Why Asian food tastes so different to Western Food

Gizmodo has a great article looking at why Asian food tastes so, well, Asian. The short version is that we in the West tend to pair our food flavours – Blue cheese shares 73 flavour compounds with chocolate. But Asian food works in the opposite way, Asian recipes seek out the contrast in flavours making Asian cuisine distinctly different to European dishes.

If you like food pairing then you will love foodpairing.com. Here you can find interesting food pairs that can help take your personal cooking to new levels. For example, who knew that oysters and Kiwi fruit made a good combination?

How language affects how we see colour

You’d think we all see and perceive colours the same – after all, blue is blue right? This fascinating clip from a BBC documentary shows how language affects the way we understand colour.
Quite amazing:

‪Dancing squid bowl dish in Hakodate‬‏

According the the notes, the squid is dead and the sodium in the soya sauce reacts with the nerves in the squid causing it to dance. Probably not something we’ll put on the Spirit House menu – it’s macabre and fascinating all at the same time.

The story behind the Spirit House

A few weeks ago 3AW featured Spirit House on a talkback segment about ‘ magical places’ – they were swamped with callers from Victoria who’d been here and raved about their experience. As a follow up, they contacted Helen for an interview to find out the history and inspiration behind the Spirit House – so grab a cup of coffee and let Helen explain a bit of the Spirit House story.

Water hitting a hot pan in slow motion

Water boils at 100 ° c right? But what happens when a water droplet hits an extremely hot pan – say at 190° ? Shot at 3000 fps, this video shows a water droplet skipping across the pan. In fact, the water droplet can last for some time because as it hits the pan, a small layer of vapour comes between the pan and droplet, effectively protecting it from evaporation.

At temperatures lower than 195 ° the water disappears with a hiss.

Map of facebook connections

Paul Butler, an intern at facebook, decided to map the connections between ten million or so facebookers. I won’t go into the details of the how he did it but the map of the world you’re seeing above is made up of the densities of connections between friends in different cities and countries. In other words, you’d expect strong facebook friend connections within a city and between capitals so that is reflected in the map with bright spots and brighter connecting lines.
Relationships between countries are done with curved lines. It’s interesting for me to see Australia’s strong connection to Indonesia – especially coming out of Perth.
You can read more about this fascinating project and view a high res version of the map from facebook notes page.

Wedding Video with a difference

Occasionally we see wedding videographers at our weddings and I always wonder what the end result is – then I stumbled upon the following video from The Stylish Soiree. Shot in the style of Amelie, it is simply awesome:

Amelie Inspired Shoot from Lovespun ~ Handmade Films on Vimeo.

The sign of a good restaurant

In 1990, 30,000 people lined up to eat at Moscow’s first McDonald’s. I like the expressions on the faces of the people once inside – a cross between bewilderment and dissapointment. I’ve fallen victim to this in Thailand, a long queue was forming around a city block for a new chain of cinnamon bun stores – I passed this queue every day, dying to know what the fuss was about. Then one day, on closing time the line was small and I managed to get my hands on one – just a gooey sticky bun. This shop spurned some imitation stores and now, a few years later, there are none to be found – the trend has died. But McDonald’s has proven itself to be more than a trend, please enjoy Russia’s first taste of Captalistic Decadence in the video below:

How airlines make their money

One of the people on our tag-along tour had his partner cancel a month or two before the tour started – so he found a friend who was willing to come with him and rang his travel agency to make the name change for his airline tickets and hotel reservation (on our tag-along tours, you pay for your own flights and accommodation). He was amazed and shocked – changing the name for the flights and accommodation cost him an extra $500. We’re talking a few keystrokes – but then I was reading 50 amazing facts on the mental floss blog and fact 31 caught my eye:

31. In 2009, U.S. airlines collected $2.7 billion in baggage fees. Another $2.4 billion came from reservation change fees.

Imagine if a restaurant charged you to make changes to your reservation – by the airline or hotel standards, we’d be justified in doing so, after all, we collect the same sort of data as these other industries.

Just wanted to get that off my chest and I hope Saul feels better that I’ve given his complaint against the airlines some internet space.

Where do Super Models come from?

The answer is: Brazil.

This fascinating video from the New York Times shows a unique poverty stricken area in Brazil that has produced some of the world’s top super models like Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio. It turns out that German, Italian and Russian migrants settled in this area many years ago and their descendants have the features that the world finds attractive. Modelling scouts study books and websites to track which areas Europeans settled in. They then visit schools (which is kind of creepy) hunting for attractive teens and pre-teens (even creepier) for their modelling agencies.

I won’t spoil the rest of the story but the article and video can be found in the following link: Finding Supermodels in Rural Brazil – Video Library – The New York Times.