Category: chillies

Covering all your bases

First, an apology. I have this thing about cricket, and while some of you may like it, I realise it means nothing to others, and for that I apologise. I guess I tend to write “long tail”, with different posts being of interest to different small groups.

Now cricket people tend to know very little about baseball. If you asked a budding Bill Frindall what Tinker to Evers to Chance meant to him, you’d probably be met with a blank look. Baseball’s Sad Lexicon is not part of the traditional cricket aficionado’s vocabulary.

There are some things, however, that don’t need such lexical power for their enjoyment. Things like Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First routine. I’d heard of it a long time ago, even read the script, but for some reason never actually heard it. Then, at reboot this year, Dan Gillmor made sure I didn’t miss out. [Thanks, Dan!].

Coincidentally, Tom Raftery made a passing tweet about the same thing today, as a result of which I found a video version.

If comedy routines were chillies, this one would be a naga jolokia.

If you’re a cricket fan, see how the other side laugh. If you’re a baseball fan, get your own back. If you’re neither, sit back and relax anyway. One way or the other, watch it. It’s too good to miss.

And if you’ve seen it before, I can’t see you not seeing it again….can you?

Some like it hot

I love chillies, particularly when they are seriously hot; I’ve written about it before here and here. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me that my father’s day present was this:

Absolutely brilliant stuff. I made myself a sandwich this evening (we usually eat only one “cooked” meal a day, and fend for ourselves the rest of the time). Seeded bloomer, pastrami, some rocket, a dash or three of the habanero paste. Sensational. If you want to find out more, go to the  Chilli Factory or direct to the Turbo Supercharge Habanero Paste.

I call this ” a blog about information”. And yet it would appear that I write about all kinds of things besides information and its enabling technologies: food, music, books, humour, cricket, DRM and IPR, identity, it’s a long list. Why do I do that? Here’s why:

I think information per se is meaningless; to have value it must inform someone about something. So I write about things I am interested in, and look at ways that information about those things is created, how it is enriched and improved, how it flows. How people publish that information, how people subscribe to that information. What tools are available to read that information, to amend or update it, to delete it; to create it in the first place. What visualisation techniques are available. How to make all of this better.

Let’s take chillies for example. Many people know that chillies are hot. A smaller number may know that there is a unit of measure for this hotness, the Scoville Unit. But most people find it hard to really understand what a Scoville unit is.

But what if they had something like this?

You can find the original here. The entire Scoville Food Institute site, The Science of Heat, is worth visiting if, like me, you’re into this kind of stuff.

Great stuff. But it made me wonder. We use heatmaps for visualising all kinds of things…. but not hotness? I’m sure someone out there has created a heatmap for chillies.

We will learn more about information and its tools and techniques and technologies by using the tools, techniques and technologies to publish, and subscribe to, everyday information about everyday things. That is my fervent hope.