Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
The Imaginary Factories Inside All Our Gadgets
WHAT IF AN IPHONE WASN’T JUST A GADGET BUT A PLACE WHERE TINY PEOPLE WORKED? THE IMAGINARY FACTORY SERIES EXPLORES THE INNER LIFE OF OUR TECHNOLOGY.
The problem of explaining how technology works to an inquisitive kid can befuddle the best of parents. It’s easier to explain to a kid how a radio works if you pretend that, instead of transistors, there’s a tiny orchestra inside every box. Likewise, a television is the stage of a versatile, microscopic theatrical company; a computer, filled with wizards and mathematicians.
Maybe it’s because grown-ups resort to such whimsical explanations of technology that there’s something so deeply satisfying, as an adult, to think of our gadgets as filled with a race of tireless Lilliputians. Twenty-eight-year-old PUK artist Jing Zhang’s work explores the imaginary world of the tiny imaginary people who live inside our iPhones, televisions, cameras, and teapots. Her Imaginary Factories are very charming, indeed.
Part How Stuff Works, part Polly Pocket, Zhang’s Imaginary Factories peel back the layers inside our favorite devices to reveal the whimsical factories within. Her work isn’t going to teach anyone how to tear down an iPhone or a digital camera, but it does humanize our technology by making us think about it more intimately: the gadget, not as a sandwich of silicon and glass, but as a workplace some tiny munchkin might conceivably spend 40 hours a week in.
"One thing that really intrigued me in the creation of Imaginary Factories was Ikea furniture manuals," Zhang tells Co.Design. "They are just the amazing, beautifully designed pieces of universal instruction." What Zhang wanted to do with her Imaginary Factories was borrow the design language of an Ikea brochure and bring it to life with as much vividness as a kid’s playhouse.
In Zhang’s designs, for example, Apple’s iPhone becomes a long, mostly flat radio station. An antenna connected to a giant mainframe sucks in and spits out broadcast signals, while blue-collar pixies man the intricate clockwork of the camera and gesture control apparatuses. A digital camera, on the other hand, is like a multistory printer, in which different wavelengths of light are combined into a single vibrant photograph. A cuckoo clock doesn’t just house strange clockwork birds but actual people, pulling on cords and working levers. And in Zhang’s world, even something as simple as baking a cake can be explained with the metaphor of the munchkin.
"I believe there is a miniature world in everything," says Zhang. And she’s right, of course. Our gadgets may not be filled with tiny people, but like any factory, they do have inner lives to be explored. Zhang’s infographics might not explain to archeologists of the future the specifics about how the technology inside an iPhone actually worked, but that’s not what they’re for. Zhang’s Imaginary Factories aren’t so much a glimpse inside our gadgets as they are a glimpse into the child within all of us.
You can explore Zhang’s other work here.
Big-picture thinker. Likes the window seat.
Photo by Dragon Images/Shutterstock
Introverts, rejoice! The Internet thinks your glorious idiosyncrasies and private vexationsare adorable and that you are worthy of complex care and feeding. Yes, it's great to be an introvert in 2013! So how do you know if you are one?
Huffington Post’s popular diagnostic, "23 Signs You’re Secretly an Introvert," says you may claim membership in this elite club if “idle chatter” fails to thrill you, if networking “feels disingenuous” (you “crave authenticity in [your] interactions”), if you “have a penchant for philosophical conversations and a love of thought-provoking books and movies,” if you’re “geared toward intense study and developing expertise,” if you “have a keen eye for detail,” and if your habit of “thinking before [you] speak” gives you a “wise” reputation. There’s more: You might also be an introvert if you “look at the big picture” and if you prefer the window or aisle seat on buses.
I always thought I was an introvert because occasional bouts of solitude recharge me and lots of excited conversation with new people eventually turns me limp. But given the above lofty criteria, maybe I'm actually an extrovert? Luckily, Gawker’s Caity Weaver has come out with a list of “15 Unmistakable, Outrageously Secret Signs You Are an Extrovert.” They include:
You interact with other humans in orthodox ways and sometimes it’s fun and sometimes it’s not and mostly it’s whatever.
When you want to stay in, you just do it without making a big, aggrieved production about how it is absolutely essential for you to stay in sometimes—you need to do it, you just have to recharge—because you have extreme intermittent photosensitivity...OF THE SOUL.
You speak at a volume perceivable by humans.
So maybe I am, secretly, an extrovert. Or an ambivert, which is a mix of the two personality types. This makes me a little sad, since the cachet of the introvert seems to have skyrocketed recently: A great piece by Sandip Roy, “The Introvert Strikes Back,” posits that “the tables are turning … The Introverts Rights Revolution … might well be upon us.” Books like Quiet: The Power of the Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talkingand articles like “Why Introverts Can Make Excellent Executives” imply that introversion is marketable. And, anecdotally, sighing over your “old lady ways” and “social awkwardness” has become a bit of a humblebrag—as if you can’t wait to get the check, go home, and work on your novel while your silly friends fritter away their youth at some gross bar.
So why the cultural apotheosis of the lone wolf? Why has she captured both our admiration (with her supposed profundity) and our sympathy (with her supposed fear of social gatherings)? Why does she get to climb the Parnassus of nerd-cool, one commendatory listicle at a time, while friendly, tail-waggy extroverts are left in the dust?
It’s the Internet’s fault, writes Amy Grey in the Sydney Morning Herald. The online balance of power between introverts and extroverts is totally skewed. Grey says that “the Internet has become an introvert’s playground,” allowing them to “perform to a captive and sympathetic audience.” Online, they control the terms of their social engagement. They can unplug at any time. And yet they still enjoy the benefits of communicating with others, of feeling heard and valued. (This makes the Web a great place for shy extroverts, too. They can interact from a distance, take time to compose their thoughts, and present a safe, curated image to the world.) Drawn by these advantages, introverts and shy extroverts flock online, where they produce lots of introvert/shy extrovert clickbait (seehere, here, and here). And then the poor, conforming regular extroverts, who just want to get along with the group, adopt the new norms, the ones lionizing introspection and alone time, and soon enough our nation's bars and restaurants will be empty, with everyone busy at home being "introverted."
Of course, the scientific definition of introversion is different from the Internet's definition. The introvert label doesn’t mean you are scared of others—that’s shyness—or that you contain mental and emotional depths incomprehensible to the trifling masses. It merely describes a person who prefers interacting in smaller social groups and occasionally wishes to be left alone. How trendy
Monday, August 26, 2013
Don’t Wash Your Chicken! No Matter What Your Cookbook Says.
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Posted Monday, Aug. 26, 2013, at 2:19 PM
To wash or not to wash?
Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
NPR’s excellent food blog, The Salt, draws our attention to a public health campaign created by researchers at Drexel University and New Mexico State University called “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” (No beating around the bush for this campaign.) The centerpiece of the campaign is a horrifying 14-second animated video that portrays germs, represented by green goo, splattering everywhere as a woman washes a chicken: onto countertops, onto nearby cheese and produce, onto paper towels, and onto the washer’s T-shirt.
"There's no reason, from a scientific point of view, to think you're making it any safer," explains Drexel food safety researcher Jennifer Quinlan, "and in fact, you're making it less safe." Studies back Quinlan up: The only way to kill the bacteria on chicken is to cook it properly.
The Salt sets up the advice of “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” in opposition to that of Julia Child, who endorsed chicken-washing on The French Chef. But Child is hardly the only famous cookbook author to recommend giving poultry a rinse before cooking it. Here are a few other food luminaries who, according to my research, have sanctioned the practice:
- Martha Stewart (in Martha’s American Food)
- Mark Bittman (in the New York Times)
- James Beard (in The Essential James Beard Cookbook)
- Alton Brown (in I’m Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0)
- Marion Cunningham (in The Fannie Farmer Cookbook)
- Marcella Hazen (in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking)
- Sheila Lukins (in USA Cookbook)
- Harold McGee (in Keys to Good Cooking)
- Michael Ruhlman (in Ruhlman’s Twenty)
- Marcus Samuelsson (in Aquavit and the New Scandinavian Cuisine)
- Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (in The Joy of Cooking)
If you feel confused and betrayed by all your favorite cookbook authors, take heart: There's one typically impeccable source that's told us the truth for almost a decade. "Don't rinse poultry before cooking," say the editors of Cook's Illustrated in The Science of Good Cooking. "You aren't killing any bacteria and you may be spreading bacteria around your kitchen." Cook's Illustrated has taken this safety-minded stance since 2004. However, a glance at their 1999 publication The Cook's Illustrated Complete Book of Poultry indicates that they recommended rinsing birds in the late 20th century. We guess nobody's perfect, especially when it comes to the counterintuitive danger of washing chicken.
How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bottle
FROM A 17TH-CENTURY FISH SAUCE, KETCHUP EVOLVED INTO A PATENT MEDICINE, A CARCINOGENIC HEALTH HAZARD, AND EVENTUALLY, A NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID. HERE’S HOW KETCHUP’S RICH HISTORY IS REFLECTED IN THE DESIGN OF A BOTTLE OF HEINZ.
What do you think about when you see a glass bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup on a table? If you’re like most people, you probably don’t pay very close attention to it. It is a means to a hot dog’s end, unremarkable except for its ability to spread a thick, sweet-and-sour tomato puree on some item of food. Otherwise, what is there to say? But even commonplace objects have been designed, and seemingly simple questions about the design of something as unremarkable as a bottle of ketchup can have remarkably deep answers.
How deep, then, is a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, really? What is the meaning behind the "57 Varieties" label wrapped around the bottle’s mouth, and why is it there? Why is a bottle of Heinz Ketchup transparent, instead of opaque? And why does the bottle make such a point of emphasizing that it is specifically full of tomato ketchup, when ketchup is synonymous with tomatoes?
WHY TOMATO KETCHUP?
Although we most closely associate ketchup with tomatoes these days, ketchup was around for hundreds of years before anyone even dreamed of chucking a tomato in the bottle. In fact, that most American of condiments isn’t even American. It’s Asian.
The long history of ketchup in the Western world extends back to the early 16th century, when British settlers in Fuji were introduced to a sauce used by Chinese sailors called ke-tchup. Local recipes for ke-tchup varied, butthe first recipe on record dates back to 544 A.D. and instructs any prospective condiment maker to "take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark and mullet, and wash them well. Mix them with a moderate amount of salt and place them in a jar. Seal tightly and incubate in the sun. It will be ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring or fall and a hundred days in winter."
By the time the British discovered ke-tchup, the recipe had been simplified into a pungent, amber-colored liquid made out of salted and fermented anchovies. In a very real way, the original ketchup wasn’t ketchup at all. It was fish sauce, pretty much identical to the fish sauce you can buy by the bottle in any Asian supermarket. When British traders headed back to England with a taste for the sauce, they attempted to re-create it, Anglicizing it with the addition of (what else?) beer. Eventually, anchovies were taken out of the sauce entirely and replaced with walnut ketchup (Jane Austen’s favorite kind) and mushroom ketchup (which tastes similar to Worcestershire sauce).
In fact, even as they experimented with every other variety, the English enjoyed ketchup for close to 200 years before anyone thought of chucking a tomato in the mix. The resistance to tomato ketchup can largely be chalked up to the widespread misconception among Europeans that tomatoes, which looked nearly identical to deadly nightshade berries, were poisonous. Tomatoes were largely considered an ornamental curiosity for gardens ever since Cortez had brought them back from the Americas in the 1500s, but they weren’t meant to be eaten.
Despite its status as a native fruit, Americans inherited Europe’s aversion to tomatoes. There were, of course, tomato advocates. In 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, New Jersey, stood on the steps of the local courthouse and consumed an entire basket of tomatoes to prove they weren’t poisonous. By and large, though, it wasn’t until the 1830s that America got hip to the fact that tomatoes could be delicious. In 1834, an Ohio physician named Dr. John Cook Bennett declared tomatoes to be a universal panacea that could be used to treat diarrhea, violent bilious attacks, and indigestion. Pretty soon, Bennett was publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which were then concentrated into pill form and sold as a patent medicine across the country.
By 1876, tomatoes had undergone a remarkable turnaround in the court of public opinion. Tomato ketchup was not only popular, but because of the teachings of an influential quack promulgated by the patent medicine trade, tomato ketchup was actually considered to be a sort of tonic, a condiment that was actually healthier than normal ketchup.
At the time, though, nothing could be further from the truth.
WHY IS THE BOTTLE TRANSPARENT?
"Filthy, decomposed and putrid." These were the words that cookbook author Pierre Blot used in 1866 to describe the quality of commercial ketchups being sold at the time. Of course, prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (and as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously showed), the food manufacturing business as a whole could largely be described with these same memorable adjectives. But ketchup was particularly bad. In fact, when you opened a bottle, the contents could literally kill you.
The reasons ketchup was such vile, potentially deadly slop are varied, but start with the shortness of the tomato season. Lasting from mid-August until mid-October, ketchup could only be made fresh for two months out of the year. However, by the late 19th century, Americans were used to expecting ketchup year around. A year’s worth of ketchup could not be made in two months, so manufacturers preserved tomato pulp to meet yearly expectations. It wasn’t a bad strategy, except for the fact that they did so with the same carelessness, filthiness, and lack of quality control that was endemic in the food manufacturing industry at the time. Entire barrels of pulp were stored so badly that, when open, they were found to be filled with mold, yeast, spores, and deadly bacteria.
The result was that commercial ketchups in the 19th century were disgusting filth from the get-go, and only got worse in processing. To prevent the ketchup from moldering further, ketchup makers filled their batches with harmful preservatives, including boric acid, formalin, salicylic acid, and benzoic acid. Then, because ketchup with the pulp sieved out is actually more yellowish than anything else, coal tar was added to dye the ketchup red. To put this particular additive in its proper perspective, coal tar is flammable enough to fire boilers, is commonly used to coat asphalt in parking lots, and in concentrations above 5% is considered a group 1 carcinogen. Still worse: Many ketchups were cooked in copper tubs, leading to a chemical reaction between the copper and ketchup that could actually make the concoction poisonous to consume. How bad were the ketchups of the time? In a study of commercial ketchups conducted in 1896, 90% of all ketchups on the market were found to contain "injurious ingredients" that could lead to death.
This was the sorry state of ketchup when Henry J. Heinz released his first bottle in 1876. But Heinz was a visionary, a morally strong man who believed that "heart power is better than horse power." Under his leadership, the H.J. Heinz Company was truly ahead of its time. The factories were models of progressiveness. Not only were Heinz employees given free life insurance, death insurance, doctor and dental services, but also access to onsite cafeterias, dining rooms, medical stations, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and roof gardens. The workers were also encouraged to be meticulously clean. At a time when many factory workers didn’t even have running water at home, Heinz provided fresh uniforms, a free laundry service, and even an in-house manicurist to help them keep their nails immaculate. In fact, Heinz’s factories were such models of cleanliness and happiness that 30,000 visitors were allowed to tour the factory every year. Heinz felt he had absolutely nothing to hide.
Heinz wasn’t just driven to make his workers happy and healthy, though. At a time when no one else cared, Heinz was obsessed with making his products as pure as possible. It was a principle that had always guided Heinz in his business dealings. In fact, when Heinz began his career selling horseradish, he refused to sell it in the brown opaque bottles common at the time. Instead, he used transparent jars, so that buyers could see his horseradish’s purity for themselves before they gave him a penny.
But the recipe to make his ketchup as pure as his horseradish eluded Heinz for nearly two decades. It wasn’t until 1904 that Heinz’s chief food scientist, G.F. Mason, was able to find a good preservative-free recipe for ketchup. Before then, Heinz used many of the same preservatives as his competitors, even coal tar to dye his ketchup red. By 1906, though, the nut had been cracked, and Heinz was producing five million bottles of preservative-free ketchup every year.
If there was one principle that Henry J. Heinz valued more than any other, it was purity and transparency. "It is always safe to buy the products of an establishment that keeps its doors open," Heinz once famously wrote. That every bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup sold is see-through is no accident. It’s a design statement: purity through transparency.
57 VARIETIES
Each bottle of Heinz ketchup somewhat mysteriously brags about the company’s "57 Varieties" in a small label wrapped around the neck. That there are actually 57 varieties of Heinz products has literally never been true. Inspired by an advertisement he saw on a train for a company that made "21 varieties" of shoes, Heinz combined his favorite number, 5, with his wife’s number, 7, to brag about his company’s own breadth of products. When he first began to put the "57 Varieties" label on his ketchup bottles, the H.J. Heinz Company already produced over 60 different products.
So "57 Varieties" has literally always been playful nonsense. But the small label that circles the mouth of every bottle of Heinz ketchup sold? No nonsense there. It’s purely functional.
One interesting fact about ketchup that everyone should know is that it’s a non-Newtonian fluid. Naturally, ketchup is rather thin and watery, because the tomato pulp that gives it consistency is sieved out. As a result, commercial ketchup makers add a small amount of xanthax gum to their ketchup recipes to thicken it. But this ingredient has another side effect: It turns ketchup into a shear thinning fluid. In other words, how quickly ketchup flows depends upon the stress that is being placed upon it.
That ketchup is non-Newtonian is the main reason why getting it out of a glass bottle is so slow. Allowed to flow naturally, ketchup only travels at a speed of 147 feet per hour. The only way to speed it up is to apply force, which through the principle of shear thinning decreases the ketchup’s viscosity, and thus increases its flow rate. This is why you have to thump a bottle of ketchup to get it flowing from the bottle. The concussive force makes it flow faster.
But despite common opinion, the bottom of a bottle of Heinz Ketchup isn’t actually the best place to thump it. If you apply force to the bottom of a bottle of Heinz, the ketchup closest to where you smacked will absorb most of the force of impact. It will flow freely, but the ketchup that is viscously clogging the neck and mouth of the bottle won’t, leaving you no better off than you were before. The solution is to trigger the shear thinning effect at the top of the bottle, not the bottom. That unclogs the mouth and lets the ketchup below to freely flow.
So while the substance of Heinz’s "57 Varieties" label may be just a fanciful whim on the part of the company’s creator, its positioning is deliberate. It’s a target. By simply tapping the label with two fingers, you create the optimal conditions for shear thinning, transforming non-Newtonian ketchup into a free-flowing liquid. Physics!
TIMELESS
Of course, these days, most ketchup is sold in squeeze bottles. Even Heinz’s competitors have figured out how to make ketchup that they aren’t ashamed to sell in transparent containers. Tomatoes are synonymous with ketchup, and you’d be hard-pressed to find even the most grotesque, lunatic quack recommending ketchup as a cure-all.
None of that matters, though. A bottle of Heinz isn’t just a container of ketchup. It’s a design classic because of everything besides the ketchup it manages to bottle up: not just the history of a condiment or an object lesson in non-Newtonian physics but the guiding principles of a great man who believed, more than anything else, that good design was transparent. And also, perhaps, tasted pretty good on a plate of fries.
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