Author Archives: quinn

To reverse the attrition by Twitter

Of small notes. Has anyone else noticed this addendum on the Whitehouse Flickr stream of this:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

But the copyright notice says this:

United States Government Work

Which links to this:

A work that is a United States Government work, prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties, is not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no U.S. copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work. Anyone may, without restriction under U.S. copyright laws,

* reproduce the work in copies in print or in digital form;
* prepare derivative works of the work;
* perform the work publicly;
* display the work;
* distribute copies or digitally transfer the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.

(Which I knew)

So that note above is a bullshit bluff, which is common, but seems beneath the dignity of the Whitehouse.

1000 Ledes n + 7: Constraints/Consumption

Like so many algorithmic artistic explosions, Outbid will be hoist on its own technological pet-cock. Already the noun consumption is perverted by the digital diffidence- we no longer look thistles up in rubbishes.

Outbid is scriptable, therefore possibly obsolete, and not alone that way. My 1992 inutility to Utensil demonstrated that Daily too seemed to be consumed in the larger that possible noise genitor we came to know as the intersect.

1000 Ledes n + 15: The Writer’s Fallacy

Perhaps someday I can write something so perfect, so beautiful, something full of ideas so important, that you can’t help coming back to me and loving me forever.

Variations include the general artistic fallacy, and the performer’s fallacy. Some employ the absence of a mother’s love in place of a partner.

Gazpacho stone soup, the adaptability of bruschetta, and more

(Yes, I know if I’m food blogging I should take pictures. I don’t really do that for this blog, but I am keeping it mind, I swear.)

I touched down in PR and found myself at the local market figuring out what I could make, since it turned out I had somehow agreed to cook for six newly minted lawyers. The SuperMax was kind of kooky for me. It was oddly arranged, and seemed stocked arbitrarily. No corn on the cob, but almond milk? Sure.

I decided to go Spanish/Italian. What the hell. I found a loaf of bread bearing a resemblance in form to French, and decided all bread can be bruschetta in a pinch. Bruschetta is an Italian appetizer that is basically crap on thick toast. Traditionally this is tomato and mozzarella, but that’s kind of boring. But a dish that is crap on toast can be so many things, as long as you’ve got something that looks like a french loaf or baguette to start with. This got chopped 3/4th inch thick, drizzled with olive oil and a little crushed garlic then toasted to a burn. Form does not actually suggest cook time, it turns out. Then the burn bits got scraped off, and we were good to go. I found a wondrous PR food: guava paste, and topped it with a precious bit of basil goat cheese.

This was damn tasty, and for me the evening’s best hit. This is the thing that’s great about bruschetta, it’s a wonderful way to experiment with the local idiosyncratic foods. If you really get a hit you not only find a new bruschetta to take home, but give the locals a new twist on an ingredient they thought they’d seen the length and breadth of. I suspect this trick only works if you’re not in Italy.

Then I did yag, or yet another gazpacho. I think I’ve found the true wonder of this soup. You learn the form, and do it with local produce. Every one is a unique delight, and it can be relatively inexpensive that way. As near as I can tell the two atomic ingredients are tomatoes, which makes it gazpacho, and cucumbers, which makes it not salsa. More on this as I learn to grok the gaz. Maybe ‘gazpacho design patterns’.

I did my first risotto as well. Lacking the white wine my recipe called for, I poured in a half can of light beer, which turned out great. Risotto is one of those sneaky recipes which is actually really easy to make and seems impressive. I fried up some onions, garlic, and mushrooms in far too much butter and oil, then threw in 2.5 cups(ish) of rice and got the whole mess nicely coated in the oil. I threw everything in a big pot and poured in a half can of the local light beer and let that absorb. Then I threw in some veggie stock, a cup at a time, and cooked it over a mediumish heat, covered. I stirred and tasted it every so often to figure out if it needed more stock. Towards the end I threw in most of a can of asparagus, seeing as the fresh stuff locally is more expensive than gold. I should have added more- it turned out that while it gave the rice a nice tang, it was a mushroom risotto with a hint of asparagus, and I’d been after an asparagus risotto with a hint of mushroom. Risotto made this way comes out stupidly creamy, and has no right to be. Cheese is great in it as well, but I like to have a small collection of vegan recipes that are fairly rich and creamy, because vegan cuisine so rarely goes for that kind of texture and flavor. Of course, you have to omit the butter. Risotto seems like another good design patterns kind of food.

Finally I made another creme anglaise. (I’ve decided I probably need to just travel with my own vanilla beans.) This time it was over some pears cooked in butter and cinnamon and topped it with a dollop of a gritty ganache made with a local chocolate. This was the least exciting- I want to try it again, but perverting some local cuisine like the plantains. Mwahahah.

All in all, the main outcome was that I overfed the lawyers.

But I also found a nice use for leftover creme anglaise. French toast, anyone?

A new dessert

I’ve been playing with creme anglaise a bit lately, and I had two willing victims^wdiners tonight to iterate on. I started them out with my Andalusian-ish green gazpacho (which still needs *something*) your basic feta and watermelon salad with pepper, and some garlic bread. For dessert I did a straightforward creme anglaise by the thirds- three egg yolks and a third of a cup of sugar for a cup of creme with vanilla. (I used extract. It wasn’t nice.)(I’m poor, ok? Grocery store beans are reamingly expensive. All hail eBay.)

Anyway I picked up this weird green south American fruit I can’t remember the name of, which we’ll call WGSAFICRTNO for short. The WGSAFICRTNO was definitely tropical, and had huge brown seeds, but also vaguely pear like. Raw it had a tang and a touch of bitterness that was, let’s face it, unpleasant. Victim #1, Tina, viewed it with some doubt. I also had a safety mango.

I recommend safety mangos.

I was pretty sure the creme wasn’t really going to cut the problems with the WGSAFICRTNO. I started by squirting some lemon on it, which Tina and I both agreed helped but didn’t fix the problem. Then I remembered one of the slogans I live my life by: Almost anything can be improved by being browned in brown butter. (So I quickly did brown it in butter, but lemony butter.) At the end it was almost apple like, but but more complex. Not every problem was solved, but what was left seemed fixable by the power of custard.

Boy was I right. The custard soothed the last of the WGSAFICRTNO’s hard edges and the WGSAFICRTNO imparted lots of flavor to the neutral richness of the custard. All three of us mango fans shunned my safety dessert in favor of the WGSAFICRTNO in Creme Anglaise, served in a martini glass and garnished with sliced almonds.1

I still like nailing desserts more than savory dishes, because while a good meal will get you strong and loving praise, it takes something decadent and rich and sweet to get your hosts furtively withdrawn, planning how they’ll tie you to the basement on a tether long enough to reach the kitchen. That’s right, for me a meal hasn’t really succeeded until someone plotting to turn me into a culinary gimp against my will.2

I decided afterward the almonds were kind of eh, and it would have been better with pine nuts. And caramel. And then I thought, pine nut caramel! Oh I think so.

1 By shunned the mango I don’t mean didn’t eat it, I mean expressed preference for the WGSAFICRTNO. We aren’t insane.
2 My latex gimp hood will require copious nose holes and either an always open mouth bit, or one I can easily open myself. FYI.

Notes on Gravity’s Rainbow

From pg 250ish:

Plasticity has its grand tradition and main stream, which happens to flow
by way of du Pont and their famous employee Carothers, known as The Great
Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties
and brought us directly to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and
a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within
the System, an announcement of Plasticity’s central canon: that chemists were no
longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what properties they
wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it. At du Pont, the next
step after nylon was to introduce aromatic rings into the polyamide chain. Pretty
soon a whole family of “aromatic polymers” had arisen: aromatic polyamides,
polycarbonates, polyethers, polysulfanes.

Puts me very much in the mind of synth bio today. (This story falls into the ‘too good to check’ category, and besides since I’m using it for allegory, I don’t care if it’s historical or rhetorical.) What, do you suppose, is the nylon of synthetic biology? The application that will not only escape from the lab, but if need be wrenched from its hold to satisfy so basic a desire as to make women somehow prettier to men?

1000 Ledes n + 14: When simply asking isn’t appropriate

Faces can be deceptive on this point. The eyes, specifically, can be all over the place. Clothing, mannerisms, wrinkles or their lack, colloquialisms, shape-size-haircolor-teeth, waddles on chin or upper arms. Location, length or amount of hair. All can be intensionally or unintentionally miscues.

If you want to know someone’s age, look at the back of their hands.

Text from 5mof: How to open a vein.

(Still planning to work on this talk, but here is the first iteration, as presented to Noisebridge earlier this evening. Video should be available in the coming months.)

Hi my name is Quinn, I’m a writer, I write everyday. Some days more than others.

I am not going to tell you how to be a good writer. That’s impossible in five minutes.

There’s one thing they say can’t be taught even if you take years, and that’s how to open a vein. I figured years might be the wrong approach, and I’d see if I could do that in five minutes.

First off- writing is a risky business. More than you realize. When I say I’m a writer I mean I’m a thrill seeker in emotional hellholes. I’m like Steve Irwin but for the inner demons of humanity instead of crocodiles. There’s a reasons so many of us drink ourselves to death and eat gun barrels.

But let’s say you still want to write. What does it mean to open a vein? To explain it without doing is kind of impractical, but let’s call it caring so hard that you use words to force other people to care, often against their will.

Meet the enemy: the blank page.

The page is an impenetrable barrier, and we writers spend our lives trying to tear it down to get to you and hide behind it all at once. This is why we’re kind of nuts.

Words are barriers and conduits. Horribly and wonderfully, they are for the most part all we really ever have of each other.

Seeing as I am a writer, I have all sorts of complex writing tricks. I can make text sing, I can make it dance, I can obfuscate and explicate in even parts. None of that matters if I don’t care about my topic. You will be able to tell.

Another warning: When you are doing it right, when you are writing from your heart, it will never be good enough. There’s not a point where it’s finished, there’s a point where you can’t go on.

So what is writing from the heart, writing in your own blood? It is saying what you mean because nothing less will do, and nothing less will help. It’s always expressing out of desperation. Because you need them to know.

Here’s a list of motivations for writing that don’t make very good writing. This makes you boring, so boring usually you know somewhere in your heart that you are boring. And we all do this. We all do this most of the time. <slide>

But lets turn that on it’s head and see the reasons that make you bleed.

…wanting to get the things out of you before they eat your head, wanting your mother to love you, wanting to know for sure that you really exist, wanting to not die of the shame of knowing your mediocrity wasted the precious and finite moments of the lives of those you love, or even that you hate, or only believing you lived when you look back and see your bootprints on the hearts of as many people as possible…

It’s telling the naked story of why you care.

You’d think it’s something that takes a long time to do, that you fret over every word. But consider how you’d tell someone you loved they were in danger. It’s precise, it’s tight, it’s not more than you need and sure as hell not less.

It’s running 26 miles to declare ‘We have won.’ and then falling dead. (That guy knew how to punctuate.)

Another warning: You can write about it or you can talk it out- talking out your feelings and verbally telling your stories is great for productive group therapy, not so good if you want to write about it. I need both, so I’m learning to write first.

If you think this doesn’t apply to your python documentation, you may be right. But it probably applies as soon as you’re explaining. We think tech writing has no blood in it, but when it’s good, it has a bit. It’s there whenever you care.

Consider this opening about plate tectonics:

The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes and 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes and 14 seconds north latitude- a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea.

My editor for years at wired, Kevin Poulsen, helped me find how to convey what I cared about, and therefore make you care as well. It’s a lot about trust. When I don’t bleed on the paper It’s because I don’t trust you the audience to get it, won’t trust you with my pearls, my heart, or to understand the importance of my arcane knowledge. It’s arrogant as well, to think you cannot possibly get the stuff in my head.

Here’s the beginning of a piece on software defined radio, where you might not think you’d find my heart, but it’s there:

Matt Ettus has the sly smile of someone who sees the invisible. His hands fly over the boards of his Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, snapping them together with an antenna like Lego bricks. Then he plugs in the naked boards to a USB 2 cable snaking to his Linux laptop.

After few minutes of normal Linux messing around (“Takes forever to boot…. Haven’t got the sound driver working yet….”) he turns the laptop around to reveal a set of vibrating lines in humps and dips across the screen, like a wildly shaking wireframe mountain range. “Here,” he explains, “I’m grabbing FM.”

“All of it?” I ask.

“All of it,” he says. I’m suddenly glad the soundcard isn’t working.”

Radio is that bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that sits between brain waves and daylight. It’s made of the same stuff that composes light, color, electrical hums, gamma radiation from atom bombs, the microwaves that reheat your pizza.

So if you want to write, if you want to really write, ask yourself, why do I care? Why is this important enough to risk humiliation, ridicule, hope, life, love and madness? And when you answer that, you will know how to make us care.