Fermentation

Filed in Uncategorized, May 8, 2005, 10:13 pm by

Thanks to Joe Kissell of ITOTD  for editing this article. —————————
In the Paleolithic age, fire was invented and was subsequently used for cooking. Cooked food had a dramatic impact on human evolution by helping the development of our advanced brain.  In the Paleolithic age, Fermentation emerged as another important technique. Fermentation, although naturally occurring, is one of the key processes our ancients harnessed to preserve food for longer durations and enabled survival.  In the ancient world, where food sources were mostly local, having access to food in the lean winter season was a major problem for survival and fermentation helped solve that problem to a great extent. We will review shortly, how fermentation had a monumental impact on human civilization rivaling that of the invention of fire.

If you are a resident of North America, you have to thank the ancients for their invention of pickling which employs fermentation and drying.  Legend has it that, Amerigo Vespucci, who was then a stocking agent, stocked Christopher Columbus’s ships with pickles for his voyage that discovered the new world.  Seafaring, aside from being highly risky, also caused several debilitating sometimes fatal diseases, Scurvy being chief among them. Scurvy is caused due to Vitamin C deficiency.  Pickles turned out to be an excellent source of Vitamin C and hence prevented Columbus’s crew from contracting Scurvy on the long voyage and indirectly helped the discovery of the New World.  Captain Cook issued a daily ration of Sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) to his crew on his long voyages to prevent scurvy.

Vikings had learnt how to preserve Codfish by drying and allowed them to take long voyages colonizing Greenland, Iceland and even attempt colonization of North America long before Columbus.  Long voyages were hitherto difficult because of the short shelf life of food. 

Bread and Wine
Patrick McGovern, an expert on origins of ancient wine has proven that wine making was probably invented in the late stone-age/early Neolithic period (8,500 B.C. – 4,000 B.C.).  This probably gives credence to the theory that wine making was invented first and some accidental spillage of wine onto a piece of flat bread resulted in the invention of leavening.  Bread is leavened by the fermenting action of yeast.  Wine is again a product of fermentation and every major ancient culture had developed some form of wine or beer.  Sumerians and Babylonians brewed beer as early as 6000 B.C. We all know the kind of impact alcohol has wrought on us!

Although flat bread is known to have been in use since 10,000 B.C., leavening is relatively new. Egyptians are credited with inventing leavening around 3,000 B.C.  Flat bread was mostly made with Barley and Wheat.  But the high gluten content in wheat that gives bread the rising property quickly made wheat, the preferred grain over rice, oats, barley and other grains available at that time.

What has fascinated me about leavened bread is that there is no leavened bread in the southern part of India that I hail from.  Curiously enough, it is the home of the Dravidian culture which in the view of some scientists, pre-dates the Ancient Aryan civilization of Northern India and so is at least 4500 years old.  So the question is, why is there no leavened bread? 

This led me to look at other older cultures – though China is credited with inventing fermented vegetables and grains, there is no indigenous Chinese leavened bread.  Ethiopians, Japanese, Korean and Polynesian cultures have no leavened bread. As I explored further, I realized that Egyptians, the inventors of leavened bread, were lucky to be a wheat growing culture and as we have seen already before, the high gluten content in wheat gave it the rising property when combined with yeast. However, all the other non-Egyptian cultures listed above including the Dravidian culture cultivated rice, millet, teff and other grains but not wheat. China started cultivating rice as early as 5000 B.C. but wheat was introduced much later around 1500 B.C. So even though fermentation technology was well known within these cultures, they simply couldn’t make leavened bread due to lack of high gluten content in rice.

Given that fermentation is not just a preservation technology but also a taste enhancing technology, every one of these cultures applied their knowledge of fermentation to create their own versions of leavened bread.  In South India, we make “Dosa” and “Idli”  – fluffy pancakes and dumplings, made out of a fermented batter of rice and green grams.  Ethiopians make “Injara” bread made out of a fermented batter of teff. Chinese harnessed some moulds to ferment grains and make “Chu”.  Koreans make the famous “Kimchi” fermented pickle. Polynesians make “Masi” by pickling Taro in an ingeniously designed fermenting pit.  This allowed them to preserve food and survive in the desolate pacific islands that they colonized. “Gundruk” (Nepali Sauerkraut) made by the Nepali community is a fermented and dried vegetable product. “Gari” and “Fufu” are fermented cassava products that are consumed in most parts of Africa.

Fermented Milk Products
Fermented milk products are the other major category of ancient foods and includes butter, yoghurt, cheese, buttermilk etc. Scientists have discovered evidence of fermented milk products in Ancient Babylon dating 5000 years back.  Scientists have also discovered evidence of cheese-making in Ancient Sumer circa 3500 B.C. Today we have 400 varieties of cheese and is an important food through out the world.  Given that most of humanity is Lactose intolerant and aged cheeses don’t contain lactose, it is easy to see why cheese is popular.  Interestingly, in my native southern India, we have yoghurt, butter and buttermilk, there is no indigenous cheese? One reason is that Lactose intolerance is non-existent in that part of the world so milk products could be consumed directly.  Another is that, in India, butter is melted and converted to “ghee” or clarified butter to preserve it, which perhaps obviated the need to make cheese.  “Ghee” is still an important ingredient in Indian recipes. 

Isn’t it scary to think, where will we be without fermentation?
——
 References
1. Cod, a fascinating book by Mark Kurlansky covers the far-reaching impact of Codfish on the history of mankind. Also covers Codfish preservation techniques of the Vikings and Basques like drying, salt curing etc. 

2. Collapse by Jared Diamond is an extremely well researched book on why and how cultures collapse. It covers the Viking colonization of Greenland, Iceland and attempted colonization of New Foundland. Also covers Polynesian colonization of Easter Islands and other pacific islands and their fermenting pits.  The part where Jared describes how the Inuits survived and outlasted the Vikings in Greenland is particularly interesting.

3. FAO’s website has a lot of details on ancient preservation techniques.

4. An excellent description of Polynesian/Melanesian Pit Fermentation technique by Susan Brown and Edward Mayer on can be found here (PDF File).

5. This National Geographic article talks about Patrick McGovern’s discoveries about ancient wine-making.

6.Wikpedia has a lot of interesting information on Fermentation and links for further reading.

7. New York Food Museum’s Pickle Timeline can be found here.  New York Food Museum also holds an International Pickle Day every year.  Most recent one was held on October 3, 2004.

8. History of Cheese can be found here. 9. Another article with a similar theme.

“Avalon”che is coming – part 4 – Strategic Implications

Filed in Uncategorized, , 9:03 pm by

Microsoft’s somewhat open approach with XAML is already creating competing solutions (Teaser #1 from part 2 of this series).  1. A company called XAMLON has created a XAML implementation with a 600KB runtime that can be downloaded to the client.  I suspect this is the company that Microsoft pulled in as  a special guest in their FITC presentation referred to in Dave Shea’s post.  Interestingly, XAMLON also has developed a converter for converting Adobe Illustrator SVG files to XAML probably proving that XAML is not too far from SVG (See part 2 of this series for more on this). Another cool thing from XAMLON – A XAML to Flash Converter.  This allows you to use your familiar Visual Basic/Visual C++ tools to create Flash applications  – a solid way to overcome  DonXML’s objection that Flash does not grok XML.  Of course, Macromedia added MXML and Laszlo systems gave Flash LZX support (another XML format) but you have to use Macromedia’s or Laszlo’s tools instead of Microsoft’s tools. 2. While I was contemplating this final part of this series, couple of interesting events took place: A. Adobe bought Macromedia. Read Jason Kottke’s excellent roundup of the deal.  Very interesting possibilities  for  melded Flash/PDF client side and Acrobat/MX server side solutions amongst others. If I were an M&A advisor for Adobe, I would promptly go to them and ask them to look at XAMLON for a possible acquisition.  We would see XAML support on all major OS platforms even before Longhorn hits the market and fulfill Andrew Stopford’s dreams of  a XAMLON/Flash server side product. Would that be powerful or what ?  The XAML world will be complete if brother Miguel de Icaza comes up with a “Mono”lon project. B. Microsoft and SAP announced the Mendocino Project.
It will add connectors to Microsoft Office whereby tasks emanating in the Office software can reach SAP’s back end software and vice-versa. Hmmm, interesting. Microsoft is arguably the shrewdest business model innovator that the world has seen so far (a  separate post on this  subject later). So what is Microsoft up to with this ? 3. Microsoft Office is now Office system and even hosted its own developer conference.   Since the Windows API lock is now gone as Joel Spolsky says, perhaps Microsoft is moving the lock to the Office layer. The Mendocino Project could be seen as a big step in that direction. Already, Microsoft Excel  is a proven front end analysis tool for light OLAP applications.  With Avalon, fully expect Excel to gain superior data visualization capabilities to stake a serious claim to the OLAP client crown. Cognos, Business Objects, Microstrategy had better watch their client-side strategy or maybe one of them will do a Mendocino-type project with Microsoft ceding the client side to MS Office in the hopes of controlling the backend and the cube-building parts of their suites. 4. Maybe the powers-that-be in Microsoft have seen the graph  in this post comparing Autodesk and MSFT.   Hope this post is not really true and Autodesk, Shapeworks and other CAD vendors are watching out for Avalon.  I am  sure the Visio team is working on a 3D version that leverages Avalon and offers CAD features. Since Visio is already bundled with Office, it could throw a serious spanner into the CAD world. In conclusion, I think, the software world is in for an interesting “Avalon”che. Can’t wait.

“Avalon”che is coming – part 3 – Avalon Basics

Filed in Uncategorized, April 24, 2005, 7:39 pm by

Okay, this series is back. 1.  It has taken me a while to figure out if what I thought is a major limitation of Avalon is correct (Teaser#3 from previous post).  Based on XAML’s design and the fact that JScript.NET is a supported language and my experience with Mozilla’s XUL (a XUL/javacript file can be rendered on the fly by Mozilla browser), i had assumed that you could write a XAML file with imbedded JScript and you could render the XAML page to the Avalon client on the fly much like an HTML/Javascript page is rendered by the browser.  But as I started reading up on Avalon, I started to think that this was probably not possible. Here are a few examples that created the confusion in my mind. First, this article by  Dino Esposito on MSDN is an excellent primer on Avalon. However, Dino mentions the following – “Today the list includes C#, Visual Basic .NET, and JScript® .NET. By the time Longhorn is released, other .NET-compatible languages are expected to be added to the list.” and couple of lines later says “Longhorn doesn’t process uncompiled code, nor does it have the ability to compile code on the fly.”
Second, Intel has a long article on XAML on their Developer Services site writtten by Peter Barnhardt of 3Leaf. Overall it is a good article to introduce basic XAML concepts. However, it has the following statement on page 3 “XAML is not interpreted at runtime as JavaScript* is; it is a compiled language. XAML-based applications do not suffer a performance penalty when you run them. In fact, XAML files compile to the same intermediate language (IL) as procedural code, so they appear no different to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) than any other program.” Fortunately, I stumbled upon ChrisAn’s write up on Dynamic XAML. My doubts were laid to rest – an XAML/JScript page can be rendered by the client on the fly ! But, wait, ChrisAn says “Parsed-at-runtime markup like Projection-based markup is supported, just not encouraged”.  Not encouraged ! Please tell me what that means. It seems I am not alone in this. Dave Shea shares his worries based on his first look at Avalon. It seemed like his post touched off a nerve with 40 comments as on date. Will the real Avalon stand up please? 2. On the learning front, we will have to learn some new concepts for Avalon UI programming (Teaser #2 from previous post): a. First, read this MSDN article by Ian Griffiths of Developmentmentor on the Avalon Grpahics Model. Very lucidly written and I think illsutrates the “Vector” graphics idea verey well with examples. b. To understand 3D UI concepts, read this excellent 2 part article by Dan Lehenbauer. I guarantee Camera, Transforms,  Viewport etc (remember MDI, modal windows anyone!) will permeate the UI development community and you had better learn. Also read this MSDN article on Avalon 3D. c. To understand Viewport, Camera etc. read this other superb article by Ian Griffiths on MSDN. d. I also found this Channel 9 video interview with Daniel Lehenbauer very useful to understand Avalon 3D. e. The other Avalon terminology to learn is VisualTree. This excellent article by ChrisAn and its pre-reading links within the article is a good starting point. Overall this rounds up the basics of Avalon. Up next: Strategic Implications of Avalon.

A more plausible explanation for Newton’s discovery of Gravity

Filed in General Interest, April 17, 2005, 4:54 pm by

On March 14, 2005, I attended a seminar in New York City, which included a session by Tony Buzan, the renowned expert on the human brain and the inventor of Mind Mapping. It was a very interesting presentation about the Brain. He talked about a lot of little known facts about the brain. For instance,   how we use less than 1% of it and also how an individual’s creativity goes down progressively from 95% at the Kindergarten stage to <10% by the time we become adults. I asked Tony – “What about curiosity, the thing that drives everything including creativity?”.  He started answering by saying creativity can be essentially boiled down to A+B = C, in other words, its the spark that puts A and B together to create C. As an example, he mentioned that, contrary to popular belief, Isaac Newton  was actually sitting under the apple tree looking out at the full moon on a clear night and he saw the apple falling.  At this point, Newton’s creative genius was in putting this scene together in his mind and asking the question – why did the Apple (a small ball) fall, but the bigger ball (the moon) did not? The rest, as they say, is history. I think this is a much better explanation of what could have happened.  Tony mentioned that Newton’s handwritten notes confirm this view.

Superb paper on Social Bookmarking

Filed in Uncategorized, April 16, 2005, 11:08 am by

If you are doing a start-up you better add the “social” moniker to it, to attract VC funding. Jokes apart, the social bookmarking scene is looking pretty good. If you could read one paper and  become a social bookmarking whiz, this is it.  Its a 2 part article – 2nd part is here. Great job Ben, Tony, Martin and Timo.