Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and accomplished orator who was amputated and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony for his scathing criticism and opposition against the man.
But before his hands and head were non-consensually separated from his body, he authored a work on ethics titled "De finibus bonorum et malorum" ("On the ends of good and evil”) in 45 BCE.
"There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." is the English translation of an excerpt from that work.
This work survives only because centuries later, the Church declared him to be a “Virtuous Pagan” and thus his writings were spared the fate (banning/burning etc) of a lot of Roman-era literary works.
In the 1500s, an unknown printer scrambled the words in the aforementioned phrase and that scrambled version survives to this day in a rather ubiquitous fashion.
Fast forward to the 1960s, a typeface manufacturer named Letraset started using the scrambled version of that excerpt from Cicero in their advertising campaigns, and in the 1980s, Aldus (which went on to become Adobe) used it in their Pagemaker Desktop Publishing Software.
The Latin original of “There is no one who loves pain itself…” is “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...
This is the origin of the dummy filler text used by almost every designer on the planet.

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5 Sep
When I was in high school, my English teacher told us this fascinating story of India’s electrification drive in the 1960s. The government sent armies of electrical engineers village by village to bring what would be a disruptive change - light after dark.
And it wasn’t easy because electricity was a newfangled thing and understandably, village elders regularly resisted what the 1960s equivalent of WhatsApp (hearsay and gossip) told them - this was a scary bit of technology that was dangerous.
Apparently, some of them would say - “We heard that electricity is hot and things can catch fire”. As one might imagine, Indian languages did not possess the vocabulary to describe the movement of electrons through conductive materials back in the day.
Read 8 tweets
8 Aug
When you add a pinch of baking soda and a teabag to the pressure cooker when cooking chickpeas, you are using the chemistry of acid-base reactions and also exploiting the ability of sodium bicarbonate to break bonds in pectin.
When you add gram flour (besan) to yoghurt and whisk it to prevent it from splitting in a kadhi, you are experimenting with the physics of emulsions. When you whip air into egg whites for cakes, you are dealing with foams
When you make a perfectly soft-boiled egg, or work cold butter into an omelette, or squeeze lime juice into a marinade for chicken, you are denaturing protein molecules with precision and control.
Read 8 tweets
7 Aug
Uwe Hohn, Neeraj Chopra's coach, and the only man to ever throw a javelin over 100m did not win an Olympic medal because East Germany boycotted the 1984 games in Los Angeles
As throws reached 100m during the mid-80s, the design of the javelins changed to push the centre of gravity 4 cm ahead, which reduced throw distance because it's harder to throw something that is more front-heavy
While it's tempting to assume that this sport is all about shoulder and arm strength, it isn't. The biggest biomechanical factor in throw distance is the ability to plonk the left foot down and transfer energy via the hips and trunk to the throwing arm
Read 4 tweets
1 Jul
The erstwhile school librarian of my late father’s village, Gopalasamudram (near Tirunelveli) used to maintain an annual handwritten diary of literally everything he learned during the year. This is the diary from 1956
The list of Melakartha ragas in Carnatic music
English proverbs (occasionally with Tamil translations). Also some surprising entries
Read 11 tweets
21 Jun
Flavour memories combine and interfere with subsequent aroma detection. For instance, anything with vanilla will taste mildly sweet even if it contains no sugar because we associate vanilla only with sweet dishes. This is a trick one can use to reduce the intake of added sugars.
Adding powdered cardamom to your tea can make it taste sweeter with a relatively smaller amount of sugar. Incidentally, umami can make a smaller amount of sugar linger for longer, so using glutamate-heavy ingredients like walnuts in desserts lets you use lesser sugar
This is also why eggless cakes & ice cream taste cloyingly sweet. Egg yolks, which have a reasonable amount of glutamates let you get away with less sugar.
Read 6 tweets
3 Jun
What connects two 18th century German physicians/naturalists, the Nawabs of Arcot, and winged termites with South Indian cooking? A thread...
Johann Andreas Murray was a Swedish physician of German descent who studied under Carl Linnaeus, who pioneered the binomial nomenclature of all living organisms, a system that we continue to use today.
He was also a pioneering pharmacologist who wrote a 6-volume compendium of herbal remedies and edited subsequent versions of Linneaus’ work - “The Vegetable Kingdom”.
Read 15 tweets

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