Subj : Sourdough Whole-Wheat Biscuits
To   : Ruth Haffly
From : Ben Collver
Date : Mon Jun 23 2025 09:51:56

  Re: Sourdough Whole-Wheat Biscuits
  By: Ruth Haffly to Ben Collver on Sun Jun 22 2025 18:24:27

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.

Potlucks can be weird.  I went to one where someone made a classic pear
crisp using home grown pears, and they made it with love.  Not one other
person took any besides me and the baker.  I suppose the others considered
it unattractive because it was not what they would normally eat.  I asked
the baker if i could finish it off, and she told me i was welcome to have
as much as i wanted.  We didn't remain single for long, and eventually
ended up dating each other.  :>

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.)

Interesting that you were a sociology major, and that you got to experience
using punch cards.  I read that paper tape and punch cards were in use way
past their "expiration date" because the equipment was so inexpensive.

I recently went down a rabbithole on a rainy day.  A friend sent me a video
of someone creating art on an oldschool mechanical typewriter.  I found
books about typewriter art on archive.org, one of which was published in
1936.  I sent it to another friend and called it 1936 ASCII art.  This
friend reminded me that ASCII didn't exist in 1936.  I found that what DID
exist in 1936 was ITS-2, a 5-bit encoding that was often punched on 5-hole
paper tape.  I wrote a script to convert between ASCII and ITS-2, and
another script to convert between ITS-2 and a plaintext representation to
simulate paper tape.

I searched and found homebrew kits to use paper tape, but they were all
surprisingly complex and expensive.  If i were using paper as a computer
storage medium, i'd probably use QR codes.  I found manuals for units
in the late 60's that could read and "write" punched tape.  One thing
that surprised me was that none of the manuals mentioned RS-232.  IIRC,
they talked about logic levels and oscilloscopes.  It made me wonder
what it was really like to connect the paper tape "drive" to a computer.

What inspired you to pursue a sociology major?  The first thing that
popped into my mind was "I wonder what the difference is between
sociology and anthropology?"  A cynical answer could be that sociology
is about us and anthropology is about them.

.