Three Beautiful Things

 

Carol invited us for dinner; she made a beautiful fresh-fruit tart for dessert.

Math and Beauty

For mathematicians a solution to a long-standing problem is a thing of great beauty. This week, a problem that was originally posed almost 200 years ago appears to have been solved by using artificial intelligence. Mathematicians, including a good friend of ours, have spent enormous efforts to find a solution to this problem which deals with the apparently chaotic behavior of fluids like the wake of a boat where water appears to churn without any definable pattern. The success by AI appears to be quite a surprise to the math community. The problem, known as the Navier-Stokes problem, was named for the two mathematicians who originally proposed it: Claude-Louis Navier (1785-1836) and George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1837). The result was achieved by 88 hours of computer time using 10,000 artificial intelligence agents. (source)

Photos © 2026 mae sander

Pear Cake

Out of the pan!

© 2025 mae sander

The Greatest Foods of All Time?

CNN.com has a current article titled "International desserts: 50 famous desserts around the world" by Jen Rose Smith. This photo collection is so utterly tempting that I can't resist saving my favorite photos, the ones that I'd like to eat RIGHT NOW! 

I have tasted many more than half of them -- you probably have too. All the ones I know about are so fantastic I can hardly stand to look at the photos. Here are a few samples (but I think it's a fun project to just look at all the photos).

Number 8: Cardamom buns from Sweden.

Number 10: Chocolate chip cookies from the US. The photo shows them fresh and hot. Irresistible.

Number 11: Chocolate mousse from France. I remember my first-ever bite of this. Awesome.

Number 20: Gelato from Italy. Luckily, there are at least some ice cream shops here that have this treat.

Number 28: Lemon tart from France -- my favorite of all. Though I like the single-serving ones best.

Number 36: Pavlova from Australia and New Zealand. Quite a rivalry.
I think a chef in New Zealand has been shown to be the real inventor, but the popularizer was Australian.

I hope CNN won't mind that I have copied their photos because they make me so hungry.