why are car break lights binary? why aren’t they set up to become brighter as more pressure is applied?

I was reading yesterday about faceted classification, here and here. I like the wine.com vs. Best Cellars examples. I was trying to think of other industries that could use this kind of revamp to get more customers. Of course, any industry selling varieties of things could do with an organizational rethink. Super markets (Bread & Circus has about 20 varieties of apples right now, as well as hundreds of cheeses), cigar shops, and book stores come to mind (amazon.com has addressed this in one way with the rating system / reader comments.. but how about books classified by how “fast” of a read they are? etc.). The nice thing about selling stuff online is that you can slice the data any way you like. The Best Cellars web site could offer searches on vintage and winery if you really knew what you were doing, and seaches by flavor (mild, fruity, medium-bold, etc) if you didn’t.

Also thinking about recipes today, and how I never have my cookbook when I need it: on my way home, when I’m walking past the store. So I went online and looked around at cooking sites.

My ideal cooking site would have:

• a fast and easy way to find and build your own online collection of good, high quality recipes, complete with background info, etc!
  
• a place to learn and discuss techniques with others.
  
• an encyclopedia of equipment and ingredients. Something that can tell me what mirin is, with a brief history, nutritional info, how to store it, how long it lasts, and people’s comments on their favorite mirin.
  
• perhaps an area for beginners, about how to stock your kitchen in the first place, the virtues of (and sources for) good ingredients, etc.
  
• a periodic “newsletter” bit about food (not recipes).
  

Here’s my take on a sampling of them:

foodtv.com is more about the channel and its celebrity chefs than it is about cooking, and while they have some nice recipes, the organization and UI is not great, and the site is slow with too much gratuitous graphical content.

Epicurious has a nice collection of recipes that they’ve culled from (conde nast?) magazines and cookbooks. I love this approach because the quality is bound to be higher on average. The recipes I looked at were thorough and well explained. The downside is, they haven’t incorporated community/ratings systems very well. Each recipe has a score (from one to five forks) and comments from other visitors, but you can’t sort or search recipes based on the score, so unless I look at all of the roasted lamb recipes, I won’t see which one is favorite.
They also have a food dictionary and etiquitte guide, but it’s definitely not the best content— no community features, no illustrations of anything, no passion! Kind of boring overall.

Cooks Illustrated’s site looks really bad, I’ve always been turned off by it, so I won’t subscribe to find out if the membership reveals something great. I’m surprised by their failed approach to the web, because their magazine and books are so good.

allrecipes is chock full of ads. Pop up, pop under, flashing all over the damn place. They have some useful features: ratings for recipes, conversions to metric, printing for recipe cards. In fact, my biggest complaint is that there’s too many features and too much crap getting in your way. Just give me what I want: a set of known good recipes. What alllrecipes.com wants to do is set up an infrastructure and let all the visitors do the work, and while that might be a good approach, their design has caused unmitigated content to take over. At least it’s rated.

Top Secret Recipes is kind of ghetto but I love it. It’s a very simple site, but the focus is finally on the food! A simple interface. Thanks to these guys for not spending tons of money on web development; no need for it. And finally I know how to make those Waffle House Waffles!

RecipeSource is one of the oldest and largest recipe archives (formerly known as SOAR). Recipes on this volunteer site are nicely categorized, and it definitely qualifies as vast. How does the novice chef know which among 15 variations of Chicken Paprikash is best?

RecipeLand looks like a slightly less cool version of RecipeSource that wanted to be more cool (a pay service), but can’t pull it off. I admit I didn’t get very far into this site.

Of course I cannot leave out Outlaw Cook. John Thorne is one of the best food writers out there, who cares if he’s not also the best web designer. Check out his article In Defence of the Savory Breakfast. When I’m retired, I’m going to stop eating Eggos. Thorne’s site may not be a recipe archive in the traditional sense, but with someone so passionate about food, who cares?

Maybe the Internet just isn’t the place for recipes right now. I bought my first real paper cookbook recently, called A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider, and I’m very happy with the recipes in it. They are all clearly well thought out and well explained, with interesting variations that get you thinking more like a real chef (and less like a line cook, just following orders), and she has some great chapters on techniques and ingredients. I just wish I could access the book from work.

A fifteen mile (I think) bike ride today, out to Lexington and back. Sunny, coldish, and excellent foliage — especially outside of town. Very picturesque, but I forgot the digicam.

An interesting soundtrack (amazon) coming out soon for a movie called Bodysong. It’s Johnny Greenwood and some of the production guys from Radiohead. Sounds very promising.

Saw Lost in Translation last weekend; definitely one of the better movies of this year. Bill Murray is excellent as usual. Daniel turned me onto a French band hidden in the soundtrack, called Phoenix. Their disc (the only one they’ve released?) is called United, it came out in 2000, and from what I’ve heard of the bad RealAudio clips, it’s a pretty great disc.

When I was at The Art Institute of Chicago a couple weeks ago, I saw something new in impressionist paintings. When you get up close to a Monet or Seurat, it’s all a blur (or a bunch of dots), with no discernable form or pattern. These paintings, even the small ones, are best viewed at 6 or 8 or more feet away. And this is the madness and genius of them: How did Monet go about painting something he couldn’t see without backing up a few feet? What the hell is going on here? I picture the artist with a six foot long paintbrush, or with an assistant who does the actual painting while he smokes a cigarette and gives instructions from across the room. Or maybe he had a mirror next to the canvas and another at 3 feet in front of it, so he could quickly see the developing form at a distance.

But of course none of this is true, at least as far as I know. There were no mirrors, there was no smoke. Just Monet at the canvas. I laugh because the Impressionist painters have played a joke on me, the viewer. I can’t dispute how beautiful these paintings are when you do step back and look at them, but I am equally boggled by the technique.

Icon Art also boggles. Take a look at the work of Hide Itoh. Under very severe size and color restrictions, he has created many tiny icons that are beautiful to look at and instantly recognizable as what they represent. You cannot simply take a photograph of a bulldozer and resize it down to the scale of an icon. It would become a blob in the process, and not the kind of blob that looks like anything when viewed from far away (or really small). Instead, the icon artist must decide what is absolutely essential and build, pixel by pixel, the essential reprensentation of the object.

They look great at their intended (tiny) size, but if you enlarge them you’ll see how ridiculous they look on the large scale. There’s something beautiful about the effects of scaling something that scales poorly. Suddenly your attention is on the colors, and the actual object is less important. if you step across the room, though, the cowboy reappears. It takes a special mind to come up with the right combination of pixels in a 20x20 grid such that, when scaled down by 1200%, it’s perfectly recognizable as a cowboy.

Since I’m not an icon artist, I have to find my own way of drawing the effects of scaling out of an innocent object. Here’s an appraoch that Daniel and I came up with over the phone one evening: Photocopy a small (3x6”), simple drawing or some text out of a book (or your own work) and enlarge it to 3’x6’ black and white, then color it in with acrylic paint (or don’t). There is no added detail at the large scale, of course, but all the tiny imperfections of printing and photocopying start to come out. These artifacts of scaling add something, stylistically, that was never intended, and you end up with a new perspective.

Now here’s my challenge to you: Create an 20x20 pixel icon of a Monet painting.

to Stephanie:

I played scrabble today and got my first-ever BINGO. The word was CEMENTED, and the D landed on a triple-word score. 92 points. I felt I’d finally redeemed, in some way, the 15 quid I fed an unsympathetic fruit machine in a London pub last week. It is certainly more luck than skill. My scrabble partner later turned it into UNCEMENTED, but it was too late, I had already cemented my victory.

But uncemented is exactly how I feel. The fact that it isn’t even a word makes it that much more poignant. I wanted to organize my thoughts and projects this weekend, or even do some work on them, but my only thought is: What the hell am I doing?

With or without a lush palm-treed Floridian landscape to stare at, I ask this question a lot. Is this the underlying undying question of twenty-five-year-olds the world over?

I think it’s the undying question of us all.

So I’m off to get my bearings (that is, clean my room and perhaps make a list).