Early October Quickies

Actually, they’re more like late September links, but still…

• History of the Internet
  • ZERO SECONDE: Les 6 cultures d’Internet (par Martin Lessard)
    1. Military personnel (DARPA)
    2. Academics (universities, colleges)
    3. Programmers/Coders (Alpha Geeks)
    4. Virtual communities (BBS)
    5. Entrepreneurs (Web 1.0)
    6. “Web 2.0″ (bloggers, social networking, user-generated content…).
  • Of course, there’s a lot of overlap, some categories could be reshaped, and the term “culture” is applied somewhat loosely, but it’s an interesting perspective.
  • It’s hard for me not to think of the specific cultural turn there as it seems that the West Coast of the United States has had a tremendous impact through this history. Still have to read the article but some people are making connections between “geek culture” (linked to the third step above), specialty coffee (Peet’s, Starbucks), and the “craft beer revolution.” The thlot pickens.
• Celebrity Chefs, Culinary Philosophy, Personality
  • Rick Tramonto
  • Hungry Magazine #24: TRU Character
• NewAcademic Journals Online
  • Sociolinguistic Studies
  • Oral Tradition becomes eOT
• Now online, CMoS: The Chicago Manual of Style Online
  • As the printed manual is a bit bulky and costly, having an online version can be very useful.
• Academic Podcasting
  • Should start podcasting my lectures, next semester.
  • Academic Feeds
  • Using Moodle: New Podcasting module (login as guest)
  • Oncourse CL Podcasts
  • ProfCast - Features
  • Other approaches to online content
    • Yale to post courses on Web for free
• Editing structured texts
  • My Wandering Wiki: MultiMarkdown
  • From a simple email-like syntax to XHTML, LaTeX, PDF, RTF…
  • We really need a new approach to editing and “word processing.” XML is likely to be a key in this respect.
• Canadian Politics: Stéphane Dion
  • Stéphane Dion, candidat à la direction du PLC
  • My own personal opinion: he does seem to be on a “charm” campaign but his ideas sound like a rather rigid application of Leviathan instead of a principled take on direct democratic representation.
• Jane Elliott’s discrimination experiment (1968 through 2006)
  • Open Source » Blog Archive » Race, Class and Racism
  • La leçon de discrimination
    
  • Pascale Turbide et la discrimination
• Religious tolerance, atheism/secularism/agnosticism, multiculturalism, and peace
  • Thoughtful, level-headed, public discussion on these subjects could help.
  • Les institutions québécoises et les communautés culturelles
  • HEATHER MALLICK: Atheists don’t get it
  • Friendly Atheist » Canadians
  • the eBay atheist » Blog Archive » Video: Sam Harris Interview
  • The Blog | RJ Eskow: The Sad State of Atheism Today | The Huffington Post
  • The Blog | Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion | The Huffington Post

Is that Disparate enough for you?

Beer, Food, Culinary Podcasting

Just listened to:

Food Philosophy: Food Philosophy #21: Beer and Food Pairing

From the Culinary Podcast Network.

My comments:

Welcome to the world of beer!
Incidentally, the Craft Beer Radio podcast is the reason I went to the CPN (though it had been mentioned on Eat Feed and by Fran, over at Betumi).
As it so happens, beer is one of my passions.
The interview itself was fairly interesting (shows that you’ve done your homework). But the world of beer as a culinary item is much larger than what A-B lets out. A-B should be commended for their attempts to join up forces with the craft beer movement in North America, but there’s still a lot more to think about.
On food pairings, you might want to check out a recent episode of Basic Brewing Radio when they interviewed Randy Mosher on food pairings. Very insightful and quite surprising to some (IPA and… carrot cake!).

As craft beer people tend to say, pairing food with beer makes much more sense than pairing food with wine (with a few exceptions in Italian cuisine). And beer is really quite complex, with more than a hundred styles in several categories:
(Not to mention regional differences. There are literally hundreds of different Belgian Specialty Ales…)
A large beer category which wasn’t mentioned by A-B (because they don’t brew any) and which pairs very well with food is that of sour beers. From gueuze, Flemish Red, Oud Bruid, and Lambic to Berliner Weisse and Gose.
Some restaurants are even hiring beer sommeliers:
Actually, there really should be a feature on beer and food in Imbibe magazine.