The ROT project - Root Of Time

Visual evidence of the past 11 and a half years.

"Distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" wrote Albert Einstein just a month before he died.  Not a surprising statement for the author of the relativity theory. Even if that was just a consolation of a man who felt that his life is coming to

an end.

The concept of time definitely deserves a thorough treatment, and I will hopefully dig in it in some future post of this blog. For now I will just agree that time is thus only an illusion, but the progression from the past to the future (and not vice-versa) is really hard to dismiss. Can we have a simple and clear visual evidence of the past? If I take an empty plank at the start and put a nail in it at regular time intervals, then the accumulation of the nails on the plank can be such an evidence.

Instead of the plank I took a tree root. For the time interval I chose a week. Every Sunday I would put a nail (more likely a screw) in it. The root is big enough for 784 screws, 784 weeks, 5488 days or 15 years. That is the estimated time of the rest of my life - based on life expectancy for men of my age. Screws in the root should form a path, so that past can be traced back to every individual moment (week). To make this path more traceable, I should

paint the heads of the screws sequentially with eight colors: black, dark blue, green, light blue, red, violet, yellow and gray. Alternatively, instead of painting the screws' heads I could draw a path between points on the root colored with eight colors. In that case I would not need screws at all. But screws add a bit of dramatic and solid sense.

Before actually starting this lifelong project, I made a computer simulation. On the plane model of the root I generated a mesh of quadrilaterals with approximately 784 nodes. I chose a starting node for the first screw (at the bottom left) and then simulated the path (should I say the time?) so that the next screw was in the next closest node. Both versions (colored heads and colored path) are shown in the pictures and both look quite nice.

I put the first screw in the root on Sunday, 2.8.2020. The head of this screw is not colored, to distinct it from all other screws. 

Today, 21.9.2020, I have seven screws in the root and, interestingly, the proportion of their  area to the area of the whole root somehow indicates the time left to my death. I therefore could not claim that I was caught unprepared.

The root.

Plane model of the root with quadrilateral elements and nodes.

Simulated path for 600 weeks - version with colored screws heads.

Simulated path for 600 weeks - version with colored continuant path.

Minimalistic cooking recipes

Dumplings with baked paprika.
I-B:Dough,D:Soft Cheese. P-Wrap. M-Boil,15'. P-Remove. I-V:Paprika. P-Add.  

There's been an explosion of cooking activities in the media in the last years. Culinary gurus from various backgrounds are emerging from every nook and cranny and fascinate us with their unique masterpieces. Cooking product resembles more a work of art then edible food, requires mind-blowing number of pots, pans and procedures to create it and almost a novel to explain how to do it.

There is a permanent oscillation between specification and generalization in human history, and while it might be nice to have a recipe for reindeer's spleen sautee from North Tungusia with all its details, I suspect that cooking is not a rocket science and can be reduced to few basic tasks.

After all, no matter how artistic your food looks on the plate, it will blend already in your mouth, will hit your stomach as a paste, and there will be no difference whether it was cooked in a Michelin 3-star restaurant or it came from a tube which they use on a space station.

My minimalist cooking follows few basic principles: (a) food should be prepared in only one dish (possibly temporarily removing (P-Remove) or adding (P-Add) some ingredients between the cooking dish and the serving plate); (b) recipes include ingredients (I-), procedures (P-) and heat media (M-) which are organized into few basic groups; (c) recipes could be generalized so that some or all of the ingredients may be replaced with some other; (d) recipes are written in a short, symbolized form in a line or two and should be read at a glance.

This approach should be clear from the following one-page cue-sheet. It starts with a table that explains the formulation of ingredients, procedures, heat treatment and tasks (tasks are applied sequently, but optionally skipping or repeating some of them; brackets ([]) indicate an optional part). The cue-sheet includes 19 general and 14 specific recipes in a form of colored tasks.  In this generalized form it can be used as a quick reference or as an incentive to invent new recipes by (randomly) choosing different ingredients and tasks.

However, I realized that this might be too cryptic for many of you and a sample explanation is needed. So, how the first general recipe for Steak + vegs: 

"I-A,P-Whol,M-Cont. P-Rem. I-V,M-Oil. P-Add. I-C" 

translates into ordinary language? It means: I-A: take an ingredient from Animal group (a steak); P-Whol: dont' cut it; M-Cont: put it in the cooking pot on heated surface (without any oil) and fry it; P-Rem: remove it to from a cooking pot to a plate; I-V,M-Oil: cut and put vegetables in a cooking pot and fry them on oil; P-Add: add a steak from the plate to the cooking pot; I-C: add condiments to the pot.

Happy minimalist cooking!

  

Pots and plates: 
1-iron pot for induction. 2-aluminium wok for gas.  3-stainless steel pot for gas, for bigger quantities of food. 4-dish for electrical oven. 5-plate for microwave oven, for eating and as a temporary depository during cooking.

And some pictures of  my minimalist cooking products.

Dumplings with baked paprika (cooked in wok).
I-B:Dough,D:Soft Cheese. P-Wrap. M-Boil,15'. P-Remove. I-V:Paprika. P-Add.  

Eggs with mushrooms (cooked in wok, on gas) 
I-V:Onio,Mushr, M-Oil. P-Remov. I-A:Egg, M-Oil. P-Add. I-C:Coriander. 

Stuffed paprika (cooked in pot no.3, on gas);
I-A:Mince,V:Oni,B;Rice, M-Oil,10'. I-V:Paprika, P-Fill.
I-S;TomPas,Oil,Wat,C;SP. M-Steam,35'. I-C:Coriander.

Baked Sea Bream with vegetables (cooked in pot no.4, in oven);
I-A:SeaBream, P-Whole, I-V:Paprika,Tomat,Garlic,C:Oil,LemonJuic.
M-Air,200C,12', I-V:Lemon.

Coronavirus epidemic predictions

WTF has Coronavirus to do with MiniBe? Did I "mak-a a mistak-a"? No, Coronavirus is perfectly suitable for the introductory post in this blog abut minimal way of living. Virus' size is about 1 micrometer. It has reduced its structure down to the basics, the pure parasitic DNK, to the border line between living and non-living things. It can't get more minimal than this! Yet, this minimal, mindless thing manages to almost crush the civilization of the most glorious species in the evolution of life (by its own proclamation, though). Which makes you wonder if "purpose" or "intelligence" really matter. So let the virus be the star of the opening post of this blog.

I simulated the epidemics by a simple model, which I will discribe here in short. During the epidemic the virus spreads in the population P. At a certain time there are four non-overlapping groups of people in the population. N are the people who haven't been affected by the virus, but are susceptible to infection. C are the contagious: people infected by the virus who can spread the disease to susceptible. D are those who were infected and died. R are those who were infected, recovered and became immune (i.e. are not susceptible). We also define a group A=C+D+R, i.e. people affected by the virus in any way. The groups are related by: P=N+C+D+R=N+A. Epidemic ends when C=0.

The basic parameters of the epidemic are the contagiousness c, mortality m and survival s. The virus spreads in a day i by new infections ΔAi from the group C according to the rules:

ΔAi=Ci-1 c ,  ΔDi=ΔAi m,  ΔRi=ΔAi s

Epidemic data in the world population on day 27 may 2020 and projection for two future months is shown on the following figure. According to this prediction the epidemic will last till the end of July and will cause about 555000 deaths.

Covid-19 epidemic in  the world; real data up to 27-May-2020 and projection.