

Why Engineers Don't Write Recipe Books - guitartabguy
http://lettur.com/kkbbc

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aaronbrethorst
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Nathan Myhrvold's multi-volume cookbook:
[http://www.techflash.com/mobile/seattle/2010/08/former_micro...](http://www.techflash.com/mobile/seattle/2010/08/former_microsoft_cto_nathan_myhrvold_unveils_massive_cookbook.html)

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Dylanlacey
Given Intellectual Venturers' reputation, perhaps they are afraid of being
sued?

Modernist Cooking is still a fairly niche tome, even amongst the technorati
hobbyist cooks. I actually only stumbled across it a few weeks ago, and I have
Food Nerd almost as much as I have Code Nerd.

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tyisathome
Humorous, but I beg to differ: <http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/>

It's a great book. Tons of analogies that engineers will love.

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kipwork
There's also

<http://www.cookingforengineers.com/>

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Helianthus16
There is no sense in my mind that a cook is not an engineer of the kitchen.

Engineering is just using quantities, directions, and properties to effect a
result.

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weaksauce
Yup... it's also the best science experiment.

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Yeroc
I do think that a proper engineer would use weight measurements (grams) in
most cases (with the exception of liquids) rather than less accurate volume
measurements.

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thwarted
Isn't the gram a measure of mass? A gram of flour is a gram of flour at sea
level, at 10,000 ft, and on a space station.

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derobert
Obviously a troll. Engineers using consistent units‽ HA. Maybe he/she meant
chemist, in which case:

\- cm3 != cm³. Unicode is 20 years old now, no excuses.

\- flour is (a) measured by weight, not volume; (b) at most 14% gluten, and
that's very high-gluten flour used for bagels and some breads, not cookies.

I fully encourage feeding the trolls with this recipe, however.

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itgoon
That's funny. I got a few dev groups to update their documentation by
comparing it to a recipe: list everything needed, first. List the things which
can be done ahead of time. After that, preparation steps, and then the actual
time-critical steps.

It is working out quite nice.

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julianz
They're nice but I find them to be much too crunchy. I'd suggest the
additional step of removing the calcium carbonate coating from ingredient #8
before it goes into reactor #2.

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RK
This sounds a lot more like a chemist than an engineer. (OK, maybe a chemical
engineer.)

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derleth
Is it really too much for someone to make a blog platform that actually works
correctly, as opposed to using JavaScript to paper over fundamental
deficiencies?

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neutronicus
I'm sort of interested in your opinion on this. Care to elaborate?

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derleth
Basically, I'm a little tired of people using JavaScript to implement the
basic functionality of a text-oriented website.

A blog is, by definition, fundamentally text-oriented, as opposed to, say, a
vlog (video log) or a podcast, and so should work acceptably well, if not
attractively or with all of the intended features, without JavaScript.
Ideally, it should degrade gracefully without CSS, too, but that amount of
respect for your readers is probably a lost cause.

And it is all about respect for your readers: Books don't demand you read them
on a veranda attached to a five-star hotel in New Delhi regardless of how much
that would improve the experience. Books are quite happy to be read in a grimy
bus terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey, if that's the best the reader can manage.
Text-based web pages are quite capable of being read, at an ugly 'bus terminal
in Hoboken' level, in browsers like Lynx or Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 6,
and the designer should not presume to demand that their readership have
access to first-class tickets booked on Firefox 4 or Chrome 11.

Sometimes this isn't possible. Sometimes, you really do want to put video on
the web and people who can't handle video are out of luck. However, you and I
both know about the impact open formats and captioning and other measures of
respect for the audience can have.

Finally, I could mention the blind tied to screenreaders, but that's insulting
both to the technology of screenreader software, which I hear is fairly
advanced these days, and to the authors of web pages, who should not need
their noses rubbed in the existence of physical limitations simply to be
convinced to show basic consideration for their audience.

(Personally, I find a .30-06 at medium range quite suffices.)

