It is totally happy-making that you can be sitting having a surprisingly leisurely breakfast of kippers (or, in my case, porridge, black pudding and a full Scottish) overlooking the Isle of Skye, go through the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, and end up back in London with plenty of time for a few pints. The UK railways are awesome, sometimes, and Britain is mesmerising. The West Highland Line is a must-see.
Comment [2]
contact
email:
chris is at anti-mega.com
Twitter:
@antimega
iChat/AIM:
antimega77
I can work for you too
The BBC Proms start this week, and to help me remember when they’re on (so I can listen on Radio 3 or watch on BBC4), I’ve created a Twitter feed called promrightnow.
It will tweet 5 minutes before a Prom starts.
Those who want a bit more chat and behind the scenes info should follow the official bbcproms feed.
Comment [1]
This is a great excuse for not having to actually blog about things:
1. Real-time advertising – I was just about to write something and then this hit it out of the park. Now to make this work outside the Internet.
2. Sound in physical/digital interactions – I’m not talking bleeps and bloops, but useful soundscapes (inspired partly by hearing a bit more about Papa Sangre, and the great sound in Electric Hotel). Time to make things and try things, I think.
3. Screens on the underground crowd out the hyper-local advertising that used to exist, and it’s a real shame. I can’t help thinking the brandwash down a whole escalator is missing a trick.
4. Moving. Moving to Maida Vale next week. Anything interesting around there?
5. Shoelaces! I was doing it wrong.
Comment [3]
After a few too many visits to Gelupo (and being recognised by them as the mayor) and kvetching at the lack of availability of the wacky flavours of Humphry Slocombe, it suddenly occurred to me – I can make this.
Maybe not the super smooth nut gelato, but sorbets? Hell yeah. In fact, I’ve had a super-cheap ice cream machine for over 3 years, unused as I always thought ice cream seemed a bit finicky, making custards.
So, to start, I picked the jesus juice sorbet Humphry Slocombe is renowned for. In the civilised world, jesus juice is known as kalimotxo – the mixture of red wine and Coke of choice for Basque teenagers. Like Slocombe’s recipe, I used Cote du Rhone rather than Rioja. I sort of adapted a recipe supplied with the ice cream machine – basically:
1. make a sugar syrup by boiling 175g of fine sugar with 175ml of water for 5-10 minutes (I cut back the sugar to 150g as there’s sugar in the Coke)
2. cool it in the fridge
3. cool 300ml of other flavouring liquid in the fridge (half and half wine/Coke in this case)
4. combine, and churn in the machine – mine has a bowl that needs to be in the freezer for at least 10 hours before
That’s it. And it worked!
It just froze – and did liquify on contact with anything unfrozen – but it basically worked, and tasted great (it’s a darker colour than Slocombes, partly because I suspect I have a higher ratio of wine to sugar syrup, and my ice crystals aren’t as fine).
Other recipes include egg whites and/or gelatine, and I may try these if making something fancy, but it’s great as is.
Yesterday, I tried a similar cocktail – Aperol spritz – half Aperol (or Campari, but then I’d add a cup of orange juice as well), half prosecco. Or pink cava, as that’s what I had to hand.
This was more liquid after churning (more alcoholic), but a night in the freezer fixed it up, and as the cava was added at the last minute, still contains a little fizz. Excellent. And bright orange.
Next: negroni. Or a Manhattan sorbet. Or a Coke float ice cream. Then maybe a prosciutto and bourbon gelato.
Comment [1]
A quick palate cleanser after all that.
Gelato! In London! In Soho even!
There’s now a gelato triangle in Soho – several shops have opened recently, and what’s great is that two of them are open late into the night.
Freggo was first – a version of the Argentinean gelato shop, serving dulche de leche gelato and Malbec & berries sorbet.
Scoop then opened a 2nd branch in Soho. I loved their ice cream, but was never often in Covent Garden. Really great fruit gelati.
Recently Gelupo opened opposite its restaurant big brother, Bocca di Lupo. I love the texture and flavours of the gelati and sorbets, and they also serve great granitas too. My favourite (and reminds me of Pozzetto in Paris – both do great nut-based gelati), serving some unusual flavours too.
(I’ll sadly discount Amorino on Old Compton Street – I like their Paris stores, and gelato petals, but compared to Scoop and Gelupo, the gelato just doesn’t compare. Similarly Oddonos in Selfridges and Kensington. Further afield, I really liked the chocolate sorbet and yoghurt based gelati at Gelateria Danieli, but the basic gelato didn’t compare)
Sadly, in London we have nothing like Humphry Slocombe (and their interesting flavours), Bi-Rite Cremery or The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. I’m hoping the Chin Chin Laboratorists in Camden bring something new with their liquid nitrogen-cooled ice creams.
Edit – for the hard-of-Googling ;), here’s a map:
Comment [3]
This is probably only of interest to me and James, but hey.
One thing I forgot to say in the last post – where are the academics? The outside commentators? The sociologists and the ethnographers? How come there’s no other research on, say, Grindr? Other technology and social topics are covered in general conferences, books, magazines and Internet commentary. The gay press doesn’t feel like the kind of place that will cover these topics, unfortunately (and this post was premeditated by a slightly disappointing event last week called Homo Computers that played up the stereotype that gays are more interested in other things than technology and science).
Unfortunately you need both motive and means to spend academic time on research such as this, and lack of funding for such controversial subjects as gay social networks, combined with apathetic private companies and (stereotypically) technophobic academics mean that there’s little research. Facebook and Twitter don’t know how lucky they are to have people like danah boyd digging into why and how people are using such things, and importantly making this information accessible and understandable to wider audiences. Most academic research on gay online networks (that isn’t concerned with public health) falls somewhere between communication theory and queer studies, and pretty much remains in academic publications and conferences – which I don’t have access to.
This is what I’ve found so far:
Ben Light at the University of Salford has published a few papers on Gaydar (1, 2), as has his colleague, David Kreps (1) – also remixed into a presentation on Chat Roulette. There was a Big Gaydar Workshop last month, but I can’t find anything more about it, what research was presented, and any outcomes. Co-organiser Dr Sharif Mowlabocus has also written a few papers on Gaydar. There’s a book too: LGBT Identity and Online New Media.
There’s a bit more research generally about online dating, but I can’t see much long-term or deep ethnography, and little looking at how it has changed in the last few years, with pervasive Internet access and more multimedia experiences available.
One other avenue of comment is exploring these issues through culture. I’ve found a few productions covering these subjects – The Gaydar Diaries, Sex Addict and Blowing Whistles.
More mainstream is an interview with Henry Badenhorst, one of the founders of Gaydar.
This was just a quick online trawl – what have I missed?
Comment [2]
A few months ago last.fm started looking for a data griot – in their words, a griot “must … have the ability to extemporize on current events, chance incidents and the passing scene. His wit can be devastating and his understanding of history formidable.”
I thought this was a fascinating take on the need within companies for stories. It’s normally gussied up in other language – research (stories of the past and present) & design, futurism, innovation, even business contingency (all stories of potential futures). Companies spend a lot of money looking for these stories. Traditional product companies had to ask people and users to tell their stories, normally through market research. Web companies are at a huge advantage: they have rivers of usage data flowing through their servers, and the problem inverses – how to make sense and tease out meaning and interest from such a torrent.
So employing an internal data griot makes a lot of sense: someone who can spend the time looking for both large trends and individual needs and uses that illuminate and portend. It’s a hard job, needing a mix of skills rarely found – a smidgen of hard maths and statistics, a pinch of programming, and dessert spoons of various liberal arts. The Economist (sub required) posits them as data scientists (a position Flickr are currently looking for), but this misses the ability to ask interesting questions, and having hunches – being so immersed in the data that relevancy screams out.
I also liked the term griot as it reinforces the need for a point of view. Would a data philosopher, a data poet and a data troubadour produce the same stories? (In my mind, they’d be locked in a room together, arguing all day about who has to do the typing.)
Being embedded is important. Whilst we have the luxury of open APIs to services, it’s rarely rich enough data for interesting stories to be told. APIs tend to be locked in the present – as the present is what a lot of services are fixated on. Use, not stories. Some element of time is normally needed to pull out data that tells interesting stories, often long periods of time. okcupid is doing a great job at trying to tell interesting stories that help their own users and attract others, even if sometimes a little statistically questionable.
I thought I should have a play. So, some investigative griotism, with some really facile stories told by data.
A few months ago I dipped an Internet sample cup into the river of Grindr. For the uninitiated, the Guardian has an only slightly quibblable story about Grindr. I find it as odd a phenomenon as Chat Roulette, and squicks me out about as quickly.
One interesting quirk is that it’s entirely based on iPhones (and now BlackBerrys). There’s no web version – but of course it all resides on the web, so it’s only a small exercise for the reader to work out how to prise out data from the service.
The data available is exactly that in the app – for any location, it will give you nearby online users, with a description, age, height, weight and a photo (all optional). Given the terseness of the data, it’s hard to tease out stories from just one or two samples.
Here’s a Saturday night in London. Each point is a tube or rail station (used purely as a handy dataset and reference points). The number is the average reported weight (in kilos).
There’s something interesting happening just to the right of the middle of the map. Why is the south end of the City and London Bridge, well, heavy? A little knowledge of what’s happening will lead you to a club night called XXL in Southwark, which, well, obviously does what it says on the tin.
Tracking usage from Saturday night to Tuesday night starts to show how time is important (this takes Saturday usage numbers as a baseline of each point as 0).
Whilst generally there’s less usage (something I’d filter out if I had another go), a few areas are busier on a Tuesday – including Clapham and a few areas of West London, both places I’d expect users to live.
Data such as descriptions are much richer, but takes a lot more time to analyse. The semiotics of such things, plus the emergent social etiquettes are fascinating but totally unclear to me. A quirk of being on the iPhone means there’s no indecency allowed, either in the pictures or descriptions, leading to more coding of messages than you’d expect.
Here’s a quick wordle of what people are saying:
I’d love to spend time going through the pictures – there’s a PhD or two in there. On a very quick scan, there’s some interesting taxonomies about iPhone colours (many photos are taken in the mirror), face pics vs. naked torsos, most popular places (a toss up between bathrooms, gyms and on holiday), and what’s in the photos (notably absent are books and food).
This is just a taster to show what can be done in a few hours with a terribly little knowledge of Python and Processing. I hope more data griots emerge, and sing us their songs of data and meaning.
It’s rare in London to get proper installations, especially ones delicate enough to warrant taking shoes off.
But there’s two now – Neto at the Hayward, and Architects Build Small Spaces at the V&A. Neither scale, really, to London crowds, so go at odd times. And smile. Totally worth it.
Not just to say the Ernesto Neto exhibition at the Hayward Gallery is excellent, but these are good words to live by… as are these:
From the introductory note of Edwin Valentine Mitchell’s anthology, The Art of Walking:
When I remarked to a friend that I was engaged in compiling an anthology on the subject of walking, he said, “I suppose the depressed state of the world has made walkers of a great many people who a few years ago were almost in danger of losing the use of their legs. It’s odd, when you stop to think of it, that because of the harshness of the times and the fact that show leather is cheaper than gasoline a lot of people have been driven to the discovery that walking is among the most rewarding pleasures of life.”
…
To those who may look in these pages for practical advice concerning the paraphernalia of walking, such as footgear, rucksacks, and clothing, all I can say is that I interviewed a veteran walker with a view to the possibility of getting something of the sort for the book, but about the only advice of any kind he was willing to impart was this: “Ladies should not walk alone in Corsica.”
(thanks, Russell)
On the sunniest day of the year, Milton Keynes thinks it’s LA. (see also)
Very different to what I expected – I’ve seen new towns before, but this is a midland market town being imagined as California, with wide straight boulevards, shopping malls drifting between enclosure and outdoor, indoor palm trees, pastel colours and architectural swooshes. It felt like it was only just being completed, with the Theatre Quarter and mysterious squares of hotels and chain restaurants, unconnected by people, buildings or signs; newbuild happening metres from the supposed centre.
Comment [1]