Mouth Feel

In most cultures, people ingest a variety of astringent foods and beverages during meals, but the reasons for this practice are unclear. Many popular beliefs and heuristics exist, such as high tannin wines should be balanced with fatty foods, for example “red wine with red meat”.

Finally, science tells us why.  This week, a look at the principle underlying the international practice of palate cleansing.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "A good conscience is a continual Christmas." - Benjamin Franklin (US author, diplomat, inventor, physicist, politician, & printer, 1706 - 1790)

Mouth Feel

Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China

In 2012, the drought-stricken Western United States will ship more than 50 billion gallons of water to China. This water will leave the country embedded in alfalfa – most of it grown in California – and is destined to feed Chinese cows. The strange situation illustrates what is wrong about how we think, or rather don't think, about water policy in the U.S.

This week, a look at shipping water to China in the form of alfalfa.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: " 'Maybe Christmas', he thought, 'doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!' " - Theodor Seuss Geisel (American writer and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen names Dr. Seuss, 1904 - 1991)

Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China

New Dreams, When the Old Ones Don't Fit

"Whatever it is you want to do, if you can do it, do it now."

As I get older, I am reminded these are words to live by.  As Ringo so eloquently put it, tomorrow never knows.

This week, a reminder not to put off to tomorrow what is important to do today.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." - Hunter S. Thompson (US journalist and author, 1939 - 2005)

New Dreams, When the Old Ones Don't Fit

Getting The Blues

The world over, the myths surrounding blue cheeses' origins have a similar ring.  A careless shepherd forgets his fresh cheese sandwich in a cave.  Or a distracted cheesemaker leaves in a hurry to meet his lover, neglecting an uncovered vat for too long.  All come back to find their folly transformed into something surprising and delicious, so doe sit matter how it happened?

This week a handy primer on what are widely considered the classic four blue cheeses.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "

Getting the Blues

7 Deadly Sins of Business Meetings

The majority of people dread meetings. Meetings tend to be boring, always go on too long, and in the end, sometimes not much is accomplished. 

You can fight meeting malaise!  Send those boring non-functional hours packing and get the group moving in the right direction.

This week, seven deadly sins of business meetings and how to avoid them.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy." - Guillaume Apollinaire (French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic, 1880 - 1918)

7 Deadly Sins of Business Meetings

Tomato Helps Cut the Risk of a Stroke.docx

A new study shows that men who had the highest levels of lycopene – an antioxidant found in tomatoes – had fewer strokes than men who had the lowest level of lycopene in their blood. Overall, the risk of strokes was reduced by 55%.

This week, a look at lycopene.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." - Pablo Picasso (Spanish Cubist painter, 1881 - 1973)

Tomato Helps Cut the Risk of a Stroke

Buttermilk

Many home cooks keep buttermilk on hand for pancakes, ranch dressing or corn bread. They might know that it makes more tender cakes (because it softens the gluten in flour), loftier biscuits (its acid boosts leaveners like baking soda and baking powder) and thicker dressings (lactic acid in buttermilk gently curdles proteins into a smooth mass). 

But what few cooks know is that commercial buttermilk isn’t really buttermilk. It is made from regular low-fat or skim milk, usually low-grade rejects from cheese and butter companies. The milk is inoculated with cultures to make it acidic, and thickened with additives like locust bean gum and carrageenan. The result is a flattened facsimile of the real thing, as a ring tone is to a song. 

This week. a look a buttermilk.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke (British science fiction author, inventor and futurist,1917 -  2008)

Buttermilk

The humble oreo cookie.  In 1912, Nabisco had the revolutionary new idea for a cookie: two chocolate disks with a creme filling in between. The first Oreo cookie looked very similar to the Oreo cookie of today, with only a slight difference in the design on the chocolate disks. 

Great disputes have arisen as to the best way to eat them: dunking them in milk or twisting off one side and eating the middle first.  However you eat them, Oreos have become part of twentieth century culture.

This week, a look at the many flavors of O-R-E-O.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do." - Joe Walsh (American musician, songwriter and record producer, 1947 - )

Oreo

Regional American BBQ Sauces

We've talked about barbecue before. Barbecue sauce is a flavoring condiment ranging from watery to very thick consistency. As the name implies, it was created as an accompaniment to barbecued foods. While it can be applied to any food, it usually tops meat after cooking or during barbecuing, grilling, or baking. Traditionally it has been a favored sauce for pork or beef ribs and chicken.

But why stop there? Isn't everything better with barbecue sauce? Well, maybe not maple bacon donuts, but you get the general idea.

This week, a look at regional American BBQ sauces.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Imagination is more important than knowledge..." - Albert Einstein (US (German-born) theoretical physicist, 1879 - 1955)

Regional American Barbecue Sauces

Canned Ripe California Olives Spread Botulism in 1919

In 1919, canned ripe olives spread an outbreak of deadly Botulism to three states. Nineteen people died, almost half the deaths ever caused by food products commercially canned in California, all killed in one outbreak.

This week, a look at one of the 10 deadliest outbreaks of foodborne illness in U.S. history.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination." - Bertrand Russell (British author, mathematician, and philosopher, 1872 - 1970)

Canned Ripe California Olives

Hues on First

We've talked about color additives that give the red tint to your fruit punch and the green hue to your mint-flavored toothpaste. New research suggests color, from the color of the plate to the color of the tablecloth, can affect how much people serve themselves.

This week, a look at the hues of food and how it affects serving sizes.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." - Carl Jung (Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology, 1875-1961)


Hues on First

Spark of Ingenuity

A match a tool for starting a fire under controlled conditions. It is also a British football magazine, a clone of Superboy, a supermarket chain in Hungary and a carbonated soft drink sold in Japan. But I digress.

This week, a look at the history of matches.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (US novelist, 1926 - )


Spark

Gum

Chewing gum in various forms has existed since at least 5,000 years ago, as chewing gum with tooth imprints, made of birch bark tar, has been found in Finland. The ancient Aztecs used chicle as a base for making a gum-like substance. Forms of chewing gums were also used in Ancient Greece, made from the resin of the mastic tree. The American Indians chewed resin made from the sap of spruce trees.

Most chewing gum companies have since switched to synthetic gum bases because of their low price and availability. Thank goodness we don't need to chew on trees anymore.

This week, a look at the history of chewing gum.

TTFN, Fred.
Quote of the week: "Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!" - Yuri Gagarin (Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, and the first human to journey into outer space, 1934 - 1989)


Chew

Golf Balls

Shady Acres. More than just a miniature golf course, it was a magical spot for a youth. Handing over less than a dollar would result in receiving a couple of putters, two beat up golf balls and a score card. We would pass through the windmill, the long "L" and the pesky volcano, where I always took the 6 strokes after 5 tries.

I never graduated from Shady Acres to a real golf course, so the allure of air pressure, turbulence, and aerodynamics all rolled into a golf ball escapes me to this day.

This week, a look at the history of the golf ball.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails." - Bertha Calloway (African-American community activist and historian, 1925 - )

Dimples

Top 10 reasons why Darth Vader was an amazing project manager

A project manager can have the responsibility of the planning, execution and closing of any project. It requires individuals who are intelligent and adaptable and can fine-tune the immediate strategy and manage particular tasks effectively while focusing on the main goal.

While organizations typically have subject matter experts, they also recognize that project management requires a different set of specialist skills. The tools and techniques of project management can be applied on any project and a good Project Manager should be able to add value to any environment, whether it's an IT implementation, a hotel build, an office refurbishment or construction of a Death Star.

Nice segue, huh?

Think about it. Vader takes personal charge (as the new Project Manager) to get the project back on track. After all, he built C3PO and a pod racer from scrap earlier in his life, and who was going to point out he had no major construction project experience? He also understood the business case and was fully committed into realizing the benefits on his project as soon as possible.

This week, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, a look at the top ten reasons why Darth Vader may have been a good project manager.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience." - Paulo Coelho (a Brazilian lyricist and novelist, 1947 - )

Top 10 Reasons Why Darth Vader Was an Amazing Project Manager

Harvesters

You reap what you sow. Farming metaphors worked well in societies dependent on agriculture, and the idea of “you reap what you sow,” is that actions will have consequences and people can expect to harvest the fruit of their behavior, just as farmers expect to harvest the crops that they plant.

Of course, if you are that farmer, you actually reap what you sow. And until the combine harvester thresher came along, reaping wasn't always easy.

This week, a look at the history of the combine harvester thresher.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning." - James Russell Lowell (American Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat, 1819 - 1891)

Fruit

Talking to Kids About Quality Improvement

Like many people, I carry home the smells of my job. My last stop each day for one employer was the bakery, so those days I smelled like cinnamon or cookies. I have also arrived at home smelling like peanut butter, onions, garlic and cooked fruit. All of these odors helped me describe to my daughter what I really did each day at work, as trying to explain to a child what quality control and assurance was really about was not on my list of things to attempt.

I never considered using M&Ms to explain quality to anyone before. Maybe it is because always eat them first and ask questions later.

This week, a look at how to talk with your kids about quality improvement.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." - Douglas Adams (English writer and dramatist, 1952 - 2001)

How to Talk With Your Kids About…Quality Improvement

Shape

The shape of an object located in some space is a geometrical description of the part of that space occupied by the object, as determined by its external boundary – abstracting from location and orientation in space, size, and other properties such as color, content, and material composition.

Most shapes occurring in the physical world are complex. The shape of the Coca-Cola bottle...well, it doesn't defy traditional mathematical description, but it may require analysis by differential geometry to explain.

This week, a look at the shape of the Coke bottle.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "So Einstein was wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice.' Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen." - Stephen William Hawking, (British theoretical physicist and cosmologist, 1942 - )

Shape

Raw Milk

I am neither a proponent nor an opponent of raw milk. I am, however, a proponent of food safety. All too often, raw milk is tied to illnesses. And it isn't just due to the machine that is the modern food industry.

This week, a look at how raw milk killed 48 in an outbreak in Boston a century ago.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart." - Johann Wolfgang Goethe (German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath, 1749 - 1832)

Raw Milk

Warning - Shameless Self Promotion - Danger, Will Robinson! - Shameless Self Promotion - Warning

THINK Elemental is the newest line from the mind of Sidetracked Artist. Show your superior intellect or superior nerdiness by wearing apparel with words or phrases made with elemental symbols straight from the periodic table.

Why wear a shirt that just says beer, when your shirt can say BeEr (Beryllium and Erbium)? If you are a Twilight fan (and who isn't...sparkly vampires that reproduce!), then I RuN WITh VAmPIrEs is waiting for you. Whether you like CuPCaKEs or are a BrONY, we have something for you. Your name may even be possible using elements...just ask!

http://www.cafepress.com/sidetrackedart/8168371

Thanks for your support.

TTFN, Fred.

Lasers

In everyday life we're more or less surrounded by laser applications. Carpenters use laser instead of spirit levels, hunters use laser instead of ordinary telescopic sights and most likely, you use laser when you listen to music.

This week, a look at the history of the laser

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap." - Cynthia Heimel (playwright, television writer, and author)

Light

The Healthy Mind Platter

Dr. Daniel Siegel, a respected clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, asked the question, what would the equivalent of a recommended daily diet for a healthy mind look like? To answer that question he created the Healthy Mind Platter, a pictorial overview of seven daily essential mental activities you should do each and every day to optimize brain matter and create well being.

This is such a simple and great reminder of what we need to do every day to have a healthy mind. My personal experience is that when I pay attention to these seven areas, life is good. When I don’t, it isn't.

This week, a look at the healthy mind platter.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "If one dream should fall & break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up & begin again." - Flavia Weedn (contemporary inspirational writer and artist, 193? - )


The Healthy Mind Platter

Cameras

The term camera comes from camera obscura, which is Latin for "dark chamber". This was an early mechanism for projecting images. The modern camera evolved from the camera obscura, and now is understood to be a device that records and stores images, whether they be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies.

This week, a look at the history of the camera.

TTFN, Fred.

Quote of the week: "The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology." - Red Auerbach (American basketball coach of the Washington Capitols, the Tri-Cities Blackhawks and the Boston Celtics,1917 - 2006)



Smile