Much of the Cuisine We Now Know, and Think of as Ours, Came to Us by War

“Sicily became quite famous for its fruits and vegetables, and that can be traced back to the Muslim era, when the gardens probably began as  pleasure gardens,” says Wright. Pleasure gardens were designed as places of repose, and for Muslims, a reminder of the paradise awaiting the virtuous. “They were eventually turned into ‘kitchen gardens,’” Wright continues, describing them as “experimental horticultural stations” to develop better propagation methods. But at the same time, they were places of beauty. “The gardens were lush with vegetable crops, flowering bushes, and fruit trees, and graced with water fountains and pavilions,” Wright explains in A Mediterranean Feast. During the 300 years that the Arabs ruled Sicily, its agriculture and economy grew, and institutions evolved. In fact, when the Normans seized power, they kept many practices of their predecessors, including the organization of the government and, in the upper classes, the wearing of flowing robes.

Humans are bound to food by necessity first, and then by choice. The types of food you eat distinguish your country from another country, your group from another group. When new influences come—whether from conquest or colonial exploration or the popularity of a TV cooking show—there is a period of adaptation, and then often the full incorporation of a new technique or ingredient into the country’s culinary lexicon. The potatoes and tomatoes that went from the New World to Europe in the Columbia Exchange of the 15th century were first scorned by Old World diners who feared they were poisonous, then in time became emblematic of their cuisines. In its original form, Sicilian caponata would never have been made with tomatoes, but today there are versions that include them and they are considered perfectly Sicilian.

Food constantly evolves, as do taste buds. To the Western palate, Japanese food seems so distinctly Japanese, yet it went through many modifications once the country opened to the West in the 19th century, explains Katarzyna Cwiertka, the chair of modern Japanese Studies at Leiden University and a scholar of East Asian food. “New ingredients, new cooking techniques, and new flavorings were adapted to Japanese customs,” she says. “The changes were really tremendous.”

Military canteens played the role of first adopters. Once Japanese soldiers became accustomed to a food, they would eventually introduce it to the wider public when they returned to civilian life. Such was the case with curry, which started appearing in Japan in the late 19th century. It was a borrowing not directly from India, but from the British Empire. “The Japanese start to serve it as a  Western food,” says Cwiertka. “It enters military menus and canteens and continues after [World War II] into school canteens. By the 1950s and 1960s it is a national dish. When you ask Japanese students abroad what they crave most, they would say ramen or curry. And ramen [of Chinese origin] is also not a Japanese food.”

What the Japanese have done—over and over again, Cwiertka points out—is move foreign foods into the category of washoku, the genuinely Japanese. They adapt and absorb foreign culinary influences this way. “It’s more like the invention of a tradition than a tradition,” she says.

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What Are The Odds?

This week on Wednesday within a span of a few hours - I saw an Owl and then even Neo got startled when two bald Eagles flew over Max's Walden. 

How Some Trees Evolved to Birth Live Young

Typically, a seed’s number one job is to have patience. Before it grows into a new clover or pumpkin vine or oak tree or hydrangea, it has to wait. Only when conditions are just right will the seed sprout, which gives it the best chance of survival.

Yet for a few tree species, the seed’s job is different. It doesn’t wait. It starts growing right away, while still attached to its parent plant, and only separates later. Trees that do this are called viviparous, or live-bearing. It’s the same name scientists give to animals, such as humans, that birth live babies instead of laying eggs.

Despite the unexpectedness of this trait, researchers studying the genetics of viviparous trees recently showed that the pathway to their evolution might have been surprisingly simple.

While viviparity is rare among trees in general, it’s common among the mangroves, roughly 80 species that live on warm coastlines around the world. These trees are already unusual, as they absorb water that’s up to 100 times saltier than what most plants can tolerate.

A live-birthed baby mangrove doesn’t look like a chubby infant, or like a miniature adult mangrove. Instead, it’s like a string bean with a bulbous cap, topped by a little crown of roots. The babies hang from their parent tree in clusters, and when they reach a certain stage of development they drop straight down into the mud or sand below, says Yingjia Shen, a researcher at China’s Xiamen University. 

If the tide is out when the baby mangroves fall, their roots grow rapidly, Shen says, with the plants starting to take hold within a few hours of hitting the ground. In other cases, though, the young plants may take a journey. Baby mangroves are buoyant, and “those that fail to root in the mud can drift in the ocean currents for several months,” Shen says, “potentially reaching coastlines thousands of kilometers away and taking root there.”

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Two Types of Uncertainty

Uncertainty is thus not an intrinsic property of events, Spiegelhalter writes, but rather a reflection of the knowledge, perspective and assumptions of the person trying to understand or predict those events. It varies from person to person and situation to situation, even when the circumstances are identical. It is subjective and shaped by what we know or don’t know at a given time.

Spiegelhalter distinguishes two main types of uncertainty: aleatory uncertainty, that which we cannot know, and epistemic uncertainty, that which we do not know. Understanding this distinction is crucial for making informed decisions. Whereas aleatory uncertainty is often irreducible, epistemic uncertainty can be minimized through better data collection, refined models or deeper investigation.

- Review of the book The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter

The Insanity Of War Has Returned To Our World

Noah Smith penned a heart felt piece for the new year.  Thank you!

Just because someone is in their 20's they don't magically eat food from their ass and poop via their mouth.  Agreed,  that’s biology. Warnings for history are different from innate biological warnings.  As I get older, I see most of old and new sapiens try to force their dinner via their ass.  

Alas, I wish warnings of history because of some sort of epigenetic memory for sapiens. Or maybe lack of these memories is a way of this planet bidding adios to a species. 

If you think about this idea from first principles, its fundamental insanity becomes apparent. Spend a few days in Taiwan, and tell me honestly if there is anything wrong with it — some terrible injustice that needs to be corrected with saturation missile strikes and invasion fleets. You cannot. The people here are happy and wealthy and productive and free. The cities are safe and clean. There is no festering racial or religious or cultural conflict, no seething political anger among the citizenry. Everyone here simply wants things to remain the same.

And yet there is a good chance they may not be granted that wish. High explosives may soon rain down on their homes and their families, and an army of stormtroopers may march in and take all of their freedoms from them. And if this happens, it will be because of the will of men far away — an emperor on a throne, generals hungry for glory, bored malcontents behind a computer screen. If the peaceful, unthreatening people of Taiwan suffer and die, it will be because those distant men decreed that they should.

Why would you do this?? Why would anyone want to launch wars of conquest? The world has progressed beyond the economic need for warfare — China will not become richer by seizing the fabs of TSMC or the tea plantations of Sun Moon Lake. The mostly stable world created in the aftermath of the Cold War was good not just for Taiwan, but for China as well. Why topple it all chasing a dream of empire?

The only possible answer here is that the world is created anew each generation. We still call China by the same name, we still draw it the same way on a map, but essentially all of the people who remember the Long March, or the Rape of Nanking, or the Battle of Shanghai are dead and gone. The hard-won wisdom that they received as inadequate compensation for suffering through those terrible events has vanished into the entropy of history, and their descendants have only war movies and books and half-remembered tales to give them thin, shadowed glimpses.

And so the new people who are now “China” are able to believe that war is a glorious thing instead of a tragic one. They are able to imagine that by coloring Taiwan a different color on a map, their army will redress the wrongs of history, bring dignity to their race, spread the bounties of communist rule, fulfill a nation’s manifest destiny, or whatever other nonsense they tell themselves. They imagine themselves either insulated from the consequences of that violence, or purified and ennobled by their efforts to support it.

They do not understand, in the words of William T. Sherman, that “war is destruction and nothing else.” Nor do they think very hard about the future of the world their short, glorious conquest of Taiwan would inaugurate — the nuclear proliferation, the arms races, the follow-on wars. The German and Russian citizens who cheered their armies and threw flowers as they marched to the front in 1914 could not imagine Stalingrad and Dresden thirty years later. We have seen this movie before.

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And whether the U.S. is even committed to global freedom in the abstract is now an open question. The fabulously wealthy businessmen who have the greatest influence in the new administration openly mock the courageous Ukrainians who stayed and risked death to defend their homes and families from the rape of Russia’s invasion — even though if war ever came to their own doorstep, they would be the first to flee, clutching their Bitcoin to their chests like sacks of gold. An aging Donald Trump indulges in idle fantasies of staging his own territorial conquests in the Western Hemisphere, LARPing the new fad for imperialism even as his peers practice the real thing overseas.

America, like every other nation, has been created anew as the generations turned. This is not the America of Franklin D. Roosevelt, or even the America of Ronald Reagan. My grandparents are dead. Their hard-earned warnings are abstract words fading into memory, and I wonder if the world they won will outlast them by much.

And so across the sea, the old stormclouds gather again. In the seas around Taiwan, an armada assembles. Across the strait, the emperor orders a million kamikaze drones, hundreds of nuclear weapons, a forest of ballistic missiles, and a vast new navy. In Taipei, the sun is out, and people sip their tea, and eat their beef noodle soup, and and try not to think too hard about whether this will be the year the old world finally gives way to new.

Meta Values - 37

I tried meditation for 8 years without significant "insights" then I realized being with Max, we are not meditating for 20 minutes or a few hours but instead we are living a meditative life. 

My life and every moment in it is meditation in itself with my awareness fueling it as much humanely as I could. 

Your Life Is Not A Story

So, why is this a problem? One issue is complexity. Seeing yourself as the main character in a story can overly simplify the fullness of life. Think of the way in which people talk about their ‘journey’ through life. Through this narrative, certain events become more significant while others are overlooked, and random events can be reframed as being part of some grand plan. Yet viewing our lives in such a narrow way hinders our ability to understand the complex behaviour of others and ourselves. For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs. Stories can change us by locking us into ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

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So, what does it mean to reject a narrative? Living in a non-narrative way means rejecting a particular identity, and instead seeing life and meaning as a set of open choices. For the waiter, rejecting his narrative identity would mean acting in a way that reflects his choices and sense of self, not just the story he tells about himself.

To understand what is involved in rejecting a narrative, it is important to remember that narratives do not exist outside of people’s minds. The stories we tell ourselves are not out there in the world. They are tools that mediate our relationships with the world. Though they relate to facts, and real events, they are not factual. In fact, they are neither true nor false. Instead, stories help us make sense of things. So, if we rejected the power of narratives to sequence events in our lives, how else would we organise our thoughts about the world?

Think of the ways that perspectives organise experiences differently. By ‘perspective’ I mean something more complex than ‘point of view’. I’m referring to the way we engage with the world from a particular position or orientation that draws our attention to aspects of experience, like how our visual ‘perspective’ allows bright colours to show up more easily than dull ones. Perspectives are shaped by our place in the world, our beliefs, values and what we think matters. As the philosopher Elisabeth Camp explains, a perspective ‘helps us to do things with the thoughts we have: to make quick judgments based on what’s most important, to grasp intuitive connections, and to respond emotionally, among other things.’ Through perspective some features of our experiences ‘stick out in our minds while others fade into the background.’

Poetry captures a way of seeing and feeling, not just a sequence of events

Perspectives, then, determine the narratives we adopt. In other words, our core beliefs and values shape the way we see things and what we take to be important in our experiences. It is our perspectives that generate our narratives. Perspective also explains why our narratives can differ so radically from those of other people, even when we experience the same events. But once we understand these perspectives, we can see how flexible our narratives can truly become. Perspectives, it turns out, don’t have a linear, ordered structure. We can’t think of them in terms of sequences of events, like stories. In some ways, perspectives are better represented by the non-linearity of poetry.

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And so, instead of just changing our narratives, we should learn to understand the perspectives that shape them. When we focus on our own stories, we live life as we already know it, but by loosening the grip that stories hold over our lives – by focusing on the perspectives of ourselves and others – we can begin opening ourselves up to other possibilities. We can adopt new orientations, find significance in new places, and even move toward the exciting unpredictability of shared perspectives.

As Sartre warned, everything changes when you tell a story. Narratives limit our potential. Though we are complex beings, living in a chaotic universe, our stories create the illusion that our lives are ordered, logical and complete.

We might never fully escape the narratives that surround us, but we can learn to change the perspectives behind them. And so, we are never bound by stories, only by our ability to understand how our beliefs and values shape the way we perceive and engage with the world. We don’t need better narratives; we need to expand and refine our perspectives.

- More Here

The Virtues of Virtue Signalling

This brings us back to the original question motivating this essay: Should you be public about your charitable donations? I have been worried that doing so would be perceived as self-aggrandizing or obnoxious virtue signaling – that such immodest boastfulness would reduce the moral value of these actions. However, by concealing my donations, I have missed the chance to also spread the norm of effective giving. This wasted opportunity strikes me as a moral mistake in itself. Clearly signaling our virtuous behavior can have an important moral role, not in highlighting our character, but rather in spreading pro-social norms.

Norms are sticky, and changing them is costly. However, they are not completely fixed. We should celebrate the early movers willing to incur these costs for changing norms. While virtue signaling is often perceived as objectionable, engaging in costly virtue signaling to shift social norms toward more pro-social and moral equilibrium seems like an admirable thing to do. For this reason, I have decided to add my name to the list of almost 10,000 people who have signed the 10% Pledge, and to explain my reasons for doing so in this essay. Thereby, I hope to also inspire others to do the same.

- More Here