Tiled With Pentagons

Here's a thought that's been rattling around my head for the last decade or so: leftovers - as in, leftover food - obey chain complex rules. Let me explain. One thing you can do with leftover food rather than just eat it is to use it as an ingredient - the base for a new meal, remixing it to some extent. Turn a hamburger patty into ground meat for a casserole, or use the carrots and celery from a crudite tray as the start of a mirepoix. There's numerous patterns and a whole art to it - for one, fried rice, French toast, and Spanish omelettes are all exemplars of one excellent pattern: "take slightly stale starch, apply some egg, some seasoning, and maybe some fresh produce". (It's no accident that the French for "French toast" literally translates as "lost bread".) There's only a few techniques, and you can learn most of them and start experimenting if you care about avoiding food waste as much as I do: a few others include "use ad...

(Epistemic status: just my opinion/frame, but I claim to know whereof I speak. With thanks to IL, JSW, and PR.) When people talk about conceptual engineering, what do they mean? And why is conceptual engineering so difficult and yet so important? To triangulate this practice properly, we must surely look at it from many angles - math, philosophy, intuition, and utility, for the best few I can think of. Before any of that, here's a first attempt to describe what conceptual engineering is: it's the cognitive technology or practice of carefully defining some concept. It has to be either a natural category of objects or of other abstractions, or else a property that objects or abstractions might have; it has to both live in the world and be useful for further efforts regarding the world. You can sometimes do conceptual engineering without really trying to; whoever invented currency engaged in conceptual engineering, as was whoever kicked off the Great Sandwich Debates. The importan...