hum

One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.

“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date.

[…]

Though he’s capable of mirth, Cook’s default facial expression is a frown, and his humor is of the dry variety. In meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats.

Mike Janes, who worked with Cook for five years, ultimately as head of Apple’s online store, recalls a Macworld conference in New York when Cook convened a meeting in the afternoon after one of Jobs’ mesmerizing morning keynotes. “A number of us had tickets to see the Mets that night,” says Janes, now CEO of an event ticket site called FanSnap. “After hours, he was still drilling us with question after question, while we were watching the clock like kids in school. I still have this vision of Tim saying, ‘Okay, next page,’ as he opened yet another energy bar.”

Man must always bear in mind that God is omnipresent and is always with him; that God is the most subtle matter everywhere diffused … Let man realize that when he is looking at material things he is in reality gazing at the image of the Deity which is present in all things. With this in mind man will always serve God even in small matters.

One sheep who got a reward every time she recognized a human face correctly on a video screen scored a perfect 50 out of 50.

[…]

And it’s not just sheep.

Hamlet the pig is a computer wiz. He gets a reward every time he uses a joystick designed for a chimp to move a cursor into a blue area on a computer monitor. A Jack Russell terrier couldn’t achieve such a task after a year of trying.
In other words, pigs are smarter than dogs.
“They’re very curious, and they’ll charge off on their own,” said John Webster, a professor at the University of Bristol in England. “They will investigate the world with their noses down and batter through like a small boy.”

New research shows that chickens can be taught to run the thermostat of the chicken coop, and that even the lowly cow has a surprising inner life.

Cows have been known to form lifelong friendships, and one recent study found that they actually show excitement when they’ve learned something new “as if they’re saying, ‘Eureka, I found out how to solve the problem,’” said Donald Broom, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Shut, lock up; quick, quick: one runs to beg assistance from the sheriff; the others hastily shut up the shop, and bolt and bar the doors inside. The multitudes begin to increase without, and the cries redouble of: bread! bread! open! open!

We tend to think of pasta like potatoes but it has never been viewed as a bland staple. It’s been associated with prestige - people used to buy votes with pasta.

People may know
what but rarely
they know how

Despite their fatalistic streak, many Italians are also hypochondriacs and the death of someone so young and fit will have disturbed a great many. The tragic news will probably not prove sufficiently unsettling to stop people from eating Nutella for breakfast, even if Mr Ferrero’s untimely demise naturally begs the question of whether he ate too much of it. The sticky spread is the nutritional equivalent of Agent Orange, being packed with saturated fat, sugar and not much else.

Michael Day

Yoga + meditation = the
most important conversation
you can ever
have with the
wisest person you
will ever meet

As Alan Davidson points out in The Oxford Companion to Food, “Italians have succeeded better than any other European country in developing and spreading over most parts of the world a cuisine that has the enormous merits of being cheerful, tasty, varied, inexpensive and unworrying.” He might have added that the Mediterranean diet magically manages to be both healthy and delicious.

Christopher Hirst