My breadchum Joanne took off for New York a couple of weeks ago, and before she left I persuaded her to lend me Hamelman's Bread to plunder. The first thing I did from it was a Semolina Bread with a soaker and fennel seed, made with commercial yeast. It was really good, and I planned to convert it...

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Björn over at 5¢ense points to a brief report, that the godlike J Craig Venter was slapped with a cease-and-desist by the estate of James Joyce, for daring to encode a Joyce quote in the DNA of the microbe Venter built.

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Wha...

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Odd how some things make us reassess other things. A little notice on The Fresh Loaf informed me that Bernard Clayton Jr had died, and I realised I knew absolutely nothing about the person who wrote the book that first gave me a real idea of how interesting and varied bread and bread-making could...

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Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?

It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". ¹

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I know there are readers who don’t care that what they see here is now being served by a delicious new all-singing, all-dancing, super-spiffy server -- but they might give silent thanks when they (or so I am promised) receive far fewer error messages in the future. For them, then, which is probably...

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