Jeremy Cherfas

So much for taste being purely subjective. But there’s more. If taste were purely subjective, how would the evil NuFood Corp be able to engineer foods that taste so good that almost all of humanity becomes borderline addicted? 4/6

And yet, it is incredibly easy to leap from “this tastes good (to me)” to “I have good taste,“ and from there it is a hop, skip and jump to “I am a good person”. That being the case, my clear moral duty is to improve your taste and so to improve you. 3/6

What happens on my tongue, in my nose and especially in my brain is mine alone, and you can have little useful to say about it. You could of course point out that I have no idea how bad cilantro tastes to you, but that’s not helpful. 2/6

I’ve been getting myself in a right old muddle about taste lately. Not music or architecture – well, not entirely – but gustatory taste, the taste of food. Of course, we all acknowledge that taste is subjective. 1/6

I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done. And there’s no getting around it: we should learn to better work in this medium and we are really resisting having to confront it.This is a very real tension, to me.

So many interesting ideas about not returning to normal when (if?) this thing is over.

Chicken Skin Music is truly balm for the soul on an afternoon that feels weird for reasons I cannot put my finger on.

Today I happened across two wiseacres on Twitter – and no I am not going to bother with a link – who make me glad I am able to say nothing, there, in return. Turning off RTs doesn’t help either, when people will insist on quote RTs when they have nothing of substance to add.

I’m not actually a designer, and never will be, but I do enjoy trying to make my website pleasing on the eye, even if it is only my eye. So I was happy enough to go along with CSS Naked Day yesterday, not by removing all the stylesheets but by using ViewPage StyleNo Style in Firefox. And there was only one glaringly obvious problem: a hamburger icon that would choke the entire world.  Eric Meyer explained:But take away the CSS, and the SVG will become 1200 x 1000 again.  That might tell you to resize it for production, sure, and you probably should.  But it also points out that browsers will not constrain that image, not even to the viewport.  If your window is only 900 pixels wide, the SVG could well spill outside, forcing a horizontal scrollbar.  Is that good?  Maybe!  Maybe not!  We might wish browsers would bake something like img {max-width: 100%; height: auto;} into their user-agent stylesheet(s), but maybe that would have unforeseen downsides.  The point is, this is a thing about browsers that CSS Naked Day reveals, and it’s worth knowing.At some point, then, I ought at least think about defining the size of that monster. The rest of it, I’m OK with.

Amen to that, with knobs on.

I fully endorse this proposal.

Here’s that piece of pizza again, trying to decode what happens.

I’m prompted to note that the sounds our kettle makes depend on how recently it has been de-scaled, and I have no idea why that should be so. Our water is very hard, so I have observed this often, and it mystifies me.

Two minutes is probably a bit much for an intro. But I do think it is useful to introduce the person, if there is a guest, and at least give a hint of what you will be talking about. At least, that’s what I do.