Status-Q

I love this gallery of images by Vincent Bousserez on the Telegraph website.

Those of my readers who are outside the UK will have been spared the whole ‘Question Time’ thing: the national debate about whether the head of the British National Party – the nearest thing Britain gets to far-right politics – should have been allowed to appear on the BBC’s Question Time debating programme.

He did appear, looked like rather a buffoon, and so today the papers are saying that he was so ridiculed that the BNP will do well out of it. Why? Because it looks as if the Beeb recklessly allowed him to be so overwhelmed that they made him into a martyr. The Beeb really can’t win on this one. Actually, of course, that’s not the reason the papers are printing this. They’re simply printing it because ‘BNP backlash’ makes a more profitable headline than some of the other possible speculations.

Anyway, since I don’t really do politics, and I don’t really watch TV, I might have remained blissfully ignorant of the whole thing if it weren’t for Twitter. Relaxing in the bath of a remote northern hotel room, I checked up on what my friends were tweeting about. (What? You don’t read Twitter in the bathroom? I thought that’s what it was for!) A lot of them were mentioning #bbcqt, and since I hadn’t come across Question Time before it took me a while to work out what this acronym meant. It was a bit like overhearing snatches of conversations in a café without knowing the topic of discussion.

Eventually I worked it out, and realised that it was probably big enough that I should try and watch some of it. It reminded me of my schooldays, when there were only three or four TV channels, so the chances of your schoolfriends having watched the same thing as you were really quite high, and it would be the topic of conversation the following day. Then, we knew what our friends were viewing because we had little choice. Now, we know because of social networks…

So, after towelling myself dry, I sat on the bed and spent a while seeing if my iPhone’s 3G connection was good enough that I could pull up the programme on iPlayer or some similar site. I was a little way into this when it hit me. Right in front of me was a TV set! It’s something I now ignore so totally when going into a hotel room that I hadn’t even noticed it was there!

I turned it on and, though the picture wasn’t as good as I would have got from iPlayer, I was able to watch the latter part of the programme that all my friends were watching… a somewhat fuzzy version but quite watchable after I had tweaked the little internal aerial a bit. It was just like the old days.

Except, I guess, for the tweeting-in-the-bath bit.

Both Google and Bing have signed agreements with Twitter to be able to index the live feed of ‘tweets’. There are several things I’d love to know about this.

Firstly, just from technical curiosity: how fast is that data flow, exactly? I wonder what kind of infrastructure is needed to index it in real time. Presumably they’re going to index everything?

Secondly, the business side… Several companies have exited successfully by creating something interesting enough for Google or Microsoft to want to buy. I wonder how many healthy ongoing businesses can be made from creating a data stream interesting enough for them to want to index?

And thirdly, the statistics will be fascinating, if we ever get to hear them. For example, I wonder how often the search query will now be longer than the item returned…

Once upon a time, only the rich could afford to buy books.

Now, only the rich can afford the time to read them.

I worry about the future. In particular I worry, as so many of us must, about whether the progress in desserts that has been achieved over the last few millennia will slow down in the centuries to come.

There are probably those who believe that puddings were all created long ago in a dramatic few days’ work, and collected together in Mrs Beeton’s ark, and have been fairly static ever since. Indeed, if one considers a beautiful specimen of Sticky Toffee Pudding, it is hard to believe that there wasn’t one, single infallible designer somewhere near the Garden of Cartmel who came up with the perfect dessert in one glorious act of creation.

But in truth the evidence for culinary evolution is all around us. I remember, when the family were invited to friends’ houses in my childhood, my mother would often ask for the recipe of any particularly delicious courses, and she in turn would pass the recipe on to others when requested. Sometimes, variations would be introduced by, say, an expected local shortage of brown sugar requiring a substitute to be found. If that mutation proved particularly successful, it would increase its likelihood of being replicated both in our own puddings, and of the recipe being transmitted more widely elsewhere. See? All the Darwinian… umm, ingredients… are there!

Now, I’m sure this process still occurs amongst those who have more frequent culinary intercourse than I do, but I wonder if the wide availability of standard recipes, of mass-media to transmit them, and the rarity of brown sugar shortages in this time of plentiful supply, means that the process of culinary evolution has slowed. On the other hand, it could be argued that, while mutations may be less frequent, the adoption of successful ones can now be much swifter.

Anyway, this is particularly exciting for me, because I’ve occasionally contemplated a return to academia, and have wondered about finding a topic of research that could truly capture my heart. Now, though, I intend to start submitting grant applications for a major project to trace the evolution of desserts, do extensive studies of the true qualities of various historical recipes around the globe, and explore whether such factors as online social networks can be harnessed to keep up the pace of culinary progress so that future generations have something to look forward to.

It would, of course, be tragic to make such research so theoretical that it was of little use beyond the ivory towers, so my proposal will be for a very ‘applied’ approach, involving extensive user testing…

Now, here’s an interesting challenge: can you re-learn one of your earliest-developed skills in a different way? When you get to my age, those neural pathways are pretty fossilised… but if you want the challenge, to keep your brain supple, why not try a new way of tying your shoelaces?

The Ian Knot gives you the same results as the conventional shoelace-tying method, but faster and more evenly. Something to practise in front of the hearth on those long winter’s nights? Here’s how to do it, and here’s an alternative set of diagrams which may be easier.

Thanks to David Shores for the link.

Today I made my first call with Skype To Go. I’ve no idea how long this has been around, but I was impressed: I made a long call to the States from my mobile, and it was flawless, and free.

Here’s how it works:

• You apply for a Skype To Go number in the location of your choice. Mine is in London.
• You call that number. It’s a speed-dial on my phone, and I have more free minutes than I ever use, so it doesn’t cost me anything.
• You are prompted for the number you want to dial. You can use the Skype website to set up some favourites which can be dialled in a couple of keypresses.
• The call is routed over the Skype network and charged to your Skype account. From the UK to the USA costs a penny a minute, which is 1% of what O2 would charge me for calling direct.
• The favourites you set up on the website can include Skype accounts – and calling them is free. Since my friend Hap was sitting at his computer, I used that option, and saved even the 1% I would have paid.

The call quality was very good and there was no noticeable latency.

Now, since I have an iPhone, I could have used Skype directly on the phone. But that would have depended on a good data connection: much harder to find than a reliable voice channel.

Recommended if you call abroad regularly.

Leo Laporte is the host of the TWIT.TV network. He’s an excellent host and his range of podcasts on a variety of topics have been the background for most of my shaving for some time!

The nature of the group discussions on the shows mean, however, that you never get to hear Leo for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch, and he’s a very smart guy with a lot of interesting experience. So it’s great to be able to hear the whole talk he gave at the Online News Association conference.

I’ve loved this image since I first saw it some time ago, and have just managed to track down a copy. I don’t know its… errm… origins, though. Does anyone else?

Found this in the past, somewhere out there on the net…

Look at the dot in the centre and move your head towards or away from the image – the surrounding circles seem to move.

Anyone know why? Could you use such effects to make advertisements, or road-safety signs, more noticeable?

Here’s a fun page – enter your birthday and you can find out the number one hit on the day you were born. It gives the UK, US and Australian charts.

This could almost be a kind of astrology – what does it say about me that I was born to Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on a string? Was I destined to seek out VC funding? (Actually, I was born in Kenya, rather a long way from any radio that would be playing the UK charts, but still…)

My brother became a doctor, no doubt inspired by Lily the Pink’s ‘medicinal compound’, about which he might have heard much in his first few days.

I found this thanks to a tweet from Martin Weller and retweeted it. A couple of my more senior friends responded that the nearest they could get was Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, because the charts didn’t go back far enough. And I guess any kids born in the recent past won’t know what the charts were…