A decade ago, a trip to Egypt’s North Coast was simple. Whether you were staying in a rented chalet or just visiting for a few days, getting into most compounds was a matter of knowing someone or speaking to a security guard at the gate. Beaches were more accessible, and while many areas were still gated, entry felt more flexible and informal. Today, reality is different. Many newer compounds now operate with QR code systems. One code is needed to enter the gated community. Another, sometimes entirely separate, is required to access the beach. If you are not a property owner or registered guest, access is restricted and, in most cases, denied. QR codes have quietly reshaped the way people experience the coast. They are requested by security, issued through apps exclusive to owners, and sometimes shared between friends or resold online. A day at the beach now often depends on whether you can obtain the right pass. A New North Coast The North Coast of Egypt, overseeing the Mediterranean Sea, has always had gated communities. Yet, the system at the gates was different as it was not built to…
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If you ever lived through Egyptian summer holidays in the 90s, chances are the first thing that popped into your head was cruising down the road with your cousins or siblings, windows down, blasting the most iconic Egyptian summer anthem of all time: Amarain (1998) by Amr Diab, one of Egypt’s most well-known modern singers. Just picturing that moment now feels like stepping into a different era: a time when life was simpler, when summer did not need much more than a packed car and Amr Diab’s beats filling the summer air. That song was, according to some sources, a love letter to his children, a theory seemingly confirmed at the end of the music video when the camera lingers on two twin babies. As he sings Amarain, which means “two moons” in Arabic, he describes their eyes as two moons in the sky, which is a poetic metaphor widely used in Arab culture. More than 20 years later, Amr Diab is circling back to that same simplicity, but this time, he is not just singing to his children, he is singing with them. His latest album, Ebtadena (We’ve…
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Discover why El Gouna and Hurghada are two of Egypt’s top destinations for private boat rentals, sailing trips, and Red Sea escapes. From luxury yachts to snorkeling adventures, explore the coast your way.
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This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient. The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.
Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:
garden vegetable with thick, succulent leaves, late 14c., spinache, spinage, etc. (late 13c. as a surname), from Anglo-French spinache, Old French espinache (14c., Modern French épinard, from a form with a different suffix), from Old Provençal espinarc, which perhaps is via Catalan espinac, from Andalusian Arabic isbinakh, from Arabic isbanakh, from Persian aspanakh "spinach."
But OED is not convinced the Middle Eastern words are native, and based on the plethora of Romanic forms pronounces the Romanic words "of doubtful origin." Compare Medieval Latin spinagium. Old folk etymology connected the word with Latin spina (see spine), supposedly for the prickly fruit, or with Medieval Latin Hispanicum olus.
Then I remembered that four years ago I had written a very long, detailed post on the subject of the origins of English "spinach": "Spinach: the Persian vegetable" (1/19/21). After I finished writing that post, I thought I'd never have to investigate the origins of the English word "spinach" again. Now, however, I began to be troubled by problems about the derivation of "spinach" that I hadn't considered before. So I asked Don Ringe about them:
According to my research here, when English borrowed the word for "spinach", ostensibly it came from Old French espinache (14c.), which apparently got it from Arabic isbanakh, which got it from Persian aspanakh "spinach." As you can see, however, Old French, Arabic, and Middle Persian had it in a form with prosthesis, whereas Old Persian did not have prosthesis, just beginning with initial "sp-).
This is very confusing to me. How could English borrow the word from a language that already had prosthesis and then get rid of the initial vowel that had already been added and go back to an earlier form of the Persian word?
Reassuringly, Don replied:
This one is easy: English routinely drops French prothetic vowels, because in OF they were maximally unstressed. Adding or subtracting a fully unstressed vowel at the margin of a word is an easy change, in both directions. Take a look at the history of Italian: Latin sp- and st- acquired a prothetic vowel i- in Old Italian, and then more recently it was dropped again. So the fact that the English word apparently resembles the Persian word more closely is literally a historical accident.
But you should also take a look at the etymology recorded in the OED online, which is the gold standard for English etymologies: it's not certain that the Persian and Arabic words are the source of the Romance words rather than the other way around.
Following Don's advice, I turned to the OED:
Summary
A borrowing from French.
Etymon:Frenchespinage.
<Old Frenchespinage, (e)spinache (also ‑ace), = Catalanespinach, Spanishespinaca, Italianspinace, Romanianspenac, medieval Latinspinachia (‑achium), spinacia (‑acium), of doubtful origin. Compare Middle Dutchspinage, ‑agie, ‑aetse (Dutchspinazie, Flemishspinagie), Low Germanspinase, ‑axe, obsolete Germanspinacie, ‑asche, German dialect spinaz, Middle High German and Germanspinat (whence Danishspinat, Swedishspenat).
Notes
The difficult problem of the ultimate origin of the word is complicated by variation of the ending in the Romanic languages. In addition to espinache, ‑age, Old French had also espinoche (still in dialect use), ‑oce, = medieval Latinspinochia, and espinarde, espinar (French épinard), = Provençalespinarc, medieval Latin spinarium, ‑argium. Portuguese exhibits the further variant espinafre. By older writers the stem of these forms was supposed to be Latin spīna, in allusion to the prickly seeds of a common species. De Vic considers the various forms to be adoption of Arabisfināj, Persian isfānāj, ispānāk, aspanākh (Richardson), but it is doubtful whether these are really native words. It is difficult to explain either the Romanic or the Middle Eastern forms from the synonymous Hispanicum olus recorded from the 16th cent. and represented by older French herbe d'Espaigne (Cotgrave).
OED seems more concerned about finals whereas I'm more concerned about initials.
To quote an American icon: "I'm strong to the finich 'cause I eats me spinach."
It looks like I'm not done with "spinach" yet, so I'd best keep up my spinachy quest to determine where the word (and the plant) actually came from.
Though the Chinese were already eating spinach by the middle of the 7th c. and definitively calling it the "Persian vegetable" (bōcài 菠菜), the name they gave it just refers to the country it came from, not what the people of that country called it:
From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 (cài, “greens, vegetable”).
where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":
The botanical homeland of spinach does indeed seem to be the Persian realm, so it is not surprising that many of the words for this vegetable in the world's languages ultimately come from Persian or allude to Persia. So I thought that maybe, by tracing the origin of the Persian word for "spinach", I could get closer to the IE root. None of my usual go-to sources for PIE roots (e.g., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots) were hazarding a guess for what the ultimate IE root for "spinach" might be.
There was, however, an old folk etymology that connected "spinach" with Latin spina ("spine; backbone", originally "thorn, prickle"). Usually I'm wary of folk etymologies, but this one was convincing. It made sound and sense! Moreover, it fit well with the early Iranian words for spinach.
I had the unstoppable urge to listen to Tori Amos yesterday. And so I listened to some Tori Amos. This also gave me the urge to pull out my old Tori Amos “Little Earthquakes” tour tee, which I have stuffed in my sentimental T-shirts box in the back of my closet. But that, that was a bridge too far. For now. I think I’ve said it before, but Tori is way overdue for some kind of Kate Bush Renaissance. Some show wants 90s street cred needs to resurrect her hits for a new generation. Or not, and we Gen Xers get to keep her all to ourselves. Also, sorry, there’s nothing especially gay about this post. Sometimes a girl just feels sentimental. (Fine, I had a crush on Tori, all that wild red hair and wilder piano playing.)
Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.) Solar's secret (other than apparently practising 4 hours every day) is, of course, bypassing characters altogether. On this Weibo post (3rd image [click to open and enlarge]) she reveals that she's been learning Mandarin purely using Pinyin all this time, and even strictly observing the spelling rules!
It's certainly a feat, and another mark on the scoreboard for the "ZT" method.
I wouldn't say that Solar's Mandarin is perfect, but after learning it for just seven months, I would have to declare that her command of the language is amazing. Her delivery is fluent, natural, and confident. Solar's Mandarin doesn't sound "foreign" at all. She is able to express herself freely and with wit.
This is how Mandarin could become a rival to English as the world language, but I doubt that it will ever come close to challenging English in the coming decades. The Chinese people — including those who teach Mandarin as a foreign / second language — are too viscerally wedded to the cumbersome, hard-to-learn sinographs as the only proper way to write Sinitic languages. Never mind that Dungan and POJ Taigi have proven that you don't need the Chinese characters to command a spoken Sinitic language at native level, and you can use alphabetic scripts for writing too.
John Rohsenow, who is a regular reader and commenter on Language Log, is the authority on the ZT experiment, and Mark Swofford, long-time webmaster of Pinyin.info and the site's blog, Pinyin News, is also a contributor to Language Log.
John DeFrancis, "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 171 (June, 2006), 1-26, with 3 exhibits, including the famous shopping list with pinyin used for common forgotten characters ("egg; shrimp; chives"); reprinted as an HTML version in Pinyin.info here. This outstanding article by the doyen of Chinese language teachers during the second half of the 20th century lays out clearly and systematically the past, present, and future of scipt reform as they stood at the beginning of the 21st century.
These chewy, flexible almond flour tortillas are made with the perfect blend of almond flour and coconut flour for structure that still lets the satisfying mild nutty, buttery flavor shine. And they only have 2 net carbs.
With the addition of a touch of xanthan gum, the finished tortillas are as thin as “regular” flour tortillas, and will bend and fold any way you like. Add your favorite fillings and wrap them up like a burrito that won't break!
Why this recipe makes the most flexible tortillas
Unlike other recipes you'll find, these almond flour tortillas are rolled paper thin for a tortilla that can be used in any way our regular gluten free flour tortillas can. You don't have to roll them as thick as flatbread, or have them break as you try to wrap them around fillings.
We add enough coconut flour and a touch of xanthan gum to finely ground almond flour, plus one egg, to create true structure and resilience in both the raw dough and the finished tortillas.
You can make the dough in a mini chop food processor or with just a bowl and spoon, and store it in the refrigerator for up to a week. And the finished tortillas will stay fresh at room temperature for days. Truly an amazing tortilla!
Ingredients explained
There aren't many ingredients in this recipe, and each contributes something to the tortillas. Here's a bit about the importance and background of each:
Almond flour: Adds bulk, some structure, and flavor. Because it has so much fat, it's soft, though. Be sure to use finely ground and sifted blanched almond flour like Wellbee's, Blue Diamond, nuts dot com, or Costco's Kirkland brand. Almond meal, which is coarsely ground and the almonds have intact skins, won't bind the dough together properly for a smooth, integrated tortilla.
Coconut flour: Has a lot of fiber which helps add structure and helps absorb some of the fat from the almond flour, making these two flours into a magic combination of flavor, structure, and low carbohydrates.
Xanthan gum: Keeps the dough from crumbling so you can roll it out. Without it or a substitute, the raw dough is too soft to hold together long enough to transfer it to the griddle. Xanthan gum is better here than psyllium husk, which can add unwanted flavor and potentially color if not sourced properly.
Baking powder: Adds rise and gives the tortillas some dimension.
Salt: Adds taste and brightens the other flavors.
Egg: Helps to hold the tortillas together, provide structure and some rise, and moisture for water-absorbent coconut flour.
Water: Just enough to finish bringing the dough together.
How to make almond flour tortillas
1. Make the dough
Whisk together the almond flour, coconut flour, salt, xanthan gum, and baking powder, then add the beaten egg and 2 tablespoons of water to form a relatively soft dough that feels like extra soft play-doh.
Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 10 minutes, if not longer. This will make the dough much easier to handle by allowing the coconut flour to absorb the moisture from the egg and water and the fat of the almond flour. It's also less sticky when it's cold.
2. Smooth and divide the dough
Unwrap the chilled dough and sprinkle it lightly with tapioca starch. Roll it into a rough rectangle and fold it into a packet at least once to smooth out the dough and make it easier to work with. Use a bench scraper or sharp knife to divide the dough into 8 equal pieces.
3. Shape the dough into rounds
Roll all 8 pieces of dough into smooth rounds between your palms. Transfer some excess dough to the first piece of dough, then use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a rough round about 7-inches in diameter so there's excess to trim. Sprinkle the dough lightly with tapioca starch to absorb some of the moisture so the dough is less sticky.
A pro tip for perfectly round tortillas is to cut off excess with a a 6-inch metal cake cutter or metal lid of a pot. Remove the excess, and add it to the next portion. You can skip this step and just have messier edges, or use a knife to trim the rough parts.
The tortillas should be thin enough to be transparent enough that you can see your hand through them when you pick one up. That's how you know they're rolled thin enough.
4. Cook the tortillas
I shape all of the rounds first, sprinkling them with tapioca starch to prevent them from sticking to each other. This way, I can cook them all at once when the skillet is hot and not worry one will burn while I'm shaping the next. You can shape and cook each raw round as it's ready, though.
Heat a griddle to 375°F or a cast iron skillet for at least 5 minutes or medium-high heat. Try adding a small piece of trimmed dough to the skillet and press it down with a spatula. It should start to cook very quickly when it's hot enough.
Place the first shaped tortilla on the hot skillet and press down firmly with a large spatula to force the whole round to make contact with the hot surface. Cook until bubbles form, then flip back and forth a couple times until the tortilla is opaque and has some browning on both sides. Stack the tortillas on top of one another covered in a tea towel and serve.
Expert tips
These tortillas have a few things in common with all my other gluten free tortilla recipes, but also call for some special handling. Here are some tips for success:
Firm up a too-soft dough
If you find that the dough is just too wet to roll out properly, knead more coconut flour into the dough by the pinch, and try shaping it again. Or knead in some tapioca starch to absorb some of the fat from the almond flour, and keep sprinkling tapioca starch to keep the dough from cracking and sticking as you roll.
Add extra dough to the first piece
After you divide the dough into 8 equal pieces, remove about 1/4 of the dough from one piece and add it to another. The extra dough makes rolling out the dough thin enough so much easier, and the excess dough gets trimmed and added to the next portion.
You can start with a tortilla press
It won't press the dough thin enough, but it's a good way to start. Line it with parchment paper or plastic to keep the dough from sticking to it, then then use a rolling pin to roll it thin enough.
Use a cake cutter or pot lid for clean edges
I used a 6-inch cake cutter to get neat edges on the tortillas. It's a very useful little trinket to have in the kitchen, but it's totally not necessary at all. The lid of a pot works great for the same purpose, or rough edges left intact are of course perfectly fine.
Ingredient substitutions
These tortillas are already dairy free, but here are some ideas for replacing other potential allergens:
Almond flour-free
You should be able to use finely ground cashew flour or hazelnut flour in place of almond flour.
Nut-free
Try sunflower seed flour, but the tortillas may turn green. The chlorophyll in the sunflower seeds reacts with baking powder, leading to a harmless green color.
Coconut flour-free
I tested this recipe with 6 tablespoons (48 g) of tapioca starch/flour in place of the coconut flour, and it worked. The dough isn't quite as easy to handle, and the tortillas tend not to bend as well right away. They were more flexible the next day when stored in a sealed plastic zip-top bag with a moistened paper towel. Keep in mind that the tortillas will be higher in carbohydrates if made with tapioca in place of coconut flour.
Egg free
I recommend trying 1 “chia egg” (1 tablespoon ground chia seeds + 1 tablespoon lukewarm water, mixed and allowed to gel) or a “flax egg” in place of the egg. Bob's Red Mill egg replacer may also work.
Xanthan gum-free
Guar gum should work instead. You can also try using 8 grams of finely ground blonde psyllium husk to the dry ingredients in place of 4 grams of xanthan gum before adding the warm water.
Tapioca starch
Instead of using tapioca starch to sprinkle during shaping, you can use finely ground rice flour, arrowroot, cornstarch, or potato starch. You can skip the starch and roll between sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap, but your tortillas will have crinkle lines in them.
In a bowl or the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade, place the almond flour, coconut flour, xanthan gum, baking powder, and salt. Whisk or pulse to combine.
Add the beaten egg and 2 tablespoons of water. Pulse or mix to combine.
If the dough holds together well and feels moist but not wet, mix or process until it forms a cohesive dough. If using a food processor, process just until it forms a ball and mostly clears the dough from the bottom of the container.
If the dough feels at all dry, knead or process in more water by the quarter teaspoonful until it reaches the proper consistency.
Let the dough rest
Transfer the dough from the bowl or food processor to a piece of plastic wrap, wrap tightly and store in the refrigerator until you’re ready to make the tortillas (up to 7 days). It’s best to allow the dough to chill for at least 10 minutes.
Shape the tortillas
Unwrap the chilled dough, knead in some of the optional tapioca starch to smooth out the dough, and roll it out into a rough rectangle. Fold it in thirds like a business letter, then fold in the sides to form a packet.
Using a bench scraper or sharp knife, divide the packet it into 8 pieces of equal size. Roll each between your palms into a smooth ball. Remove about 1/4 of one ball and add it to another, and begin working with the larger piece of dough.
Press the first piece of dough into a disk and place in on a large, clean surface. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a round about 7-inches in diameter, dusting lightly with the optional tapioca starch to prevent sticking as you work.
In place of tapioca starch to prevent sticking, you can roll each piece of dough into a round between two sheets of parchment paper or plastic wrap.
Use the cake cutter or pot lid to cut out a 6-inch round. Remove the excess dough trimmings and add them to the next piece of dough, the one from which you had removed 1/4.
Repeat the process with the next piece of dough, transferring excess to the one after it. Sprinkle the raw tortillas lightly with tapioca starch to prevent them from sticking to each other.
Cook them
When you’re ready to make the tortillas, heat a nonstick or cast iron griddle over medium-high heat for at least 5 minutes. If using an electric griddle with a temperature gauge, heat it to 375°F.
Place the shaped, raw tortilla on the skillet or hot griddle and press down with a wide, flat spatula. Allow to cook until bubbles start to form (about 20 seconds), then flip and press down until the tortilla looks opaque on both sides and is browned in spots. Flip again to brown more on the first side.
Repeat with the remaining dough, stacking the warm tortillas on top of one another.
Storage
Serve immediately, or place a stack of cooked tortillas in a zip-top plastic bag or tortilla warmer with a lid. Place a moistened paper towel into the bag before sealing it tightly. This will help keep them moist and pliable.
They can be refreshed in a hot, dry skillet before serving if desired.
Video
Notes
About almond flour Be sure you're using finely ground and sifted blanched almond flour with its skins removed, not almond meal, which has its skins intact and is more coarsely ground. About coconut flour In place of coconut flour, you can use 6 tablespoons (48 g) of tapioca starch/flour. The tortilla dough is a bit more fragile and the tortillas a bit less flexible, but the recipe still works. About xanthan gum You can use an equal amount of guar gum or konjac powder, or 8 grams finely ground blonde psyllium husk powder, in its place for a similar, although not exact, results. Adapted from Farm To Jar.
You can wrap and store in the refrigerator the unshaped, raw dough (or shaped into rounds) wrapped tightly in plastic wrap for up to 1 week.
If you're not serving the tortillas immediately, place them in a stack in a plastic zip-top bag or tortilla warmer lined with a slightly wet paper towel to retain moisture. They will stay fresh that way for up to 3 days at room temperature, and up to a week the refrigerator in the plastic bag. If the towel dries out, moisten it again. You can always refresh the tortillas in a hot dry skillet.
For longer storage, wrap the stack of tortillas tightly in plastic wrap, then place in a freezer-safe zip-top bag, and squeeze out all the air you can. Freeze for up to 3 months. Defrost in the refrigerator or at room temperature, and refresh in a hot, dry skillet.
FAQs
Are these tortillas like Mission low carb tortillas?
No, Mission brand Carb Balance wraps are not gluten free! Some of the marketing for those low carb wraps refers to them as “keto friendly,” but the second and third ingredients are wheat starch and wheat flour, and the package states that it contains wheat. Wheat is a gluten-containing grain and must be avoided on a gluten free diet.
Are these almond flour tortillas Paleo?
They don't contain any grains, dairy, or refined sugars, so they should be considered Paleo, yes.
Are these tortillas soft or crispy?
They're soft and flexible. They are only crispy if they're overcooked, which can happen in a too-hot skillet that burns the almond flour or for too long.
Do I need a tortilla press?
No! I don't usually use a tortilla press and it's not ever going to roll the dough thin enough. But some people like to use one to get started.
Can you make these in the oven?
No, you have to cook them on a skillet or griddle to get the right texture. They would probably burn on one side before you got a chance to flip them to cook the second side.
A volcanic eruption in Indonesia on Monday sent an ash cloud soaring about 11 miles high, far higher than a plume produced by the same volcano when it erupted last month.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on the southeastern Indonesian island of Flores, spewed the ash when it erupted for about six minutes on Monday morning, the national volcanic agency reported. It erupted several more times later in the day.
That’s a lot of ash: The cloud was nearly four times taller than the three-mile-high one that Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki produced when it erupted last month.
That's also a lot of syllables — eight in the name Lewotobi Laki-laki, nine if we include Mount.
A quick check of the 13,251,059 geographical names at geonames.org turns up plenty that are as long or longer, although we should probably not count organizational names like "Centro de Estudios Superiores Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria de Ingeniería y Ciencias Sociales y Administrativas Instituto Politécnico Nacional" or "Edna Bay Volunteer Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services". But that still leaves plenty of things like "Middle Fork North Prong Little Black River" or "Right Hand Prong West Fork Pigeon River" or "Little Mattamiscontis Mountain".
Curiously, "Lewotobi Laki-laki" isn't in the list, although "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" is.
Sungai is Indonesian for "river", and laki is Indonesian for "man", so as discussed in "Lewotobi Laki-laki" (11/8/2024), "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" means something like "male Dato river", and unsurprisingly there is also a "Sungai Dato Perempuan", or "female Dato river".
I'm guessing that the use of "male X" vs. "female X" for mountains and rivers has some kind of metaphorical interpretation — but it's not clear what the metaphor is.
As noted in the earlier post, the male peak of mount Lewotobi is smaller than the female peak, as well as being more active:
The size metaphor might go either way, as in the "mother of all X" idiom, or the fact that in Yoruba drum families, the biggest drum is the "mother drum". But other connections are obviously possible.
So in the first place, can anyone define for us the geographical and linguistic distribution of the "male X" and "female X" naming practice for things like mountains and rivers? And second, what is the figurative meaning of the distinction?
Four workers were killed and at least 27 others injured after a fire broke out on Monday, 7 July, at a major Telecom Egypt data center in central Cairo, disrupting phone and internet services across the country, according to Health Ministry in a statement. On Tuesday 8 July, services continued to be disrupted with many Egyptians struggling to access the internet, use banking and digital financial services and make calls. The Egyptian Ministry of Telecommunications said on Tuesday morning that services would gradually resume within 24 hours. Most of the injuries were caused by smoke inhalation, Ghaffar said. According to Egypt’s state-run news agency MENA, the fire was prevented from spreading to the entire building and nearby rooftops. A security source cited by MENA said an initial examination suggested the cause was likely an electrical short circuit. The blaze erupted on the seventh floor of the Ramses Central building in downtown Cairo, a key hub for telecommunications infrastructure. Telecom Egypt confirmed that the fire caused damage to equipment, leading to widespread outages. Services are being gradually restored, with officials saying key systems, including emergency hotlines and government services, are back…
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Well, I am going to have a full review of “Old Guard 2” later this week, after I get my shit together from the long holiday weekend. What? Doing nothing while certainly not celebrating America is exhausting. But I thought I would give you a preview of the aesthetic we’re working here – with some bonus tank tops to boot because it’s Tuesday. Lest you forgot, it involves Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman rolling around on the ground together.
Yes, the Uma, Charlize; Charlize, Uma jokes write themselves. But why joke when we can just appreciate these two women standing next to each other. They don’t even need to be wielding weapons to look deadly.
Also, is it just me or are they essentially wearing the same outfit in these shots, minus the formal jacket on Charlize?
The 11 tracks of TREC2025 are underway, collectively constituting the 2025 edition of the "Text Retrieval Conference" organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. See the call for details and links, and this site for a few words about its history going back to 1992.
And the Wikipedia article also doesn't give a clear picture of what TREC accomplished in its early years. Here's what it says about TREC-1:
In 1992 TREC-1 was held at NIST. The first conference attracted 28 groups of researchers from academia and industry. It demonstrated a wide range of different approaches to the retrieval of text from large document collections. Finally TREC1 revealed the facts that automatic construction of queries from natural language query statements seems to work. Techniques based on natural language processing were no better no worse than those based on vector or probabilistic approach.
There's a whole book of published reports from The First Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-1), and it's all free to read. But you may find its 518 pages a little daunting, so you could start with the 20 pages of Donna Harman's clear and compelling Introduction. Or maybe just this brief passage from that source:
There is a long history of experimentation in information retrieval. […]
In the 30 or so years of experimentation there have been two missing elements. First, although some research groups have used the same collections, there has been no concerted effort by groups to work with the same data, use the same evaluation techniques, and generally compare results across systems. The importance of this is not to show any system to be superior, but to allow comparison across a very wide variety of techniques, much wider than only one research group would tackle. Karen Sparck Jones in 1981 commented that:
Yet the most striking feature of the test history of the past two decades is its lack of consolidation . It is true that some very broad generalizations have been endorsed by successive tests: for example…but there has been a real failure at the detailed level to build one test on another. As a result there are no explanations for these generalizations, and hence no means of knowing whether improved systems could be designed (p. 245) .
This consolidation is more likely if groups can compare results across the same data, using the same evaluation method, and then meet to discuss openly how methods differ.
The second missing element, which has become critical in the last 10 years, is the lack of a realistically sized test collection . Evaluation using the small collections currently available may not reflect performance of systems in large full-text searching, and certainly does not demonstrate any proven abilities of these systems to operate in real-world information retrieval environments. This is a major barrier to the transfer of these laboratory systems into the commercial world. Additionally some techniques such as the use of phrases and the construction of automatic thesauri seem intuitively workable, but have repeatedly failed to show improvement in performance using the small collections. Larger collections might demonstrate the effectiveness of these procedures. The overall goal of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) was to address these two missing elements. It is hoped that by providing a very large test collection, and encouraging interaction with other groups in a friendly evaluation forum , a new thrust in information retrieval will occur. There is also an increased interest in this field within the DARPA community, and TREC is designed to be a showcase of the state-of-the- art in retrieval research. NIST's goal as co-sponsor of TREC is to encourage communication and technology transfer among academia, industry, and government.
The "very large text collection" that she references was assembled at LDC, and was published in 1993 as Harman & Liberman, TIPSTER. That dataset included 1,077,909 documents from seven sources: the AP Newswire, the Federal Register, U.S. Patents, Department of Energy reports, the Wall Street Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and Ziff Davis magazine articles. [I believe that the Patents and the San Jose Mercury News documents may not have been used in the TREC-1 evaluation, though I'm not certain of this.]
Most previous R&D in digital document retrieval and information extraction had worked with hundreds or thousands of documents, generally all of one kind. In the preparations for TREC-1, Donna Harman explained to me that she wanted to show that such retrieval and extraction problems could be solved at a commercially-relevant scale, and that collaborative research would iteratively improve performance. She set a target of million documents of half a dozen different types — which was not an easy ask at that time, seven to eight years before Google was founded, when the World Wide Web was not very wide or very deep.
I won't bore you today with the painful details of how we managed it. There were a few things already lying around — see "Thanks, Bill Dunn!" (8/6/2009) for one set of memories — but it was a scramble to find archives of documents, mostly in the form of truckloads of old-school 9-track tapes, to decrypt and standardize their mutually-incompatible and sometimes nearly-impenetrable formats, to get legal distribution rights, and to send the results around to the conference participants.
The spectacular success of the TREC conferences is worth emphasizing, given the damage recently done to government funding of (American) research and development in pre-commercial areas. There's been a fair amount of documentation and coverage of this issue — Phil Rubin, formerly the Principal Assistant Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, has assembled what he calls a "running diary of ignominy".
TREC is of course an acronym for "Text REtrieval Conference", but it's also a pun on the work trek, which the OED glosses as
South African. In travelling by ox-wagon: a stage of a journey between one stopping-place and the next; hence, a journey or expedition made in this way; (also) journeying or travel by ox-wagon.
Now in general use elsewhere: a long journey or expedition, esp. one overland involving considerable physical effort.
If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.
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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.
A fire broke out on Monday in a central Cairo building housing a key telecom data centre, disrupting phone and internet services across the capital and leaving at least 22 people injured, according to Egypt’s health ministry. The blaze started on the seventh floor of a 10-storey Telecom Egypt building in the Ramses area, a vital hub for telecommunications infrastructure, reported the Associated Press. Thick smoke billowed over the city as emergency responders arrived on the scene. Firefighters used ladders and water hoses to contain the flames, while security personnel cordoned off surrounding streets. Most of the injuries were due to smoke inhalation, said Hossam Abdel Ghaffar, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, in a statement. Ambulances and fire trucks remained stationed near the site as a precaution, while officials worked to prevent further spread. The fire caused widespread communication issues, with many residents reporting difficulty making phone calls or accessing the internet. According to global internet observatory Netblocks, Egypt’s national internet connectivity dropped to just 62 percent of typical levels. The internet outage also impacted financial services across the country, with Egyptians reporting being unable to pay using credit…
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The title of this song attracted my attention: "Fāngyán de ànshāng 方言的黯伤" ("The sadness of topolect").
I listened to it here, but couldn't catch everything that the singer was saying. I asked Zhaofei Chen what she heard, and here's what she gleaned from listening to the recording:
tà shàng zhè tǔdì huáichuāizhe mèngxiǎng qiānxǐ
gùxiāng de fāngyán chuǎngjìn xīnlǐ mòmò suíxíng
xuānxiāo zhōng ǒu'ěr màochū jǐ jù shúxī
yèwǎn níhóng shǎnshuò zhàoliàng chéngshì de lúnkuò
Set foot on this land and migrate with dreams in mind
The dialect of my hometown enters my heart and follows me silently
A few familiar words occasionally emerge in the hustle and bustle
Neon lights flicker at night, illuminating the city's silhouette
In the bustling city, the breath of the land and water has weakened
The rhythm of the world surges like the tide
Unfamiliar language is as unbridled as the wind
We try to fit in, but deep in our hearts we stay
Leave a space for the sound of hometown (?)
The tall buildings in the city steal this beauty
The volume of topolect diminishes over time
—–
(partial transcription; modified Google translatio
Zhaofei tells me that, from what she could catch, the song seems to be about someone who moves to a big city for work, and over time stops using their fāngyán 方言 ("topolect") because no one around them speaks it. But they could occasionally hear a few words of their fāngyán 方言 ("topolect").
Zhaofei is from Shenzhen, the third largest city in China (after Beijing and Shanghai), with 17.5 million population. At the beginning of the 80s, it was a county-level town with only about 30,000 (!) population, but then the central government decided to turn it into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) to rival nearby Hong Kong, which was still a British colony at that time.
People, including Zhaofei's family, poured into Shenzhen by the millions (!) from all over China. One can imagine the linguistic cacophony of the city in those early years. Zhaofei says the song reminds her a lot of Shenzhen during the Opening-Up period. So many workers from all over China moved there, and people mostly speak Mandarin now because, as the national "common language" (pǔtōnghuà 普通话).
The gradual erasure of one's native tongue is inevitable when one moves to a place where another language is spoken.
[Posted with the permission of the author, David Helliwell]
Almost exactly five years ago, I was dismissed on the grounds of age from my post as Curator of Chinese Collections at the Bodleian Library. I had been in office for over 41 years. The last six of those were particularly pleasurable as I was able to spend all my time organising, identifying, and cataloguing the Library’s “special collections” of Chinese books. Meanwhile, Joshua, who had been appointed to take over all my other duties, did all the hard work.
My teenage years were spent in the 1960s, and we children of the sixties, as demonstrated so well by Paul McCartney at Glastonbury this year, never grow old. We simply become less young. We also have the advantage of being able to recall what to many, if not to most colleagues in this room, is the distant past.
When I first started to catalogue Chinese books in the Bodleian, the records were written on cards by hand, or with a mechanical typewriter. It was a great advance when in the 1980s the Library provided us with electric golfball and then daisywheel typewriters. At the same time, Chinese library automation was increasingly discussed at EASL conferences, and arguments about how it should be done often became very heated. The Tenth Conference in Leiden in 1990 was particularly memorable, when Lars Fredriksson demonstrated the Macintosh solution that he had implemented in Stockholm, and J-M Streffer spoke of his enthusiasm for the allegro system in Berlin.
Times change, and it’s hard now to convey the excitement that everyone felt when we first saw Chinese characters on a computer screen. And arguments about how automation should be done are now over, as the MARC CJK system has become universal, despite the fact that every feature of its construction is either inadequate or completely wrong.
But something that never goes wrong, and which hasn’t changed for over two thousand years, is the book list. TheBielu別錄, a catalogue of the imperial library whichEmperor Cheng of the Han Dynasty漢成帝ordered the scholar Liu Xiang劉 向to compile in 26 BC, is simply a list. So is what I think is the best printed Chinese book catalogue ever produced, that of Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities. This is very big and elaborate, and has a title and author index, but it is still basically a list.
Thus inspired, I’ve started to write lists myself. Actually, I started more than forty years ago. Shortly after I was first appointed to the Bodleian in 1976, I started to visit Piet van der Loon at his house on Boar’s Hill to learn the facts of Chinese bibliography. He quickly infected me with his enthusiasm for the popular editions that had arrived in Europe in the seventeenth century, and I started to make a list of them. I then expanded the list to include the seventeenth-century Chinese acquisitions in other British libraries.
As soon as the internet appeared, and the Library staff were givenspace on which to mount their own pages, which we were encouraged to produce, I mounted my list and further expanded it to include the seventeenth-century acquisitions of all other European libraries. When scholars interested in these matters saw it, they started to help me, so that little by little, maybe only once or twice a year, the list continues to grow and may one day be complete.
The list is expressed in the simplest HTML – it’s little more than a textfile – and is most certainly not a work of scholarship. But it led directly to the discovery of one of the most important Chinese historical documents in existence, the Selden Map. RobertBachelor had noticed that there was a Ming dynasty mapon my list,and asked to see it when he visited the Bodleian at the beginning of January, 2008.
I’ve recently started to produce other lists, the latest being a list of the official publications of the Chinese government when it was based at Chongqing in the 1940s. The Bodleian received a gift of 151 of these from the so-called “National Library of Peiping” in February, 1946.All of them are valuable, and someare now very rare indeed. Before he left for Princeton, Joshua had located them and extracted them from the modern collection – I don’t know how or why he did this – but it has enabled the Library to incorporate them into its special collections, and me to produce a list of them.
My first list gives access to materials that could never be found in online catalogues. I don’t know what search-term would lead the reader to materials that came to Europe in the seventeenth century. And my latest list could only be produced from most online catalogues with much time and difficulty, and by readers who know what they’re doing, who in my experience are very few and far between.
The more I work on the Bodleian’s special collections, the more my enthusiasm for lists increases. When I’ve been unable to find texts in online databases, I’ve resorted to Google searches, and these have often led to lists of books which Chinese scholars have mounted on their websites or reproduced in their blogs just as I do myself. Occasionally, you notice thingsin their listswhich turn out to be even more interesting than what you were originally looking for.
When I was still in the employ of the Bodleian, my work on the so-called “special” Chinese collections were showcased in a website called “Serica” which I was required to construct. Unfortunately I couldn’t complete my work on these collections by the time of my dismissal, so I’m continuing to work on them as a private scholar.
As the Library has now closed the old Serica website, I’m presenting the data in a new one, which I’m constructing as best I can.Thisdoes something that no online catalogue could ever manage, and I will briefly explain why.
More and more, especially during the later years of my employment, scholars – mostly Chinese ones – were not asking to see specific books. These could easily be found in our online catalogue, without reference to me or any other librarian. They were asking the question, “what have you got”.
It would have been pointless, and even unhelpful, for me to tell them to go and have a look in the online catalogue, as online catalogues are not designed to answer this question. They are designed to limit what is being looked for, not to show everything. And the more they limit it, the better most readers are pleased. The ideal is to find exactly the bookorbooks that you’re looking for, and nothing more, in the first hit.
And so I designed the Serica site as an attempt to give an overview of all the “special” Chinese books in Oxford, not just a few of them. It is nothing more than a collection of lists, some of them very long.The data is arranged in a modified version of thesibu四部classification, which can be seen and understood at a glance. Each category gives access to a list that can be viewed, printed out, or downloaded as required. Each list can be structured in a way that best suits the data it contains, and the data can be expressed in a way that is appropriate to it, rather than a way that has to conform to a particular set of rules.
Please consider making some lists and putting them on the web if you haven’t already done so. It’s a low-tech but highly effective way of providing access to discrete collections of specialised material that either can’t behandledby our library systems – ephemera, for example – or which it’s too difficult and time-consuming to make available by other means. For example, the Bodleian has some paintings and calligraphy in its collections. I made a list of these a while ago which Mamtimyn was able to use this year to get them all digitised. The list is primitive – I know nothing about painting and calligraphy – but it has already served at least one useful function.
Our listsareindexed by Google, and are so made searchable throughout the world. There are ways of expediting this which I’m only now beginning to learn about. Joshua told me about the “Google Search Console” which enables you to add a search bar to your site which gives access to your lists in a controlled manner. I’ve added one to my Serica site without any confidence that I’ve done it correctly, but it seems to work. It is also possible to direct Google to your files so that they are indexed quickly.
I’ll now go to my website (https://serica.ie/) and demonstrate some of these things, but first one final point. The web is excellent at providing pieces of information, but not so good at offering conspectus – this is the whole point of Serica. In learning how to construct my pages, I’ve made much use of W3Schools and other online resources. But cutting and pasting pieces of code is not the same as learning the subject properly. Sooner or later, something unexpected happens to remind you of this. And it’s just the same with students who cobble their essays together from the internet instead of reading books.
Today, when people mention Bulaq, it is often with a dismissive shrug to what is perceived as a crowded, lower-income neighborhood overshadowed by glossier parts of Cairo. But peel back the layers of concrete and memory, and you will find that Bulaq was once the beating heart of Egypt’s intellectual and cultural awakening. It is where the country’s first printing press was born, and where ideas, not just ink, first flowed into the bloodstream of modern Egypt. Under the direction of Muhammad Ali Pasha, Egypt launched a modernization project that included sending a delegation to Milan to study the art of printing. In 1821, that mission resulted in the opening of what would become the Bulaq Press. A year later, it published its first book, an Arabic-Italian dictionary. The press quickly became a tool for spreading knowledge, printing not only Arabic texts, but also translating scientific books, government decrees, and school curricula. It was state-owned and operated, shaping education, governance, and communication in the early years of the Egyptian state. For several decades, the Bulaq Press held an important place in Egyptian public life. Its name changed over time, from…
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Will we ever escape the military-industrial complex? Will we ever make peace with bombs? Also, and obviously much less urgently, where has Joan Osbourne been all these years? There’s one thing I know, if God really was one of us they would be pissed. Yes, of course, God is non-binary. Speaking of which, since non-binary and trans people have now been kicked out of our Armed Forces, at least they won’t have them to kick around the never-ending war machine anymore. Gotta find the silver lining, no matter how slim. Happy Monday, kittens.
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A pro tip for perfectly round tortillas is to cut off excess with a a 6-inch metal cake cutter or metal lid of a pot. Remove the excess, and add it to the next portion. You can skip this step and just have messier edges, or use a knife to trim the rough parts.
