Dashy Writing

My work notebook is quite organised (once I left it in a partner's office and she returned it to me, saying she guessed it was mine because of all the tables and numbered lists). But sometimes I retrospectively clutter the pages with doodles or recreational maths. Here is a page where I worked on a practical problem of geometrical optics.

 

Unfortunately, my handwriting in my work notebook tends to be slipshod. I suspect it is not quite at the stage where, as suggested in the early 20th century Lessons in Dashy Writing, it can be a promising ladder by which I rise in the world.

 

Bulgarian Plain Speak

Restaurants in Bulgaria serve good coffee. If you want something cheaper, instant coffee is also on the menu, but they have the grace to not pretend that it's coffee; just...

Asking for Directions in the Cinque Terre

At the Cinque Terre we stayed in a room rented out by an idiosyncratic Sardinian, Pierpaolo Paradisi, in a tiny hamlet called Prevo which has only a handful of inhabitants.

Prevo is not reachable by public transport, so we planned to go there by hiking along the Sentiero Azzurro (Blue Trail) from Vernazza. But Pierpaolo's house has no number, so I asked him how we would find it. These were his directions:

Our house is right on the blue trail between Vernazza and Corniglia.
The house is located in a hamlet called Prevo, in half way.
When you reach a small tunnel you walk in, our house is on the left when you exit the tunnel.
The door is green, generally is open, with a small bamboo gate, and you listen to opera music.

Addresses are conciser, but directions are nicer.

Long-time readers may recall another much older post with a title of the form Asking for Directions in [Place], and there is at least one other post which involves me asking for directions. Maybe one day there will be enough posts in the series to justify a new label.

Sachertorte

"There is only one Original. Since 1832."

So declares the pamphlet at Vienna's Café Sacher, purveyors of "Original" sachertorte. The rest of the pamphlet gives you the history of the sachertorte, tells you how the secret recipe with its "exact sequence of the 36 individual steps" is jealously guarded by the café, and instructs you in the 6 ways to identify "Original" sachertorte.

Between 1954 and 1963, Café Sacher and the nearby Demel bakery were involved in a complex legal dispute over the use of the "Original" label. Having finally won the right to use the label, it is as if Café Sacher will let no opportunity slip to remind their customers that theirs is the one and only "Original" sachertorte. If I am biased against Café Sacher, it is because of this tedious insistence on originality doled out without a trace of humour (surely I am not the only person who finds it amusing that a nine-year legal battle was waged over "the dessert's specific characteristics, including the [...] second layer of jam in the middle of the cake"), and the fact that I thought sachertorte itself is hugely overrated.

Nor does their branding stop at sachertorte. Nearly every item on the Café Sacher menu, from truffle ham to ice-cream cake, is prefaced by "Original Sacher", or some variant thereof. The trend degenerates into farce when, in the "Viennese Classics" section, they appear to serve portions of their founding father's anatomy.

Fontspotting in Vienna

Walking around old Vienna, I spotted an unusually high number of tasteful store signs, using fonts and styles I don't commonly see in the UK.

Manarola, 5:46 pm

A [Village], [Time] label would have been more appropriate for this one. Manarola is a small fishing town on the Ligurian coast in Italy. With only 450 inhabitants, it is the smallest of the five villages of the Cinque Terre.

Hiking trails zigzag down to the beach and up into the mountains, taking you through vineyards and past medieval monasteries. The local wine, Sciacchetrà, is sweetly potent, and the olives on the pizzas and the lemons for the limoncino come from the surrounding orchards. Not surprisingly, seafood features prominently in Ligurian cuisine, but the Ligurians also invented focaccia and pesto. The Cinque Terre National Park being a UNESCO World Heritage site, no cars are allowed in the villages; they are connected by train, ferry and walking paths. Almost all the shops and restaurants are small mom-and-pop outfits.

If all this seems too cloyingly idyllic, here is something I am more equivocal about: the "Ligurian pastel" colors of Manarola's houses are regulated by a Commissioner of Good Taste in the regional government.

Birth of a Ghost

I had never really dabbled in computer animation before, but I recently discovered Synfig, a free, open source animation program. It's a lot of fun to play with.

The first animation I created on Synfig was a very simple 8-second animation of a ball dropping on the floor and morphing into a ghost. I spent the better part of a rainy Saturday morning learning how to make Synfig do my bidding, and the remainder of the morning watching Birth of a Ghost on loop (yes, I am easily amused).

My introduction to animation was by way of flipbooks. In 1996, when the cricket World Cup was held in the Indian subcontinent, you could exchange Coke bottle-caps for cricket merchandise. My friends were into collecting trading-cards. I was by no means indifferent to trading-cards, but I saved my bottle-caps till I had enough for a flipbook, which had Saeed Anwar majestically lifting some hapless spinner over long-on.

I knew in theory how TVs worked, and I had seen a zoetrope at BITM, but until I beheld a flipbook, I don't think I had truly comprehended how a rapid display of still images can create an illusion of movement. I also realised – and this was even more interesting – that I could make my own flipbooks. But after a few months of doodling in the corner of notebook pages, I thought I had gotten over my flipbook phase.

Except I hadn't, really. My Synfig experiments got me thinking about flipbooks again, and one day during my lunch-break, I seized on a wad of post-it notes which was on my desk and re-created Birth of a Ghost on flipbook.

Here are both videos, for comparison:

Birth of a Ghost (Synfig) (0:08)

Birth of a Ghost (flipbook) (0:04)

If you want a hand-drawn flipbook, send me an email. I can make one and post it to you.

Isle of Dogs Cat

As Ethan Zuckerman said in a 2008 lecture: "Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats."

Photos on this blog of Isle of Dogs fauna have featured foxes and of course, dogs, but so far ‒ no cats. This is about to be remedied. Here is a cat, spotted on Saturday en route to the supermarket.

Shortly after spotting the cat, I discovered that Mudchute Farm, which is also on my way to the supermarket, has three llamas. This made my day.

If, as is not unlikely, Web 3.0 is created to allow people to share pictures of llamas, my llama photo will get its place in the sun.