Roxanne Shante is my new hero:
(via Mental Oasis)
Monthly Archive for October, 2007
At the vegan grocery store in San Diego, they sell raw vegan cheesecake. It’s really delicious, but it costs $5/slice. So I thought I’d try to make one myself.
I found what looked like a good recipe, and noted that I had to soak some cashews. 10 hours later, I took my newly soaked cashews and started assembling the cheesecake, only to realize that there was much more to this thing than soaking cashews. Not only do those nuts need a bath, the almonds have to be soaked too, only they are only in for two hours. The dates have to be soaked for 5-10 minutes. The pureed almonds and cashews need to sit at room temperature for 10-12 hours. The strawberries need to be frozen. The crust needs to chill in the fridge, the cashews for the “whipped cream” need to be soaked for 10 hours, but they are supposed to be done soaking 10 hours after the cashews for the filling. And when you have it finally assembled, it’s supposed to be frozen for 8 hours!
Gah! What onerous demands! Let’s create a chart of the onerosity:
hour 0: put cashews in to soak, put strawberries in freezer
hour 8: put almonds in to soak
hour 10: blend up nuts, set filling aside, start soaking nuts for whipped cream, make crust and set in fridge
hour 20: start soaking dates, blend up filling, slice strawberries
hour 20:10: blend up whipped cream, make strawberry topping
hour 21: assemble cake. put in freezer
hour 28.75: make strawberry sauce
hour 29: serve, finally!
Needless to say, I didn’t have the patience for this the first time, and just processed everything up into a nice pudding concoction. Delicious, but not quite what the recipe intended. I’m started a second one this evening, trying to adhere more closely to the directions, but I still made some timing mistakes. I could’ve really used that graph.
And the funny thing is, all these nuts and coconuts and organic california dates… they’re pretty darn expensive. The homemade version is probably a tad cheaper than buying the stuff by the slice in the store… but not by much. And what the heck am I going to do with a whole cheesecake?
Lots of San Diego is on fire right now, but in case anyone is worried about me: I’m not. We’re not even evacuated down here.
So don’t worry about me, but please worry about the others. A quarter of a million people are being evacuated. People are dead. Others have burns on over half of their bodies. I don’t know how to help, but help is needed.
“Snakes do serve some good. They eat up bugs and things that can damage crops, which is bad if you like vegetables. And you should. Just giving a plug for good living here.”
And later…
“Growing up is hard. Your parents blame you for dropping the dishes, or you come home late and you forget to feed your pet. It’s a miracle we make it this far. But the worst is over. The worst is over.”
This is my current best stab at it:
- It’s making new bodies out of computer parts. We engage the world by seeking out useful sensori-motor loops. Our bodies are critical parts of these sensori-motor loops. Some parts of tools are best described as part of our bodies.
- It’s about modeling computers in our heads. We construct internal models of external systems, and use these to predict useful interventions in the world. Over time these model/intervention/result/percept loops become sensori-motor loops as in (1) or they are externalized into extra-personal structures as in (3).
- It’s being a part of distributed cognitive systems that have computers in them too. We create and engage structures external to our bodies (other people, objects, culture, social structure) which allow us to take on larger cognitive problems than 1 & 2 alone would permit, or to do the same problems with less resources.
I’d like to draw a picture of this. Obviously, modeling activities (2) get offloaded into external structures (3). And sometimes we use modeling (2) to help us find and build external structures (3). Over time, the structures in (3) can become part of our bodies (1), and we use both our bodies (1) and external structures (3) to scaffold the modeling in (2). Basically, it’s a big rats nest. But I still want to draw it.