During the summer months, the Belgian physicist Fabrizio Bucella delivers a daily and funny unit of wisdom every morning just before 8am (CET) on the French public radio. Often addressing every day question to uncover a scientific principle. A recent morn, he mentioned Fermi’s estimates, which is a numerate way to guess(timate) a physical quantity by multiplying individual estimates, like the number of piano tuners in Chicago. (My preparatory school physics teacher was very good at this game, beating our pocket calculators by a large margin!) But I had never heard either of the concept or of the expression. Bucella’s 2mn explanation was quite similar to the Wikipedia entry, if not mentioning that the squared root increase of the error applies to the logarithm of the estimate. And arguing unreasonably at all terms being above or below their true values with probability ½. The paradox of the waiting time the day after was more convincing, if failing to mention Siméon Poisson. [The above is a picture I took of Lake Michigan while running, the last time I visited Chicago. A few days before Barack Obama got re-elected.]
Cooked more of the same (soba, tuna, vegs) while in Japan. And visited a wasabi farm!, dating from 1915, cleverly made into a tourist trap. (Where we made fresh wasabi paste from the (local) wasabi root to mix with rice and condiment. And had a wasabi ice cream, in a clash between creamy sweetness and strong pungency! Much more a successful clash than the lavender ice cream the day after….) Also tasted oyaki dumplings filled with pumpkin, daikon, and nozawana, a local delicacy of Nagano.
Cooked my own okomiyaki in a 
