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.

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?