Friday Four

1. My daughter, who just turned four, has been asking to help me in the kitchen when I cook lately. The first time, the interest came out of the blue, so I had to think on my feet to come up with a few hands-on things that she could do safely. (This is harder than you might think!) I also tried explaining what I did, and why, and that the first step in learning is often watching others doing something.

That said, I need to come up with a few simple things we can do with more pedagogical value.

2. The latest new beer for me, Founder's Devil Dancer Triple IPA, is a winner:

When you dance with the Devil, the Devil don't change. You do. Massive in complexity, the huge malt character balances the insane amount of [alpha acids] used to create it. At an incredible 112 [international bittering units], it's dry-hopped with ten hop varieties. [link added]

Almost everything that brewery makes I like.

3. After reading a news story in the British press, I saw a link to an explanation of why people started wearing powdered wigs, which were called perukes. Thanks to curiosity getting the better of me, I now know more than I wanted to:

For nearly two centuries, powdered wigs -- called perukes -- were all the rage. The chic hairpiece would have never become popular, however, if it hadn't been for a venereal disease, a pair of self-conscious kings, and poor hair hygiene.

Read the whole thing to see how this all fits together.

4. Blogger "graydon2" justifiably waxes rhapsodic about text, which he calls "the oldest and most stable communication technology":

Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic, programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their ideas.

I sometimes wish more of those employed for the purpose of ... creating? ... assembly instructions had gotten the memo.

-- CAV