Pressure cooked split black urad dhal

This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food. I’m posting it here so it doesn’t get lost. Ask if you want this just to be the first of a series! First pressure cook of split urad dhal was a success. Needs some understanding and […]

Brainstorming a better YouTube recommendation algorithm

This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched – the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways. I think it deserves to be – with billions of users, it is long past time for them to spend their energy on reducing harm, rather than on more growth. There’s a bit less talk […]

A cycle home along the river

A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home. A sunny day, so take the route along the river! Crossing the road by the docks. The sky impeccable. Delicious light of being away from the tropics, strong and clear, but not overly harsh. The dome of one of the three […]

On using a variety of information services

In the last couple of weeks I’ve: Deactivated my Facebook account. Logged out of Twitter on my desktop. Stopped using Google Contacts, Calendar and Photos I’m not really sure why, but there it is, I have. I think over the last five years in excitement at the good user experience and high user adoption, I […]

A thousand times an ant colony of fifty times a cat

Culture is important. Particularly, it’s important for technology which is about how we as humans talk to one another. Telephones, computers, mobile phones, internet… They’re all about how our particular species of primate communicates. And now they’re becoming one powerful industry newly reformed. We’re each a neural network, thrown abruptly into a chaotic world, which […]

A fugue on authoritarian high modernism

He listened. The speaker started with a natural forest. A gorgeous, maddening, complex, survived-of-the-fittest, multi-species, layered, organic feedback pathways, mycella-ridden delightful speckled sunlight happy, violent/eating/parasiting/singing insects/birds/people, robust kind of a forest. They followed with a timber forest. A straight-laced, single specied, splatted down, polygonally-bounded-tree-age-contoured, money spinning, automation hugging, zen simple, database-like, timber-producing, silent, vulnerable all-lined-up-in-rows […]

The peace to know what you don’t know

I avoided statistics at school like a rash – filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead. I’m not sure why, as it turns out statistics is vital to the good functioning of our world in 2017. We have plenty of computers and plenty of data, and plenty of willingness […]

Email review #1: FastMail

I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about. I’m going to start by reviewing what I use now, which is FastMail. This is for my personal email, which I use for identity on many web services, for notifications and for writing letters to people. I’m working for myself at the moment too, […]

A short walk around Vote Leave’s software VICS

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS – blog post, github repository. This afternoon, prompted by a chat with Incubator of Change (a Liverpool based think tank working on new ideas […]