Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: the obligatory EDC post; heavily prescriptive on strong grounds and long experience; check out what's cluttering up my Bag of Holding.) There is maybe one website I will happily link to on this blog, ever, and it is how.complexsystems.fail . It's a favorite; it's pretty much just text with some sourcing for bona fides, and a frame for understanding, well... how it is that complex systems end up failing. It's a shockingly broadly applicable way to think; one of those things where once you start looking, you'll see it everywhere. Traffic and accidents; medical care and iatrogenic ailments (not just hospital-acquired infections but also cutting the wrong leg off); political systems and their dysfunctions (and just how easy it is for a single bad-actor practitioner to ruin a lot); social groups and their collapses; cooking and ruined dishes. And, perhaps most dubiously at first blush, navigating daily life. Listen: I am a fan of the OSHA-coded "d...

  (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)   This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant. You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't bu...

(Epistemic status: a nonstandard frame for economics that finally crystallized; as usual, descriptive of patterns I've observed in trade, gift economics, and coordination; more prescriptive than my usual about what patterns build what kind of prosperity; and surely incomplete. Built heavily out of the Glowlarion theological-decisiontheoretic frame. For SC, and anyone through whose hands the coins I've made pass or have passed.) Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale... "Long ago, on a dusty road through a desert, there trudged a travelling merchant. The road was unpaved dirt, barely better than the shifting sands around it; the merchant's donkey struggled to pull his cart over potholes and through the occasional dune that had drifted onto the path; the merchant's cart was loaded down with bolts of fine cloth and sturdy pottery jars of preserved fruit. The merchant relaxed as he approached an oasis; he and his steed were parched, and he had been wal...

(Epistemic status: project idea that I am reasonably confident is actually achievable. Feedback, independent experimentation with shared results, and especially alpha-testers all decidedly welcome. There's someone who this post would have been for, in a brighter kinder universe, but this is not that possible world and he will never read this. It's not for him and he will never get to eat anything I make. So it's for MEG, IL, and TT instead, and all my other friends who appreciate good experimental desserts. And also the Philly Pies. Go birds; eat your batteries; third championship fornever.)    I can't remember quite when I first came up with this idea. Maybe it was after reading up on the Tree of 40 Fruits pictured above. Maybe it was after reading that passage about kitchen trees producing different kind of snackable fruit year-round in Too Like The Lightning. Maybe the seed of it was planted in me while wandering through a farmer's market one afternoon.  I had a ...

(Epistemic status: well-attested and frequently mentioned and talked around, but often not actually talked about explicitly. For IL.) "Truth is stranger than fiction." "Stories are sometimes truer than hard facts." "Elith-mirta, true-truth, must never be confused with ainai-mirta, beauty-truth; such would be a severe heresy." "Long, long ago, when crows were white..." "As a writer, your job is harder than God's. God simply made things be true. You have to make them make sense." There's something lurking here. Can you see it? There's a slippage of language around truth here. Sometimes it hides behind the verb "to be". It seems to have to do with two senses of "truth". One sense lives in the world of atoms; of cause and effect; of axioms, theorems, and proofs; of studies of psychology and economics; of precisely how everything that objectively exists is, precisely how it is, devoid of any subjectivity or in...