Author: doodledweller
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ML for Creative Writing, Cont.
“You shall know a word by the company it keeps!” is the historically common approach to linguistic modeling. It uses word vectoring, or word embedding, to train a set of word vectors based on a large corpus of text. With each word represented by a point in the embedding space, these points are learned and…
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Silken Tofu
Unless tofu is life, one would think it too much effort to ferment soy whey just to make tofu. But in East Asia, soy is life; as in elsewhere, cow milk is life. Just as folks have devised myriad ways to process cow milk, others have accumulated knowledge over millennia to turn soybeans into soy…
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Making Cheese & Tofu
I was raised on soy rather than milk. Once I grew teeth, my kiddie diet included soy milk, fried tofu, and soy sauce, but hardly any milk, and certainly no cheese. When I moved to the United States, I was surprised to find that despite the numerous tofu varieties available, none tasted like the ones…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread: The Panettone
On the other end of the yeasted sweet bread spectrum, we have the panettone, packed with eggs and butter, tower tall and impossibly fluffy like a bed of soft cloud. In the south of France, it is called the brioche aux fruits, also known as the gâteau des rois, or the Twelfth-Night cake – reserved…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread
It all started with the holiday baking project – fermenting flour, sugar, and butter into decadent, fluffy, and buttery panettoni. Yeasted sweet bread suddenly seemed so fascinating, arousing in me a desire to learn more about this mouth-watering arena of bread baking. I’ve learned to appreciate textures that only a yeasted sweet bread can give…
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Horn Salt
Horn salt, aka piss salt, is deer horns ground into salt, used as a leavening agent for baking. It does bewilder me to consider the first one to think of grinding antlers into powder, and then proceeded to add it to flour to be baked into flat breads and cookies, especially that it smells like…
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House of Ten Thousand Frames
They say that memory is not reliable; but it is all we have to tell the story of our life, to remind us of who we are. Whenever the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More comes on, I come back to my 8-year-old self at my friend’s house, listening over a cassette tape. The Beatles’ And I…
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February 14th
February 14th is Valentine’s day. It’s the day to celebrate love, and love is a complicated topic. Like the concept of time, the concept of love has been debated, over and over, since the dawn of time. Everyone wants to be loved, but you can’t make others love you. You can, however, learn to give…
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The Fourth Dimension
“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his time plays many parts,His acts being seven ages.”–William Shakespeare We perceive our world in four dimensions, constituting space and time. The first three dimensions make space, but it’s the fourth that fascinates the…
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