Curiouslyrong

a twentysomething flâneur curiously.rong documents the burps, bruises and banalities of the struggle to realize a full-bodied life; properly chewed over 32 times before swallowing. let's hope i don't choke

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“What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.” 

- Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

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consistency per patient, across trials, and no reuse

Posted from: 50 Haven Ave, New York, NY 10032, USA

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all things are magic before we begin to understand them

Analog voronoi tessellations with paint!

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Inspired by this dress.  via A

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A teleological utility for functional currencies may date back to the 1950s. Blockchain is the innovation but cryptocurrency is not quite as novel as many would like it to be.

Table 1: Joseph Aschheim and Y.S. Park, Artificial Currency Units: The Formation of Functional Currency Areas, Essays in International Finance via P

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Yesterday Is two days before tomorrow, The day after two days ago.

- Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women: Stories

photo slides: Garry Winogrand, Color, Brooklyn Museum

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Brainstorming ideas for holiday cards. via J

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In a deeply tender and human way, those who in supporting others to do what they do not make time to do themselves, are engaging in a predicable act of compensation typical of caregivers who have no container for their work.

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antecedent to meditation

September has a liminal tone. The practice of ashtanga is not for the faint of heart or the fool of courage. Much reputed for being a very intense and complex form of self-care, sequenced into 75 fixed poses (first series), it is suited for the energetic type who enjoys surrender in the form of high-viscosity twisting, dizzying pace of vinyasas, and attenuated breath work. 

There is no big claim on truth but the practice turns into a sharp-edged tool for cutting through the modern conditioned mind. Ashtanga offers perspective on what Foucault talks about almost from outside of time and context; rooting hidden assumptions of interlocutors; scanning for performative contradictions; scrambling mental constructs in the off-chance that the delayed effects might let your mind see a new way. Insofar as anyone can perceive how power gets into people’s heads, how it structures and dominates life-force, and how hard it is to break free unless you can perceive both the internal subconscious as well as the unspoken agendas of the social institutions that otherwise control you. 

Anyone can be trained to initiate an inhalation a moment before jumping into some suspended driste and on the exhale activate the arches through the adductors into the bandhas and up the spine. At its core, ashtanga is less about precise body alignment or Sanskrit tonal mastery and more about dedication to methodology in the pursuit and study of the conditioned mind. To be receptive to even deeper states of absorption in practice and insight in life.

[curiouslyrong]

herb-crusted rack of lamb

Time: 2 hours (or up to 5 hours)  Serves 6-8 as main course

Ingredients:

2 racks of lamb (each with 6-8 bones; 2.5 to 3 lbs total) 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 to 2 cloves of garlic, minced 1 cup panko (Japanese style bread crumbs)* 1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary or thyme .25 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley, plus 1 tablespoon, for garnish 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard freshly ground black pepper sea salt**

1. Preheat sous vide water bath to 55°C/131°F

2. Place each lamb rack in a gallon-size freezer-safe ziplock bag and seal using water displacement method.

3. When water reaches target temperature, lower the bagged lamb into water bath, making sure the bag is fully submerged and cook for at minimum 2 hours.

4. While lamb is cooking, prepare the crust. Heat the oil and garlic together in a sauté pan over medium-low heat until the garlic sizzles but does not color, about 1 minute.

5. Add bread crumbs and stir and toss them to coat them with the oil. Cook, stirring constantly, until the bread crumbs are beginning to color, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the rosemary, the 0.25 cup parsley, and a pinch of salt. Transfer to a platter or tray, spread in an even layer, and let cool to room temperature.

6. Preheat oven to 450°F, or preheat the broiler.

7. Remove bags from water bath and let the lamb rest for 5 minutes. Transfer the lamb to a platter or tray and pat thoroughly dry with paper towels, then season with salt and pepper. Discard the liquid in the bags.

8. Use a brush to spread the mustard over the meaty “top” side of the racks. Press the lamb racks, mustard side down, into the plate of bread crumbs, using enough pressure to ensure the crumbs adhere. Some crumbs will be left behind on the plate. Transfer the lamb racks, crumb side up, to a roasting pan or sheet pan. Sprinkle the crumbs left on the plate on top of the racks, then press firmly to form a thick, even crust.

9. Transfer the lamb to the oven or under the broiler and cook until the crumbs are golden brown, 5 to 10 minutes. Keep an eye on the racks, as the crumbs will brown quickly.

10. Transfer the lamb racks to a cutting board or serving platter and let them rest for 5 minutes. Sprinkle the remaining 1 tablespoon parsley and the sea salt on top fo the crust on each rack.

11. To serve, carve between the bones of each rack to separate the chops, then allot 2-3 ribs per person.

*Excluded; need low-carb alternative **Eden Sea Salt (for the calcium)

- Lisa Q. Fetterman, Sous Vide At Home

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I am, at the Fed level, Libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a Socialist.

Geoff and Vince Graham via Nassim Taleb , Skin In The Game:  Hidden Asymmetries In Life

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“...self-knowledge is a fiercely attentive form of humanity and thankfulness, a sense of the privilege of a particular form of participation, coming to know the way we hold the conversation of life and perhaps, above all, the miracle that there is a particular something rather than an abstracted nothing and we are a very particular part of that particular something”

-David Whyte, Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

camera: canon ae-1 film: kodak bw 400 location: brooklyn, ny

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calculus === math_of_change | math_of_time

Thus, calculus proceeds in two phases: cutting and rebuilding...the cutting process always involves infinitely fine subtraction, which is used to quantify the differences between the parts. The reassembly process always involves infinite addition, which integrates the parts back into the original whole. 

Think of the rim of a perfect circle, a steel girder in a suspension bridge, a bowl of soup cooling off on the kitchen table, the parabolic trajectory of a javelin in flight, or the length of time you have been alive.

Notice the act of creative fantasy here. Soup and steel are not really continuous. At the scale of everyday life, they appear to be, but at the scale of atoms or superstrings, they’re not. 

Calculus ignores the inconvenience posed by atoms and other uncuttable entities, not because they don’t exist but because it’s useful to pretend they don’t.

-Steven Strogatz, infinite powers

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storytelling style

[Game of Thrones last season]...character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

-Zeynep Tufekci, “The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones”, Scientific American 

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ongoing

Holly Brook Hafermann aka Skylar Gray here, here, and especially here.

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effort over free-will

[Spinoza]...conatus, quo unaquoeque res in suo esse perseverare conatur, nihil est proeter ipsius rei actualem essentiam—that is, the endeavour [the effort] wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself. 

-Miguel de Unamuno,  Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos (Tragic Sense of Life)

Maybe the question of moral responsibility does not hinge on the existence of free-will. What is central to any humanistic philosophy is how the endeavor(u)r, the effort, endures. To proceed along a course of action knowing there is no objective omniscient certainty. 

The calculus of choice, in the context of risk, is to model observable reality and give more weight to the vastly counterfactual and unobservable. To insist on absolute moral responsibility gets to the core of human nature; avoidance of self-loathing from timidity, akratic action, and feeling virtuous in freely criticizing others. 

Humans alight upon the determination of good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, ignorance vs. wisdom unconsciously. While the conscious mind wants to take control in decision-making, the brain is conditioned to follow this hyper-reflexive reaction long before the present choice is rendered. Consequently, these flinch responses may be the reality that we are not prepared to overcome. 

[curiouslyrong]

Chicken and Pistachio Terrine

Time: 2 hours 20 minutes, including 2 hours cooking time. Serves 8 as an entrée

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken (size 18) or 2 chicken breasts and 2 thigh fillets 50 grams whole pistachios, blanched and skinned 5 grams thyme, leaves only 5 grams basil, leaves only, torn 6 garlic cloves, confit oil oil, strained 1/2 lemon, zest of 125 ml white chicken stock 1 bay leaf salt pepper

1. Skin the chicken by using a sharp knife to cut the skin along the spine, starting at the backbone. Run the knife under the skin, and carefully remove it in one piece. Reserve.

2. Slice all the meat from the chicken and cut into strips--the thigh meat is best if cut across the grain. (If using chicken breasts and thigh fillets, cut into 1cm-thick strips the length of the breast.)

3. Weigh the chicken strips, then transfer to bowl and add 1% of their weight in salt (for example, 10g of salt for 1kg of meat). Add the pistachios, thyme, basil, garlic, lemon zest to the bowl.

4. Add seasoning to taste, and massage the mix into the meat. Rest for at least an hour to allow the flavors to develop.

5. Meanwhile, make a white stock from the chicken bones. Then pass the stock through a sieve, then chill in the refrigerator.

6. Preheat a water bath, sous vide, to 68°C/154.4°F.

7. Lay a piece of commercial-grade cling film on the bench and spread the chicken skin on top.

8. Season with salt and pepper. Carefully form the chicken mixture into the shape of a cylinder on top of the skin, then wrap the skin over the filling. Roll in the cling film to form a bonbon and twist the ends tightly, tying them as you would a balloon.

9. Slip the wrapped terrine into a vacuum pouch with the bay leaf and 125 ml of the chilled chicken stock. Seal on medium using the liquids plate for vacuum machine. Cook in the preheated water bath for 2 hours. Chill using the three-stage cooling method.

10. Remove terrine from the vacuum pouch and discard cling film. Slice the terrine into 1cm-thick portions and serve with warm toast, cornichons, a pinch of salt flakes or a small salad, and salsa verde.

-Dale Prentice, At Home With Sous Vide