For a while, I had a capture of my twitter feed running here. It ended up doing something weird to my API calls, stopping me from running my desktop client, so I killed it. Which is probably just as well, as I talk a lot of shit on Twitter. It’s basically mental slurry, the wet lumpy bits from a day spent at the keyboard vented off into a trap so the buildup doesn’t blow some crucial valve in my head. Look at these, from the last month, and pity me:

*  It cannot possibly be December already. I am returning to bed and when I get back up I expect this to be FIXED.

*  Kittens are trying to break into my office. It sounds like the smallest and most rubbish zombie attack ever.

*  Join my Xmas Eve tradition: sit in a barn all night shrieking that an invisible space god put a parasite inside you and it’s coming out

* good morning sinners. the fishpond has iced over and so have my eyes

*  Warren stares at important work. Warren must concentrate and summon intellect. CUT TO: INSIDE WARREN’S BRAIN: http://bit.ly/UJ2w7M

*  just stating my availability for the post of BBC Director General. my first act would be to change that title to Dear Leader

*  If you analysed my folder of email with @mollycrabapple you would find the most frequently used words to be "shut", "up" & "Molly"

*  I like to think that @benhammersley releases his moustache into the streets of London at night to devour weaker moustaches during Movember.

*  [Oct 31 ] A depressing night for my agent to refuse to pitch my new musical horror project THE KING AND I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

*  My daughter has just accused me of being so old that I "remember when fire first came out."

*  "CRUSH THEM LIKE MONKEY" may be the worst piece of advice I’ve ever given to another writer. Or the best. One of the two.

• Brian Eno 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell To Earth (2011) – YouTube
  "This film explores his life, influences and creative output, from Eno's debut with Roxy Music through to his last rock album, Before and After Science."
  (tags:music interviews video )
• Open the Future: Interview at Singularity 1 on 1
  "Roughly hour-long interview, wherein I talk about my educational background, humanizing the Singularity concept, and why "meat fetishism" isn't so bad."
  (tags:peopleIknow interviews video )

• Daily chart: Live and unplugged | The Economist
  "IN The World in 2013, which is published today, we predict that the internet will become a mostly mobile medium. Who will be the winners and losers?"
  (tags:net comms )

• The Ethics of Nostalgia | Notes on Metamodernism
  ."..as much as we may still love to superficially aestheticise history as a ‘style’ and a consumer ‘product’, we are also witnessing an engagement with nostalgia that is about ethics rather than simply style. Like postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, our current engagement with the past is consciously aware of what Fredric Jameson has termed its own “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”, yet nevertheless seeks to say something beyond style in the process."
  (tags:theory philosophy history )
• Surgeon « mary anne hobbs
  "…this is the Surgeon… one of the most fascinating men i ever met.. President of the Russian motorcycle club the Night Wolves…"
  (tags:writing )
• One big fiction, read and written by us all | Books | The Observer
  "The newly released iPhone and iPad app The Silent History collects case histories of a future epidemic of speechlessness, in the form of a serial novel released one day at a time. Each short episode is designed to be absorbed in 15 minutes and some of the stories are tied to particular locations: the reader stands within 10 metres of a dot on the map in order to unlock the section."
  (tags:digital publishing books )

• Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod
  "SIMPLE TOOLS AND SYSTEMS FOR DIGITAL PUBLISHING"
  (tags:magazines publishing )
• The Pelican Project
  Because these are among the greatest book covers in the world.
  (tags:books covers design )

• The Interstellar Gravitational Assist
  "In a 1963 paper, Dyson speculated on how an advanced civilization might use a binary star system made up of two white dwarfs. Send a spacecraft into the system for a close pass around one of the stars and, depending on the mass and orbital velocity of the stars, it is thrown out of the binary system at velocities as high as 3000 kilometers per second. But Dyson took the idea even further. His paper, which appeared as a chapter in a book called Interstellar Communication (New York: Benjamin Press, 1963), described not just white dwarfs but the creation of a binary neutron star system as an engineered launch platform…"
  (tags:space )
• The Internet Through a Postmodern Lens » Cyborgology
  "The postmodern world is obscene since everything is made visible, broadcast, and so forth. The Internet is obscene because it is characterized by endless information and communication as well as never-ending social commentary…"
  (tags:comms social net philosophy )
• Open the Future: #War
  "What's the hashtag for terror? For propaganda? I've been talking about the role of social media as a possible enabler of political violence for years. In my June 2009 talk at Mobile Monday in Amsterdam, I argued that Twitter and similar media had the potential to serve a role similar to the radio stations used to drive the 1990s Rwandan genocide. I went into more detail on the idea in this article at Fast Company a short while later…"
  (tags:war future peopleIknow comms social )
• The Joy of Dredd | Mulholland Books
  Duane Swierczynski's JUDGE DREDD comic for IDW in America
  (tags:comics )

• Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The notebooks contain quotations that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or long reflections. It is those reflections that help Lichtenberg earn his posthumous fame. Today he is regarded as one of the best aphorists in the Western intellectual history. Some scholars have attempted to distil a system of thought out of Lichtenberg's scattered musings. However, Lichtenberg was not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to have, any consistent philosophy."
  (tags:writing notes )
• The Daily Routines of Famous Writers | Brain Pickings
  "I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)"
  (tags:writing notes )

I’m not sure why I keep blogging about this – which is why I’m timeshifting this post to the middle of the bloody night, actually – but it keeps bugging me. 

It is, on some level, about inbound: tuning the world so that the good stuff comes to you without having to spend all day looking for it and grabbing it manually.  It’s why you have news sources, and clever and curious people, in your Twitter feed.

I must say, I’m thinking about unlinking podcasts from iTunes on the desktop entirely.  If Instacast (frequently recommended to me) syncs between iPhone and iPad instances, then I might make the break.

I’m trying Monocle Affairs because their podcasts seem to be under ten minutes in length. I like that idea.  I’d probably have had a lot more subscriptions for a lot longer if there were a lot of good podcasts under ten minutes.  Which probably just speaks to shattered attention span on my part, but fuck it.  Dan Carlin tends to get saved for long periods of travel.  (I would also say “long sunny afternoons in the back garden,” but we didn’t have any of those this year.)

I’m snapshotting this now because 1) it’s quicker than listing it 2) I’m going to find an hour this week to both prune and add to my podcasts list.  I need more news analysis, more new music, and possibly a decent tech cast or two.

#informationdiet

• Sound bullets in water
  "In 2010, researchers at Caltech led by Chiara Daraio, a professor of aeronautics and applied physics, developed a nonlinear acoustic lens that can focus high-amplitude pressure pulses into compact "sound bullets." In that initial work, the scientists demonstrated how sound bullets form in solids. Now, they have done themselves one better, creating a device that can form and control those bullets in water." SOUND BULLETS. Ah, world, you are too good to me, some days.
  (tags:sci med )
• Scientists pioneer method to predict environmental collapse
  "The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse." ECOSYSTEM FLICKERING. Oh, I like that. I will wait to see if Deb Chachra decides it counts as a daily idiom.
  (tags:eco )

• von himmel – florid pagoda side a by donkey disk on SoundCloud – Create, record and share your sounds for free
  von himmel – florid pagoda side a
  (tags:music ifttt soundcloud )

• Geometries of Utopian Desire | Notes on Metamodernism
  "The triangular figure that hangs in the night sky in each of these images, a digital cutout of the aurora borealis, is echoed in the equilateral segments of the domed architecture beneath. As a kind of occult ritualistic symbol, the triangle motif here seems to signify the return to a faith in the more primitive geometries of a bygone Euclidean age; one in which truth and beauty appeared one and the same, linear and attainable, yet mystical in their absoluteness."
  (tags:art architecture pol )
• wearespartacus.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-Peoples-Review-of-the-Work-Capability-Assessment.pdf
  "The People's Review is presented in order to show the reality
  of going through the Work Capability Assessment
  for those who are living with sickness and disability every day."
  (tags:pol social )
• Rhizome | Drone’s Eye View: A Look at How Artists are Revealing the Killing Fields
  “the drone also, for me, stands in part for the network itself: an invisible, inherently connected technology allowing sight and action at a distance. Us and the digital, acting together, a medium and an exchange. But the non-human components of the network are not moral actors, and the same technology that permits civilian technological wonder, the wide-eyed futurism of the New Aesthetic and the unevenly-distributed joy of living now, also produces obscurantist “security” culture, ubiquitous surveillance, and robotic killing machines."
  (tags:drones war gz )
• Meaning: Plausible Utopias | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

  (tags:talks eco )

• First Teleportation From One Macroscopic Object to Another | MIT Technology Review
  "…practical quantum routers and the quantum internet that relies on them are just around the corner."
  (tags:sci comms )

• russell davies: the internet of middle-class things
  "The point is that – once the bridging/programming/installing problem is solved, hopefully by something like the BERG cloud  - people are going to want this kind of stuff. It's the decorative, furniturey, not exactly useful, certainly not to do with work stuff that people buy in the nicer sort of garden centres."
  (tags:comp iot )

• Between Us | Hollow Press

  (tags:music bandcamp ambient )

• About the Service Ecology of Resilience

  (tags:resilience pol social dooooom )

• Resilience Maps – Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps
  "Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps is a Creative Commons licenced mapping and analysis tool for evaluating personal and social resilience. It is intended to be used for planning, and is simple enough to learn during a crisis to facilitate cooperation and effective response."
  (tags:resilience pol social dooooom )

• BBC News – Popular physics theory running out of hiding places
  "If superparticles were to exist the decay would happen far more often. This test is one of the "golden" tests for supersymmetry and it is one that on the face of it this hugely popular theory among physicists has failed."
  (tags:sci )

This is how it begins. It doesn’t look so good, does it?

I’d been wanting to try this for ages, and was given an opportunity last week to experiment on the child.

I discovered pulled pork back in the 90s, in a NYC restaurant (that has since burned down, something I remain kind of unsurprised about).  I was never going to even approximate that first dish, but I thought I’d give the general idea a go.

This is a boneless shoulder of pork, around 1.75KG.  There are, I warn you, a million pulled-pork “purists” who will complain about the cut, and the bone out (or in!) and any number of other things.  But we are The People Who Burn Water, and We Don’t Care.

This is a slight adaptation of a Baker Brothers recipe.  All measurements from this point are approximate, and in English.  Make Google do the regional adaptations.

The day before.

What you need is a large bowl, because you are going to throw the following things into it.

A fair glug of olive oil.  Like, the equivalent of a tablespoon and a half.  Sort of.

A larger whack of Worcester Sauce.  And if you have balsamic vinegar, a little splash wouldn’t hurt.

An even larger whack of honey.  Like two, two point five tablespoons.

Some smoked paprika.  I went with two heaped teaspoons.

Fresh rosemary – strip the leaves off a couple of sprigs.

Fresh thyme – same, only use twice as many springs.

Break up a head of garlic.  Get rid of the papery shit on half of the cloves and throw them in.  Peel the other half, crush them under the flat of your knife, and throw them in.

Grind in some salt, equivalent to a large pinch.

And, of course, a bottle of beer.  Because this is me.  Now, I went with an excellent ruby red porter, but, in the end, I think maybe it was slightly too hoppy and bitter for the mix.  You might like that.  But next time I’m going to use a golden ale.

Mix all this up.  Yes, it looks disgusting.

The meat goes into a big roasting tin.  Get your knife and score the meat all over, in a large crosshatch pattern.

Grind up another pinch of salt and rub it into the meat.

Now take that muck you mixed up and rub that into the meat too.  Get the garlic and honey pressed into the scoring as you go.

Now look at your hands.  You look like a vet who’s been tending a cow with the runs.  Wash.

Pour the mix into the roasting tin, throw another bunch of rosemary and thyme sprigs on top, and sling it in the fridge.  Come back in four hours to turn the meat so the fat side is down. Come back four hours after that to turn the meat back.  Go to bed.

The cooking day.

The first thing you do is set the oven to 240 degrees C and stick the meat in, flashing it for twenty minutes.  Take it out, baste it in the mix again, cover the pan tightly in tin foil and put it back in the oven at 140 degrees C for seven hours.

Seven hours later, you get something like this.

This is, of course, utterly horrifying.  But that awful charred crab-head lid?  That’s the fat.  You just pull that off.  Underneath, you’ve got pork so moist and tender that you can quite literally shred it with two forks:

Serve in bread rolls with anything you like, including a spoonful of the cooked marinade.

• Pasta&Vinegar » Blog Archive » “Pixeliose” a disease resulting in partial pixelation of the field of vision
  "Adrien suffers pixeliose, an unknown disease resulting in partial pixelation of his field of vision. To cure this disease, he goes to a woman, Dr. Rittenmatter, ophthalmologist."
  (tags:video newaesthetic sf design+fiction )
• Intelligence Spending Drops for a Second Year | Secrecy News
  "But while intelligence budgets are shrinking, they remain very high by historical standards, having more than doubled over the past decade."
  (tags:intel )
• SVA Workshop: Books After Books | booktwo.org
  "The workshop started with two briefs. The first examined the book cover: its purpose in the old world of bricks-and-mortar bookshops and bookshelves, and its new place online and embedded in devices, more avatar than wrapper for the book. The second looked at the problems of navigating a long-form electronic text, without the ability to thumb and spatially conceive of a solid block of paper."
  (tags:books design ebooks )
• BLDGBLOG: Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012
  "…we should all have, as he phrased it, a "difficult New Year." That is, we should all look forward to, even seek out or purposefully engineer, a new year filled with the kinds of challenges Lebbeus felt, rightly or not, that we deserved to face, fight, and, in all cases, overcome—the genuine and endless difficulty of pursuing our own ideas and commitments, absurd goals no one else might share or even be interested in."
  (tags:architecture writing )
• Ice Music « mary anne hobbs

  (tags:music )

• Wood Land | Infraction

  (tags:music bandcamp )

• BBC News – Europe’s oldest prehistoric town unearthed in Bulgaria
  Archaeologists believe that the town was home to some 350 people and dates back to between 4700 and 4200 BC.

  That is about 1,500 years before the start of ancient Greek civilisation.
  (tags:history )

• Rediscovering Infinity | Black Unicorn

  (tags:music bandcamp )

• Stories from the New Aesthetic: James Bridle on Vimeo
  Stories from the New Aesthetic: James Bridle Stories from the New Aesthetic took place at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City on October 11, 2012. The New Aesthetic is an ongoing research project by James Bridle, investigating the intersections of culture and technology, history and memory, and the physical and the digital. For this event, Bridle will be joined by Aaron Straup Cope and Joanne McNeil to discuss stories related to these ideas. James Bridle is a writer, publisher, and technologist. He writes a regular column for the Observer (UK) and his writing has also appeared in Wired, Domus, Icon, and widely online. He speaks worldwide on the intersections of literature, technology, and culture, and writes about what he does at booktwo.org. Aaron Straup Cope is currently Senior Engineer at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Before that, he was Senior Engineer at Flickr focusing on all things geo-, machinetag-, and galleries-related between 2004 and 2009. From 2009 to 2011, he was Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names at Stamen Design, where he created the prettymaps project. Joanne McNeil is the editor of Rhizome. She is a 2012 USC Annenberg-Getty Arts Journalism Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Modern Painters, Wired (UK), the Los Angeles Times, and other web and print publications. Organized by Rhizome, the New Silent Series receives major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. Rhizome
  (tags:ifttt vimeo video )

• Obsolete Airbases « fringejoyride
  "Ultimately, these hard-shelled aircraft shelters holds the two most commonly wanted superpowers: Flight vs. Invisibility. In John Hodgeman’s ‘informal’ survey, the desire for flight was really an ‘inflated mythical, heroic” image that people only aspired superficially. Ultimately, nobody wanted to use the powers to fulfil our traditional sense of ‘good’. As it turned out, being a Superhero was no fun."
  (tags:architecture war history ruinporn )
• Inky-Linky – Roo Reynolds
  "Inky-Linky makes web pages 100% more useful and irritating when printed. It’s a bookmarklet that adds a QR code to the margins for each external link in the page."
  (tags:web papernet comms )
• Parties Tangle Over Discovery in Kiriakou Leak Case | Secrecy News
  “The government must prove only that the defendant had a ‘reason to believe’ that the information ‘could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation’…. The defendant’s intent to injure or serve the United States is not at issue.”
  (tags:crime war intel )
• polis: Jorge Luis Borges on Mapping Empire

  (tags:maps )

• Interstellar travelers may be helped by physicist’s calculations that solve the Pioneer anomaly
  "Kopeikin's research suggests that the photons move faster than expected from the Newtonian theory thus causing the appearance of deceleration, though the craft were actually traveling at the correct speed predicted by the theory."
  (tags:space sci )
• Astrobotic Technology assembles prototype of lunar water-prospecting robot
  "Astrobotic Technology Inc. has completed assembly of a full-size prototype of Polaris, a solar-powered robot that will search for potentially rich deposits of water ice at the moon's poles. The first of its kind, Polaris can accommodate a drill to bore one meter into the lunar surface and can operate in a lunar regions characterized by dark, long shadows and a sun that hugs the horizon."
  (tags:space robots )

• IDW To Publish Cerebus Book Of Covers | Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors
  IDW To Publish Cerebus Book Of Covers, from Bleeding Cool Comic Book, Movies and TV News and Rumors http://www.bleedingcool.com
  (tags:ifttt googlereader Bleeding Cool Comic Book Movies and TV News Rumors )