Brittle (food)

Brittle is a type of confection consisting of flat broken pieces of hard sugar candy embedded with nuts such as pecans, almonds, or peanuts. It has many variations around the world, such as pasteli in Greece,croquant in France,gozinaki in Georgia, chikki in India and kotkoti in Bangladesh. In parts of the Middle East, brittle is made with pistachios, while many Asian countries use sesame seeds and peanuts. Peanut brittle is the most popular brittle recipe in the US. The term brittle first appears in print in 1892, though the candy itself has been around for much longer.

Traditionally, a mixture of sugar and water is heated to the hard crack stage corresponding to a temperature of approximately 300 °F (149 °C), although some recipes also call for ingredients such as corn syrup and salt in the first step. Nuts are mixed with the caramelized sugar. At this point spices, leavening agents, and often peanut butter or butter are added. The hot candy is poured out onto a flat surface for cooling, traditionally a granite or marble slab. The hot candy may be troweled to uniform thickness. When the brittle cools, it is broken into pieces.

Food

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth.

Historically, people secured food through two methods: hunting and gathering and agriculture. Today, the majority of the food energy required by the ever increasing population of the world is supplied by the food industry.

Food safety and food security are monitored by agencies like the International Association for Food Protection, World Resources Institute, World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Food Information Council. They address issues such as sustainability, biological diversity, climate change, nutritional economics, population growth, water supply, and access to food.

The right to food is a human right derived from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), recognizing the "right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food," as well as the "fundamental right to be free from hunger."

Food (Kelis album)

Food is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Kelis, released on April 18, 2014, becoming her first album released under Ninja Tune Records. In 2007, Jive dropped Kelis, and she later signed to Interscope and will.i.am Music Group in 2009, through the label she released her fifth studio album, Flesh Tone, which saw Kelis experiment with a dance sound. In 2011 Kelis began work on the follow up to Flesh Tone, however she left Interscope and signed to Federal Prism, before officially signing to the British independent label Ninja Tune for the release of Food.

Food is an R&B and soul album with a diverse musical style that incorporates funk, Afro-beat, Memphis soul, R&B and neo-soul. Its songs feature crackling horns, brass, earthy guitars, simmering electronics and vocals from Kelis that were noted as being breathy, smoky and sultry. The album was viewed as a return to Kelis' previous music prior to Flesh Tone, and was described by Kelis as, "a kind of unspoken lovefest". The album was written by Kelis, alongside David Andrew Sitek, and Todd Simon, and was entirely produced by Dave Sitek and features guest performances by CSS and Priscilla Ahn.

Zico Chain

Zico Chain are a rock band from London, United Kingdom, formed in 2002. To date, they have released two full albums entitled Food and The Devil in Your Heart, a self titled EP and an EP called These Birds Will Kill Us All. The band opened the main stage at the Download Festival on 8 June 2007. They supported Velvet Revolver on their 2007 summer tour of the UK, in support of their second album Libertad. Their new album The Devil in Your Heart was released on 16 April 2012.

Early years

The band formed in East London. Vocalist-bassist Chris Glithero had moved there from Manchester, and met guitarist Paul Frost and drummer Ollie Middleton. Their dissatisfaction with 21st-century British rock helped them connect with one another. Influenced by such bands as Motörhead, Queens of the Stone Age, The White Stripes and System of a Down, they began recording, and soon were signed to Hassle Records. For their first EP, they worked with Ted Miller, who has previously worked with Placebo. They then toured with Nine Black Alps, Alkaline Trio, Cave In and The Fall of Troy. They had a number-one video on MTV2's chart. Slash and Duff McKagan of Velvet Revolver (and Guns N' Roses) revealed that Zico Chain were their favourite new band. On 9 November 2009, the band released a standalone single "These Birds Will Kill Us All" with B-sides "Blood 'N Bile" and "Daycase", available on iTunes among other internet sites.

Brittleness

A material is brittle if, when subjected to stress, it breaks without significant deformation (strain). Brittle materials absorb relatively little energy prior to fracture, even those of high strength. Breaking is often accompanied by a snapping sound. Brittle materials include most ceramics and glasses (which do not deform plastically) and some polymers, such as PMMA and polystyrene. Many steels become brittle at low temperatures (see ductile-brittle transition temperature), depending on their composition and processing.

When used in materials science, it is generally applied to materials that fail when there is little or no evidence of plastic deformation before failure. One proof is to match the broken halves, which should fit exactly since no plastic deformation has occurred.

When a material has reached the limit of its strength, it usually has the option of either deformation or fracture. A naturally malleable metal can be made stronger by impeding the mechanisms of plastic deformation (reducing grain size, precipitation hardening, work hardening, etc.), but if this is taken to an extreme, fracture becomes the more likely outcome, and the material can become brittle. Improving material toughness is therefore a balancing act.

Software brittleness

In computer programming and software engineering, software brittleness is the increased difficulty in fixing older software that may appear reliable, but fails badly when presented with unusual data or altered in a seemingly minor way. The phrase is derived from analogies to brittleness in metalworking.

Causes

When software is new, it is very malleable; it can be formed to be whatever is wanted by the implementers. But as the software in a given project grows larger and larger, and develops a larger base of users with long experience with the software, it becomes less and less malleable. Like a metal that has been work-hardened, the software becomes a legacy system, brittle and unable to be easily maintained without fracturing the entire system.

Brittleness in software can be caused by algorithms that do not work well for the full range of input data. A good example is an algorithm that allows a divide by zero to occur, or a curve-fitting equation that is used to extrapolate beyond the data that it was fitted to. Another cause of brittleness is the use of data structures that restrict values. This was commonly seen in the late 1990s as people realized that their software only had room for a 2 digit year entry; this led to the sudden updating of tremendous quantities of brittle software before the year 2000. Another more commonly encountered form of brittleness is in graphical user interfaces that make invalid assumptions. For example, a user may be running on a low resolution display, and the software will open a window too large to fit the display. Another common problem is expressed when a user uses a color scheme other than the default, causing text to be rendered in the same color as the background, or a user uses a font other than the default, which won't fit in the allowed space and cuts off instructions and labels.

Brittle (disambiguation)

Brittleness is the liability of a material to fracture when subjected to stress.

Brittle may also refer to:

See also