Things to try: tequila edition

Until recently, my only experience of tequlia had been tequila shots and the 'lip, sip, suck' (salt, tequila, lime) drill.  I didn't know that shots typically used just one type of tequila, and that there are other types with different types of flavours.

Silver (or 'white') tequila is what they normally use in shots.  Silver tequila is un-aged and has a rawer, more vegetal taste.  All the other types are aged.

There's Reposado which is aged for less than a year.  ~AUD$40-50 upwards

Añejo which is aged for one to three years.  ~AUD$70 upwards (often over $100).  There's also an Extra Añejo category, which is aged even longer.

Gold tequila (known as Joven or oro tequila) is a mixture of a silver tequila and an aged tequila.

Trying them.

Reposado tequila has a nice smooth, earthy flavour.  I reckon it goes best 1:1 with some soda water.  The slight bite of soda water suits it (soda water is preferable to mineral water, which is preferable to still water).  You can also sip it straight.  Of those I've tried, El Espolon is my favourite, el Jimador is decent, and I'd steer clear of the Sierra reposado - it's not very nice.

I haven't tried an Añejo yet, but presumably it's similar to a Reposado.

I find Silver tequila goes well with generous amount of soda water and a dash of lime juice, or with tonic water.


Other things.

Watermelon wedges soaked in Reposado tequila tastes great!

If gluten is a problem for you, good quality tequilas are 100% gluten free.  Tequila is made from the blue agave plant, and the good quality tequilas will say "100% blue agave" on the label - these are completely gluten free.  If the label doesn't say that, then the tequila will be a Mixto, which includes other ingredients, and these mightn't be gluten free.  More info.

Oh, and this is what blue agave plants look like:

source

the 'hearts' of the plants, from which the tequila is made. source.

Wikipedia page on tequila

I'd like a 'Lessons Learnt' episode of Grand Designs

It must be Grand Designs season on this blog, coz this post makes two in a row about the show.

That show's been going for over ten years and they've probably featured around 100 homes.  So what are the lessons learnt?  Are there any lessons to be learnt?  Any common patterns to successes or to failures?  Any other types of patterns (concerning: aesthetics, construction materials, amount or type of planning done, use of experts, etc etc)?

It could make for an interesting episode.

Visually comparing the different stages of a house's construction

I was just watching the tv show Grand Designs.  It's nice to see the development of a house from plans, through construction to the finished design.

One thing I find, though, is that it's always hard to connect the before and after.  You see the after shot and it's hard to remember what that spot looked like at different stages in the construction, and it made me think about how you make those details more apparent.

They could show the exact same shot -- with the camera in the exact same location, pointing in the exact same direction -- at different points in the house's development, starting with the empty site, when the foundations are up, when the wall frames are up, when the roof and walls are done, and when it's fully furnished.  They could run through them in chronological order, transitioning between them by fading the current one out and at the same time fading the next one in, so you could see a bit more of the relationship between the two.

Such a technique could also be employed on moving shots, such as a shot that sweeps across a room, or one that starts at one end of a long room, facing towards the other end of the room, and then moves towards the other end of the room.  As the camera moves along, the imagery could seamlessly progress between the different stages of the development.

And of course such techniques lend themselves to some sort of interactive presentation on a web-site.  (It makes me think of these interactive before-and-after photos of the recent Brisbane floods.)

The perfect martini

At a friend's James Bond-themed party I discovered how much I like martinis.  There's something that really works about that combination of gin, vermouth and olives, making a flavour truly "greater than the sum of its parts".  Afterwards, I set out to try the different variations on martinis to see which ones I liked and which I didn't.  This is what I learned.

Lets look at the three ingredients.

Gin

While gin's the classic base for a martini, some people like to use vodka.  To my taste that's losing out on a lot of flavour - you're basically making a different kind of drink.

It's important to use a reasonably good gin for a martini because it's the main ingredient.  While a cheaper gin can be fine in a Gin & Tonic, because the tonic water has a stronger flavour, it can ruin a martini.  I tried using Vickers gin once and the result wasn't that nice.

Vermouth

Some people have their martinis with none or almost no vermouth - that is, 

they're basically having straight gin.  All I can say is prefer the 

combination of gin and vermouth to just straight gin.

There's three common types of Vermouth

• Sweet (aka 'Rosso', 'Rosato', 'Italian')
• Semi-sweet (aka 'Bianco', 'Blanc', 'White')
• Dry (aka 'French')

 

There's lots of different brands of Vermouth.  Cinzano and Martini & Rossi (labelled just as "Martini") seem to be the most common here in Australia.  The Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth (their 'Rosato') is a noticeably sweeter than the Cinzano sweet vermouth (their 'Rosso').

Most recipes seem to refer to only the sweet and dry vermouths.  The Bianco vermouth is often called a sweet vermouth, but it's less sweet than the Rosso/Rosato.

The different types of vermouth don't just differ in terms of how sweet they are - they each actually have a fairly different flavours.

The Rosso and Bianco vermouths have stronger, more fragrant flavours.  In comparison, I find the flavour of dry vermouth a bit flat.  For me, the Bianco has the nicest flavour.

The classic martini uses dry vermouth, but I actually prefer it with bianco vermouth.  I like its flavour more, and the slight sweetness it adds.

The other thing about vermouth is that it's only around 15% alcohol, so it should be kept in the fridge not on the shelf.  Apparently an opened bottle will maintain its flavour for a month or two in the fridge.

Olives

I skewer three olives on a toothpick and drop that in the glass.  Lemon peel can also be used [2], or even cocktail onions (in which case, the drink is called a Gibson), but I don't think their flavour suits it as well.

[2] to make a lemon-peel twist use a fruit peeler to peel the rind off a lemon.  Start at one end of the lemon and work you way around its circumference in a spiral - just like you would when peeling an apple.  You can get enough peel for several drinks from the one lemon.

Temperature

Martini's taste better very cold, so you want keep all the ingredients cold.  They don't taste that nice if they're only slightly cool.  Keeping in mind that the drink will warm up in your hand and that it'll take a bit of time till you've finished drinking it, you want to get the initial ingredients as cold as possible

• keep the vermouth in the fridge
• keep the gin in the freezer
• keep the martini glass in the freezer

My perfect martini recipe

A ratio of 5:1 of gin to vermouth.

• 2.5 oz/shots good quality gin
• 0.5 oz/shots bianco vermouth
• 3 stuffed olives, skewered on a toothpick.

Add the gin and vermouth and lots of ice (enough to at least cover the liquid) into a cocktail shaker.  Shake vigorously for about thirty seconds. (You can also just stir it for about the same amount of time.  I'm not sure if shaking vs stirring makes much of a difference to the flavour).  One thing this does is adds some water into cocktail.  Pop the olives into a martini glass and then strain the cocktail shaker mix into it.

Variations

• The best variations I've come across
• Cranberry martini (tastes good and has quite a nice colour)
• 2 oz gin : 0.5 oz vermouth : 2 oz cranberry juice
• Fresh, frozen or dried cranberries for garnish
• Others
• Add a little extra olive brine to make a 'Dirty Martini'
• There's all sorts of variations on the ratio of gin to vermouth. E.g. a 50-50 martini uses equal quantities of gin and vermouth (you could use 1.5 oz/shots of each).
• Cranberry Lime Martini (this one was a bit sharp for my tastes, but a friend really liked it)
• 2 gin : 2 freshly squeezed lime juice : 2 parts cranberry juice
• Lime wedge for garnish
• Breakfast Martini (thought this one wasn't bad, but didn't think it was that great).
• 2 gin : 0.75 cointreau : 0.75 lemon juice. plus 5ml orange marmalade
• orange twist to garnish
• There's two variants that add orange juice: the Bronx and the Minnehaha.  The difference between them is that they basically switch the vermouth and orange juice ratios.  Personally neither of these did that much for me
• Bronx
• 1.5 oz gin : 0.25 oz dry vermouth : 0.25 oz sweet vermouth : 1 oz orange juice
• Orange slice for garnish
• Minnehaha
• 1.05 oz gin : 0.75 oz dry vermouth : 0.75 oz sweet vermouth : 0.25 oz orange juice
• Marguerite
• 2 gin : 0.75 dry vermouth. plus a dash orange bitters
• Lemon twist to garnish
• Haven't gotten around to trying these variants yet
• Broadway Martini
• 3 Gin : 0.5 Creme De Menthe (ideally the clear 'white' type)
• mint leaves for garnish (optional)
• Emerson
• 2 gin : 1 sweet vermouth : 0.5 lemon juice : 0.5 maraschino liqueur
• Dirty Blues Martini
• 4 oz gin
• 6 green olives stuffed with blue cheese
• 1/4 teaspoon olive juice (adjust to personal taste)

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Here's some other ways you can use vermouth

• bianco goes quite well with equal portions of orange juice.
• rosso goes well in equal portions with cranberry juice, and well with cola (though seems to be better if you add a larger proportion of cola).
• dry goes not bad with pineapple juice.
• and you can use them for cooking.

Gently-Baked Salmon with Cabbage, Bacon, and Dill

This is the "Slow-Roasted Salmon with Cabbage, Bacon, and Dill" recipe from serious eats.

It's quite quick and easy to prepare and tastes fantastic.

I wouldn't have thought it'd be possible to make salmon come out so soft and succulent, but baking it at low temperatures works wonders.  And the mild sweetness of the cabbage cooked with bacon really compliments it.

• savoy cabbage, 1 head (halved, cored, and roughly chopped)
• bacon, 6 slices
• onion, 1, diced
• water, 1 cup
• salmon fillets, 4 (4-6 ounces each, skin removed)
• fresh dill, chopped, 1 teaspoon (plus more for garnish)
• olive oil, 4 tablespoons 
• butter, 2 tablespoons
• lemon juice, from one lemon
• salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 120 degrees celsius (250°F).

Cook the cabbage

• In medium saucepan, place bacon and heat over medium. Cook, stirring occasionally, until fat is rendered from bacon and bacon is beginning to crisp.
• Add onion and cook for an additional minute, then add cabbage and water.
• Bring to a boil, then simmer until cabbage is tender, 20-25 minutes, adding more liquid if necessary.
• Once very tender, season with salt, pepper, and half the dill.

Prepare and cook the salmon

• In the meantime, season salmon fillets with salt and pepper and place salmon on non-stick sheet pan.
• Drizzle olive oil over fillets, top with half the dill, and finish with small knob of butter.
• Cook 15-18 minutes for medium rare, or up to 25 minutes for medium, depending on thickness of fish.
• Remove from oven and drizzle with lemon juice.

Serve

• Divide cabbage and salmon among plates and garnish with more dill, if desired.
• Serve immediately.

Books I read in 2012

The best:

Wool - Omnibus edition, by Hugh Howey
Great bit of storytelling


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Ones that were decent:

We Are All Weird, by Seth Godin
A touch wishy-washy but an interesting, brief look at broad cultural currents.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Fairly good, but mainly as a plausible near-future (c 2025) world of pervasive augmented reality & wearable computers.


A number of Kindle Singles, all of which were decent:

My Seinfeld Year, by Fred Stoller
Memoir. A couple of interesting insights into how the writing process for Seinfeld worked.

Gutenberg the Geek, by Jeff Jarvis
A look at Gutenberg as an entrepreneur

Cautionary Tales, by Stephen Tobolowsky
Memoir of bad (but funny) mistakes the author made.

The First Light of Evening, by Mark Ernest Pothier
A day in the life of a guy 3 years after divorce and still dealing with it. Pretty nicely done.

Shakedown, by James Ellroy
Pretty sharply written. Somewhat salicious.


A number of books on ancient Rome, all pretty decent. Working on slowly building up my understanding of history.

Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, by Simon Baker.
Decent, readable basic overview. Focus mainly on politics and major political figures

The World of Rome, by Michael Grant
This one was a bit less readable than the others, but fairly informative.

Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland

Julius Caesar, by Philip Freeman

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, by Anthony Everitt

Antony and Cleopatra, by Adrian Goldsworthy

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor, by Anthony Everitt


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Ones I really didn't like. I'd avoid these: 


The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, by Roger Williams

Accelerando, by Charles Stross


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And several that I read bits of but didn't around to finishing. Not because I didn't like them, just didn't get time:

Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin

The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 23, by Gardner Dozois
I read about 5 stories from this, and didn't think much of most of them.

Pro Git, by Scott Chacon

Poems of Emily Dickinson, series 1, by Emily Dickinson

Sweet Red Onion Pasta

This is a Jamie Oliver recipe.  I photocopied it from one of his cookbooks years ago, but I don't know anymore which cookbook it was.

The original recipe is vegetarian, but if you want to include meat some chicken thighs would suit the flavour.  You could add 2 chicken thighs, cut into thin strips.

• Olive oil
• Butter, 2 large knobs
• Onions, 2 white, 3 red (i.e. five in total).
  • Peel and slice
• Garlic, 1 clove
  • Peel and finely slice
• Red chilli, 1
  • Finely slice
• Potatoes, 200g
  • Finely slice
• Cinnamon, 1/2 a stick
• Thyme (fresh), small handful
  • Pick the leaves from it
• Salt
• Black Pepper
• Nutmeg, a grating of
• Fusilli or spaghetti, 450g
• Chicken or vegetable stock, 250ml
• Parmesan, grated, 2-3 handfuls of
• Flat-leaf parsley, a handful of
  • Finely chop

Get a casserole-type pan

Put a drizzle of olive oil and the butter into it.

Slowly fry onions, garlic, chilli and potatoes with the cinnamon stick.  If adding chicken, add the chicken thigh strips now.

Cook slowly for 5 minutes

Then put the lid on and continue cooking for another 5 to 8 minutes until lightly golden (I found I had to cook a lot longer than this).

Add the thyme leaves and season carefully with salt, pepper and a light grating of nutmeg.

Bring a separate pan of salted water to the boil

Add the pasta and cook according to the packet instructions.

Try one of the potatoes to check that it is soft (if not, you've made the slices too thick, but no worries -- just add a little water to the pan and continue cooking until softened).

Drain the pasta, reserving some of the cooking water.

Add the stock to the onions and mush up about half of the potatoes.

Discard the cinnamon stick and season to taste.

Working quickly, toss the pasta with the onions and potatoes, loosening if necessary with a little of the reserved cooking water and add one or two handfuls of Parmesan and the parsley.

When it's all nicely mixed together, serve in warmed bowls.

An authoritative source of current scientific opinion would be useful

[update: I've written a newer post that contextualises the kind of idea outlined here, as a way of helping truth spread in our 'information ecosystem']

I was talking to someone the other day who believed that Quantum Mechanics (QM) basically equated to the Copenhagen interpretation of it -- you know, the one where an observation collapses the quantum wave.

As far as I know, this interpretation is not very popular among working physicists. But I can't recall anymore where I got this detail from. No doubt it was from books I've read or things I've read in discussion forums, but I just can't remember.

I would have liked to have been able to point the person towards something online that showed that in fact most physicists don't believe the Copenhagen interpretation, but it's just not easy to find something that will tell you the current scientific opinion on a particular topic.

And if I can't reference some sort of reputable source, the person I'm talking to has no particular reason to believe what I'm saying.

Being able to easily find out, and link to, the current scientific opinion on topics would make it easier to address common misconceptions. A better informed public can on-the-whole only be a good thing, and surely this would also be helpful for matters of public policy where scientific opinion is relevant.

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I'll explain what I mean by a source outlining current scientific opinion.

Imagine that a high status journal like Nature did a biannual survey of working scientists to gather their opinions about various topics, such as which interpretation of QM they believe. They could survey scientists in different fields, asking them about topics specific to their field. For example, Cosmologists could be asked whether they believe the big bang theory is true. Biologists could be asked whether they believe evolution is true. And so on.

Obviously a lot of thought would have to go into the questions they asked. Since the results of the survey would be for the general public, the media and the government to use, you'd want it to cover the sorts of questions these people might have a use for.

They could put the survey results up on a web-site that you could search and find answers such as (to make up a statistic) "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution".

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The goal would be to have an authoritative source of such information. First, a reasonable proportion of practicing scientists would need to respond to the survey, so you know that the statistics it provides are representative. Hopefully scientists would be willing to respond to the survey, as a kind of public service.

Second, it would need to be a "brand" that was known to be reputable. So that if you presented a fact like "99% of surveyed biologists believe in evolution", linking to this source, the people seeing it would recognise that site and know what it's about and believe that it is reputable. (Obviously this is just an ideal. It couldn't just start out with that reputation, and it could never have that reputation for everyone in the population).

There's learned philosophers but not philosophical experts

I posted the following to reddit/r/philosophy:

It seems to me that the notion of expertise can only apply to fields in which there is an established body of knowledge. By that I mean fields in which we have (empirical) grounds for believing our knowledge is at least an approximation or heading in the right direction. Physics or genetics or how to fix cars are examples of such fields. You can be an expert in physics.

Philosophy seems different. What makes philosophy interesting is that it's about things we don't understand well. In philosophy we're not even sure that existing approaches to problems are heading in the right direction.

Philosophy is pretty much by definition about things we don't understand well. Once a philosophical topic is understood it ceases to be part of philosophy, and becomes part of another field like physics, biology, economics, etc. (or alternatively, the problem may be dissolved and seen as a kind of misunderstanding.)

I would say the kind of knowledge that exists in the field of philosophy is more of ways of describing problems, or particular arguments for or against a view of problems. It's more like a discussion.

You can be an expert in the different positions about a philosophical problem, but I would distinguish this from the idea that someone can be an expert on a philosophical subject.

For example, someone can be an expert on the various problems and arguments associated with consciousness, but I don't think anyone can claim to be an expert on consciousness (at least the hard problem of consciousness) because we just don't understand it.

So rather than saying there are experts in philosophy I would say that there are people who are very learned in philosophy.

Why does this distinction matter?

When there isn't established knowledge, we're less certain that existing approaches are correct. The fact that an existing approach hasn't been able to solve a problem for long time may mean that it's the wrong approach. It is more likely in philosophy that someone who comes from outside of the field, who isn't well versed in the existing approaches, can add something of use to the table. The fact that they aren't familiar with existing arguments may even be a virtue.

If there aren't philosophical experts, then there aren't experts to challenge.

Yet it seems to me that philosophy seems to hold greater reverence for 'experts' than most other fields.

Improving 'use by' labelling on food

Here's a pretty basic suggestion for improving 'use by' labelling on food.

Even food that's properly packaged and uncontaminated can still go bad well before its use by date.

For example, once a tub of tomato paste has been opened it needs to be used within a few weeks at most, even if its use by date is still more than a year away.  And of course, it needs to be stored properly, in the fridge.

'use by' labelling unfortunately suggests that the food is ok to consume as long as that date hasn't passed, regardless of any other details.  (the same applies for 'best before' dates).


Here's my suggestion for how the labels could look:

    Use by:
    7 days after opening
    and before 31 Mar 2012
    Refrigerate after opening.

Packaging does often show 'time after opening' information and storage info, but they're usually in some fine-print separated from the (much more prominent) use by date. I think all this information should be shown right next to each other, as in the labelling suggested above.

With the way it currently is, you can easily just see the use by date by itself and draw the conclusion that if today's date is before then the food is ok.

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You might think it'd be obvious how food needs to be stored, but people often put condiments that according to the labelling should be refrigerated in the pantry.

And even if you have stored it properly, the sight of the use by date being still months or years off can make it feel like the food must still be ok.  I've seen someone who has, for this reason, used tomato paste that's been put in the fridge but since gone mouldy (first scraping the mould off).

Of course labelling is never going to *stop* people from doing anything, but that's not the point.  It's to try and help reduce the chances of it happening, even if only by a relatively small amount.

Keep in mind, also, that it's not just about the one-off effects of eating unsafe foods, but whatever the cumulative effects of this may be.

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Warning: the following is a bit rambly... where I try to think through some of the issues to do with human perception and psychology that underly labelling.

Labelling concerns human perception and psychology.  It's not a matter of what information is, strictly speaking, available.  It's about what information we'll notice and how we'll perceive it and how it can effect our actions.

The thing is that people aren't going to devote much time or effort to checking food safety info on labels.

The amount of time and effort and concentration we devote to a task tends to be proportional to how important it is to us at that point in time (and this is not usually the result of a conscious choice).

We don't fully consciously process the smaller things.  To some extent we're always handling certain tasks on automatic, rather than giving them full conscious deliberation.  We're creatures of habit, as they say.

While we're doing the little tasks we usually have our concentration focused more on the bigger tasks and concerns on our minds.

We're unlikely to ever devote that much time or effort or conscious thought to food labelling info.

As soon as a person finds something that seems like its telling them the whole story (the "use by" date) they're likely to stop their search.

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Think what it'd actually take to actually find and process the other food safety information in addition to the use by date.

We'd have to think to look for it.  We'd have to find it on the packet, then take the effort to read it.  And then we'd have to reconcile that information with the use by date information.  The latter is harder than it sounds.  It took me a fair while to get clear how the use by date relates to the 'time after opening' info.

And we'd have to overcome our natural inclination to stop our search once we have found an answer (you can find a description of some research on this here.  I can't recall where I had first heard about this, but I do remember that Dan Airely describes it in his book Predictably Irrational).  We make swift, relatively sub-conscious judgements.

Where's the motivation in a normal situation to do these things?  There doesn't seem to be one.  There's always heaps of things you could be doing, but unless they're relevant to what you are doing or want to do they don't come to mind.

It may seem so "obvious" as something to focus upon because that's what we're doing right now in this bit of writing.  Which is the 'paradox' of discussing aspects of tasks that you wouldn't think of when you were actually doing the task - when you're discussing it you're making yourself to focus on it.

Future scenario: personal AI drone cameraman

Here's a possible future scenario.

There's really cheap, light, compact drones (mini helicopter things) with good AI, an on-board camera, and really good battery life. They're quiet, too.

You and a friend go on a hike together, and take one of these with you.

At the start of the hike you take it out and tell it to follow you. (it's got voice control, so you just tell it what to do).

You tell it to take shots every once in a while. Its AI is good enough to compose reasonable shots, ensuring it gets one or both of you in the frame.

Perhaps it can even spot things of interest on the side of the track (e.g a big mushroom nestled in a rotting log on the side of the track) you might have missed.

You come to nice waterfall beside the track so you ask the drone to fly out so it can get a shot of both of you with the waterfall in the background.

It flies out to where it thinks it might get a good shot. It's transmitting the image to your phone so you can see what it looks like. You want it to move more to the left and get a little lower so you tell it that.

At the end of the walk you sit down on a picnic blanket and have lunch together. You figure it'd be nice to get a shot of both of you having the picnic so you instruct the drone to take one.

(and of course that's just one of many possible scenarios, many no doubt with a sinister edge, that such technology might make possible).

Reframing how digital content is sold

Perhaps we could change how digital content (e-books, MP3s etc) is offered for sale.  Instead of "buy a copy of this item", offer it as "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Buying a copy means buying some bits, and since bits sound insubstantial and making copies of bits is effortless, it doesn't sound like it should be worth much money.

But when you frame it as paying the content creator for their effort, that sounds (to me) like something that's worth more.

This is about changing how people view what it means to purchase digital content.  There's obviously a big question about how that could be achieved and I'm not sure of the answer.

One component of that is the user-interface in online-stores.  I wonder if you could replace the 'buy' button with something else?  Replace it with something that suggests you are giving money to pay for the effort that went into creating that content.

Perhaps it could be a 'pay' button, with hover-text saying "pay for the effort that went into creating this item".

Obviously you'd want it to be something pretty short and sweet.

--

update: I wonder if the visual "branding" used by Creative Commons might serve as a model for this.  There are a range of buttons that represent particular Creative Commons licences (see the image to the right of this paragraph for an example).  Perhaps you could have something analogous to this and by, instead of a 'buy' button, having a special button that represents this notion of paying for the creation of the content instead of for the content itself.

Idea: hold-and-swipe touch-screen gesture

An idea for a type of touch-screen gesture for phones: the user places their left-thumb anywhere on the screen and keeps it in the same place, and at the same time they swipe across with their right-thumb.

You can think of the left-thumb as acting like a modifier, like the shift-key.  A left-handed person could keep their right thumb stationary and swipe their left thumb - it'd have the same effect.

Each different swipe direction (up, down, left or right) could be recognised as a distinct gesture with its own distinct meaning.

I don't know if anyone has used this type of gesture before, but the benefit of it is that it's quite easy to perform.  Which is one of the challenges with gestures: finding ones that are really quick and easy to do.

On distinctions made between 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge'

Someone recently asked me what I thought about the distinction between data, information and knowledge.  I emailed them a response, and I thought I might as well turn that response into a blog post.

I think that it's good to recognise that not all "information" is the same, and that there is a kind of spectrum between 'raw data' and 'deep knowledge'.

But I'm not that keen on all the arguments about how you distinguish between these three concepts.  I just don't think we have a clear enough picture of what *any* of them are to draw sharp lines between them.  I also doubt there are any *sharp* lines to be drawn along that spectrum.

But aren't these sorts of arguments what is required to get a clearer understanding of the concept?  I don't think so.  I think our current understanding of these concepts is a "pre-scientific" one, and that what these arguments are doing is trying to find some set of criteria within these concepts that sharply distinguishes each from the other.  

I think that task is doomed to failure.  Here's an analogy: when philosophers had a "pre-scientific" understanding of matter, they could get into all sorts of arguments about what was the difference was between liquids, solids and gasses (this is a thought-experiment, I don't know the historical details well enough to know specifically what happened).  But they were never going to solve the problem just trying to find some criteria to sharply distinguish these concepts from each other.

We now know that what was required was to get an understanding that we'd now label with terms like 'chemistry' and 'physics' -- an understanding in terms of molecules, atoms, etc.  What was required was to go deeper than their phenomenal concepts of 'liquid', 'solid' and 'gas'.  To have an understanding of what each of those things actually are, rather than just how to distinguish between them.

So, in the case of data, information and knowledge we need to go beyond our phenomenal notions of them and get at their "underlying physics", so to speak.  And when we do so we may find that -- like with 'liquids', 'solids' and 'gasses' -- there is an underlying unity there.

Nassim Taleb on the lack of respect for those not doing steady and predictable work

Our society doesn't really understand work that doesn't deliver steady and predictable results.  People working away on this kind of work tend not to get much respect.  This is a real problem, because such work is essential to society.  In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb nicely describes what it's like for people having to deal with this lack of respect:

     Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan's East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery—hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your "found nothing" as information and publish it. 

     Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions—large and steady commissions. "He is doing very well," you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance—which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one. Holidays can be terrible. You run into your brother-in-law at family reunions and, invariably, detect unmistakable signs of frustration on the part of your wife, who, briefly, fears that she married a loser, before remembering the logic of your profession. But she has to fight her first im­pulse. Her sister will not stop talking about their renovations, their new wallpaper. Your wife will be a little more silent than usual on the drive home. This sulking will be made slightly worse because the car you are driving is rented, since you cannot afford to garage a car in Manhattan. What should you do? Move to Australia and thereby make family re­unions less frequent, or switch brothers-in-laws by marrying someone with a less "successful" brother? 

     Or should you dress like a hippie and become defiant? That may work for an artist, but not so easily for a scientist or a businessman. You are trapped. 

     You work on a project that does not deliver immediate or steady results; all the while, people around you work on projects that do. You are in trouble. Such is the lot of scientists, artists, and researchers lost in society rather than living in an insulated community or an artist colony.

(pg 86)

     Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. "How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the out­side. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come. 

(pg 87)


This touches a nerve with me, as my research is definitely a long way from the steady and predictable, though I would say that I've been pretty fortunate in that I have had support and understanding from people.

The sound of things just out of reach

#music. Songs that evoke a sense of things just out of reach, whether hazy childhood memories or something ethereal. All the songs here share a family resemblance that is best exemplified by Boards of Canada's music.



Memories of times past.


















The bittersweet beauty found in desolate isolation






Ethereal






Subtle Euphoria






Also somewhat similarly evocative

iPhone app idea: "flow forms"

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

"Flow forms"

This idea is for a novel (at least as far as I know) type of UI for tasks like adding new expenses in an expenses app, where each time you do it you choose from the same set of options and you frequently perform the task.

The point of it is to make doing the task as fast and fluid as possible.

It aims at doing this by removing two sources of friction that you find in the existing form-like UIs normally used to perform these sorts of tasks.

How the normal UIs work. There's a screen for the form, showing the different fields. You tap a field to be taken to a screen for the various options for that field. After you've chosen a value for the field, you're returned back to the main screen for the form.

Friction 1: you have to complete a task before you can see the screen for the next task. A task is either tapping a field to select it, or tapping a value for the field. So you have to tap a field's name before you can see the screen for choosing the value for that field. So when you go to perform that next task you have to take a little bit of time to survey the layout of the screen and find the item you want. Even if you're familiar with the screen's layout and roughly where the item you want is located on it, it still takes a little bit of time to find that item.

Fiction 2: a lot of finger movement. You have to move your finger around a bit - to tap a field here, to tap a field-value there, and so on. This doesn't sound like adding friction, but I think it is something that can be reduced.

These might not sound like much, but if you're frequently using the same form these things start to feel tedious.


The basic idea of the proposed technique.

The form would be just one long page, which would continuously scroll up the screen. Below each field name would be one or more horizontal bands, each divided into equal-sized cells. Each of those cells would represent a different value for the field. To fill out the form the user just needs to slide their finger to the left or right as the form scrolled by.

Essentially the user only needs to move their finger along one dimension, thus simplifying the task. And all they need to do is select field values. They don't have to tap to go to the next field. And the hope is that if the next field is visible on the screen while they're entering the current one, they will have some sense of where the items of a field are located before they come to select them.


Here's some more specific details of one way it could work:

• the line for selecting a field's value would be divided into N equally-sized segments, where N is the number of different options. (if there were too many options I'd be split up over multiple lines).


• probably have these lines fairly thick - like 2.5 cm, so that the user has a fair bit of time to select the item as it scrolls past.


• each segment would contain an icon (or short-description, if there is one) representing the particular value.


• when the user has their finger on a segment, it would show a label describing the value.


• the user could swipe their finger across a line to see the descriptions of all the items.


• if the user made a mistake or missed entering a value for a field, they could scroll the screen back down just like they do in other applications.


• perhaps they could also be a way to pause the scrolling.


• perhaps the user could flick their finger up (just like they do in documents on the iPhone to scroll down) to quickly move down to the next field, once they've selected a value in the current field.


• the user may not want to enter the values for all of the fields. if they've only entered a couple of fields and want to save the record, they could click a save button (or perhaps a two-finger sideways swipe).

Questions

• how to handle the input of numbers? Would it just scroll a keypad into view and then pause the scrolling while you enter in the value? Or could number-entry also be handled in a similar fashion to the rest of the form entry?
  
  
  
  • it could show eleven choices across two rows: one for each of the ten digits and one for the decimal point.
  
  
  • if after you selected on of those you moved your finger over to a 'gutter' area on the side of the screen it would assume you'd finished entering in the numeric value.
  
  
  • but if you instead kept your finger within those gutters it would add another two rows for selecting another digit or decimal place.
  
  
  • the above process would continue on until you'd finished entering the number in.
  
  
  of course the question is whether this, or some alternative, would be convenient and fast enough.
  


• similarly, how to handle the input of textual values (such as for a 'note' field for an expense item)? Would it just scroll up a keypad and a text area and pause the scrolling while you enter in the value? Or might there be useful way of entering it in a 'flowing' fashion, like I described concerning entering in numbers?

Notes

• ideally it would show the fields in an order such that the most commonly used fields come first. I typically just enter two field values, and if these were the first two that came up I could just save the record after I'd selected values for them.


• since the user is likely to buy the same item a number of times (e.g. I buy the same coffee everyday, or I might get a packet of chips every day) their muscle memory may be able to learn the path their finger traces out to enter the expense for that item.


• to make entry even faster, you have an option to control the speed it scrolls at. As you got more familiar with it you could increase the speed. Perhaps there could be a speed-control slider that sat at the top of the screen next to the save button. It could even have a setting to automatically -- but gradually -- increase the speed over time. For example, it could get gradually faster every month.

Another question I have is: are there any other sorts of tasks or apps that this kind of UI technique might be useful for?

And finally, obviously it'd require a lot of experimentation to figure out how best to have the UI work. There's lots of different ways the basic idea could be done. Hopefully there would be one that is workable and which would make the task quicker and easier to perform.

iPhone app idea: "battlechat"

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

"battlechat"

An app for a kind of verbal battle amongst friends.

I'm thinking of like the verbal battles rappers do. I'm also drawing on my own experience when I used to be bored at work I used to have a lot of email conversations with a friend that basically came down to creative ways of insulting each other.

So this'd be an app that was like a mix between real-time (textual) chat between a bunch of friends, but with some competitive elements thrown in, to make it a bit game-like.

There'd be lots of different ways you could do this kind of thing, and getting it right would probably involve a lot of experimentation.

Here's one possibility.

The game is played in rounds. Each round lasts a set amount of time (e.g. 15 seconds). Players can type in whatever they want to say. And obviously they can make comments on what the others say.

At the end of the round, the players anonymously vote on who said the 'best' stuff.

The more 'votes' you get, the more "ammunition" you can use and you can choose who to expend it on. Players would start off with some amount of health and when they're 'fired on' they loose health. They get knocked out when their health reaches zero, and have to sit on the sidelines, so to speak.

Last person standing wins.

-

I can imagine the players being represented by their twitter or facebook picture, but with cartoon facial expressions and arms and legs attached to them (the facial expressions wouldn't have to be matched up with the face in the picture, or wouldn't even require a face in the picture, for the effect to work, I suspect... the idea is to do it for comic effect). Then when they're hit with some ammo, the cartoony facial expression shows an expression of pain, falls over, etc.

---

After thinking of this idea I came across Turntable.fm which while very different also works on the idea of adding game-like elements to more socially-oriented activities. That's a general area that could be explored.

iPhone app idea: 'ground control' side-scrolling car game

Some iPhone app ideas. Feel free to make use of them. If you do, an acknowledgement is all I'd ask. I'd play around with some of these ideas myself, but my PhD is what I need to focus on at the moment.

'ground control' 2D side-scrolling car game

In this game the player doesn't control the car, but the ground level. Sliding their finger up raises the height of the ground at that point, and also increases the slope of the ground leading up to that point. Sliding their finger down lowers the ground level.

The screen is constantly scrolling across with the car always moving forwards. The car might always sit about 1/3 in from the left of the screen.

Steeper uphill makes the car move slower. Steeper downhill makes it go faster. A small uphil can be used as a jump, making the car fly through the air.

These techniques could be used to make the car avoid static and moving obstacles, jump over crevices, etc.

---

update, 02 Aug 2011: I just heard about the game 'Bumpy Road' which works using this kind of mechanic (see the video on the linked page). It seems to use the mechanic in a different way, though. It seems it as effectively like an alternative to having a 'jump' button. I was thinking more of it as a way of changing the landscape ahead of the car, to speed it up or slow it down or to create ramp-like jumps.

update, 10 May 2012: The iOS game Contre Jour involves a mechanic where you raise and lower the ground-level.

Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake

Chinese Steamed Sponge Cake

This simple cake is mildly sweet, and has a mild, slightly eggy flavour. It also has a somewhat unique texture.

My mum used to make it sometimes when I was growing up, and I've always liked it. I haven't seen it in Chinese restaurants or bakeries, so many people would probably have never seen it before.

I'm afraid I don't know what recipe book this recipe was originally from. I've just got a photocopied page of this recipe.

• eggs, 4


• sugar, 1 cup. brown sugar is probably better for this


• oil, 6 dessertspoons


• milk, 6 dessertspoons


• plain flour, 1 ½ cups


• baking powder, 1 tsp

• Beat the eggs and sugar together until thick.
  
  Add the oil and milk.


• Sift the flour and baking powder.
  
  Stir it into the egg mixture till smooth.


• Pour this mixture into a 9 inch sponge tin
  
  
  • (or you multiple smaller containers, like small ramekins).
  
  Leave the tin uncovered.


• Steam it for 25 minutes
  
  
  • e.g. put the tin into a large saucepan and let it stand on a small rack above the water.

It seems to be a bit tricky to steam the cake long enough that it is cooked inside (and not sticky) yet not too long and have it dry out too much. You might have to experiment a bit with the timing. Also, if you cook it in multiple smaller containers, like small ramekins, it obviously will cook the center of the cakes more quickly.

Other versions of this recipe