Really skillful short portending Pixar’s foray into full-length drama features. There’s probably a limit to what even their creative talent can do with animated comedy, so this will be a new canvas to depict. Success would make the bean counters at Disney plenty happy.
Touching film that is significantly elevated by the beautiful artwork of Mickey Duzyj and animation by Naoko Hara!
I was lucky enough to attend the 6th Annual Grain Gathering for the first time last weekend. It’s a well-organized event bringing together an eclectic mix of makers & dreamers committed to introducing the full nutritive value of grains into our food supply. Approximately 300 Farmers, Millers, Bakers, Restauranteurs, Entrepreneurs - young & old, from around the world, were in attendance this year.
The event occurs on the scenic Washington State University Research campus in Mount Vernon (Skagit Valley). Home to 93,000 acres of farmland, Skagit yields Berries, Potatoes, Apples, Wheat, Rye, Barley etc. of all kinds and from many eras, experimentally and at-scale. The weather at the end of July was pristine - crystal clear skies, and a gentle Sun making conversation easy.
Hyper-processed nutritively diluted flour dominates our food supply today. It’s not going to do much for your body, and it will leave you craving more food soon. Minimally processed grains that preserve the germ, endosperm & bran deliver the full complement of macronutrients to your body, leave you feeling fuller for longer, and are tastier to boot. The Grain Gathering is a grass-roots movement to increase adoption of whole grains into our diet, one local community at a time.
These wood-fired whole grain bagels I helped roll with Jeffrey Hamelman & Mark Doxstader had unrivaled character - take it from someone who’s had the best New York & Montreal have to offer!
I attended because we appear to be at a tipping point in this Refined vs. Whole adoption curve. Bakeries today have more discerning consumers to please and there is only so much product innovation left to do with refined grains. Whole grains open up a whole new spectrum of products that have a unique point of view, and deliver health benefits with them. There seems to be strong alignment amongst various stakeholders that makes wider adoption of whole grain products inevitable.
Observations:
- A lot of the bakers I spoke with or listened to seemed to be struggling with locally sourcing & milling of whole grains. They wanted access to a network of producers who could consistently supply them with high quality flour for their products. This is easier said than done. Growing grains appears to be more art than science right now. The same goes for milling. And for roasting. There’s a lot of experimentation before folks get things just right.
My technology background leads me to believe that a network connecting farmers, millers, roasters, bakers, brewers, restauranteurs and other artisans will go a long way to solving these supply issues. Let’s call it GrainSource. GrainSource should allow Bakery X to request “50 pounds of Rye Flour, milled super-fine.” from Supplier Y and have a reputation system that allows them to rate each other.
If the source is flakey, the community-at-large should know. If the Bakery is flakey, same outcome. The bottom line here is that the whole grain supply network needs to self-select for consistency, improve resiliency, increase grain diversity. A successful network will enable Farmers scale up their operations by exposing them to bigger demand curves. Conversely, it will help Bakeries & other artisans deliver more product to their local communities without being as vulnerable to supply disruption.
- A lot remains to be understood with Farming. The same genetic material on the same plot of land will yield differently season-to-season. Resiliency to disease in Area X does not mean resiliency to disease in Area Y. Variabilities in soil composition, weather patterns and nature’s other guiles remain formidable adversaries. There is no immediate solution to this, but can intuit that there is significantly more to learn from the ‘deep quantification’ of farms. The second conclusion one can draw is that locality is a huge component. It matters where a grain comes from – it affects flavor, variety, yield and just about everything else, even with the genetic material being identical.
Top Experiences:
- Meeting an array of people who genuinely want to take whole grains to the next level of adoption. I was impressed with the energy they brought, the sophistication of their palates, their skill, their humility, their dedication, and their noble intentions.
- Touring the WSU research fields with Steve Lyon (Senior Scientific Assistant @ The Bread Lab), with grains from the 1500s and up. Including this line that was first planted in 1776:
- Rolling & baking lots of diverse wholegrain bagels with the crew (see above)
- Baking this insane wholegrain Blueberry+Blackberry Pie with the dedicated & talented Tara Jensen & Co.
- Tasting a dark chocolate, olive oil & pernot flatbread that had a pleasantly surprising flavor profile. Megan - if you’re reading this, holler back if you make one of these at your bakery!
- Cross-breeding Barley in a class by Phd. Student Brigid Meints (her research into sustainably producing two-colored Barley is pretty cool).
- Some outrageously good Nectarines, Tomatoes & Plums. Worthy of a mention.
This was an excellent event, and I suspect the energy harvested from it will move the whole grain agenda forward in an impactful way. Huge props to The Bread Lab team (Steve Jones, Wendy Hebb and others) for making it happen - I look forward to GG7!
An interesting article from JJD (an InfoQ stalwart)…
http://www.infoq.com/articles/no-more-mvc-frameworks
And an interesting discussion on Gitter around this topic…
With the SAM pattern, he’s clearly approaching the problem from a server-side engineer’s perspective – the emphasis is on clean abstractions, formalism, clear representation-of-component-state – but he misses why React + RxJS + Cycle.js and potentially Angular2 are a thing: it’s because they allow modern product teams to ship code quickly, performantly, and predictably on the browser (mobile or desktop). In the quad-polar world of browser engines, this is a critical consideration.
For most web apps, productivity depends on the ProductManager and FrontEndEngineer(s) establishing a fast-feedback-loop. Product teams want to ship quickly, validate assumptions, and iterate further. The backend is in service of the front-end and that’s why patterns like Backends For Frontends (BFF) are a thing.
Front-end Engineers expect backends to feed, protect and accept data. And while that sounds really hard to fulfill when one doesn’t control the front-end, let alone anticipate future needs – it is still possible to design artful APIs that deliver the goods. One gets better at this with practice.
Is our current state-of-progress perfect? No. I believe Cycle.js is pointing the way forward for a lot of frameworks – it certainly opened my eyes. I applaud JJD for sharing some bold thoughts, and leveraging Leslie Lamport’s awesome TLA+ in a unique context. In the end, the patterns that prevail will always be the ones that help developers and their teams deliver. For that, they must reflect operational realities.
This is not the same thing as taking things for granted. To do that, you have to recognized that they exist in the first place. At Google there are thousands of problems that simply aren’t there anymore, owing to lots of smart people who identified them and extinguished them while you were in the eighth grade.
And so it’s only after you march triumphantly out of the mothership to write your own story, and then spend nine months by yourself in a small dark room, that the howling voids of talent, distribution, capital and institutional expertise become painfully apparent.
Super proud that one of the startups I founded, Alma Safety played a role in sculpting the FCC’s Wireless E911 Location Accuracy Requirements. Items (15) (28) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45) and (46) are steps in the right direction. If you want to learn more about Alma’s stance on the future of Wireless 911 indoor location, read our filing.
We look forward to APCO and NENA instituting a transparent testbed and validating the viability of solutions, such as Alma’s. I’m thankful for being part of a country that listens, and being part of a country committed to the continued safety of all its people.
If you must build a giant, build an honorable one. As Tata grows evermore relevant, it will be harder and harder for that DNA to permeate into their people, but I suspect the fabric will hold overall. The more interesting question is how the new leadership under Cyrus Mistry sees Tata’s place in the world. So far, it seems like he’s getting to grip with the vastness of this empire and keeping things steady. In the future, I hope he imbibes a little Steve Jobs in him and allows the group to “stay hungry, stay foolish”, just as his predecessors did so successfully before him.
Ran into an interesting piece by Robin Sloan in The Atlantic delving into two contrasting approaches to experiencing food in San Francisco. I’m not sure we need to choose between “warmth and inefficiency” vs. “cold and efficient”.
An interesting alternative might be the following:
– A Josephine-like ecosystem of home cooks that are “discovered” by curators/taste-makers within the community. These are either people on the payroll of the startup or people in the community willing to experience the occasional bad meal in the quest for a few truly exceptional ones.
– The exceptional meals are the “promoted” to get featured by the startup to their community. Promoted meals require the buy-in of the home-cook… in exchange for a cut of the proceeds, the home-cook provides the recipe/technique… Future “re-promotions” may result in a smaller royalty for the home-cook, but incentive all the same to share the “secrets”.
– For a majority of the proceeds, the startup provides a scaled up kitchen, raw materials, a pro-chef who strategizes with the home-cook and scales up the recipe where applicable.
– With this model, we get the consistency/convenience of a Sprig, but the community connection and diversity of flavors of a Josephine.
– Aspirational home cooks get to cook for hundreds of folks, be potential stars, and make “real” money along the way (plus they don’t have to do the dishes).
– The startup gets to learn and perfect unique recipes and keep them on the rotation, delivering a wide range of community-centric flavors and options throughout the year and through different seasons.
Food for thought.
Youtube recommendations are generally great, but tend to weigh my most recent (read: last two weeks) interests disproportionately higher than anything I have seen in the past. Binge-watch anything in particular and the algorithm rapidly assimilates its recommendations around that interest to “feed the fire”.
Because I saw a couple of Schumacher F1 videos, and checked out some SUV reviews - I now have a feed littered with other recommendations of this ilk even though my interest graph over a wider temporal bound is far more diverse.
Youtube’s data likely indicates that it is monetarily more significant to promote the binge habit (symmetric recommendations) over diversity (asymmetric recommendations). I posit that there is a growing corpus of Youtubers who change their viewing behavior and view fewer videos of a given kind in order to help this naive algorithm keep diversity up.
Clearly, interests can be fleeting. Perhaps the algorithm can make topical approximations of “stickiness” to counter this. If a person consistently engages with a topic over time, it should “fade” more slowly off the recommendations grid. Obviously, the behavior of other folks with interests similar to mine would also be a signal input.
tl;dr
the Youtube recommendation algorithm’s agility is impressive, but I wish it wouldn’t forget so easily that humans are capable of fleeting obsession and enduring curiosity.
Peter Giacobbi’s Ferrari 250 TR Specialé is the supreme automotive passion project.