Introduction

A coworker of mine gave me some live yeast bread starter two weekends ago, and I have proceeded to actually bake it into bread. This is, believe me, quite out of character. I am posting this recipe here (which, as far as I know, is relatively useless without the culture) both for my records and so I have a place to point people who need the recipe and may not want a printed copy, perhaps because they are, like me, allergic to paper.

If you live in Boston, I’m happy to provide you with some starter for free (I hear it’s like a cult); I’ll have 3-4 become available every week and a half or so.

I don’t know the origin of the recipe; Liz gave me a photocopied sheet with no authorship information. I’ll try to find out. I’ve made a few minor edits for my own clarification.

I’m also open to suggestions on a means of distribution other than plastic gallon ziploc bags; while they have the advantage of being air tight, and clearly indicating when the bag needs to be squeezed, it seems like a waste of plastic. I am reusing the ones I’ve received, and the ones I’m keeping for my own permanent starter, but it seems like there might be a better way.

Caveats

• Do NOT refrigerate the mixture (this will kill the yeast)
• Air formation in the bag is normal (a byproduct of fermentation)
• “Squeeze” means let the air out, and mix the starter a bit by squishing

Schedule

For each day, from the date marked on the starter, do the listed step:

1. Nothing
2. Squeeze
3. Squeeze
4. Squeeze
5. Squeeze
6. Add 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, and 1 cup milk. Squeeze.
7. Squeeze
8. Squeeze
9. Squeeze
10. Bake!

Baking

In a large bowl, combine the batter with 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, and 1 cup milk. Mix.

Partition 1 cup of starter into four 1 gallon ziploc bags. Pass along to friends and family, along with a copy of these instructions or a link to this blog post: http://blog.ultranurd.net/2009/03/15/amish-cinnamon-bread/

Add to the remaining batter in the bowl:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 small boxes instant vanilla pudding
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup milk

Mix well.

In another bowl, mix 1 tsp cinnamon and 2 tsp sugar (or just use cinnamon-sugar if you have it). Sprinkle this into the bottom of two well-greased bread pans, then add the batter.

Bake the loaves at 325° for 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

I saw Watchmen tonight.

Generally, I liked it. Unfortunately, at times the soundtrack was jarringly terrible. I think reading the graphic novel before seeing the film is almost required; as such, I suspect most viewers won’t like it. That said, there was a lot of laughing, but I know in part that was directed at some of the more ridiculous lines. The gore level was very high, way above most movies I see; I haven’t seen any of the torture genre, but I suspect it was about on par for some scenes.

Overall, I’d recommend it to fans of the original, and to people interested in stylized comic book visuals. I look forward to the extended edition that cuts in scenes from The Black Freighter animated film, as in the novel. I’ll see if Netflix gets the separate DVD release of The Black Freighter soon.

Spoilery discussion below the cut.

Continue Reading »

I’ve been getting a lot of blocked spam comments, mostly from Russian IP addresses. I clear them out once a week or so, and tweak my IP address filters. You’ll probably never see them, as I block comments that aren’t from a previous poster or a verified OpenID. However, in clearing them out today I noticed a block of text that I felt inspired to reformat into a more poetic form. The credit goes to random spammer username Gefafuw (which my brain wants to read as “guffaw”, ironically enough). It appears this particular Wordpress comment bot is using a very simple bigram language model.

Another Drunken Energy

Several days their meaning
muffled voice turned,
been unable
when meat is enough.

Sanity spoken aloud,
Astur attacked,
multiheaded beast.

Fruit bonus machine!
Stilled shock and direst need
until today raise their difficulty.

Have the luxury noticed
just that caribbean stud
videos another drunken energy.

Of course it makes no sense! That’s the point! :oP The raw text, with spam links removed:

Several days their meaning muffled voice duin turned been unable when meat enough sanity spoken aloud astur attacked ultiheaded beast fruit bonus machine ames duin stilled shock and direst need ntil today raise their and difficult hey have the luxury odrigo noticed just that caribbean stud videos another drunken energy

I found it an amusing distraction, at any rate :o). Have you received any particularly hilarious spam that was attempting to beat your spam filters?

Today I took my Little Brother Patrick to the MIT Museum near Central Square. I had seen a blurb on their website about an exhibit on social media, and I wanted to check it out (and, since it was billed as interactive, I thought he would enjoy it as well, even though he’s 11).

The exhibit, Connections, features a number of interactive art and technology installations from MIT’s Sociable Media Group. I took a few mediocre iPhone pictures of some of the displays, all of which were very interesting. I love the cool stuff that arises when art and technology collide.

The first thing you see when you walk into the museum right now is the piece Metropath(ologies), which consists of several projectors some big white pillars, plus some speakers, a camera, and several screens. Technically, the first thing you see is the disclaimer that your image and voice may be recorded when interacting with the piece, but I think that’s really cool.

Twitter word clouds projected onto white pillars, with a visitor moving among them.

They also have some interesting ways of some Twitter (and other?) feeds; based on the posts they’re from about 2 weeks ago, not live, but I’m not sure what kind of harvesting they do to produce the visualization. As part of another piece, Lexigraphs I, they also have some stylized views of personal word clouds.

3-D visualization of Twitter posts from a few weeks ago

Person-shaped Twitter word cloud

One of the other Data Portraits was the piece Themail, which gives a timeline word cloud of personal e-mail correspondence between three close individuals. I have e-mail archives going back a long time, I’d be interested in seeing what these look like over time; aggregated they’d just be a roughly Zipfian distribution of English, but presumably there’d be visible spikes as certain topics came and went.

Timelines for three individual's e-mail accounts over 3+ years

Finally, there was a live display of data from the Mycrocosm service, of which I couldn’t get a reasonable picture. It seems to be very similar in concept to the tool Daytum, which I started using several weeks ago. The big difference is that MIT is explicitly wanting to study your usage patterns of the Mycrocosm service, and Daytum has a nice Twitter DM method for submitting data items while mobile.

The exhibit is up through September 13th, 2009, so there’s plenty of time to check it out. There are admissions discounts for students, but it’s free if you’re a Big Brother (or Big Sister) there with your Little :oP.

You can click any of the images above to view a larger version, or see the entire (small) gallery.