If you weave narrow wares (inkle bands, rigid heddle bands, tablet woven bands), you could help Mari with her research if you participate in her survey on dedicated apps and other digital aids used in narrow wares' weaving. Mari's reason for the survey?

I am a weaver and teacher of narrow wares' weaving, but I also study IT. My bachelor's thesis for Laurea University of Applied Sciences
researches digital aids used in band weaving with a rigid heddle or string heddles and tablet weaving. My main focus is on the use of
dedicated narrow wares' weaving apps, but I also look into other digital aids used for designing and weaving warp-faced bands and for
teaching band weaving and tablet weaving. The purpose of this survey is to find out which apps and other digital aids are used at the
moment and which features in the apps are or would be important to weavers, designers, and teachers of narrow wares' weaving.

The survey is short and quick to fill out; you can find the survey form here. 

Please read the terminology note at the top of the introduction before scrolling down to the survey itself. The survey does not ask for any personal information and even the obligatory background questions all have the option of not telling anything. Survey responses will be destroyed as soon as the thesis has been approved by the university, at the latest by the end of 2024.

You have a week to participate, responses are collected until the end of October 10, 2024 (the survey closes at midnight Finnish time [EEST/UTC +3]). 

Feel free to share the survey form link with others, too - it definitely helps to have many responses on surveys like that!

It's time for a few days off - I will be back on the blog on Monday! 

Meanwhile, if you're interested in finding out a little more about AI, take a look at this "AI productivity guide" - maybe it's helpful. (I haven't looked into AI support for stuff yet, but in the way and speed that this develops, it's only a question of time for it to become part of daily life and daily work life...)

One of the things you hear again and again these days is that less meat in the diet is better - for both health (generally speaking) and the environment. 

That is all well and good; however, what I don't really get is the many fake meat products. Usually heavily processed and full of stuff to make the result more or less seem like a meat sausage or whatnot, they are also generously packaged in lots of plastic and usually at least at the price point of actual meat products... even if you buy organic.

As a rule, I don't go for these stand-in products unless there's an opportunity to try a tiny little bit of it. And until now, I have not found any of them to really come close to the stuff they are trying to copy. Even if the texture of some fine-ground sausage is actually quite close to the original, the taste just is... off. It lacks the taste of meat (which is logical, but, well, if you eat it because you like the pork taste... it's lacking). 

Apparently it's also really difficult to emulate the structure of meat by processing and mixing other things. There's a paper about this (from Physics of Fluids, interestingly), that is freely available. So if you're interested in a very close look at Veggie sausage compared to the meaty stuff... enjoy.

Years and years ago, I stumbled across EscapePod, the weekly science fiction podcast. I have listened my way through it over many, many hours of car driving, spinning, and other work. And at one point, I submitted my application to be one of their narrators.

To this day, I haven't read anything for the 'Pod, but I did get to be the voice for some things in the sister podcast, Cast of Wonders. And the newest of "my" episodes is out now: 

You can listen to the episode at https://www.castofwonders.org/2024/09/cast-of-wonders-604-the-restaurant-of-object-permanence/ and I hope you like it!

Not only is it (finally) Friday, the weekend is also promising to be deliciously free of things that have to be done - so I'm very much looking forward to it. There's one run to the post office to be done and then... two days full of blissfull nothingness. 

Today I had the pleasure of watching the online PhD defense of a friend, who passed with flying colours - to everybody's great delight (and no surprise). And next week, planning and fine-tuning stuff for the Textile Forum will start in earnest!  

It's raining here, quite enthusiastically - which means I'm looking forward to a nice cup of tea. Otherwise today was filled with boring bits of maintenance work, and it feels like it should be Friday already, but I'm somehow pretty sure it isn't. Ah well.

 And as it's raining here, maybe you will enjoy this little video about a traditional rain protection made from palm leaf sheets:

Today I learned that there's a group of scientists doing a Planetary Health Check... at, not surprisingly, https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/.  If you'd like to do your daily doom scrolling with some nice flashy red colour, that's a good place to go.

There's a whole news page there as well, with all kinds of news around planetary changes and developments. Including some good news, which is nice to read. They also have a "solutions" section, though that's mostly geared towards larger businesses and policymakers.

Stuff like this makes me both hopeful, because there's people trying to change the tide before it's too late, and hopeless, because it's getting more and more obvious that we're speeding up towards a wall as a species, and still way too little is happening to stop it. That is true both in Germany and globally. Yes, it helps that a lot of us are, as individuals, trying to do eco-friendly stuff, but we also need the governments and really big players to drastically change some things.

And now I'm going to go and cuddle the cat. Because we all know that content cats, much like cat content, makes things better!