Subj : Sourdough Whole-Wheat Biscuits
To : Ben Collver
From : Ruth Haffly
Date : Tue Jun 24 2025 15:20:53
Hi Ben,
RH> As for dessert at home, it's usually fruit or a cookie but sometimes
RH> I'll get ambitious and make a pie or cobbler. Those are usually made for
RH> pot lucks tho, and if we have left overs, we'll take them home and
RH> finish.
BC> Potlucks can be weird. I went to one where someone made a classic
BC> pear crisp using home grown pears, and they made it with love. Not
Sounds yummy, makes you wonder why it was ignored.
BC> one other person took any besides me and the baker. I suppose the
BC> others considered it unattractive because it was not what they would
BC> normally eat. I asked the baker if i could finish it off, and she
BC> told me i was welcome to have as much as i wanted. We didn't remain
BC> single for long, and eventually
BC> ended up dating each other. :>
Interesting way to meet. I don't know if you were on here when Nancy
Backus was but she was allergic to apples. She hosted a picnic (sadly no
longer a Fido event) about 8 years ago; part of it included service at
her church followed by a pot luck lunch. I made a waldorf salad subbing
out pears for apples, thought I'd be bringing some back. When I went to
get the dish, it was empty--guess I ought to do that again. I'm glad
Nancy got some of it, (G)
RH> No, but back in the mid 70s I used key punch cards to enter survey
data RH> into a computer. My Population Problems class (sociology) had
done a RH> survery of about 1/4 of the campus population and we
co-olated the data RH> that way. I used some of the data for a paper for
my Social Psychology RH> (psychology) class. (I was a sociology major,
psychology and art RH> minors.)
BC> Interesting that you were a sociology major, and that you got to
BC> experience using punch cards. I read that paper tape and punch cards
BC> were in use way past their "expiration date" because the equipment was
BC> so inexpensive.
It was the fastest way to quickly get the data in useable form as the
end of the semester was coming up. There were about 8 of us, each with
about 25-30 copies of the survey.
BC> I recently went down a rabbithole on a rainy day. A friend sent me a
BC> video of someone creating art on an oldschool mechanical typewriter.
BC> I found books about typewriter art on archive.org, one of which was
BC> published in 1936. I sent it to another friend and called it 1936
BC> ASCII art. This
BC> friend reminded me that ASCII didn't exist in 1936. I found that what
BC> DID exist in 1936 was ITS-2, a 5-bit encoding that was often punched
BC> on 5-hole paper tape. I wrote a script to convert between ASCII and
BC> ITS-2, and
BC> another script to convert between ITS-2 and a plaintext representation
BC> to simulate paper tape.
That must have been an interesting rabbit hole for you. The typewriter
art must have been fun; I remember seeing some of it decades ago.
BC> What inspired you to pursue a sociology major? The first thing that
BC> popped into my mind was "I wonder what the difference is between
BC> sociology and anthropology?" A cynical answer could be that sociology
BC> is about us and anthropology is about them.
As part of the general ed requirements I took an introductory course
taught by J.Whitney Shea, brother of George Beverly Shea, and found it
fascinating. It inter relates with anthropology; it would have been
interesting to do a major combining the 2 but anthropology was not
offered at the (small) college I went to. I originally had just an art
minor but after taking enough psychology classes, I realised I was close
to a minor in it so declared and finished it.
---
Catch you later,
Ruth
rchaffly{at}earthlink{dot}net FIDO 1:396/45.28
... Our necessities are few but our wants are endless...
--- PPoint 3.01
* Origin: Sew! That's My Point (1:396/45.28)
