Midtown Delights

Hanging out at Midtown Coffee in Quincy, Ca. Rainy day. Reading, drawing, and this:



Coffee:
Ethiopian dark

Grub:
Cherry turnover

Found at C.A.N.

Found a can of this at C.A.N.:


It's delicious, smoky, and hot, man! I've been adding it to spice up my fixin's and I've learned to moderate it.

Chipotles are smoked jalapeno peppers. The adobo sauce usually includes the following ingredients:
cumin, paprika, coriander, fennel, yellow mustard, garlic, onion, ancho, pasilla and Mexican oregano.

In case you want to geek out on it, here's some background info on Chipotle Adobado

Chipotle, which comes from the Nahuatl word “chilpoctli” with "chil" meaning chile pepper and "poctli” meaning smoked (was originally “pochilli”). Morita means “small blackberry” in Spanish.

The ancient civilization of Teotihuacan was the largest city/ state in Mesoamerica (located north of modern day Mexico City). The original habitants of Teotihuacan smoked chiles hundreds of years before the Aztecs (1345-1521) did. This "smoke drying" process was initially used for drying meats but they found that smoking allowed the chiles to be stored for a long period of time. Teotihuacan is actually the Aztec name for the city, which translates to "Place of the Gods" as the original name has not been deciphered from surviving name glyphs (unique marks that collectively add up to the spelling of a word) at the site. Chile historians believe that the Aztecs also smoked jalapeno peppers because the fleshy, thick walls of the jalapeno were often difficult to dry in the sun and tended to rot.

Jalapeños are named after the town of Xalapa (often spelled as Jalapa) in Véracruz State (although no longer commercially grown there), and are also known by the names cuaresmeños, gordo or Lenten chiles. In Veracruz jalapenos are called “chiles gordos”, in Puebla and Oaxaca they're are called “huachinangos”. In its dried form, the traditional chipotle chile (known as chipotle “meco”) is a dull tan to deep coffee brown in color with a wrinkled, ridged surface. It is usually 2” to 4” long and 1” wide, with a medium thick flesh.

A Spanish friar living in Mexico in the 1500s wrote of a dish he ate in Cholula (modern day Puebla) called "teatzin" which had a sauce made from chipotle and pasilla chiles that was used to stew Lenten palm flowers and fresh jalapeno chiles.

After the fall of the Aztec Empire (1345-1521), smoked chiles were found mostly in central and southern Mexico markets of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz.

(from spicesinc.com) 

Oh, James, how I miss you. We need you now, more than ever.

I can't very easily put to words my regard for this man. I'm still reading, discovering, exalting in, and being astonished by his work. I'll let some of the words of others that have experienced his thoughts live here:

His examination of the heart image clears away constricting notions: heart as muscle and pump, as symbol of royal pride and willful energy, as seat of personal feelings.  Freed of these mechanical and personalized  notions, the heart can reclaim its place as organ of aesthetic perception that responds directly to the beauty of the sensuous world, much like the instinctual responses of animals.  Therefore, to restore the heart's courage and its imaginative power, the soul of the world needs the same attention that we have been giving to the soul of persons. For the soul cannot be owned only by humans. There is a soul quality to all things in the environment, whether "natural" or "manmade". 

And here is an obituary from the Guardian, written by Mark Kidel, 12/21/2011.

He was a dedicated subversive – witty and original – and an heir to the Jungian tradition, which he reimagined with unceasing brilliance. Fiercely critical of America's dedication to the pursuit of happiness, Hillman focused on the darkest and most difficult human experiences – illness, depression, failure and suicide – not merely as abnormal pathologies that should be avoided or cured. 

He drew on the writers and philosophers of the Italian Renaissance and ancient Greece, as well as a romantic tradition that included Keats, Goethe, Schelling and Dilthey. Not wishing to create a school of his own, he proposed an "archetypal" or "imaginal" psychology that would restore the psyche or soul to a discipline he believed to have been diminished by scientific and medical models. Influenced by the French Islamist and Sufi Henry Corbin, the poetics of Gaston Bachelard and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he argued that reality is a construct of the imagination – the stuff of myths, dreams, fantasies and images. There was, however, very little about his thought that was divorced from the world of money, war and politics. His unrelenting cultural critique embraced everything from masturbation to plastic surgery, and the design of ceilings to US foreign policy.

The "image" as an expression of the imagination, in poetry, dreams or visual art, was of paramount importance to him – as an antidote to the literalism that dominates everyday discourse. Hillman warned against the reductive tendencies of interpretation and theoretical speculation. He would advocate "sticking to the image", whose often indistinct or paradoxical language spoke, he argued, with more authenticity than verbal discourse. Film was an ideal vehicle for his ideas. He was the main contributor to my films The Heart Has Reasons (Channel 4, 1993), Kind of Blue (Channel 4, 1994) and the five part-series The Architecture of the Imagination (BBC2, 1994). 

Hillman drew on pre-Christian modes of thought – a polytheistic perspective reflecting the myriad possibilities of the human psyche, imagined as gods and goddesses, myths and metaphors whose polymorphous nature spoke for the instincts that shape our thoughts and actions more truthfully than the good-and-evil world of oppositions central to the monotheistic religions of the book.

Having practised as an analyst for 40 years, he eventually became highly critical of therapy. He argued that the sickness of humanity lay in the world rather than within each person. Therapy should, he believed, change politics, cities, buildings, schools and our relationship with the natural environment rather than focus solely on people's inner lives. 

He moved on to find a wider audience through a series of popular but still provocative books, including The Soul's Code (1997), which reached No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and The Force of Character (1999), works which explored, with examples running from Picasso to Hitler, the idea that we all have a calling, an individual and innate character which shapes our lives. In A Terrible Love of War (2004), he reflected on humanity's abiding martial ardour and need for the periodic spilling of blood, at great cost and with incalculable suffering. 

As well as writing beautifully – texts of layered intellectual exposition that were dense yet always skilfully articulated – Hillman was an electrifying lecturer and teacher: a tall and charismatic mixture of rabbinical scholar and comedian, with a breathtaking ability to lead his audience through arguments that turned accepted ideas upside down. Unlike other critics of the mainstream approach to mental illness, he was not "anti" anything, seeing in opposition a fantasy that drew us away from meaning and from life. He preferred to deconstruct, often playfully, whether he was speaking of plastic surgery, the politics of the Middle East or the paranoia of the psychiatric profession.

James Hillman, 1926-2011.  A hero in my world. If you can only read one of his books, get THE SOUL'S CODE.

PASSING AN ORCHARD BY TRAIN

Grass high under apple trees,

The bark of the trees rough and sexual,

the grass growing heavy and uneven.

We cannot bear disaster, like

the rocks--

swaying nakedly

in open fields.

One slight bruise and we die!

I know no one on this train.

A man comes walking down the aisle.

I want to tell him

that I forgive him

that I forgive him, that I want him

to forgive me.

ROBERT BLY

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
wide eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Beauty In Numbers, 1b: A circle, a spiral, a flower.

A curve that starts from a point and moves farther away as it revolves around the point is called a spiral.



















These happen everywhere in nature.  Spiral curves are seen in the way plants arrange their leaves in circular patterns. It turns out, rather beautifully, that these plant spirals are often formed according to something called the Golden Angle, which in turn, is related to the Golden Ratio, also seen in the Fibonacci series. I won't go into the Golden Ratio here( dude, look it up! ), but the Golden Angle seen below as angle b can be thought of this way: the ratio of the arc of b to a is the same as the ratio of a to the entire circle.

Another way to calculate it: Golden Angle = π(3 − √5) = roughly 2.4 radians = roughly 137.5 degrees.

Now, if we plot 500 points, plugging in the Golden Angle in R, the code would look like this:

# Defining the number of points
points = 500

# Defining the Golden Angle
angle = pi*(3-sqrt(5))

t = (1:points) * angle
x = sin(t)
y = cos(t)
df = data.frame(t, x, y)


resulting in

and if we clean it up and add some color, we get

Cool. I LOVE this!

Today's Breakfast of Champions

Coffee: San Francisco Bay French Roast beans (Costco)

Adulterated with:

1. Kirkland Organic Virgin Coconut Oil
2. Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter (unsalted)
3. Richi Turmeric Ginger Chai

Grub: homemade chocolate chip cookie (thanks Margaret)

For Team Purple

 A friend who had pancreatic cancer (and has since passed away) created a campaign to raise awareness and research funds called Purple Stride. I wasn't able to make the walk so I let her know I was thinking of her ...

The Beauty In Numbers, 1a: Plotting a circle.

Let's use math to draw pictures, shall we? There is a wonderful world out there of representing patterns in nature, especially flowers, in mathematical terms. Ever gazed into a sunflower? I hope so. I'm learning and exploring as I go along here, so I'll start with simple circle plots and move on from there. But where to start?  How about Pythagorus?

Although it is often argued that knowledge of the theorem predates him, the theorem is named after the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BC) as it is he who, by tradition, is credited with its first proof, although no evidence of it exists. There is some evidence that Babylonian mathematicians understood the formula, although little of it indicates an application within a mathematical framework. Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians all discovered the theorem independently and, in some cases, provided proofs for special cases. (Wikipedia)

The Pythagorean theorem is a wondrous thing, having to do with the relationship among the three sides of a right triangle. The theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It can be written as an equation relating the lengths of the sides a, b and c, :

where c represents the length of the hypotenuse and a and b the lengths of the triangle's other two sides.

But how do we turn this into compelling pictures? We can do a lot with this if we use software programs to draw or plot, say, circles. A lot of beautiful geometric patterns come out of circles, including patterns that represent the arrangement of petals and stems in flowers. But how do we get circles out of these triangles? By expressing the Pythagorean theorem in terms of trigonometric functions.

We need to move to trigonometry because we need to move beyond solving triangles. Trigonometry give use a mathematical description of our physical world, of things that rotate or vibrate, such as light, sound, the paths of planets about the sun or satellites about the earth. We have to have angles of any size, and to extend to them the meanings of the trigonometric functions.

The Pythagorean trigonometric identity states that sin²(θ) + cos²(θ) = 1 for any real number θ. Since every (x, y) point should be in the unit circle (a circle with a radius of 1), it follows that x² + y² = 1.

Okay. Now that we've established the background information, we can begin building a series of plots. We start by creating a dataset of two variables, x and y. First, we'll draw 50 points on a circle of radius 1. 

In R, some code for drawing (plotting) 50 points in a circle looks like this:

t = seq(0, 2*pi, length.out=50)
x = sin(t)
y = cos(t)
df = data.frame(t, x, y)

# Make a scatter plot of points in a circle
ggplot(df)

Running this code results in this:

Very basic, yes? But with various enhancements and tweaks to the code, we can begin to get images that look like the geometry seen in flowers.

Thanks to @aschinchon

Hello, you gorgeous algorithm you.

Can there be beauty in math?  I think so. I want to experiment with this idea for awhile. So, here goes a new series: The Beauty In Numbers. I'm going to off on a tangent (!) and study mathematics and art together.

Algorithmic Beauty in Plants

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. (Bertrand Russel)

Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is. (Paul Erdős)

An example of beauty in method Click to learn more.