I've graduated from Blogger. You can now read my rambling diatribes on my shiny new website, HeartSeed.net.
Cheers.
12.08.2014
9.20.2014
Zero-Bullshit Cooking
Cooking is the culture of processing food in such a way that it becomes more easily digestible, making more nutrients and energy available to the consumer, as well as destroying harmful microbes and chemical compounds. This makes it so the cook has more free time as he doesn't have to spend his whole day chewing and gnawing, and has enough extra calories to fuel an energy-hungry brain. Voila: humanity.
The zeroth form of cooking is physically brutalising the ingredients, with hands, mortar and pestle, or blades. The first form of cooking is using fire to heat and thereby break down ingredients, most simply directly over the fire, as with barbecue, but also in a vessel and with liquid, as with soups and braises. The second form of cooking is using the chemical action of salt, alcohol or acid, as with pickling and massaging lemon juice into greens. The third is using bacteria to ferment ingredients, as with bread and beer. Yes, brewing is a form of cooking.
Cooking is about gathering the best ingredients you can, pairing them to compliment each other and fucking with them as little as possible. Because the very nature of cooking is pre-digesting ingredients, there is a very fine line between making food easier to digest and creating disgusting homogenous mush. If you are paying attention, which you certainly should be, you will see and taste this line as you approach it. Try not to cross it, but don't be afraid to get close.
On the same note, using advanced technology to process ingredients is almost always folly. If an ingredient needs to be run through a food processor to become usable, it's entirely possible that nature never intended it to be eaten by people. Also, we eat food for energy, so using more energy to process the food than we will get by eating it is wasteful and disrespectful to the Earth, who was nice enough to give us the food in the first place. Think long and hard about this one.
Cooking is an art. The medium is food. We think of taste as the most important aspect of food, and this is a good way to think, but as multi-sensory creatures, we judge food by it's appearance and smell before taste and feel. As a culinary artist, make presentation a priority, because it ultimately will effect how the food tastes.
Cooking is a science. Any cook worth his salt takes proper nutrition seriously. In addition, using local and seasonal ingredients is the only truly wise way of cooking, because if we destroy our ecosystems by wasting energy on ingredients which are not local, seasonal and edible, we will no longer have anything to cook with. If you care about food, study ecology.
Cuisine springs from both the art and science of cooking. Bioregions have their own traditions for cooking no by chance but by natural selection. Warmer regions spice their food liberally because the spices have anti-bacterial properties: advantageous when your food tends to spoil more quickly. Other regional cuisines are based on native species, lifestyle, and so on. I therefore feel that mixing cuisines is fine as long as you take these variables into consideration. Cooking with ingredients grown on another continent just because you can is rather disrespectful. However, growing a crop in your backyard which has been imported may be somewhat better if it does well in the climate. I like to think of this process as 'breeding' new cuisines.
Cooking is power. As was alluded to in the first paragraph, cooking is the only thing that separates us from other animals. Beavers build. Termites garden. Birds sing. Only humans cook. Bread and booze built the pyramids. Needless to say, with great cooking comes great responsibility.
Finally, and crucially, cooking is both easy and deeply satisfying. It takes a little practice to make things that are pleasing to the senses, but making healthy meals with whatever's on hand will elevate your day from 'meh' to 'yes life satisfaction'. Along with cooking's sister, gardening, every human should have a basic knowledge of this invaluable, wonderful way of life.
The zeroth form of cooking is physically brutalising the ingredients, with hands, mortar and pestle, or blades. The first form of cooking is using fire to heat and thereby break down ingredients, most simply directly over the fire, as with barbecue, but also in a vessel and with liquid, as with soups and braises. The second form of cooking is using the chemical action of salt, alcohol or acid, as with pickling and massaging lemon juice into greens. The third is using bacteria to ferment ingredients, as with bread and beer. Yes, brewing is a form of cooking.
Cooking is about gathering the best ingredients you can, pairing them to compliment each other and fucking with them as little as possible. Because the very nature of cooking is pre-digesting ingredients, there is a very fine line between making food easier to digest and creating disgusting homogenous mush. If you are paying attention, which you certainly should be, you will see and taste this line as you approach it. Try not to cross it, but don't be afraid to get close.
On the same note, using advanced technology to process ingredients is almost always folly. If an ingredient needs to be run through a food processor to become usable, it's entirely possible that nature never intended it to be eaten by people. Also, we eat food for energy, so using more energy to process the food than we will get by eating it is wasteful and disrespectful to the Earth, who was nice enough to give us the food in the first place. Think long and hard about this one.
Cooking is an art. The medium is food. We think of taste as the most important aspect of food, and this is a good way to think, but as multi-sensory creatures, we judge food by it's appearance and smell before taste and feel. As a culinary artist, make presentation a priority, because it ultimately will effect how the food tastes.
Cooking is a science. Any cook worth his salt takes proper nutrition seriously. In addition, using local and seasonal ingredients is the only truly wise way of cooking, because if we destroy our ecosystems by wasting energy on ingredients which are not local, seasonal and edible, we will no longer have anything to cook with. If you care about food, study ecology.
Cuisine springs from both the art and science of cooking. Bioregions have their own traditions for cooking no by chance but by natural selection. Warmer regions spice their food liberally because the spices have anti-bacterial properties: advantageous when your food tends to spoil more quickly. Other regional cuisines are based on native species, lifestyle, and so on. I therefore feel that mixing cuisines is fine as long as you take these variables into consideration. Cooking with ingredients grown on another continent just because you can is rather disrespectful. However, growing a crop in your backyard which has been imported may be somewhat better if it does well in the climate. I like to think of this process as 'breeding' new cuisines.
Cooking is power. As was alluded to in the first paragraph, cooking is the only thing that separates us from other animals. Beavers build. Termites garden. Birds sing. Only humans cook. Bread and booze built the pyramids. Needless to say, with great cooking comes great responsibility.
Finally, and crucially, cooking is both easy and deeply satisfying. It takes a little practice to make things that are pleasing to the senses, but making healthy meals with whatever's on hand will elevate your day from 'meh' to 'yes life satisfaction'. Along with cooking's sister, gardening, every human should have a basic knowledge of this invaluable, wonderful way of life.
9.09.2014
Computational Power Sharing
As I hope I have established by now, I am a big fan of decentralisation. This
anarchist philosophy extends to computing as well. It keeps striking me
how much cool stuff we can do with the internet, and yet we are
squandering that potential by introducing chains of middlemen in between
individual users. To me, a peer to peer system in which users
communicate directly instead of going through a third party seems ideal.
Retroshare is a program which allows this type of communication in
limited ways, and torrenting seems to be an even bigger step forward, as
far as content sharing techniques go.
Furthermore, it's worth considering that some very bright kids out there have limited access to computing power, as computers cost money. Companies like Google and Pixar are able to do amazing things with server farms, but they aren't sharing their computing power, and a creative individual can hardly be expected to purchase a building full of servers in order to pursue his/her programming visions.
So, what if there was a way to draw computing power from all the computers connected to the internet? Most people don't use their computers for anything CPU-intensive anyway, so they could certainly spare a small fraction of that power. If all this combined power was available to anyone with a good idea, we could have real progress in computing and software.
What I'm proposing is this: A voluntary computational power sharing network. Let's call it PowNet. PowNet, like torrenting, would be accessible through a PN client downloaded from the web. Also like torrenting, there would be many sites users could visit to download (or torrent, for that matter) a "driver" for whatever program they wish to donate power to. In this way, only ideas supported by users would get power.
That's the basic idea. It could be combined with torrenting, effectively a storage-sharing system, to spread out a large lump of program data over many users. It could also feature some sort of interface-sharing system in which the main user would have the normal program interface and the power contributors would have a secondary interface, through which a contributor could submit content, or other forms of input.
The goal of this kind of system would be to utilise the vast amount of computing power which is currently connected through the internet and is mostly sitting idle while its users browse Facebook. Secondarily, it would allow someone using a low-power device such as a tablet or a phone to run programs which would normally only be able to be run using a server farm. This could have social justice implications, since low-power devices are cheap and through a network like this could run software which could educate the user dynamically or perform any number of other high-impact processes.
This concept has been implemented to a limited degree, with p2p, grid computing and volunteer computing, but in order to have something that works like magic, which is how it should be, I think we'd need to work on the physical infrastructure of the internet. High-speed would be the name of the game, since a PowNet program's speed would be limited only by the speed of the user's internet connection. This calls up the recent net neutrality issue and also our government's role in public infrastructure (it's mostly neglecting it, basically).
We have passive media, we have interactive media, and now we have dynamic media: that which is influenced by an ecosystem of users across the world. Most of our current dynamic media is trifling (Twitter comes to mind) compared to what we could achieve with a sturdier soft and hard infrastructure, especially given the kind of data-gathering sensors we put into mobile devices these days.
What it comes down to is this: using PowNet, I could run a program on my tablet computer which could understand me and my environment and use that understanding to deliver content accordingly. Sounds like talking to a person, yeah? To a poor kid living in the inner city, without access to quality educational systems, that kind of program could be life-changing.
Is the internet ready to start raising children?
Furthermore, it's worth considering that some very bright kids out there have limited access to computing power, as computers cost money. Companies like Google and Pixar are able to do amazing things with server farms, but they aren't sharing their computing power, and a creative individual can hardly be expected to purchase a building full of servers in order to pursue his/her programming visions.
So, what if there was a way to draw computing power from all the computers connected to the internet? Most people don't use their computers for anything CPU-intensive anyway, so they could certainly spare a small fraction of that power. If all this combined power was available to anyone with a good idea, we could have real progress in computing and software.
What I'm proposing is this: A voluntary computational power sharing network. Let's call it PowNet. PowNet, like torrenting, would be accessible through a PN client downloaded from the web. Also like torrenting, there would be many sites users could visit to download (or torrent, for that matter) a "driver" for whatever program they wish to donate power to. In this way, only ideas supported by users would get power.
That's the basic idea. It could be combined with torrenting, effectively a storage-sharing system, to spread out a large lump of program data over many users. It could also feature some sort of interface-sharing system in which the main user would have the normal program interface and the power contributors would have a secondary interface, through which a contributor could submit content, or other forms of input.
The goal of this kind of system would be to utilise the vast amount of computing power which is currently connected through the internet and is mostly sitting idle while its users browse Facebook. Secondarily, it would allow someone using a low-power device such as a tablet or a phone to run programs which would normally only be able to be run using a server farm. This could have social justice implications, since low-power devices are cheap and through a network like this could run software which could educate the user dynamically or perform any number of other high-impact processes.
This concept has been implemented to a limited degree, with p2p, grid computing and volunteer computing, but in order to have something that works like magic, which is how it should be, I think we'd need to work on the physical infrastructure of the internet. High-speed would be the name of the game, since a PowNet program's speed would be limited only by the speed of the user's internet connection. This calls up the recent net neutrality issue and also our government's role in public infrastructure (it's mostly neglecting it, basically).
We have passive media, we have interactive media, and now we have dynamic media: that which is influenced by an ecosystem of users across the world. Most of our current dynamic media is trifling (Twitter comes to mind) compared to what we could achieve with a sturdier soft and hard infrastructure, especially given the kind of data-gathering sensors we put into mobile devices these days.
What it comes down to is this: using PowNet, I could run a program on my tablet computer which could understand me and my environment and use that understanding to deliver content accordingly. Sounds like talking to a person, yeah? To a poor kid living in the inner city, without access to quality educational systems, that kind of program could be life-changing.
Is the internet ready to start raising children?
6.06.2014
Retrograde
Retrograde. It's what you do when your culture abandons ideas like using high quality materials, building things to last and designing for the user. It's an antidote to a world of consumerism and throw-away products. It's a word I hope to add to your lexicon today.
Retrograde (verb) - To dispense with a modern technology in favour of an older, more suitable one. "Check it out dude, I retrograded my bluetooth speakers to this dope ghetto blaster!"
Dig it:
Retrograde (verb) - To dispense with a modern technology in favour of an older, more suitable one. "Check it out dude, I retrograded my bluetooth speakers to this dope ghetto blaster!"
Dig it:
5.20.2014
The Digital Environment/This Is PurdyCulture
If someone asked you what made humans unique, you might reply that it is our technology that sets us apart from our fellow animals. Of course, it is not the fact that we have technology that sets us apart. Birds hunt with wooden spears, termites build imposing towers of detritus in which they cultivate fungal gardens, and beavers are capable of totally altering their environment in the course of a few years. No, technology is not unique to our species. What is unique is how we use our technology: not to change the way we interact with our world, but instead to create a new world altogether.
A digital environment.
Right now, provided that you are reading this on a personal computer, you are existing in the digital environment called The Internet. It's a big place, our world wide web. You can talk to other people, play games, watch porn... If something exists in the real world, you can find an online embodiment of it.
As far as I know, no other organism or even group of organisms has created a separate space of cultural existence. And why should they? Most animals seem perfectly content to socialise, play and have sex in the real world. But we humans have a different way of looking at things.
First of all, we think we're pretty hot shit. This belief in the inherent 'better-ness' of the human species is called anthropocentrism. If you're not the scientific type, perhaps human supremacy is a better term? Basically, when you get down to it, it means that we're rather selfish, and to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. You have to put yourself and your own first, or else life is pretty harsh. However, this is not to say that we should think only of ourselves or our kin. It is entirely possible to have a respect for and relationship with the rest of the world while still looking out for yourself. The two are not mutually exclusive, contrary to what most Buddhists preach. This principle also extends to our faith in our experts. We would follow our scientists off the edge of a cliff if they told us that they would invent a flying device before we reached the bottom (incidentally, even if they were to succeed, that flying device would emit hydrocarbons that would pollute our food chain and kill us anyway).
Second, we're pretty lazy. If we can push something off until tomorrow, we will. If we can get someone else to do the work we would otherwise have to do, we will. If we have to sacrifice some amount of physical comfort in order to be more responsible, we won't. This leads to such phenomena as slavery, global warming, and our current congress.
The digital environment is a result and an embodiment of anthropocentrism combined with apathy, or arrogance combined with laziness, if you like. You may argue that modern PCs were invented to improve our disastrous educational system, or that the internet was born of a pure sense of invention and the chasing of a great "what-if". And you'd be right, in some ways. However, what you're not thinking about is what education and scientific progress actually are. The former is a process by which we take young people at the point in their life where their mind is most malleable and indoctrinate them into our culture, whether they like it or not. Scientific progress is a game of chicken we play with our world: how cool can we make our toys before one of them malfunctions and levels a city, or more realistically and less dramatically, slowly pollutes our environment until cancer is a statement rather than a question. 'Education' and 'scientific progress' are just buzzwords, just like 'tough on crime' or 'terrorist'. You say them and no argues with you, for fear of sounding radical.
Just between you and me and the world wide web, I'm not afraid of sounding radical.
However, I am afraid of sounding pessimistic. Despite how gloomy a picture I've painted so far, those who know me know that I am solution oriented, and fundamentally optimistic for the future. So hang in there, the fun stuff is coming.
Before we get to that, though, I have to clarify why I think the digital environment is not a good thing. It's pretty simple, really: just as every part of the real world is reflected in the digital world, everything in the digital world is a weak, pale reflection of something that really exists. Why would you waste your time chatting with people on Facebook when you can have a conversation over a cup of coffee while people watching and listening to that cool new band? Why would you play a game about soccer when you can play a game called soccer, and get in better shape while you do it? Why would you stare at a PDF until your eyes are sore when you could go a library, get personal recommendations from a librarian, and enjoy a tactile reading experience in a pleasant public environment?
When you get right down to it, the simple and indisputable truth is that the world is really freaking complicated. The book you should be reading might be made of paper that's made of wood pulp which comes from a tree which the last surviving member of an endangered species of woodpecker lived in. Or, if you don't care about woodpeckers because of that darned anthropocentrism, consider that the tree is made of organs, made of tissues, made of cells, made of organelles, made of proteins, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of quarks, and even those are probably made of some smaller thing. The laws of physics tell us that every atom is related to another atom. Everything is dynamic; nothing is isolated. This immense level of complexity is what gives rise to such emergent phenomena as life.
The digital environment is made of computer code. Complex? Yes. As complex as quantum mechanics?
Never.
Why never? The electrical signal and the processor that enable the digital environment to exist are made of real particles. They have to be, and they always will have to be. Therefore, neither computers nor computer language could ever exceed or even match the complexity of the physical universe. The hosted system cannot exceed the complexity of the host system.
Holy shit, why does any of this matter?
It matters because complexity is what gives rise to everything you love. Reduce the complexity, and you reduce the love. Listening to music on Spotify is fine. Listening to music from a crackly record which comes in a nice big printed art sleeve, while playfully moshing with your bandmates in your living room which is literally vibrating from the bass?
Lovely.
Therefore, the bottom line is this: through my many years of experience living in both the digital world and the real world, and borrowing ideas from the most bleeding-edge science and the oldest ingrained beliefs of original peoples, I hereby assert that the digital world is inevitably and inescapably inferior to the real world.
It necessarily follows that there is no reason to stay in the digital environment. Now, don't get me wrong. As I will explain in later posts, I don't think we should stop using technology, even digital technology. What I'm saying is that we should pick up where we left off, what, 20ish years ago, and use technology to help us do a thing, not to do everything for us.
There's a few things I missed in this post. For example, the environmental impact of a high-tech society, or the psychological effects of being constantly plugged in. But there are already lots of people who can tell you about those things. I'm here to say what you haven't heard already. I'm here to write a blog about why blogging is bad. I'm here to use the digital environment to destroy the digital environment. This is counterculture at its heart, but it's flavoured with such cultural spices as a passion for badminton, a constant desire to play percussion instruments, and an affinity for Hobbit-like fashion.
This is PurdyCulture.
Stay tuned.
A digital environment.
Right now, provided that you are reading this on a personal computer, you are existing in the digital environment called The Internet. It's a big place, our world wide web. You can talk to other people, play games, watch porn... If something exists in the real world, you can find an online embodiment of it.
As far as I know, no other organism or even group of organisms has created a separate space of cultural existence. And why should they? Most animals seem perfectly content to socialise, play and have sex in the real world. But we humans have a different way of looking at things.
First of all, we think we're pretty hot shit. This belief in the inherent 'better-ness' of the human species is called anthropocentrism. If you're not the scientific type, perhaps human supremacy is a better term? Basically, when you get down to it, it means that we're rather selfish, and to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. You have to put yourself and your own first, or else life is pretty harsh. However, this is not to say that we should think only of ourselves or our kin. It is entirely possible to have a respect for and relationship with the rest of the world while still looking out for yourself. The two are not mutually exclusive, contrary to what most Buddhists preach. This principle also extends to our faith in our experts. We would follow our scientists off the edge of a cliff if they told us that they would invent a flying device before we reached the bottom (incidentally, even if they were to succeed, that flying device would emit hydrocarbons that would pollute our food chain and kill us anyway).
Second, we're pretty lazy. If we can push something off until tomorrow, we will. If we can get someone else to do the work we would otherwise have to do, we will. If we have to sacrifice some amount of physical comfort in order to be more responsible, we won't. This leads to such phenomena as slavery, global warming, and our current congress.
The digital environment is a result and an embodiment of anthropocentrism combined with apathy, or arrogance combined with laziness, if you like. You may argue that modern PCs were invented to improve our disastrous educational system, or that the internet was born of a pure sense of invention and the chasing of a great "what-if". And you'd be right, in some ways. However, what you're not thinking about is what education and scientific progress actually are. The former is a process by which we take young people at the point in their life where their mind is most malleable and indoctrinate them into our culture, whether they like it or not. Scientific progress is a game of chicken we play with our world: how cool can we make our toys before one of them malfunctions and levels a city, or more realistically and less dramatically, slowly pollutes our environment until cancer is a statement rather than a question. 'Education' and 'scientific progress' are just buzzwords, just like 'tough on crime' or 'terrorist'. You say them and no argues with you, for fear of sounding radical.
Just between you and me and the world wide web, I'm not afraid of sounding radical.
However, I am afraid of sounding pessimistic. Despite how gloomy a picture I've painted so far, those who know me know that I am solution oriented, and fundamentally optimistic for the future. So hang in there, the fun stuff is coming.
Before we get to that, though, I have to clarify why I think the digital environment is not a good thing. It's pretty simple, really: just as every part of the real world is reflected in the digital world, everything in the digital world is a weak, pale reflection of something that really exists. Why would you waste your time chatting with people on Facebook when you can have a conversation over a cup of coffee while people watching and listening to that cool new band? Why would you play a game about soccer when you can play a game called soccer, and get in better shape while you do it? Why would you stare at a PDF until your eyes are sore when you could go a library, get personal recommendations from a librarian, and enjoy a tactile reading experience in a pleasant public environment?
When you get right down to it, the simple and indisputable truth is that the world is really freaking complicated. The book you should be reading might be made of paper that's made of wood pulp which comes from a tree which the last surviving member of an endangered species of woodpecker lived in. Or, if you don't care about woodpeckers because of that darned anthropocentrism, consider that the tree is made of organs, made of tissues, made of cells, made of organelles, made of proteins, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of quarks, and even those are probably made of some smaller thing. The laws of physics tell us that every atom is related to another atom. Everything is dynamic; nothing is isolated. This immense level of complexity is what gives rise to such emergent phenomena as life.
The digital environment is made of computer code. Complex? Yes. As complex as quantum mechanics?
Never.
Why never? The electrical signal and the processor that enable the digital environment to exist are made of real particles. They have to be, and they always will have to be. Therefore, neither computers nor computer language could ever exceed or even match the complexity of the physical universe. The hosted system cannot exceed the complexity of the host system.
Holy shit, why does any of this matter?
It matters because complexity is what gives rise to everything you love. Reduce the complexity, and you reduce the love. Listening to music on Spotify is fine. Listening to music from a crackly record which comes in a nice big printed art sleeve, while playfully moshing with your bandmates in your living room which is literally vibrating from the bass?
Lovely.
Therefore, the bottom line is this: through my many years of experience living in both the digital world and the real world, and borrowing ideas from the most bleeding-edge science and the oldest ingrained beliefs of original peoples, I hereby assert that the digital world is inevitably and inescapably inferior to the real world.
It necessarily follows that there is no reason to stay in the digital environment. Now, don't get me wrong. As I will explain in later posts, I don't think we should stop using technology, even digital technology. What I'm saying is that we should pick up where we left off, what, 20ish years ago, and use technology to help us do a thing, not to do everything for us.
There's a few things I missed in this post. For example, the environmental impact of a high-tech society, or the psychological effects of being constantly plugged in. But there are already lots of people who can tell you about those things. I'm here to say what you haven't heard already. I'm here to write a blog about why blogging is bad. I'm here to use the digital environment to destroy the digital environment. This is counterculture at its heart, but it's flavoured with such cultural spices as a passion for badminton, a constant desire to play percussion instruments, and an affinity for Hobbit-like fashion.
This is PurdyCulture.
Stay tuned.
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