My Saturday exercise walk took me out to 20th Ave and Irving St, where I saw that the shake-lovin' tricyclist sidewalk chalk art had accumulated more art down the block: a skateboarding Scooby Doo and an ambigram.
2026-01-20T16:43:56.070754
Book Report: Frostbite
It's a book about food preservation.
It's mostly about refrigeration; that's because in recent decades, developed countries concentrated on refrigration, setting aside research into other methods. When refrigeration first came along, consumers didn't really trust it: Who would dare to drink old milk just because it'd been stored in one of those newfangled noisy boxes? Generations later, we have the opposite problem. If someone figures out another way to preserve some kind of food, consumers might not trust that food to stay good if it hasn't been kept cold. It doesn't make sense for a grocery store to sell soy milk from its dairy case—until you consider that a considerable fraction of consumers balk at the idea of room-temperature "milk."
Our refrigeration system is pretty impressive. Reefer trucks haul things between refrigerated warehouses. Specialized workers have learned to get things done in cold storage; but not try to do too much as the cold is bad for bodies, bad for brains, bad for reaction time to avoid crashing. Cold is bad for our defenses against disease; our noses don't defend as well against diseases if those noses are nearly freezing.
The book covers a lot of ground. Some bits that struck me:
A lab where they develop suits for working at extreme temperatures.
In a test chamber with us, suspended from a sturdy metal frame, was a life-size gray manikin wearing a black woolen hat, a navy-blue turtleneck, dad jeans, Velcro sneakers, and a pair of mittens.
"Here's one of our thermal sweating manikins," said [North Carolina State Univeristy Thermal Protection Lab deputy director Shawn] Deaton. "This one has a breathing mechanism, so we call him Darth Vader. The other one is Anakin the Manikin, and of course we have Hand Solo for gloves."
(The book didn't explain the difference between a mannequin and a manikin, so I had to look it up. If it's for displaying fancy clothes, it's a mannequin, spelled like "quinceañera gown." If it's in a lab to measure what happens if, say, clothes are set on fire, it's a manikin, spelled like "kindling.")
The logistics of food transport get weird:
In nonpremium brands, a pint of ice cream is, on average 50 percent air. This leads to all sorts of logistical complications. National brands of ice cream have to use different formulations for different regions to take into account the thinner air at higher elevations. "You can't truck it from Washington to Georgia," Espinoza told me. "The Rockies, he explained, shaking his head.
Why do Americans put so much corn syrup/sugar in everything? Probably partly because we drink so many ice-cold beverages.
At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive. When food or drinks cool the tongue to below fifty-nine degrees, the channels through which these three taste receptors message the brain seem to close up, and the resulting signal is extremely weak. This is why a warm Coca-Cola or a melted ice cream is so sickly sweet: because they're intended to be consumed cold, they have to contain too much sugar to boost the signal and register in our brains as tasting sweet at all. In 1929, the president of Coca-Cola set up the Fountain Training School to ensure the drink was being prepared and served properly: salesmen were told, "It's gotta be cold if it's gonna be sold."
Those gross Jell-O/whipped cream "salads" may have started out as status signifiers, back when household refrigerators were novel.
Why is it a shame that developed countries went whole-hog for refrigeration, while letting other food-preservation methods languish?
Refrigeration contributes to rising greenhouse gas levels in two main ways. Generating the power to run cooling equipment, whether it be elictricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks, already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (Cold-storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.) Using renewable sources to generate that power would help, but solar-, wind-, geothermal-, and hydro-power generation are growing much too slowly to keep pace with demand. …
The other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas—either a little (roughly 2 percent a year from thee most up-to-date domestic refrigeratrs) or a lot (a third, on average, from small delivery trucks). Different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. Others like the hydrochlorfluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs and HFCs) that are popular in the developing world…are known as super-greenhouse gases because they are thousands of times more warming than CO2.
Before I read this book, I figured the best thing we could do for developing nations was help them set up a cold chain; now I wonder if we should work harder on other ways to preserve food. Pickles are nice. Who doesn't like pickles?
2026-01-15T21:06:55.797391
My morning walk was longer than intended. There was a fun run going on in Golden Gate Park today. I kept thinking "Surely I have made it around the edge of the racecourse. I can now head back directly towards home…" only to find my way blocked by yet more fun runners. Silver lining: When I did finally manage to head directly home, I thusly hit 20th Ave and Irving, where there was Kal Zakzouk chalk art.
2026-01-11T21:27:07.742072
Here are some of my popular posts from 2025. Now I can post a link to this post on the various social networks where I'm 99% dormant so folks can catch up. (If you're wondering about my active socials, that's mostly Mastodon and a little Bluesky.) Anyhow, behold the posts:
- I once again wrote many-many small puzzles during the month of EnigMarch. This one was popular, having a laugh as DOGE made bad budget "cuts" along with typos. (This one was funnier before the reports of the hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from those budget cuts came out, so pretend that news hasn't hit yet when reading): One Money Don't Stop No Show
- I snapped a pic of the building that housed Twitter HQ after they took down the Twitter sign. I guess this one was popular with my former co-workers.
- A short post quoted in its entirety here:
Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security.
That was before the 1½ month federal government October-November shutdown. My cousin figured out which way the wind was blowing a few months ahead of time. - I wrote Walkzee, yet another little phone web app to entertain you during walks. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just this year though it feels like forever ago.)
- I took photos around my neighborhood, including one useful for juvenile humor about LLMs: an advertisement for "AI Integrated PoS System."
- I walked around San Francisco on the new Roundabout Trail. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just a few months ago though it feels like forever. Wow, 2025 was a long year.)
2026-01-05T14:36:03.415566
Stencil artist Eclair Bandersnatch knows that it pays to increase your word power. Consider phthalates: if these chemicals are good for softening PVC plastic, maybe they can also soften your bones? The best way to find out is through experimentation, perhaps by eating microplastics or absorbing phthalates that are in cosmetics for some weird reason?
2026-01-01T14:39:34.048108
I have once again updated the Phraser phrase list and word list. These are big text files that list out some common phrases, along with a hazily-computed score number for each phrase; high-score phrases might be good candidates for puzzle answers; low-score phrases are so-so candidates. If you're a computer programmer and you want to write a little program to find the solution to a word puzzle, these files might come in handy if your logic is too gnarly for nutrimatic.
I gotta keep updating the lists, though. The list I generated six months ago doesn't think labubu is a thing. It acknowledged the existence of demon hunter but not kpop demon hunters. The old list doesn't know paramount skydance, the new list recognizes this modern monument to nepotism. The new list knows about phrases that have trended recently, including such gems as: in july 2025; in september 2025;… (many similar)…; sequel video games. OK, maybe they're not all gems. Anyhow, if you find these files handy for solving and/or designing word puzzles, head on over to the Phraser page and download the new ones.
2026-01-01T14:31:25.862171
A couple of weeks back, I once again spent an afternoon helping to playtest the MaPP Challenge '26, a puzzle hunt aimed at math-enthusiastic high school students. When university math outreach nerds run hunt at various cities, hopefully things will go smoothly because dedicated playtesters Dave Moulton and I bumped into all the rough edges so the MaPP people will have a chance to sand those down.
The youth might think it's "sus" that I was playtesting their puzzles: It's been 30+ years since I was a high school student. But it's fine: as a precaution, I forgot all of my university math and most my high school math, too. OK, that's an exaggeration. There were a few times during the playtest when I thought, "Oh, I recognize this! It's a [spoiler redacted]!" But I swear I failed to remember anything about [spoiler redacted] that would actually help solve the puzzle.
When I hauled my phone out of my pocket and ran the ClueKeeper app, it was still showing the MaPP Challenge 2025 playtest, which tells you how many puzzling events I've attended lately. (Zero (0))
2026-01-01T14:35:54.792637
