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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 20-Feb-2026 13:41:55 JST 
simsa03
The whole "What would I like to eat today?"-attitude is long gone. I plan in advance when to eat which of the few groceries and fruits I have, and when to cook what and how to divide the cooked food to last for several portions.
I usually don't prepare a dish by merely cooking either rice, potatoes, or beans as side dish. I mix them. Often I fetch a can of tomatoes, put garlic, onions, and some seasoning, into it, then red beans, and all with the rice or with the rice and potatoes.
To guard against nutritional deficiencies I regularly take extra vitamins and minerals, vitamin D, Omega 3 (both long-chain and short-chain fatty acids), Zinc, and a few others. Although expensive, in sum they help me to keep the food costs down.
As a treat I mix a teaspoon of baking cocoa with sugar, a little milk, and hot water. Way more delicious and far less costly than regular chocolate. In fact, since I do that, most chocolate taste bland and over-sugared.
I've given up on milk, butter, and other dairies. Sometimes a little piece of cheese to go with the bread I bake in the pan but nothing else.
What I do care about is the quality of the oil. I have four types of oil in my kitchen: rapeseed (frying), olive (on top of meals like pasta), sesame (for "oil pulling" in dental care), and linseed oil (for the short-chain fatty acids).
I managed to reduce my coffee intake by paying attention to start the day with drinking water (and the "oil pulling"). I used to make that mistake in the library at university and later on the job: Drinking coffee to quell my thirst. And then wondering why I got so nervous.
I had a whole month last year in which I managed to go by with only 40 € for food. Admittedly I had some stocks of coffee and oils, still, that was tough, and rationing food for two meals a day was, well, an interesting experience in externally induced intermittent fasting.
The long-term experience of little food on a basic level made me appreciate well-cooked food all the more. I recently was in a diner and had a meal for only about 12 €. I was blown away by the explosion of taste in my mouth and the joy that came with it. I almost cried. The chef saw me eating slowly, carefully, deliberately tasting, my breathing in relief. He offered me a drink on the house but I was too impolite and declined with thanks. "I'm sorry, Chef, you meant so well!"
Which reminds me of this story by WaiterRant from 2008 to which I keep returning: "Miracle Pizza" https://waiterrant.net/2008/03/438/ which is still the best story I know about the joy and gratitude when kindly offered food comes at the right moment and makes you feel human again. Read it.
In general I've experienced that gifted food tastes the best. In my kitchen I have no food waste, everything is eaten. I learnt to get better in cooking. But nothing beats when friends invite me for a meal or when they give me some food or staples to keep.
It reminds me of my late landlady a decade ago for whom in her last days I cooked some chicken broth to feed her with. She only ate two spoonful of it but it was clear that she felt nourished by the attentiveness, the gesture, not the carrier in itself.
Same today: It's the gift in the gifted food that nourishes me, not so much the food itself. And so, in the end, it seems that it's not the quality or abundance of the food that matters, but how much kindness and how much gratitude come with it. It is these that nourish us.
So give. And please: Do receive. Accept the gift that is offered to you. Because we lessen the person whose gift we decline.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 31-Dec-2025 00:09:00 JST
simsa03
Norman Podhoretz, "Hannah Arendt on Eichmann:A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance" (1963) https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/hannah-arendt-on-eichmanna-study-in-the-perversity-of-brilliance/
Podhoretz saw the flaws in Arendt's "Eichmann" early and described them lucidly. Eichmann became for Arendt a vindication of her "Origins of Totalitarianism", albeit she had to distort historical events and entertain questionable premisses. Or perhaps better: Her questionable premisses, visible in "Eichmann" hint to their underlying efficaciousness in "Origins". Anyway, this article is rich in its observations, so I quote passages that are more of interest to me right now.
«And the Nature of Totalitarianism? What Miss Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial teaches us about the Nature of Totalitarianism is that the time has come to re-examine the whole concept. Apart from the many other weaknesses it has revealed since the days when it was first developed to distinguish between the “simple” dictatorships of the pre-modern era and the ideologically inspired revolutionary regimes of Stalin and Hitler, the theory of totalitarianism has always been limited in its usefulness by the quasi-metaphysical and rather Germanic terms in which it was originally conceived. For what the theory aimed at describing was a fixed essence, not a phenomenon in flux, and the only changes it saw as possible within the totalitarian structure were those leading toward a more perfect realization of the totalitarian idea itself. (One consequence of this—and it speaks worlds about the limitations of the theory in general—was that many students of Soviet society refused for a long time to credit the significance of the liberalizing tendencies that were so obviously becoming manifest under Khrushchev: once a totalitarian state always a totalitarian state, unless, of course, it could be overthrown by force.)
But since the perfect totalitarian state did not yet exist, how did the theorists of totalitarianism know what it would look like in a fully realized condition? The answer is that they knew from the Nazi concentration camps, which, as they rightly understood, had in part been set up to serve as models and as “laboratories” for experimenting with techniques of absolute domination. Here was where totalitarianism stood nakedly revealed; here was its essential meaning; here was what the system was really all about.
So far, so good. The trouble began with a tendency to speak of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as though they had already attained to the perfection of vast concentration camps, and as though the Nazis in their style and the Communists in theirs had already been transformed into the new men of the transvalued totalitarian future. Yet on the basis of a somewhat more optimistic view of human nature than is implicit in the theory of totalitarianism (which substitutes for the naïve liberal idea of the infinite perfectibility of man the equally naïve idea of the infinite malleability of man), one may be permitted to doubt that the whole world could under any circumstances ever be made over into a concentration camp. As it is, Soviet Russia seems to be moving in the other direction. And so far as the Third Reich is concerned, it lasted for less than thirteen years and conquered only a small section of the globe, with the result that: (1) Nazi Germany never had a chance to seal itself off completely from outside influences; and (2) the people who participated actively in Nazism knew they were being criminal by the standards under which they themselves had been raised and that also still reigned supreme in the “decadent” culture of the West.
This is why it is finally impossible to accept Miss Arendt’s conception of Eichmann’s role and character. Eichmann was not living in the ideal Nazi future, but in the imperfect Nazi present, and while we can agree with Miss Arendt that, as a mere lieutenant-colonel, he probably did not enjoy the importance that the Israeli indictment attributed to him, neither can he have been quite so banal as she makes him out to be. After all, there was enough opposition to the Final Solution to have persuaded him that not everyone looked upon the murdering of Jews as a fine and noble occupation, and after all, he was a first-generation Nazi and an important enough one to have been trusted with a large measure of administrative responsibility for a top-priority item in the Nazi program. Now, if we are not to lose our own minds in the act of trying to penetrate into the psychology of the Nazi mind, we must be very careful to keep it clear that this item of the Nazi program—the “cleansing” of Europe, and ultimately the whole world, of Jews—was literally insane. It is one thing to hate Jews, but it is quite another to contemplate the wholesale slaughter of Jews; it is one thing to believe that no nation-state can be healthy when it contains “alien” elements, but it is quite another to decide upon the murder of eleven million people (the estimated target of the Final Solution) as a means of achieving ethnic homogeneity. Ponder the difference between the Germans and the Rumanians in this connection. The Rumanians were the worst anti-Semites in Europe and were delighted to join in the butchering of Jews, until they discovered that there was money to be made from the saving of Jews, whereupon they began saving Jews: this is pathological anti-Semitism bounded by rational limits. The Germans, on the other hand, regarded the Jews, whom they had rendered utterly helpless with a stroke of the pen, as dangerous enemies, and they were so convinced of the necessity to do away with these enemies that they were willing to let the war effort suffer rather than let up: this is pathological anti-Semitism bounded by no rational limits. Insanity, in short.»
«It is in this insanity, I believe, and not in the pedestrian character of Adolf Eichmann, that whatever banality attaches to the evil of the Final Solution must be sought. And because Hitler and his cohorts were madmen on the Jewish question, there is probably little of general relevance we can learn from the Final Solution beyond what the Nuremberg trials established concerning the individual’s criminal accountability when acting upon superior orders, even within a system guided by insane aims. There is, however, much to be learned from the Final Solution about other matters, and principally about anti-Semitism. When Miss Arendt speaks of the amazing extent of the moral collapse that the Nazis caused “everywhere,” she must be referring specifically to the Jewish question. The will to fight the German armies did not collapse everywhere, and the will to defend democracy against the Nazi onslaught stood up well enough to triumph in the end; the only collapse that took place “everywhere” was a collapse of the will to prevent the Nazis from wiping the Jews off the face of the earth. Here again, Miss Arendt can be refuted out of her own mouth, for acquiescence in the Final Solution (as she demonstrates) was far from universal in Europe (though it may well have been nearly universal in Germany). The fact remains, however, that there was acquiescence enough to allow this insane Nazi ambition to come very close to succeeding. Nobody cared about the Gypsies because nobody ever thinks about the Gypsies—except the police. But how did it happen that nobody cared about the Jews when everyone seems always to be thinking about the Jews? The question surely answers itself, and the answer incidentally provides the justification for Ben Gurion’s statement that one of the purposes of the Eichmann trial was to make the nations of the world ashamed.
[...]
This habit of judging the Jews by one standard and everyone else by another is a habit Miss Arendt shares with many of her fellow-Jews, emphatically including those who think that the main defect of her version of the story is her failure to dwell on all the heroism and all the virtue that the six million displayed among them. But the truth is—must be—that the Jews under Hitler acted as men will act when they are set upon by murderers, no better and no worse: the Final Solution reveals nothing about the victims except that they were mortal beings and hopelessly vulnerable in their powerlessness. And as with the victims, so with those who were lucky enough to survive the holocaust. There is no special virtue in sheer survival, whatever Bruno Bettelheim may say, and there is no martyrdom in sheer victimization, whatever certain sentimentalists among us may think.»
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 20-Nov-2025 21:59:08 JST
simsa03
Hannah Hindley, "University of Arizona astronomer develops novel method to make AI more trustworthy" https://news.arizona.edu/news/university-arizona-astronomer-develops-novel-method-make-ai-more-trustworthy
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 18-Oct-2025 17:29:54 JST
simsa03
Gregory Barber, "The Math of Catastrophe" https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-of-climate-change-tipping-points-20250915/
«But physicists studying bifurcations had found that near or at the point of transition, the behavior of a complex system can simplify as it passes from one state to another. “Sometimes a high-dimensional system can tip,” said Lenton, “and when it gets near tipping, it starts to behave like a much lower-dimensional system.” The lesson, he added, echoes the one learned at Peter Lake: to “simplify without oversimplifying.”»
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 18-Oct-2025 16:37:10 JST
simsa03
Walter Marsh, "The great butterfly heist: how a gentleman collector stole thousands of butterflies from Australian museums" https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/oct/04/great-butterfly-heist-how-collector-stole-thousands-butterflies-from-australian-museums
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Sep-2025 07:12:17 JST
simsa03
Steve Rose, "‘Yoda’ for scientists: the outsider ecologist whose ideas from the 80s just might fix our future" https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/apr/10/scientists-john-todd-eco-machines-pollution-technology-ships-oceans
«Todd’s solution to the Harwich pollution problem was both beautifully simple and unfathomably complex. Next to the lagoons, he assembled a line of 15 clear-sided fiberglass tanks, each about the height of a person, and filled them with water containing all the different life forms he could find from local ponds, marshes and streams – plants, bugs, bacteria, fungi, general gunk. The water could be pumped from one tank to the next, and the living matter inside them soon organised itself into a series of different ecosystems. Todd found that he could put in polluted water from the lagoons at one end of the line of tanks and by the time it came out the other end, 10 days later, it was clean enough to drink.»
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