Matt Meshulam's Brain Dump

So for the past few weeks I’ve been reading Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (pronounced ‘teese’). It consists of 101 short essays where a wide variety of cooking-related concepts are explained with science. The book was a gift from Eve, and it’s a testament to how well she knows me, since two of my favorite activities are cooking and explaining things with science.

I’m only about half done with the book (reading collections of short works from cover to cover is another one of my favorite activities), but I felt like I had to write about this book now because IT HAS CHANGED KEANU REEVES’S LIFE. According to the internet:

After reading the tome, Reeves has been spending his spare time experimenting with recipes.

“I’m dabbling in it and looking at becoming a chef. [Hervé This] is fantastic. I didn’t really cook before but this book may be changing my life.”

My first reaction was disbelief. I’m sure Mr. Reeves is a great guy, but I’ll admit that I didn’t picture him getting through a book that contains the term “glutamate receptors.” But even if we accept that Keanu has truly been inspired by this book, this kind of situation is exactly why the phrase “don’t quit your day job” exists.

The career ambitions of Keanu Reeves aside, Molecular Gastronomy strikes a respectable balance between science and interestingness. Some of the articles don’t really discuss the “who cares” aspect–how to utilize the scientific explanations to improve your everyday cooking–but overall the book paints a great picture of what’s going on inside your food.

Macarena lessons? A support group for elbowless people? Nope, this photo was taken at a Netflix distribution center, where envelope openers are taking a stretching break. It turns out that at Netflix facilities many tasks, including opening envelopes, inspecting discs, and stuffing envelopes are performed by hand.

The article linked above was pretty light on details, but this one has some great photos and a very informative video (embedded below). I imagined a Netflix distribution facility to include a warehouse filled floor-to-ceiling with DVDs, but apparently they only need a small handful of shelving units:

Which makes sense, I suppose, when you consider how densely the discs can be stored. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that on each shelf in the photo above, they can fit about 3500 DVDs. I can see at least 40 shelves in the photo, which means they’re storing at least 140,000 discs. Netflix claims they stock 100,000 films, so that lower bound feels about right, but I bet their distribution centers have closer to 2-300,000 discs not out on rental at any given point.

Netflix’s operation is remarkably efficient and well-engineered, which isn’t surprising for a company that’s offering a million dollars to anyone who can improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%.