• • • google suggested • • •
WORD SALAD: Brought from the dance floor to your listening ears, Equanimous presents his debut album, Merging Elements, via Gravitas Recordings. Merging Elements is a heart centered adventure whose inhabitant exists between bliss and bass. Through 11 artist collaborations that span over nine tracks, prepare to engage in an ecstatic, auditory journey full of rhythmic vibrations, beautiful melodies, and organic sounds. Each song has its own special process, and a special collaborative vibe consolidates to form the unified project that is Merging Elements.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
What Will Mexico City Do With 2,000 Mammoth Bones?
The fate of an enormous trove of fossils hangs in the balance.
Two thousand mammoth bones have turned up at the site of a new Mexico City airport. Where will scientists put them all? Embiggenable. Explore at home.
FOR THE PAST YEAR, THE construction site of a new airport in Mexico City has been the talk of the mammoth world. Heaps of fossils started turning up there in October 2019. “There are hundreds,” archaeologist Pedro Sanchez Nava told Phys.org. “There are too many.” Scientists now sit alongside backhoe operators as they break new ground, monitoring the soil of the ancient lake bed for molars, ribs, and tusks. While excavation is ongoing, the 2,000 bones unearthed thus far likely make up the largest mammoth find in history.
With the operation under the supervision of the Mexican Army, the team involved is under a strict confidentiality agreement, leaving experts wondering where the bones are headed. Atlas Obscura asked two veterans of accidental mammoth discoveries, Jim Mead and Dick Mol, to describe three main approaches toward mammoth presentation—and a source close to the excavation helped clear up some of the mystery.
The first mammoth-storage solution is known as in situ, or on-site, preservation. In 1974, construction work on a South Dakota sledding hill unveiled a giant trove of mammoth bones. Mead, who is now the director of research at the Mammoth Site in the city of Hot Springs, was there on day one of the excavation. “We knew we couldn’t store them all,” says Mead, “and we wanted an education-oriented approach, so ours are still in situ, right where we found them.” Leaving the bones half-exposed allows for public display while minimizing the risk of damaging the remains. The main drawback is that a well-presented skeleton might rest on top of other fossils, as is the case with a Mammoth Site skeleton named “Murray.” “He’s laid out like a filleted fish, and he’s on top of more mammoths,” says Mead. “We can see bones sticking out the sides, but I’m not going to remove Murray, because it’s a spectacular display.”
“Murray,” a mammoth skeleton at the Mammoth Site in South Dakota, is displayed in situ, meaning that it has not been moved from the place where it was discovered.
The next method for displaying mammoths is museum-based reconstruction. Dick “Sir Mammoth” Mol, a Dutch paleontologist who’s overseen mammoth finds from the British Isles to Siberia over his 50-year career, describes a mammoth excavation that took place in Sevks, Russia, in the late 1980s. The expedition was underfunded, he says, and over the course of a single weekend, a team made up mostly of volunteers unearthed seven complete skeletons and transported them to Moscow. They are now displayed in the Azov History, Archaeology, and Paleontology Museum-Reserve. The rushed job produced an impressive display, says Mol, but he laments the destruction of the original site, which was bulldozed, flattened, and developed. “The site doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. “We lost lots of very important scientific content within the sediment.” (Mol, who is a longtime friend of Mead, prefers in situ displays.)
The third approach, Mol says, can provide a happy medium between on- and off-site displays. …
The Mexican Kitchen’s Islamic Connection
When Mexico’s leading writer, Nobel Prize laureate Octavio Paz, arrived in New Delhi in 1962 to take up his post as ambassador to India, he quickly ran across a culinary puzzle. Although Mexico and India were on opposite sides of the globe, the brown, spicy, aromatic curries that he was offered in India sparked memories of Mexico’s national dish, mole (pronounced MO-lay). Is mole, he wondered, “an ingenious Mexican version of curry, or is curry a Hindu adaptation of a Mexican sauce?” How could this seeming coincidence of “gastronomic geography” be explained?
For a Mexican, this was no trivial matter. Laborious to produce, mole is served for weddings, festivals and national holidays. The legend of its origin in the convents of 18th-century Puebla, the second city of New Spain—as Mexico was then called—is part of the nation’s popular history, recounted time and again in newspapers, school textbooks, guidebooks and even on paper placemats in restaurants. Mole comes in many varieties, but it usually contains ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns, anise, coriander, chocolate, chiles, almonds, pumpkin seeds, raisins, bread and tortillas—all ground together and cooked in a light broth to make a harmonious brown sauce that is served with turkey, chicken or vegetable dishes.
Chocolate seems a curious ingredient to non-Mexicans—indeed, outside Mexico mole is sometimes referred to as a chocolate sauce—but in fact not all moles contain chocolate and even those that do use it in small quantities to balance the flavor of the other spices. More complex and less piquant than the better-known, fiery, tomato-based sauces that have spread around the world with Tex-Mex cuisine, mole, as Paz observed, does have a color, flavor and texture reminiscent of many of the Indian dishes collectively known as curries in the rest of the world. And in raising the question of the uniqueness of mole, Paz was challenging the idea that mole was the cornerstone of a uniquely Mexican culinary heritage.
But while Paz was right to point out that mole resembled curry, he was wrong to imagine that Mexican cooks had created mole as imitation curry, or that Indian cooks composed curries in an effort to emulate mole. He would have done better to picture both moles and curries as vestiges of the cuisine of medieval Islam, a cuisine that was enjoyed from southern Spain in the west to northern India in the east. …
Mole Poblano: Yes You Can!
The showcase of last week’s class was one of Mexico’s most famous and delicious moles, the Poblano, which originated in the kitchen of the Convent of Santa Rosa, in Puebla. After seeing how much guests enjoyed it, I can’t wait to share it with you.
I know, the word Mole sounds exciting to eat yet intimidating to prepare. As the root of the word describes, from the náhuatl mulli, Mole is a thick sauce or paste made by grinding ingredients together in a molcajete or communal mill. A food processor works as well. This sauce can be thinned out with broth or water when ready to use.
The Poblano with its long ingredients list and its laborious process, is not the best way to introduce Moles. There are some simple Moles with no more than 4 or 5 ingredients that are easier to prepare and just as tasty.
But here I am! I adore the Poblano and I know you will too…
I tested many ways to find the easiest route to make it without compromising its authenticity and flavor. As long as you prep your ingredients and have them in place before you start throwing them in the pot -what the French call Mise en Place and Mexicans Estate Listo!-, it’s a manageable task that takes about an hour. Trust me. Here we go. …
5 Crazy Science Stories That Flew Under Everybody’s Radar
Between Year 4,038 of our current viral episode and your social media feeds being flooded by shouting matches about which cantankerous grandfather from the Mid-Atlantic region gets to rule the world next, it’s hard to keep up with current scientific events. So if you want to take a break from all the potential planet-destroying news and catch up on some potential universe-destroying news, here are five weird and on-going scientific developments.
5. Curly The Curling Robot Is Changing The Sport Forever
Curling, despite looking like a sport invented to see how many pub game drunkards you can give frostbite to in one evening, has become quite popular. But while it’s an easy game to get into (all you need is a stone and a couple of your best OCD buddies with brooms), it’s almost impossible to master. So much so, that curling is sometimes referred to as chess on ice.
No wonder then, that this noble game of kings and janitors has been taken over by a machine-learning robot. This icier Deep Blue is called Curly, an entity divided into Skip-Curly, who monitors the target area (the house) and devises the best strategy, and Thrower-Curly, the hyper-advanced stone throwing machine that looks like if a Zamboni machine and a PS5 had a baby.
In a joint experiment by researchers of Korea University and the Berlin Institute of Technology, Curly recently took on South Korea’s leading women’s and wheelchair curling teams and wiped the ice rink with them. And since sentient-broom technology is still stuck in the Fantasia-phase, Curly had to do it without the help of a team of overclocked Roombas smoothing the ice, meaning they have to make the perfect throw almost every single time.
Big deal, right? That sounds like something robots can machine learn in their sleep. But like chess, and very much unlike chess, curling is really a game of chaos. The ice is in a constant state of minuscule flux, shifting with every temperature change or glide of the 42-pound heavy stone. That requires a lot of thinking on your feet (or one foot and one knee, in curling), not something robots are known best for. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
How pigeons went from war heroes to drug runners.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Ireland deems Subway’s bread too sugary, zoo parrots curse at visitors, Obama memorabilia goes up for auction, trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA make people more susceptible to coronavirus, the White House blocks the CDC’s cruise ship ban, and the next presidential debate might include mic shutoffs.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
I’m trying but the hard part is convincing the virus to enter his body.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) March 14, 2020
YOU'RE WELCOME. https://t.co/UW4vljOqmE
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) October 2, 2020
There's never been a better time to be stupid.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) September 26, 2020
Rev. Al Sharpton joins Inside the Hill to discuss the GOP’s response to President Trump’s Proud Boys comments. Watch the full segment on CBS All Access.
Seth takes a closer look at Trump trying to paint Biden as drugged up and senile while attempting to steal the election by lying about voter fraud.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on gym wins. Cheers!
2020年9月のまるはな日記。遊ぶはなと、平常運転のまる。 Maru&Hana’s diary of September, 2020.
LET’S GIVE GOOGLE TRANSLATE A WHACK AT IT:
Maruhana Diary in September 2020. Playing and driving normally.
FINALLY . . .
Pantone’s Newest Color Is a Nod to Menstruation: Period Red
The color registry, with the Swedish brand Intimina, takes aim at an old taboo and barrier to women’s equality.
Pantone, the color registry company, has introduced a new shade — Period red — that it hopes will get people talking about a part of life that often goes unmentioned.
By focusing on menstruation, Pantone said, it wants to overturn a taboo and draw attention to a regular life phase with a color that is “energizing” and “dynamic.”
Period red “emboldens people who menstruate to feel proud of who they are,” said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. She added that the goal was “to urge everyone, regardless of gender, to feel comfortable to talk spontaneously and openly about this pure and natural bodily function.”
The announcement is partly a marketing stunt: Pantone has teamed up with the Swedish feminine products brand Intimina, and the brand’s Seen+Heard campaign, to help make periods just a regular part of everyday life. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
