Dinner Tonight #56

 

I adore nectarines and they are both plentiful and delicious right now.  Tonight’s dinner consisted of tenderloin medallions and roasted nectarines.  Quick and easy and quite wonderful!

Night Music: Natural Woman

Image: Treeline

Night Music: Clair de Lune

Happy Tau Day!

I have for many years enjoyed celebrating each 14th March as Pi Day, in honour of pi = 3.14….  However, I have been persuaded that Tau Day is at least as important if not more so.

The value of Tau = 2pi and is thus celebrated on 28th June (6.28).  Why this is important is explained in this good short piece from ScienceNews.

“The simplest way to see the failure of pi is to consider angles, which in mathematics are typically measured in radians. Pi is the number of radians in half a circle, not a whole circle. That makes things confusing: For example, the angle at the tip of a slice of pizza — an eighth of a pie — isn’t π/8, but π/4. In contrast, using tau, the pizza-slice angle is simply τ/8. Put another way, tau is the number of radians in a full circle.

That factor of two is a big deal. Trigonometry — the study of the angles and lines found in shapes such as triangles — can be a confusing whirlwind for students, full of blindly plugging numbers into calculators. That’s especially true when it comes to sine and cosine, two important functions in trigonometry. Many trigonometry problems involve calculating the sine or cosine of an angle. When graphed, the two functions look like a series of wiggles, shaped a bit like an “S” on its side, that repeat the same values every 2π. That means pi covers only half of an S. Tau, on the other hand, covers the full wiggle, a more intuitive measure.”

So, Happy Tau Day to you all!

Image: Echo Density

Night Music: If I Can’t Have You

Happy Birthday, Son!

43 years passes so fast.

Dinner Tonight #55

 

This was really delicious.  It was called a skillet pasta but that’s a mistake as a skillet is never involved.  The changes I made were to use cremini mushrooms and farfalle pasta; otherwise, exactly as written.  It’ll become a regular, I am sure.

Kids and Dirt

A new report from the Royal Society for Public Health suggests that health is not affected by too much cleanliness.  They agree that kids should play in the dirt but parents should make sure they wash their hands.  Fair enough.  I wrote the following some while ago and still believe in it.

*  *  *  *  *

When I was a kid, I bet I ate a whole field’s worth of dirt as I played.  My mates and I mucked around in the Thames which, in those days, was little better than a sewer; we got colds and upset stomachs and simply ran them off, more as likely in pouring rain.  Sometimes we got real diseases like mumps and measles but they were considered age appropriate and we all knew it would be over in a week or two.  If any of us had suggested we had an allergy to peanut butter, say, then we would have been stuffed with it until we got over it.  We spent our childhoods shaking hands with every germ and bacteria on the ground and in the air and we grew up to be a fairly healthy generation.

These days parents protect their kids from any kind of contamination and we have the sickest kids in history, I bet.  Many parents pride themselves on keeping their home environments as — or more — sterile than hospitals.  And yet their children have allergies to this and contra-indications to that.  They are as clean as they can be and they are sick as dogs.

I believe there is a direct relationship between the health of kids and the amount of dirt they eat.  The more bugs they collect early in life, the better immunities they develop later; and the more sniffles they get as a child the less likely they are to show hypochondriac tendencies as adults.  To put it another way, the less a household pays in cleansing and sanitizing and “protecting” their kids, the less they will need to spend in health care costs later.

This change from healthy dirt to dangerous prophylaxis has occurred within my lifetime.  How did it come about?  Marketing and capitalism, that’s how.

By the 1940s and 1950s, major industrial cleaning companies had developed a whole range of cleaning solutions.  No one really needed them, but the marketers set out to convince parents, mothers especially, that they were doing their children great harm if they did not use their products.  They used fear as the primary motivation — not only fear of sickness in their kids, but more viscerally the fear of appearing to be a bad mother. And they succeeded perhaps beyond their wildest dreams.

And now we are all paying for it, with a generation of children with allergies and neuroses and medical conditions that were almost unknown fifty years ago.  It sure did the Johnson & Johnsons and the Hoovers of the world a lot of good financially, but is this really progress?

 

Wise Words

 

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed”

– Michael Jordan

Image: Echoes Of Childhood

Night Music: Misty Roses

Poem: Unwinding The Thread

 

Memory is

the first traitor

 

It is such a waste

to undo the syntax,

to untie the tender meanings,

to try to catch the logic

that meant little then

and nothing now;

to wonder what

was meant.

Was there a

design back then,

that leaves no traces?

 

Memory is

the first traitor

 

Image: Stairway To Heaven

Night Music: El Desierto

Grandview House Prices

For those interested in East Van history, I have posted some preliminary work on historical house prices in Grandview at the Grandview Heritage Group site.

 

More on East Side Pride

We went to the East Side Pride festival at Grandview Park at lunchtime today. It had only just begin so there were not huge crowds yet, but it was colourful an noisy and fun.

Select an image for a better view.

East Side Pride

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow (Saturday 22nd), the central part of the Drive will be filled with fun and games to celebrate East Side Pride.  Activities at Grandview Park begin around 11 am and go on until early evening.

There will be 30+ vendors, food trucks, a bunch of great musical acts and half a dozen drag performances.  It’ll be great fun — come join us!

Image: Two Windows