Gordon Ramsay: How to Scramble Eggs (video)

I don't do scrambled eggs much coz they never seem to come out right, but after seeing this I'm going to get some eggs this afternoon and give it a go tomorrow morning.

A few interesting things from the video: don't put salt in early, as it effects the consistency; scramble the eggs in the pan; alternate the pan on and off the heat.

(Update: had a go at it and it came out pretty good, though I didn't cook it quite long enough, and didn't have any creme fraiche. also, 3 eggs is too much for me, next time I'll try using 2)

Alternatively, if you like omelette's:

(source unkown).

A Wikipedia for data (statistics, listings, etc)

[Update: the article can now be found here]

Bret Taylor suggests that we need a Wikipedia for data. A lot of potential innovation is being held up because it’s so hard to get access to factual data (esp decent quality data). Statistics, listings, and so on. Taylor suggests a Wikipedia-like repository of factual data freely available to everyone. It could really grow if it caught on – the sort of thing that fosters a sharing spirit. You know that if you add/update/correct stuff (and everyone else does likewise), everyone benefits.

The most lifelike robot I've ever seen

This video has been around since mid-March, but I've only just seen it.

It's of the 'Big Dog' robot made by Boston Dynamics. Watch what happens when the guy tries to push it over, or when it slips on icy ground. Squint and you'd think you're watching a real animal.

A "workspace setup" tool for Windows?

When I’ve finished a session on my laptop, I always just put it to sleep rather than shutting it down. I only shut it down (or restart it) for a software install or update, or because of performance problems -- basically, when I'm forced to. Closing all the programs down, restarting the system, and then setting everything back up again just takes too long.

For those times when I do have to restart it, I’d like a software tool that could automatically set my workspace back up again, by reloading all the programs / documents I normally use. So far, I haven’t found anything that does this. “Application Launcher” programs are more about being able to quickly access a particluar program or document when you want to load it. I’d like something with these features:

• Once you’ve defined your set-up, and it’s a simple matter to get the program to open all the programs.
  
• What you can define in your set-up
  • what to open
    • programs
      
    • documents
      
    • directories (in Windows Explorer)
  • What order to open them in (so they appear in a specific order on the taskbar, which helps me to organise things).
    
  • Ideally, where to place these windows, and how to size them (when my text editor opens, the window is too wide).
    
  • Support multiple different set-ups.
    I use three virtual desktops, and I have diff sets of apps open in each, so I’d like to have three different set-ups.
    
  • Ideally, a way to specify settings for windows.
    For example, I’d like it to be able to set up Winamp to appear on all of the virtual desktops. Manually, you do this by right-clicking the winamp item on the taskbar, choosing the ‘Virtual Dimension’ option (for the virtual desktop I use), and then the ‘All Desktops’ option. I’d like to be able to set up the program to do this for me.

Is anything out there like this (and preferably not full of other features)? (I could try writing something like this myself, though with all the other stuff I'm working on, I don't think I'd get round to it anytime soon).

Really, I think such functionality should just be a basic, standard component of windows.

Paul Graham: How to disagree

A short-and-sweet look at how to disagree.

What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages.

The feasability of a kick-arse public transport system for Brisbane?

Brisbane is a great place, but one thing you hear over and over again is that the public transport sucks. While it could be a lot worse, and I'm glad we've got what we have (CityCats in particular are nice), I’m equally sure it could be a lot better.

But how much better is feasable? Would an ideal, kick-arse public transport system actually be possible? I don’t know the answers, but here's some thoughts on what would be desirable, and some of the questions I have about its feasability.

I'm thinking of a public transport system with extensive coverage and very frequent services. Where all the services started early in the morning and ran till late at night, and 10 minutes was the most you’d ever have to wait.

Where, wherever you were in Brisbane, five minutes was the most you’d have to walk to get to public transport. Where you can go pretty directly to where you want – perhaps by first travelling to one of a few major hubs, and from there straight out to your destination.

But how feasible would that be? One thing you'd need is people with the right vision and drive to carry it through. I take that as a given; what's less clear to me is the economic feasibility.

What changes or alternatives could be used to work towards these goals? What incremental changes could be made? What sorts of improvements would require new infrastructure or different transport means?

For all of these things, what sorts of costs would be involved? And how much of those costs could you expect to offset (at least in the medium to long term) by increased public transport usage? To what extent could you convince people that the extra costs were worth it (such as by painting a compelling picture of what could be done)?

And how long would the different options take to implement?

If the ideal is not possible, how close to it could you get?

Strawberries, briefly baked with sugar and balsamic vinegar to intensify the flavour

Strawberries with balsamic vinegar

"Don't be put off by the vinegar in this recipe -- once it combnies with a bit of sugar and the heat from the oven, it takes on a wonderfully sweet and complex flavour". From Tobie Puttock's Daily Italian.

This dessert has an elegant simplicity and tastes wonderful.

Serves 2 or 3

(You can bake the strawberries in an ordinary oven-safe container with a lid, or you can make a parcel out of aluminium foil. Tear off about 40 cm of foil. Make the parcel by folding it in half, then sealing up the sides by making a 2cm fold along each side. Later, we'll place the strawberry mix in the parcel then seal up the top edge).

Ingredients

• strawberries, 1 punnet, hulled
  
• castor sugar, 1 tbsp
  
• balsamic vinegar, 1 tbsp
  
• to serve it with: some creme fraiche, masarcapone or custard.

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 200 celsius.
  If using a container to cook the strawberries in, preheat it as well.

• If the strawberries are on the large size, cut them in half.
  
• Combine strawberries, sugar and vinegar in a bowl.

• Place the strawberry mixture inside your container and put the lid on -- or for the foil parcel, close it up by making a fold along the top.
  
• Place the container in the oven and cook for 5 minutes.
  
• Remove from the oven, and let parcel sit, unopened, for a few minutes.
  

• Serve at the table.
  The aroma that's released when the parcel is opened is really something special.
  
• Arrange the warm strawberries in a martini or wine glasses, accompanied by a generous dollop of creme fraiche, mascapone or custard
  

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Puttock says the dish also goes well with other desserts, such as an Almond Custard, or a chilled Zabaglione, though I haven't tried this myself.

Idea for a Full Sub-tree view in Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer provides several different views of your files and directories: as a listing, as a grid of icons, etc. I’d like a ‘full sub-tree’ view. Rather than just listing just the directory contents, it would show the entire subtree of directories and files underneath the directory, like:

   File
   File
   File 
   Subdir name
     File
     File
     Subdir name
        File
        File
        File
     File

I often find I want to be able to see all those details at once, rather than being limited to seeing each directory one at a timne.

Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech

Barack Obama's quite remarkable March 18 speech "A More Perfect Union" (37 mins).



Transcript

Moving files while they're being downloaded

When I'm downloading a file in Windows, it won't let me move the file or rename it. Sometimes I want to be able to move it, for exactly the same reasons I want to move ordinary files. In this case, I realised there was a better place to put it.

Ideally, it would let me move the file, and it'd be smart enough to update the file contents there. I'm not saying it would be a click of the fingers to implement, but it's certainly technically possible to implement an OS that works like this.

When you think about it, this limitation is simply an inconsistency (of the sort that might confuse people who aren't computer literate) arising from a technical detail, and I think these are the sorts of things we should be trying to eliminate.

---

A similar thing goes for files that are open in editors. In this case, you might want the OS to notify you that it is currently open, and confirm that you want to go ahead with the operation. The editor would be notified of the change, and adjust things accordingly.

Reader's Digest: 23 ways to avoid catching a cold or the flu

The seems to be a lot colds going around lately -- I've got one now. Reader's Digest has an interesting list of things you can do to prevent catching a cold or the flu.

Here are some of the interesting ones I hadn't heard of. Some might sound strange, but they make sense after you read the explanation for them.

• Wash your hands twice every time you wash them.
  
• Run your toothbrush through the microwave on high for 10 seconds to kill germs that can cause colds and other illnesses.
  
• Leave the windows in your house open a crack in winter.
  
• Speaking of which, buy a hygrometer.
  
• Sit in a sauna once a week.
  
• Inhale air from your blow-dryer.
  
• Wipe your nose -- don't blow.

Here's another bit from it

3. Use this hand-drying strategy in public restrooms. Studies find a shockingly large percentage of people fail to wash their hands after using a public restroom. And every single one of them touches the door handle on the way out. So after washing your hands, use a paper towel to turn off the faucet. Use another paper towel to dry your hands, then open the door with that paper towel as a barrier between you and the handle. It sounds nuts, but it's an actual recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control to protect you from infectious diseases like cold and flu.

I've always found it strange how many people don't wash their hands... I wonder why exactly?

Amazing landscape scenes made from food (pics)

Some people have far too much time on their hands.

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Similar: What chefs do when they're bored (pics)

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have

Bruce Schneier on the different mindset security professionals need to have. It involves “thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. “ The person with this mind set “can't walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can't use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can't vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice.”

Funny comic "I met a butterfly the other day."

Funny: I met a butterfly the other day. Sounds a bit twee, but it isn't.

Greek Bean Stew with Feta

Nice greek-style stew. Tomatoes and dill make a great flavour combination, and provide the central focus of the flavours here. (Unfortunately, I can't recall the name of the cookbook I got this from).

• onion, 1
  
• olive oil, 2 tbsp
  
• garlic cloves, 2, crushed
  
• canned chopped tomatoes, 400g
  
• tomato paste, 1 tbsp
  
• bay leaves, 2
  
• parsley, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• dill, finely chopped, 2 tbsp
  
• salt, 1 tsp
  
• pepper, 1/2 tsp
  
• paprika, 1/2 tsp
  
• sugar, 1 tbsp
  
• canned beans, 3 x 400g cans (cannellini, butter or kidney)
  
• feta cheese, 100g
  
• Potential accompaniments: flat bread and a greek salad.
  

• Halve and finely slice the onion
  
• Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan and fry the onion until soft but not browned.
  
• Add the
  
  • garlic
    
  • tomatoes
    
  • tomato paste
    
  • and 500ml water
• followed by the
  • bay leaves
    
  • parsely
    
  • half the dill
    
  • salt
    
  • pepper
    
  • paprika
    
  • sugar

• Bring to a simmer.
  
• Simmer, partly covered, for 20 to 30 minutes until nice and thick.
  
• Drain and rinse the beans, add to the stew, and simmer gently for another 10 minutes.

• Rinse the feta cheese, pat dry and cut into smallish cubes
  (perhaps 1cm to a side - so you don't end up biting into huge peices that'd overwhelm the other flavours).
  
• Add to the pan and simmer for another 5 minutes until the cheese is soft.

• Serve in small bowls, drizzled with a little extra olive oil and scattered with the remaining dill.
  
• Serve hot or at room temprature (it's actually quite good when cool), with some warm flat bread and perhaps a Greek salad.

Impressive shadow puppet routine on Letterman

Pretty amazing performance by Raymond Crowe, who happens to be from Adelaide in Australia.

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.