In an equally serendipitous coincidence, Position 70 in the same survey goes to Innocent.

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We do have lots of sprouts.  And because I keep on thinking we’ve run out of pasta flour and buy more and more until we have a cupboard full of it, fresh pasta’s a distinct possibility.  And what could be more festive than Brussels Sprout Ravioli?  So, armed only with a pasta maker, a ready supply of alcohol and a daughter bravely taking the triple roles of photographer, glamorous assistant and general dogsbody, it seemed time to break new culinary boundaries.

And just before we started I remembered I’d also got a piece of Zebra fillet lurking somewhere in the freezer waiting for a suitable recipe.  A quick search of the web revealed a shameful lack of recipes for either zebra or sprout ravioli.  Time for inventive genius to put right the deficiencies of the Internet for the benefit of the gastronomically adventurous… 

Brussels Sprout Ravioli

First catch your pasta.  Failing that, make some.  For a first course, it only needs a few hundred grams.  Use some of your excess stock of “00″ pasta flour that’s lurking at the back of the cupboard (or make do with plain white), mixing one medium egg with each 100 grams of flour.  Add enough warm water to make a stiff dough, either mixing by hand (messy), or using a mixer with a dough hook.  Once it’s mixed, place in a plastic bag and stick in the fridge to chill for a few hours.

As this is the festive season, I thought it would be nice to make red and white striped pasta to complement the green sprout filling.  For that I substituted the juice from a couple of beetroot that I’d cooked, for the water in the recipe, to make up 100 grams of the bright red pasta.  If you’ve no beetroot, use food colouring and lie.  Wear gloves for this bit unless you want red hands for the next few days and don’t mix it on a white worktop if you want to live.  Again, pop it in the fridge to chill after it’s made.

While it’s resting, make the filling.  For seven people you’ll need:

• 8 smallish sprouts
• 4 precooked chestnuts
• 2 rashers of streaky bacon
• 1 - 2 Tablespoons of Ricotta
• Salt, pepper and nutmeg

Cook the sprouts until they’re starting to soften, but stop before they get soggy.  Leave to drain and press out any remaining water, then chop them coarsely.  Finely chop the chestnuts.  Grill the bacon until crisp and cut into very small pieces.  Mix the sprouts, bacon and chestnuts and season well.  It’s best to over-season slightly, otherwise it will be a little bland with the ricotta and pasta.  When it tastes right (and it tastes surprisingly good) add a tablespoon of ricotta and mix together, but without mashing it into a paste.  Pop in the fridge until ready.

At this point you need a pasta machine.  Mine’s an old fashioned hand cranked one, which does the job perfectly well.  Keep on passing each batch of pasta through the machine until the consistency becomes even, then continue, rolling it on progressively thinner settings.  For ravioli you need to finish with the thinnest possible sheets.  Don’t try and process more than 100g at a time, or it will gain a life of its own and take over the kitchen.  Have lots of pasta flour handy to top it sticking to things like the camera.  And make sure your camera is flour proof.

Having separately rolled out red and white pasta, cut each in half and overlap one half of each.  Pass this back through the pasta machine on the finest setting to get a single strip of bi-coloured pasta. 

Place small dollops of the sprout mixture onto the pasta, centred on the join and cover with another sheet of the pasta, making sure you’ve matched the colour on top and bottom.  The amount you use depends on what size ravioli you intend to make.  Use ravioli cutters, pasta wheels or false teeth to seal each ravioli with an attractive edge.  Then place on a floured board or wire tray to dry.  And move on to the zebra…

 Zebra Ravioli

I came across some Zebra at the excellent Gamston Wood Farm stall in Borough Market and had been thinking vaguely about making zebra pasta ever since, but never got around to it.  This seemed an ideal opportunity to experiment with two different raviolis, so here’s how to do it.

Make two batches of 100g of egg pasta as above, but colour one batch black using squid ink.  This is sold by Italian and Sicilian delicatessens, generally untranslated as Nero di Seppia.  (If you’re visiting Edinburgh, it always seems to be available at Gaia Delicatessen in Leith Walk, so stock up when you’re there.)  Again, wear latex gloves, or you’ll end up looking like one of the great unwashed.  Pop the pastas to chill and make the filling.

•  100g Zebra Fillet
• 1 medium onion
• 1 clove Garlic
• Olive Oil
• Fresh parsley
• Salt, pepper, Worcester sauce
• Runny cows milk cheese

I’d not cooked zebra before, so I started off frying a small sliver to taste.  It’s not dissimilar to rose veal, so any veal based recipe will probably work.  This one was made up as we went along, but works as well.  Finely chop the onion and garlic and sauté in the oil until soft.  Finely slice and chop the zebra, add to the onion and brown and cook - it only takes a minute.  Season with salt and pepper and add a small dash of Worcester sauce to lift the flavour.  Leave to cool.

When still slightly warm, add enough cheese to moisten the mix.  I initially thought a goat’s cheese would go well, but the balance didn’t seem right, so I used some rather ripe Chauorce that was trying to escape from the fridge.  Anything runny with a bit of body should be fine - try a little bit and see if it tastes right.  Add an appropriate amount of chopped parsley and leave to cool.  I would probably have minced this into a finer mixture if our Breville hadn’t decided to die earlier in the day.  If you chop the zebra finely enough, it works, but if any of the ravioli splits during cooking, it falls out, so minced is probably a better bet the next time around.

Now comes the fun bit - making zebra pasta!

Take out both the plain and black pasta and use the pasta machine to produce the thinnest possible sheets.  Leave each to dry out slightly on the worktop.  After about five to ten minutes, cut the black pasta into random strips (see the photo) and pull these apart.  It doesn’t matter if they cross over each other at some points - this doesn’t need to be neat.  In fact it looks more authentic if it’s not.

Now take the white sheet and lay it on top of the black strips and press down.  Discard any black strips that go past the edges.  Cut this into manageable lengths of around 30 cms, pick up the combined strip and pass it back through the pasta machine on the thinnest setting.  You should get something that looks remarkably like a squashed zebra.

Place small dollops of the zebra mix on the sheet of pasta, moisten around each dollop, cover with another thin sheet of zebra pasta, press together and cut out.  It would be really neat if you had a zebra or horse shaped cutter, but we didn’t.  Put aside to dry.

For both ravioli, cook for around three minutes in a copious quantity of boiling water, with around a teaspoon of salt for each litre of water. 

I served it with a fairly thick green sauce, to represent festive cheer, or African Veldt, whichever you prefer.  This was based on an ordinary hollandaise, with some pureed peas to add texture and colour.  Despite asking the guests to guess what the pasta filling was, pointing out that the pasta itself was a clue, none guessed.  But they all enjoyed it.  I hope you do too.  It’s definitely fun to make as well as eat.  And the web now has a Brussels sprout ravioli recipe and a zebra ravioli recipe.

Serve with a medium bodied white wine (a Malvira “Renesio” Roero Arneis went very well with it) or champagne - chilled appropriately.  And enjoy.

Merry Christmas

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2010 was the year when the Internet finally overtook the local press.  For many years the main guide to what’s worth seeing has been the star ratings given by professional reviewers, notably from the Scotsman’s daily review section.  Over the past few years a growing number of web based review sites have emerged, with reviews contributed by audience members (and quite often by cast members).  As a result, anyone can post their own four or five star review, irrespective of the quality of the show, or their competence as a reviewer.  So every company capable of performing a Google search has been able to plaster their posters and handbills with a five star review, even though they may have submitted it themselves.  Seemingly unaware of the existence of the Internet, this triggered the Scotsman to pen a splenetic tirade about how people voicing their own opinion is devaluing the review process. 

As someone who is working with emerging location based social networking, it was disappointing to see how little has emerged at the Festival.  I came across no references to Foursquare, Gowalla or Loopt, surprisingly limited use of Facebook and Twitter and no Bluetooth marketing.  However, the growth of public reviews and the start of social media promotion by a few companies suggest that 2011 might be the year when things change and the position of the professional reviewer is finally undermined.  So what happened this year, and what do companies need to do in the future?

The Edinburgh Fringe is a curious beast.  It’s managed by the Fringe Society, who provide a box office to sell tickets for almost all of the companies performing on the Fringe.  They also publish the Fringe programme, which contains details of all of the shows and a website where audience members can submit their reviews.  A number of large venues, which house the shows, also run their own box offices and may actively promote the bigger productions.  In general the venue operators have an arrogance of approach to their potential audience which makes Ryanair appear customer friendly.  They see no problem with expecting them to queue for both tickets and shows in the pouring rain.  Whilst they may spend money on promoting big name comedians, for most of the 2,453 companies appearing at the Fringe, the only way to get an audience is to go out onto the streets and promote themselves.

In that competitive environment, you’d expect that most of them would start off with a Facebook or Twitter account to tell their friends and anyone on their mailing lists what they’re doing.  And that at the end of each show they’d encourage their audience to post comments if they’d enjoyed it.  This year I saw around eighty different productions and only three bothered to do that.  About half a dozen more had a reference in their program or on a poster to a Facebook or web page, but that was about the extent of the use of social media or the internet.  Most social networking was by the traditional techniques of thrusting flyers at passers-by, or chatting to other performers in the pub.

The other route to an audience is from a good review.  The advent of audience review websites has thrown a spanner into the works for reviews.  Last year some companies discovered the power of posting good reviews about themselves, and in some cases bad reviews about rival companies.  This year, a proliferating number of sites meant that a “five star review” became increasingly meaningless, as however bad your show, you could post and then publicise your own review.

That had the Scotsman - the paper which considers itself to be the gold standard for reviews, up in arms.  They’ve been rather slow in understanding the effect of public reviews and this year they were strident in their demands to play the Luddite card and turn the clock back.  Rather than trying to ascertain how they could regain an acknowledgement of being the gold standard, they’ve been railing about public reviews and suggesting that companies should not be allowed to use them.  They’ve not aided their case by their own performance this year.  Their review of burlesque shows by a reviewer who appeared to be severely repressed resulted in a protest march on the Scotsman’s headquarters by many of the burlesque performers.  Several of their more senior reviewers gave enthusiastic reviews to new writing at major venues which bore little comparison to what other audience members thought, and started to make their critical analysis look distinctly provincial. 

There’s an interesting project for someone to do to analyse the star ratings that each Scotsman reviewer awarded.  Overall I’d expect to see a classic bell curve, as there’s bad and mediocre stuff as well as good on display.  My suspicion from reading the Scotsman is that some of their reviewers would deviate significantly from that distribution, suggesting that they are every bit as biased or unreliable as the internet sites they despise.  If they want to be relevant in the future, they need to work out how to establish themselves as a reliable voice of authority and not just complain about the advent of audience empowerment.

Although few companies had embraced mobile technology for promotion, it was noticeable that there were a lot of iPhones around.  The demographic attending Edinburgh is very obviously not very representative of the UK population as a whole, where only 3.5% currently own them.  However, the self-serving publicity of the iPhone lovers had ensured that they were well served.  The Fringe Society produced a rather good iPhone app for finding and booking shows (although bizarrely only recommended for over seventeens) and at least one comedian had allegedly produced his own iPhone app for download.  Several performers based segments of their shows on an audience member being able to video part of it on their phone, confident that at least one iPhone user would be present.  In contrast Android, Symbian and Blackberry users were largely ignored as being irrelevant.  When questioned as to why the Fringe application wasn’t available for these at the Fringe AGM, one board member was naïve enough to query whether anyone used them?

In the absence of everything else, Twitter should have reigned supreme, but even its use seemed to be muted.  That’s a shame, as it provided the basis for an enterprising approach to crowdsourced reviews from EdTwinge.

EdTwinge was introduced last year and I’m impressed by what it’s doing, although it still has some teething problems.  It uses Twitter’s programming interface to search for any mention of the 2,500 shows in any twitter message that is sent.  It then looks for keywords within each message which indicate what the person thought of the show.  These are categorised to give a relative score (or “karma“) and aggregated to provide a public ranking.  The algorithm behind it only allows one tweet per show from each person, so it should be relatively immune from spamming.  The beauty of the system is that it’s essentially taking public data, so it should be fairly representative of what people think. 

One of the reasons I like EdTwinge is that the nature of Twitter use is spontaneous.   Whether users have something good or bad to say about a show, it’s easy enough to say it on Twitter that they’ll do it.  Very few people go to Edinburgh to be reviewers; they go to see the shows.  Even where they do feel the urge to comment and post a review to a website, it’s probably because they’ve seen something that’s either brilliant or appalling.  It means that most audience reviews are likely to ignore the bulk of productions that fall between these two camps.  So once again the bell curve is distorted.  That’s one of the advantages of EdTwinge - it should give a far more accurate indication of what people feel about the shows they’ve just seen, as the barrier to using it is so much lower. 

It has some shortcomings; if the show has a long title, people are likely to shorten it, so it won’t be picked up.  Similarly if it’s difficult to spell or misspell it may be lost.  So it had no coverage for Belt Up’s Lorca is Dead, which was the best thing I saw this year.  Equally, if the show has a single word name that is common it becomes almost impossible to differentiate it.  So Penelope - an excellent new play by Enda Wash which was probably seen by over 4,000 people was only picked up by EdTwinge on two tweets.  That’s almost certainly due to the difficulty of distinguishing tweets about it from the thousands of tweets to or from people called Penelope.  They tried to get around this by looking for actor’s or writer’s names; that works for one person shows or comedians, but has limited success for plays.  I think they err on the side of caution, as overall, EdTwinge appeared to capture fewer tweets than I’d have expected to see.

So how did it compare to the Scotsman?  Each year the Scotsman awards Fringe First Awards to what it considers to be the best new productions (excluding comedy).  This year they awarded these to eighteen companies.  With the Fringe over I though I’d compare these with EdTwinge’s performance.  Five of the eighteen were in EdTwinge’s top ten for theatre, which is pretty good going.  The ones that were missing were the ones with names that would be difficult to distinguish within a 140 character message - Bare, White, Penelope, Bound and Speechless, or with names longer than anyone would type, like the excellent Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl.  (I couldn’t find an easy way to see beyond the top ten on EdTwinge, so they probably did even better than this simple analysis suggests.)

That should be worrying the Scotsman.  EdTwinge isn’t perfect yet, nor does it give any depth of review, but is shows that it can pick the winners from crowdsourcing.  And that’s all most Fringe-goers want.  I still think it’s one of the best ideas to emerge for the Fringe and I look forward to seeing how they evolve next year.

So what should a company taking a show to the Fringe do next year?  Far more of them need to be aware of the power of social media, starting with Facebook and Twitter and use these to sell tickets before their run starts.  They need to make sure the audience is aware they exist on social media sites and ask them to come and promote the show to friends.  Social media by itself won’t sell a show out - word of mouth and reviews matter as well.  But the more people you can get to see your show in the first week, and the more of those that can be persuaded to promote it using social media, the better the chances of success.  It’s all about building awareness and momentum.  If they want to get onto EdTwinge, they might want to consider choosing a name for the show that is a memorable, but relatively uncommon single word. 

There’s a wider conclusion from this year’s Fringe visit, which is that many performers, directors and producers need to catch up with social media.  As arts funding gets more limited, companies have a responsibility to make sure they get the largest possible audience - something that a lot of professional companies didn’t seem to acknowledge this year.  Social Media extends that responsibility to all members of a production - actors, director, backstage and producers - promotion is no longer something that should be left to a marketing person.   For some reason, Scots based companies seemed to be less adept at this than any others, based on my experience with the bulk of the “Made in Scotland” shows.  I don’t know whether that’s because they assume that as they are based in Scotland they expect an audience to come to them?   There are some important lessons to be learnt, both by arts companies and also by the traditional media.  It will be interesting to see what much changes over the next twelve months.

I was recently reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titan, where I discovered that he had invented an acronym which struck me as remarkably apposite – the Universal Will to Believe. In his case it’s probably nothing to do with wireless (although it could be), but is the mysterious power source in Tralfamodorean spaceships that is harnessed to power the Martian fleet of flying saucers.  Obscure power sources for space travel seem to be a recurring theme in science fiction, as Douglas Adams created something remarkably similar a few decades later, with his Infinite Probability Drive in the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  And recurring themes and reinvention are eerily common in the curious world of UWB.

Track back a few decades to the 1940s and the original idea behind “UWB the radio” is attributed to Hedy Lamarr.  She made her name by running around naked in an early Czech film – a career move that has fortunately not been embraced by any of the current developers of UWB.  Branching out with a mathematician friend during the war, she filed a patent for frequency hopping.  The US government thanked her, but told her she’d be of greater patriotic use if she used her body to gather war funds, so she turned her back on UWB in favour of Holllywood and a later career move of suing software companies for appropriating her image.

The technical limitations of the day meant that her patents didn’t turn into a product, starting what appears to be a never-ending curse on the technology.  It wants to believe in itself, it really does, but whenever it gets close to happening something goes terribly wrong.

The second coming, like Douglas Adam’s Bowl of Petunias, fell out of the sky in the 1990’s, with not much more idea why.  Technology finally began to catch up to the point where it seemed feasible to make a UWB radio and venture capitalists poured money into a range of companies.  Their vision was to exploit the exciting new technology that they claimed could transfer vast amount of data by working under the noise floor.  “Under the noise floor” refers to the very low power of UWB.  The idea is that because it can spread itself over a very wide spectrum of frequencies, the level of radio transmission it needs is less than the background noise.  It’s not very different to the concept peddled by homeopaths, where the more you dilute your medicine the more powerful it becomes.  Maybe if UWB has dispensed with its Universal Will to Believe in itself and rebranded itself as Homeopathic Wireless it may have been more successful.

Or maybe not.  For the curse of UWB was to strike again.  The IEEE formed a group of engineers to develop the specification, known IEEE 802.15.3a. Unfortunately a continued and acrimonious debate about the form the technology should take slowly turned it from a vaguely august body into a pit of fighting dogs.  Like a schizophrenic amoeba with a temper tantrum the group eventually ripped itself apart, forming two groups – the DS-UWB and MB OFDM who ventured forth, each with the intent of proving that theirs was the chosen path.

For those with a spare evening and a penchant for British Comedy the IEEE802.15.3a committee did leave a lasting legacy.  The minutes of their meetings are still available on the IEEE website, and after a few beers they read remarkably well if you try them out loud using Monty Python voices.  They could easily form the basis of a remake of the sandal and the gourd incident from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.

Having acrimoniously split and failed to come up with any meaningful divorce settlement, the two fought like mad dogs until the DS-UWB variant eventually committed hari-kari.  Flushed at its survival the emergent MBOA-UWB camp did the schizophrenic amoeba trick again, splitting into variants aligned with Bluetooth High Speed and Wireless USB.

Technically we should probably call Wireless USB “Wireless USA”, as in its rush to market it chose to operate in a band of frequencies that were illegal anywhere else in the world.  The Bluetooth variant took the global approach and started again with a frequency band that would be useable anywhere, but that meant returning to the drawing board for a slow redesign, all the while harried by the bitter terrible toddlers of the failed DS-UWB camp, who never quite managed to get the chips off their shoulders at having lost out.

But progress was made.  Then, just when it looked as if the good fairy would confirm its Universal Will to Believe, with companies demonstrating working prototypes, the curse of UWB struck again.  At the end of last year the economy plunged and the VC funded companies developing the chips started to fold.  Today they’re disappearing at an almost weekly rate and it’s difficult to see how UWB will survive.

Even Bluetooth – UWB’s potential fairy Godmother has deserted it, selecting 802.11 as its high speed option in its recent Version 3.0 release, although they may yet find their own witch with a poisoned apple in the guise of the Wi-Fi Alliance.  And as the UWB phoenix returns to ashes in its wireless fireplace once again, it’s only to discover the presence of two new ugly sisters in the form of TransferJet and Wireless HD.

Will UWB get to go to the ball?  Will a host of unemployed UWB engineers start running naked thought the San Diego woods in the hope of a Hollywood carer?  Will UWB get to power a new fleet of Martian spaceships?  Will the ugly sisters win the Bluetooth prince?  Or will UWB reincarnate itself with a new third meaning for its acronym - “Ultimately, Why Bother?”

(Having written this, I’ve just had a chance to play with what I’d consider to be the first real UWB device from a company called Leyio.  Have a look - if it might just be UWB’s prince on a white charger.  For a real live demo, along with one of the most amusing accounts you’ll ever come across of how UWB works, take a look at the excellent Dialogue Box’s “Whatever happened to UWB?”.)

“Amateur” Science is a long-standing tradition that has been devalued over the years by the rise of corporate science and research, alongside a PR machine that suggests that no significant advance will ever be achieved without multi-million dollar budgets and a building full of white-coated researchers.  It’s an image that Science has allowed Hollywood to project and reinforce, along with the stereotype of the lone inventor as mad scientist.

Why this has happened is something of a puzzle.  If you ask the average man or woman in the street to name the three greatest scientists of all time, the winners would probably be Newton, Einstein and Darwin.  At the point that they were working on their greatest discoveries each one of them would have fitted the description of amateur scientist, beavering away on their own theories which generally went against the grain of the establishment.  Over the centuries much of accepted scientific wisdom in every discipline has emerged in this way from individuals working alone.

Today, rather than being celebrated, it’s too often seen as strange or even dangerous, with the paranoid elements in politics and the media ranting about the dangers of home scientists creating superbugs or turning into terrorists.  Like the Health and Safety lobby they see science as something to be feared, rather than enjoyed.  What is really dangerous is that if we turn Science into the corporate pursuit that they desire, only to be practised behind closed doors, we not only remove it from scrutiny, but deny the fun in it, which in turn means fewer children will enjoy it and see it as a worthwhile career.

Over the coming decade the importance of the home scientist is likely to grow.  As well as groups like the one in the New Scientist article (see their website at www.diybio.org), the new breed of citizen scientist is being increasingly appreciated by progressive companies.  More and more companies are realising that their key skill is in managing the supply chain – that is having the knowledge and infrastructure to manufacture and sell in high volume.  They see real value in utilising external design skills to supplement their internal research and development.  This has led to the rise of internet communities like innocentive.com or ninesigma.com, where individuals can trade their expertise.  It’s allowing a growing number of scientists and inventors to sell their skills to solve big company problems.  For more on that, delve into the books on shared development and ideagoras – We Are Smarter Than Me, Wikinomics and We-think.  Shared development is already changing the way progressive companies compete.  You’ll be hearing more about it from me and others in the future.

The most important point about this new generation of hobby scientists is that it promises to return the focus of science to the community.  In healthcare I see more and more complex equipment being designed to mend people rather than to preserve the quality of life, largely because big companies in this area have lost touch with the patients.  Community science, practised by groups of involved individuals can help to redress that.

Whilst politicians may carp about home experimenters who spend their time developing things such as glow-in-the-dark yoghurt as “Frankenstein Science” and “macabre”, society should rejoice in the fact that it’s letting scientists get closer to what is needed and what is fun.  There’s nothing like getting you hands into science to generate a life-long enjoyment of it.  Long may the trend continue and prosper.

What’s always intrigued me more about him is that he is credited with introducing the word “serendipity” into the English language, which is why he’s here.  I’ve always liked the fact that a scholar and Member of Parliament would revert to a memory of a children’s story – “The Three Princes of Serendip” as his source.  In it, Walpole explained, the heroes, the Three Princes of Serendip were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.  It suggests a man who has not had the misfortune of having to behave as a grown-up all of the time.

By referring to it as a Children’s book, Walpole devalued the fact that it is a much older story with nobler lineage, going back in oral tradition to stories of the life of the Persian King Bahran V.  But for the current purpose, that’s by the by.  I’ve always felt that it describes perfectly a lot of what is best and most satisfying in science and R&D – stumbling across something valuable that’s not what you expect.  Hence my choice for all of the bits and pieces that I find interesting that don’t fit under the more definitive categories of this site. I hope you enjoy them

As an indication that one’s actions can come back to haunt you, in the best gothic fashion, one other serendipitous claim to fame comes from Walpole’s cat Selima.  When it died, it provided Thomas Gray the inspiration to write his Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.