October 2016

A plate of gazpacho with bread

This week I’m going easier on the blog than in the last week's philosophy filled post. Today I’m going to share with you my favorite Spanish dish, gazpacho.😋 If you follow this recipe, you’ll get an authentic taste of Spain in the form of a healthy gazpacho. In case you don’t already know what gazpacho is, it’s a cold tomato soup.🍅 Purely vegetarian and full of vitamins! Nam, Nam…

 

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cucumber
  • 1/2 kg tomatoes
  • 2 bell peppers
  • 1 onion
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 1 dry roll of white bread
  • olive oil
  • (apple) vinegar
  • salt

Preparation

Start by cooking the onion and garlic in a pan. They don’t need to be fully cooked, but if you add them raw to your gazpacho, their taste might be too dominating. If you are in a rush and willing to take a risk, this step can be omitted. 🙂

Cut the stem and seeds off of the bell peppers. Blend all the vegetables, oil, vinegar and salt with a blender. I'm not giving any exact quantities for olive oil or vinegar, but my opinion is that there can't be too much olive oil in gazpacho.😄 You should also add vinegar and salt quite generously.😉 Gazpacho is supposed to be a little chunky, so don’t over blend the vegetables and turn your gazpacho into a smoothie!😮 When you have finished this step, tear the roll into small pieces and blend it into the gazpacho with a blender. Note: the bread should be dry, but you can also toast it in a toaster if it's not.

And that’s it! ¡Que aproveche! 😃

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Autumn forest with sun

This week’s topic is the social layer of the reality. I like to think that there are different “layers” in the reality we perceive. For instance, there’s the physical reality that exists out there regardless of us humans, there will be atoms, molecules and so on. Another layer is what our perception adds to the physical: we perceive colors, we hear music and so on, although all this is just light or sound waves in the physical layer. The reason why I’m writing about the social layer is because understanding its existence and how it works really changed fundamentally the way I see the world.😊 This discovery also convinced me to study more social psychology which has been a journey of growing as a person. I strongly recommend it!👍

To open up my idea of different layers, let me give an example: Color red. First of all, colors don’t exist in the physical world, different physical objects only reflect light differently and these differences are interpreted by our eyes 👁 and brains as colors. So the concept of red only starts to exist once we hit the layer of perception of the reality. Then again, red can have different cultural meanings. It might be linked to love 💗, Christmas 🎅🏻 or stopping 🚦 in case that we see it in traffic lights – these all depend on the culture and conventions. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine a culture in which the light making cars stop would be a blue one. I.e. what red means to us is already part of the social layer of the reality. Hopefully this example illustrates well the point I’m making. (more…)

A MacBook Pro with a photo editing software open

This post will include a tutorial for making tiled images by using Photoshop in addition to some of my own tiled images that are free to use. But first, I’ll give some background why this tutorial ended up in the positive blog. 😃

When I was a kid 👦🏼, I made games using a code-free tool called Clickteam Fusion. What games require is, of course, graphics and one way of getting them is by taking photos. 📸 Photos don’t usually make good game characters, but you can use them as background or texture for 3D objects. In such a use, you don’t usually want to use an entire picture but only a part of it, like the wooden material of your kitchen floor for instance. Then it would be nice that the same part of the picture could be repeated endlessly so that you could cover the floor of an entire 3D house with the picture of your own floor in such a way that it looks natural, i.e. that it is tiled. (more…)

people by the Eiffel tower in Paris

Today’s topic will take this blog a bit further away from the language geek theme established in the first posts.🤓 This won't be an in-depth review of the finest classical compositions made in France – not at all. Instead, I’ll highlight here two of my favorite French singers.😃

It’s also worth mentioning that I found these artists by listening to NRJ French. I like that particular internet radio station because they only play French songs.🎵 What could be a better way of improving French than that? (more…)