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around the traps

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around the traps

  • A Beginner's Guide to Pour Over Coffee Brewing Methods | Prima Coffee. Ever wondered what the hell "V60" or "aeropress" was on the cafe menu? The results from each one tend not to be wildly different to each other, but they are very different to the usual espresso options. Well worth trying if you like a good coffee.
  • 10 things the snack food industry won’t tell you | News.com.au: Beetles aren’t the only I-dare-you-to-eat-that items you may have unknowingly noshed on. Vanilla-flavoured snacks like cookies and cakes are sometimes flavoured with castoreum, a secretion from a beaver’s behind (technically, from a sac near his anus called the castor sac) At least Snopes rates it as unlikely you'll actually run into castoreum, since it is so impractical and gross to get the raw material.
  • BMW 3D prints new thumbs for factory workers | Technology | theguardian.com
  • How not to say the wrong thing - Los Angeles Times: Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring. Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.
  • Meet the gothic bake queen whose creepy cakes are storming Instagram - People - Stylist Magazine. That's some freaky baking.
  • The age of entitlement: how wealth breeds narcissism | Anne Manne | Comment is free | theguardian.com: as people grow wealthier, they are more likely to feel entitled, to become meaner and be more likely to exploit others, even to cheat.
  • Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson:

    But I had only been using a typewriter because I’d gotten one for free and I was poor. In 1981, most people were still writing on typewriters. There were five large businesses in Vancouver that did nothing but repair and sell typewriters. Soon there were computers, too, and it was a case of the past and the future mutually coexisting. And then the past just goes away.

    ...

    The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and u­sing it for criminal purposes and all the different things that people do. The people who invented pagers, for instance, never imagined that they would change the shape of urban drug dealing all over the world. But pagers so completely changed drug dealing that they ultimately resulted in pay phones being removed from cities as part of a strategy to prevent them from becoming illicit drug markets. We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination.

    ...

    I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing t­echnoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.

around the traps

around the traps

around the traps

around the traps

around the traps