vine-ripened or food for thought

I was remiss in not mentioning the contribution and suggested subject of a reader until weeks afterward, as the subject of food waste and the broader implications of nutritional policy and food-security are coming under scrutiny and have become major talking points in the news. The infographic and article at the link is an in depth but an accessible and circumspect look at the different arenas of food waste that may not occur to one as having knock-on effects beyond wonky fruits and vegetables or faulting green-grocers for tossing out edible food rather than sharing it with the needy (the statistics focus on the UK but surely it’s global in applicability and consequence).
Markets and restaurants, in fact, have been quite forthcoming in redistributing foodstuffs, though there’s always room for improvement and sometimes it is easier and cheaper to dispose of or repurpose ingredients in situ rather than delivering it to a foodbank. Household consumers are big contributors in terms food being thrown away but that’s in part due to promotions that encourage people to buy more than they need, reflected up the chain by markets that can quickly change suppliers to impact the livelihoods of farmers and state-subsidies. Surplus production can find other outlets but the production itself—even without considering the packaging and transportation—has significant environmental repercussions and small efforts towards reducing this loss can not only benefit economically, they could also help Britain and many other countries be more in compliance with their ecological pledges.

check-digit or super-symmetries

The maths world is a little giddy over a new mystery discovered through brute computing force. No one is quite sure what to make of it, but examining the distribution of prime numbers, mathematicians are realising that they try to be more different from the nearest neighbours on the number line than they need to be.

Prime numbers, above the single digits can only end (regardless of their size) in one of four numbers: 9,7,3 or 1—otherwise, you needn’t bother checking. One might expect that the law of averages would hold across infinity and there would be a one-in-four chance that one prime might end with the same digit. That does not happen, though, and mathematicians, should the findings hold, are wondering what these apparent aberrations might mean, and whether this might suggest that there is a way to break encryption and unsettle a formerly secure foundation.

gatekeeper and key-master

The European Union is reaching out to Turkey in order to help stem the tides of humanity washing up against the Greek coast and halted at the Macedonian border. The agreement currently being tendered has the country that spans two continents offering to take one migrant in limbo on the edges of Europe in exchange for resettling one Syrian refugee hosted by Turkey in EU lands.  Presumably, non-Syrian refugees deported from Greece and Italy back to Turkey will be then returned to their countries of origin—Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. after an appeals process, which could not be conducted in the chaos of camps and choke-points along the Balkan route.
I don’t know what to think, and know there’s real terror and reason to flee and that determination to survive and protect one’s family is not broken by the bartering going on in Brussels, but as if this deal did not seem tenuous enough already, Turkey (knowingly, as the EU needs Turkey just now more than Turkey needs the EU) has asked for extra concessions to include three billion euro in aid, visa-free travel for its citizens to the EU and accelerating its ascension into the economic bloc. While I truly hope the lives and aspirations of millions are not subject to such political horse-swapping—all the more exacerbated by the upcoming plebiscite over the so-called Brexit—or become a political hot-potato over the leverage that the Turkish government has garnered. Seldom is heard a discouraging word—however, as no one dare speak about deportment past and recent that this new partner has displayed on the international and domestic stage: internal political and ethnic strife that is approaching a civil war of its own, aggression towards Russia, collusion with smugglers, terror attacks, and a despotic suppression of press-freedoms that barely register a mention. What do you think? Should Europe enter into this pact?

m-class planet or studio-system

Frequent contributor to Neatorama, Miss Cellania, brings us the story of the first Star Trek cinematic adaptation that was never extracted from pre-production limbo. The original pitch from Gene Roddenberry himself concerned an encounter with a godlike plenipotentiary that had a beat that spanned all of creation, seeding worlds with religion and worshippers—leaving Spock unimpressed and probably too risky a statement for the studio to stand behind.

Other writers, with a lot of smarting egos, championed bringing Star Trek to the theatres. One alternate screenplay put forward involved dinosaurs fiddling with the timeline to retain their dominance over mammals and simians and the crew of the Enterprise also travelling back in time via a black hole to set matters straight, and another was to focus on the Vulcan-Human hybrid’s silent but anguished duality. Eventually, however, the committee of auteurs furnished something that seemed tenable in The Planet of the Titans. Expanding on the episode Who Mourns for Adonais? wherein the Enterprise was confronted by an alien pretender to the godhead of Apollo (escalated by Scotty wanting to protect his lady-love and McCoy lamenting that they could not be hailed by primitive civilisations in the same fashion), the crew travels to the home world of these elder figures of mythology where they had retreated after the twilight of the gods on Earth, only to find that they had been exterminated and an even greater threat, again escaping in the distant past through a black hole. A lot of creative minds were concocting space operas around this time and it was the box-office dominance of Star Wars that ultimately tabled the big screen debut of the Star Trek franchise for a few years.

fourth wall or study hall

Messy Nessy Chic, in anticipation of finer weather, laments how classrooms out of doors have been, in the main, unfortunately relegated to the distant past.
While we still do have Waldschulen (though I’m given to understand now it’s more like a weekly field-trip, weather-permitting, than a regular occurrence), which started the tradition back in 1904 under the auspices of better ventilation and fresh air made young people more hale and hearty, but after the late 1950s, the popularity of al fresco education has waned considerable. The idea once, however, held almost universal esteem in Europe, with the founding in 1922 of the League for Open Air Education at the International Congress in Paris, mandating schools to adopt floorplans that included pavilions and breeze-ways and even retractable roofs. This gallery of classrooms without walls does make one reminisce for the educational experience that we never had, especially whiling away the hours confined to the office, with only a tantalising glimpse outside.

mycological characteristics

Kottke informs that the variety of mushrooms that certain dishes and culinary presentation calls for—and what we are readily willing to pay a premium for—are the same species of fungus but harvested at different points of maturity. The portobello mushroom is no different than dime-a-dozen button mushrooms, just with a better P-R agent. It makes me think of the great baby-carrot fraud, which are just the whittlings off of club-sized carrots that would not be seemly for the produce-aisle.

sweded

Dangerous Minds features a comprehensive and retrospective article on the Mah Nà Mah Nà song by Piero Umiliani, who originally scored the scat number as part of the soundtrack for a Italian exploitation documentary about the racy lifestyle of the Swedes. The tune, since covered by Benny Hill, Red Skelton and Nancy Sinatra before being popularised by the Muppets (the lead beatnik singer was called Bip Bippadotta, voiced by Jim Henson, and the backup singers were called the Snowths—snout plus mouth), accompanied a scene set in a sauna and was first titled “Viva la Sauna Svedese.” Several versions of the performance are expertly curated at the link above.