google’s paper before publication. “But it was designed to prove a point. And it proved the point.”
A quantum machine, the result of more than a century’s worth of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, operates in a completely different manner from regular computers. It relies on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside Google’s machine.
One day, researchers believe, these devices could power advances in artificial intelligence or easily overwhelm the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Because of that, the governments of the United States and China consider quantum computing a national security priority.
But first, scientists must prove such a machine can be built, and some researchers cautioned against getting too excited about Google’s milestone since so much more work needs to be done before quantum computers can migrate out of the research lab. Right now, a single quantum machine costs millions of dollars to build.
Many of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Microsoft, Intel and IBM as well as Google, are jockeying for a position in quantum computing. And venture capitalists have invested more than $450 million into start-ups exploring the technology, according to a recent study.
China is spending $400 million on a national quantum lab and has filled almost twice as many quantum patents as the United States in recent years. The Trump administration followed suit this year with its own National Quantum Initiative, promising to spend $1.2 billion on quantum research, including computers.
Traditional computers perform calculations by processing “bits” of information, with each bit holding either a 1 or a 0. That has been the case for decades.
Understanding how a quantum computer is different requires a philosophical leap: accepting the notion that a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold.
By harnessing that odd behavior, scientists can instead build a quantum bit, or qubit, which stores a combination of 1 and 0. Two qubits can hold four values at once. And as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful, making today’s supercomputers look like toys.
Scientists first described the idea in the 1980s, but qubits are fragile. Stringing even a few together can involve years of work. For the past several decades, labs in academia, industry and government have worked on quantum computing through a wide variety of techniques, including systems built around particles of light or electromagnetic fields that trap tiny charged particles.
About 20 years ago, researchers in Japan pioneered “superconducting qubits,” for which certain metals are chilled to extremely low temperatures.
This method has shown particular promise, sparking projects at IBM, Google and Intel. Their machines look nothing like a regular computer. They are large cylinders of metal and twisted wires that are dropped into stainless steel refrigerators. You send information to the machine, as you would to a traditional computer chip, and receive calculations in return.
Google’s paper became a bit of an internet mystery after it was published and then quickly unpublished online in late September. That brief appearance was enough to raise the hackles of researchers at competing companies who believe the Silicon Valley giant is inflating its accomplishment.
On Monday, IBM fired a pre-emptive shot with a blog post disputing Google’s claim that its quantum calculation could not be performed by a traditional computer. The calculation, IBM argued, could theoretically be run on a current computer in less than two and a half days — not 10,000 years.
“This is not about final and absolute dominance over classical computers,” said Dario Gil, who heads the IBM research lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where the company is building its own quantum computers.
Other researchers dismissed the milestone because the calculation was notably esoteric. It generated random numbers using a quantum experiment that can’t necessarily be applied to other things.
Though IBM disputed that Google had really accomplished all that much, Dr. Gil argued that quantum computers were indeed getting closer to reality. “By 2020, we will be able to use them for commercial and scientific advantage,” he said.
Like much of the cutting-edge work being done in corporate research labs, Google’s quantum effort has its roots in academia. In 2014, Google hired a team of physicists who had spent the previous several years working on quantum computing at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The researchers were expected to discuss their work with reporters later on Wednesday.
As its paper was published, Google responded to IBM’s claims that its quantum calculation could be performed on a classical computer. “We’ve already peeled away from classical computers, onto a totally different trajectory,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “We welcome proposals to advance simulation techniques, though it’s crucial to test them on an actual supercomputer, as we have.”
The calculation performed by Google’s machine is a way of showing that a complex quantum system can be reliable. The company also believes the random numbers it generates could have practical uses.
As the machines get better over time, they could help improve cryptography, or even aid in the creation of new medicines or materials, said Daniel Lidar, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in quantum computing.
“This would be a big deal,” he said. “It has applications in many different places.”
Dr. Lidar said he expected that other scientists would try to disprove Google’s claims. But some see a broader benefit to all researchers working on this near-mythical device.
“Google’s result is a major achievement not just for Google but also for the broader scientific community,” said Chad Rigetti, who worked on IBM’s quantum computing project and now runs his own start-up. (Mr. Rigetti’s wife is an editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times.)
“It is just a short amount of time now before we have commercially relevant problems that quantum machines can solve,” he said.
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10-24-2019, 09:01 PM
#99
Junior Member
Join Date: Mar 2018
Location: MS Gulf Coast
Posts: 476
Total Cats: 28
Let's cut the crap and get to the important stuff.
Will this lead to true virtual reality?
On a more serious note this is quite extraordinary and I'm surprised it isn't making more waves.
If we ever create an AI system this will be it's "brain".
Will this lead to true virtual reality?
On a more serious note this is quite extraordinary and I'm surprised it isn't making more waves.
If we ever create an AI system this will be it's "brain".
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11-03-2019, 11:55 AM
#100
Boost Pope
Thread Starter
iTrader: (8)
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Chicago. (The less-murder part.)
Posts: 33,036
Total Cats: 6,604
How would you define "true" virtual reality?
On an unrelated note, I find the following article fascinating, as someone who grew up with a kitchen of harvest-gold and avocado-green, plus curtains with corn cobs printed on them. The narrative which it tells seems to closely mirror the recent history of automotive design, insomuch as bold styling and bright colors became fashionable in the 1950s and 60s, then gave way to cars painted brown and gold and orange in the 1970s, and eventually we wound up in the present.
Here's a challenge: how many cars do you see on the road every day which are not painted some variant of white / grey / black?
By the same measure, modern kitchen appliances are styled in a way which is vastly different from their mid-century predecessors, but have returned to a color palette which is entirely lacking in chroma.
The bright postwar landscape, with its color-conditioned schools, its two-tone Chevys, and its orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants, whetted the appetite for more color in the home. Howard Ketcham’s work on the Bell Model 500, a direct response to this taste, was paralleled by the appliance industry’s move toward color.
In the 1920s, Macy’s Color in the Kitchen promotion had popularized pots and pans in bright hues, and Kohler Color Ware had made some headway in the bathroom. But the colorization of big-ticket durable goods for the home had been stymied by the Depression and by World War II. In 1949, the Chambers Company, a small Indiana stove factory, startled everyone by offering stoves in red, black, blue, gray, yellow, and green. Rumors circulated that the colorful models accounted for one-third of the Chambers Company’s sales. When a major trade association for the paint industry reported the rising popularity of kitchens in canary yellow and chartreuse, the household equipment industry took notice.
“Let’s face it,” said a 1951 report on women and electrical appliances compiled for the Ralph H. Jones Advertising Agency by Ernest Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research. “The General Electric refrigerators, Kelvinator, and Frigidaire are not . . . different from one another,” making it hard to “capture the consumer’s heart by assaulting it . . . with a barrage of publicity.” The postwar appliance customer had most likely worked in an office, a store, or a factory during the war, and knew her own mind. Unlike her “old-homebody” mother, she decorated to express “her creativity and individuality.” She wanted “electrical appliances not only for their utilitarian value but for their contribution to her kitchen’s livability,” and she expected “the style of the refrigerator or washing machine ‘to harmonize with the rest of the kitchen’s décor.’”
The manufacturers’ challenge was to turn a utilitarian product into a fashion accessory. Dichter, who had probed the minds of consumers for hundreds of companies, recommended a “psychological strategy.” Color, he suggested, was a psychological tool that could reach deep into the mind and unlock the consumer’s nascent or unrealized desires.
The largest market for color appliances was to be found in new suburban developments such as the three Levittowns (one on Long Island, one in Pennsylvania, and one in New Jersey). Developers knew that the frazzled house hunter, exhausted after an endless Sunday afternoon of open houses, would remember “the one with the red and white kitchen.”
But the populations of these new communities were less stable than the builders would have liked, and the rapid turnover affected how houses were designed. “Today,” according to a report from a conference on color in interior decoration sponsored by the builders’ magazine House & Home in 1955, “most people buy their homes ready made, just as they buy their clothes ready made or their cars ready made. Today only one house out of six is built for a known buyer, and even that one house in six will probably be re-sold to an unknown buyer within five years.” Color selection, always a risky business, was complicated by the anticipation of mobility.
Bankers and appraisers had to deem a house suitable to be resold before they would lend money to the builder or the homeowner. The “streamlined” kitchen — one with modernistic cabinets, chrome-trimmed counters, and color appliances — was still too unusual for cautious money men. “The builder can take his profit and run once he has found a buyer who likes the colors he has chosen, but the mortgage lender must live with the house for 20 or 30 years through many changes of ownership. He has the biggest stake in the use of safe colors, for he has the most to lose by a color choice that might lower the re-sale marketability of the house.” The Federal Housing Authority, which oversaw mortgage lending to veterans under the GI Bill of Rights, took a conservative stance.
The editor of House & Home explained the realities to an appliance executive: “FHA now tends to give a lower valuation where color is used. This is for two reasons: 1. FHA is afraid color may reduce marketability, because the color that suits one woman may not suit the rest. 2. FHA has no accepted color standards that its appraisers can use as a yardstick.” The Housing Act of 1954 provided federal loans for remodeling and encouraged lenders to approve streamlined kitchens if remodelers wanted them. But a builder of new homes still couldn’t “use colors his mortgage lender will not finance.” In the end, the worries of bureaucrats, bankers, and appraisers limited the dissemination of colored appliances.
As consumers in urban neighborhoods and in older suburbs looked to modernize older homes, manufacturers of electric appliances saw sales opportunities. “One big reason the appliance makers are eager to sell color into the kitchen is their hope that colored kitchens in new houses will also start a big replacement demand as old houses follow the new house lead. That’s why General Electric is so pleased that 80% of its new house major appliance sales are in color.” GE hoped that the Piotrowskis, the Celluccis, the Goldblums, and the O’Neills would want to keep up with the Joneses, but identifying a market segment was not the same as realizing sales. How should manufacturers approach the replacement market? Should they target the consumer’s unrealized desires, or should they cater to her actual needs?
Most appliance executives took a pragmatic approach to these decades-old marketing questions, which had been codified in the 1920s. One salesman who supplied vitreous enamels to appliance makers knew Ernest Dichter’s psychological theories and was skeptical. Granting that the “consensus of the motivational research boys is that colors and built-in appliances are the only things that meet the emotional needs of the modern woman,” he expressed belief that the American manufacturing system could satisfy customers without bowing to fashion.
Through “economics and mass production,” appliance makers could deliver affordable prices and a modicum of style. The purchasing agent for Levitt & Sons also skirted around the popular psychobabble and the idea of style obsolescence: “The idea of the colored kitchen is to attract the consumer to spending more money for her kitchen — money that would otherwise be spent for a television set or automobile — something new. It is eye-catching, appealing and she wants it.”
Market researchers at McCall’s, a popular magazine for middle-class suburban housewives, documented the rising interest in colorful appliances. By early 1955, the average homemaker had seen color appliances in magazines, stores, and showrooms, at open houses in new suburban developments, and in the homes of friends and relatives. Some women still preferred white appliances: “I love a change in decorating, especially in the kitchen where I spend so much time. I would hesitate to buy colored appliances for this reason. I pick neutral colors for counter tops and floors also, so I can change to any new color.” But more than half of the women in the McCall’s survey said they would buy a new appliance in color, even if it were more expensive. “I love color! I spend most of my time when home in my kitchen and like a pretty yellow kitchen. My appliances are white and no matter how I plan my color scheme, my range, refrigerator, [and] broiler stick out like ‘sore thumbs.’ If they were in pastel colors, they would blend.”
The trend toward thinking of the kitchen as a living space encouraged the new outlook. As more blue-collar families moved to suburbs, they took the idea of the all-purpose kitchen with them. In urban apartments, the large kitchen had served as a community gathering space, much as in a farmhouse. This vernacular tradition of adaptive use fit with Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist concept of the open floor plan, with the kitchen opening into a dining-living room. Suburban builders adjusted their designs for Cape Cod cottages and split-level ranches to accommodate “nostalgic feelings for the days when the kitchen was the family living room” and “people ate near the stove and shared stories.” If the kitchen was a space for living, then it should be decorated as such, complete with colorful accents. Do-it-yourself paints allowed consumers to satisfy this impulse on a budget.
Sunshine Yellow appliances required a more substantial investment and signified a greater commitment. As public opinion was gravitating toward color in kitchen decoration, a different obstacle to color appliances appeared: three out of four appliance dealers took “a dim view of the whole idea.” The retailers worried about higher prices, the difficulty of matching shades, and inventory management — many of the same worries that car dealers had about two-tone paint jobs. “The biggest headache will be having not only the right model but the right model in the right color and . . . the right shade. What about matching chipped stove panels? What prices will we have to pay for parts due to excessive inventory . . . in our distributors’ warehouses?” Stores that stocked different brands were especially concerned about mismatches: “There’s Sky Blue, Baby Blue, French Blue, Cadet Blue. . . .” The “color idea” was a big headache — lots of work and no guarantees.
On an unrelated note, I find the following article fascinating, as someone who grew up with a kitchen of harvest-gold and avocado-green, plus curtains with corn cobs printed on them. The narrative which it tells seems to closely mirror the recent history of automotive design, insomuch as bold styling and bright colors became fashionable in the 1950s and 60s, then gave way to cars painted brown and gold and orange in the 1970s, and eventually we wound up in the present.
Here's a challenge: how many cars do you see on the road every day which are not painted some variant of white / grey / black?
By the same measure, modern kitchen appliances are styled in a way which is vastly different from their mid-century predecessors, but have returned to a color palette which is entirely lacking in chroma.
The Hidden Forces Behind the Rise and Fall of Colorful Kitchens in Postwar America
The bright postwar landscape, with its color-conditioned schools, its two-tone Chevys, and its orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurants, whetted the appetite for more color in the home. Howard Ketcham’s work on the Bell Model 500, a direct response to this taste, was paralleled by the appliance industry’s move toward color.
In the 1920s, Macy’s Color in the Kitchen promotion had popularized pots and pans in bright hues, and Kohler Color Ware had made some headway in the bathroom. But the colorization of big-ticket durable goods for the home had been stymied by the Depression and by World War II. In 1949, the Chambers Company, a small Indiana stove factory, startled everyone by offering stoves in red, black, blue, gray, yellow, and green. Rumors circulated that the colorful models accounted for one-third of the Chambers Company’s sales. When a major trade association for the paint industry reported the rising popularity of kitchens in canary yellow and chartreuse, the household equipment industry took notice.
“Let’s face it,” said a 1951 report on women and electrical appliances compiled for the Ralph H. Jones Advertising Agency by Ernest Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research. “The General Electric refrigerators, Kelvinator, and Frigidaire are not . . . different from one another,” making it hard to “capture the consumer’s heart by assaulting it . . . with a barrage of publicity.” The postwar appliance customer had most likely worked in an office, a store, or a factory during the war, and knew her own mind. Unlike her “old-homebody” mother, she decorated to express “her creativity and individuality.” She wanted “electrical appliances not only for their utilitarian value but for their contribution to her kitchen’s livability,” and she expected “the style of the refrigerator or washing machine ‘to harmonize with the rest of the kitchen’s décor.’”
The manufacturers’ challenge was to turn a utilitarian product into a fashion accessory. Dichter, who had probed the minds of consumers for hundreds of companies, recommended a “psychological strategy.” Color, he suggested, was a psychological tool that could reach deep into the mind and unlock the consumer’s nascent or unrealized desires.
The largest market for color appliances was to be found in new suburban developments such as the three Levittowns (one on Long Island, one in Pennsylvania, and one in New Jersey). Developers knew that the frazzled house hunter, exhausted after an endless Sunday afternoon of open houses, would remember “the one with the red and white kitchen.”
But the populations of these new communities were less stable than the builders would have liked, and the rapid turnover affected how houses were designed. “Today,” according to a report from a conference on color in interior decoration sponsored by the builders’ magazine House & Home in 1955, “most people buy their homes ready made, just as they buy their clothes ready made or their cars ready made. Today only one house out of six is built for a known buyer, and even that one house in six will probably be re-sold to an unknown buyer within five years.” Color selection, always a risky business, was complicated by the anticipation of mobility.
Bankers and appraisers had to deem a house suitable to be resold before they would lend money to the builder or the homeowner. The “streamlined” kitchen — one with modernistic cabinets, chrome-trimmed counters, and color appliances — was still too unusual for cautious money men. “The builder can take his profit and run once he has found a buyer who likes the colors he has chosen, but the mortgage lender must live with the house for 20 or 30 years through many changes of ownership. He has the biggest stake in the use of safe colors, for he has the most to lose by a color choice that might lower the re-sale marketability of the house.” The Federal Housing Authority, which oversaw mortgage lending to veterans under the GI Bill of Rights, took a conservative stance.
The editor of House & Home explained the realities to an appliance executive: “FHA now tends to give a lower valuation where color is used. This is for two reasons: 1. FHA is afraid color may reduce marketability, because the color that suits one woman may not suit the rest. 2. FHA has no accepted color standards that its appraisers can use as a yardstick.” The Housing Act of 1954 provided federal loans for remodeling and encouraged lenders to approve streamlined kitchens if remodelers wanted them. But a builder of new homes still couldn’t “use colors his mortgage lender will not finance.” In the end, the worries of bureaucrats, bankers, and appraisers limited the dissemination of colored appliances.
As consumers in urban neighborhoods and in older suburbs looked to modernize older homes, manufacturers of electric appliances saw sales opportunities. “One big reason the appliance makers are eager to sell color into the kitchen is their hope that colored kitchens in new houses will also start a big replacement demand as old houses follow the new house lead. That’s why General Electric is so pleased that 80% of its new house major appliance sales are in color.” GE hoped that the Piotrowskis, the Celluccis, the Goldblums, and the O’Neills would want to keep up with the Joneses, but identifying a market segment was not the same as realizing sales. How should manufacturers approach the replacement market? Should they target the consumer’s unrealized desires, or should they cater to her actual needs?
Most appliance executives took a pragmatic approach to these decades-old marketing questions, which had been codified in the 1920s. One salesman who supplied vitreous enamels to appliance makers knew Ernest Dichter’s psychological theories and was skeptical. Granting that the “consensus of the motivational research boys is that colors and built-in appliances are the only things that meet the emotional needs of the modern woman,” he expressed belief that the American manufacturing system could satisfy customers without bowing to fashion.
Through “economics and mass production,” appliance makers could deliver affordable prices and a modicum of style. The purchasing agent for Levitt & Sons also skirted around the popular psychobabble and the idea of style obsolescence: “The idea of the colored kitchen is to attract the consumer to spending more money for her kitchen — money that would otherwise be spent for a television set or automobile — something new. It is eye-catching, appealing and she wants it.”
Market researchers at McCall’s, a popular magazine for middle-class suburban housewives, documented the rising interest in colorful appliances. By early 1955, the average homemaker had seen color appliances in magazines, stores, and showrooms, at open houses in new suburban developments, and in the homes of friends and relatives. Some women still preferred white appliances: “I love a change in decorating, especially in the kitchen where I spend so much time. I would hesitate to buy colored appliances for this reason. I pick neutral colors for counter tops and floors also, so I can change to any new color.” But more than half of the women in the McCall’s survey said they would buy a new appliance in color, even if it were more expensive. “I love color! I spend most of my time when home in my kitchen and like a pretty yellow kitchen. My appliances are white and no matter how I plan my color scheme, my range, refrigerator, [and] broiler stick out like ‘sore thumbs.’ If they were in pastel colors, they would blend.”
The trend toward thinking of the kitchen as a living space encouraged the new outlook. As more blue-collar families moved to suburbs, they took the idea of the all-purpose kitchen with them. In urban apartments, the large kitchen had served as a community gathering space, much as in a farmhouse. This vernacular tradition of adaptive use fit with Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist concept of the open floor plan, with the kitchen opening into a dining-living room. Suburban builders adjusted their designs for Cape Cod cottages and split-level ranches to accommodate “nostalgic feelings for the days when the kitchen was the family living room” and “people ate near the stove and shared stories.” If the kitchen was a space for living, then it should be decorated as such, complete with colorful accents. Do-it-yourself paints allowed consumers to satisfy this impulse on a budget.
Sunshine Yellow appliances required a more substantial investment and signified a greater commitment. As public opinion was gravitating toward color in kitchen decoration, a different obstacle to color appliances appeared: three out of four appliance dealers took “a dim view of the whole idea.” The retailers worried about higher prices, the difficulty of matching shades, and inventory management — many of the same worries that car dealers had about two-tone paint jobs. “The biggest headache will be having not only the right model but the right model in the right color and . . . the right shade. What about matching chipped stove panels? What prices will we have to pay for parts due to excessive inventory . . . in our distributors’ warehouses?” Stores that stocked different brands were especially concerned about mismatches: “There’s Sky Blue, Baby Blue, French Blue, Cadet Blue. . . .” The “color idea” was a big headache — lots of work and no guarantees.
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