Recipe: Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Tuna and Boccincini Pizza

Bit different to the usual pizza, but quite nice. Here's the source for this recipe.

• Pizza base, 1
  
• Fennel bulb, 1, finely sliced
  
• Bocconcini or fresh mozzarella, 75g, sliced
  
• Tuna in oil, 185g can, well drained.
  
• Fennel fronds, 1 tbsp, finely chopped
  
• Parsley, finely chopped, 1/8 cup
  
• Basil, finely chopped, 1 tbsp
  
• Olive oil, 1 1/2 tbsp
  
• Grated lemon rind, from 1/2 lemon

• Preheat oven to 220 degrees.
  
• Brush each pizza base with a little olive oil.
  
• Sprinkle the fennel evenly over each pizza base and top with the sliced cheese.
  
• Bake in oven for 12-15 minutes.
  
• Gently toss together the flaked tuna, herbs, olive oil and lemon rind and season with salt and freshly ground pepper.
  
• Scatter over the hot pizza and serve.

Kevin Kelly: When copies are free, you have to sell what can't be copied

More and more things are becoming digitised, and thus easily copied. The Internet is a big machine for grinding out free copies. And when copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. So argues Kevin Kelly, in his post Better Than Free.

So what can't be copied? He lists eight things, which he gives plenty of examples of:

• Immediacy
  
• Personalization
  
• Embodiment (which is really a subtype of personalization)
  
• Interpretation
  
• Authenticity
  
• Accessibility
  
• Patronage
  
• Findability

Basically, making money from these means making money from capturing attention, which is a different kettle of fish from what we're used to.

I reckon his post presents some pretty deep insights into future technological development.

Here's a few other details about it.

He criticises the notion that advertising is essentially the only means to make money from free copies.

He also generalises his argument from digital copies to "any kind of copy where the marginal cost of that copy approaches zero", going on to say

Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill.

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Additional Notes

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is relevant to these issues, according to one of the post comments: it is "arguably one of the cornerstones of an understanding of multiple media in modern life, and it describes convulsive, revolutionary changes to media distribution really elegantly".

The same comment also recommends Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things for more on the value of "findability".


In relation to technological development as the removal of constraints

I think what Kelly writes fits in nicely with the notion of technological development as the removal of constraints, which I talked about in a 2006 post Scientific and Technological Development = Removal of Constraints.

Briefly, my argument was along these lines:

• Our capabilities are obviously limited, to differing degrees and in various ways
  
• Technologies lessen these limitations (or constraints).
  • It can be two-steps forwards, one step back, but I think there is an overal trend in this direction
• You can think about where technological development may go by thinking about the ways our capabilities are constrained, and the ways these constraints can be lessened.
  • You don't have to do this just to speculate, but to try and figure out how to improve on current technologies.

I think Kelly's post fits in nicely with this. Copying used to be heavily constrained. It took a fair bit of time and effort to make copies of things. But now, technology has removed a lot of these constraints.

The copying constraints enabled you, as the producer of some content (e.g. a song), to charge people for copies. But since that constraint is drastically lessened you have to find other things to sell that people can't copy - things where our ability to copy them is heavily constrained.

But even these other constraints may be lessened by further technological development. For example, it will become easier to personalise content, through higher-level ways to configure things, and through more intelligent software that knows your preferences better and can do a reasonable job of ensuring they're met.


Dimensions upon which to imagine ideals

This bit is sketching...

Another way to look at Kelly's list of eight items, is as a list of eight dimensions along which we can remove constraints, to look at where technological development may head. To think, for example, of ways for making content more immediate, or more authentic.

What I think is actually the most useful thing to do is have a clear idea of what the ideal would be for each of those constraints. For example, the ideal in terms of Findability might be for you to simply want to desire something, and with the most minimal amount of effort be able to get it. Or even better, for technology to be able to (reliably) predict that you'll want something and deliver it to you before you even have to realise you want it.

Removing all the constraints associated with interpretation would mean there is an automatic provision of interpretation -- of what the content means, what you can do about it, how to use it, etc -- suited to you. The ultimate step would be not to have to provide you with this information, but for it to be automatically applied for you.

But so what, right? What's the use if you're just imagining some fantasy ideal, and not thinking about something more realistic, or about how to improve the technology? The answer to this is that we need to think beyond means that directly lead to the improvements. What imagining these ideals can do is help give you higher-standards. And high-standards are crucial for any creative work. Steve Jobs has very high standards. So does Ricky Gervais. So it seems with most people who make good stuff.

You've got a benchmark that keeps you from simply being satisfied with an incremental improvement. You're taking a broader, more fundamental viewpoint. This might lead you to redesign things from the ground up, or at least not simply see an incremental improvement as "good" and stop there, but be thinking about there being more that is possible.

Apple is an example of a company that pushes things more than just 'one step further'.

Article: innovation is the result of hard-work, not flashes of brilliance

Janet Rae-Dupree, in the New York Times:

As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Innovators and other creative types, we believe, stand apart from the crowd, wielding secrets and magical talents beyond the rest of us.

Balderdash. Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

"The most useful way to think of epiphany is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems," explains Scott Berkun in his 2007 book, "The Myths of Innovation." "Most innovations come without epiphanies, and when powerful moments do happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point. The goal isn't the magic moment: it's the end result of a useful innovation."

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That's a common theme in innovation, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the Claremont Graduate University in California. "Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep," he writes in "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention."

Though that's hardly surprising once you're aware that most of cognition is unconscious, and that conscious thought is like the tip of the
iceberg.

Tiredness is not literally a lack of energy

One of the malaises of our modern world is that we get fat. We eat
too much sweet and fatty foods. Why? Because in ancestoral
conditions, food was a scarce resource and sweet and fatty foodstuffs
were potent energy sources. We've evolved to seek them out. In
developed countries, food is no longer a scarce resource, and this
instinctive craving makes us fat.

Tiredness is another modern malaise. Many of us just don't have much
energy. No doubt overwork, hectic lifestyle and inadequate sleep are
major contributors. And lethargy could be due to mental exhaustion,
though here I'm talking about lack of physical energy.

It is interesting to note that this tiredness must be an intentional
part of the design of our bodies, to make us get some rest, like the
way we need sleep. It is not actually a lack of energy. We have more
energy than ever. Energy is, quite literally, what those fat bellies
we're carrying around are.