My friend Ozge just started a blog on Turkish cuisine for American cooks.

In 2008, after five months of solo travel through Asia, I met up with Ozge on her home turf. (If you can travel with someone who is host, guide and friend together, I urge you to do so.) There followed a near month of highlights, as we ate and drank our way across Turkey, starting in Istanbul. It should always be nighttime, and we should always, all of us, be at rooftop restaurants near Istiklal, having meze with raki.

Aaand I can get the ingredients for the traditional eggplant dish locally. Yum.

"From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa." And: because world inequality fell, welfare measured for the world as a whole grew even faster than world GDP did, and more than doubled over the period 1970-2006.

Ushahidi-Fletcher Situation Room update - scroll to the bottom where it says "Contact us at".

We really couldn’t do this project with out the help of the Boston situation room. They are combing through the reports, getting updates via many different forms of media – basically making sense of a mountain of incoming data. On top of that, they’re coordinating with many more thousands of individuals all over the world to help find critical data on locations, needs and confirmations with the people on the ground in Haiti.

And you can be one of those people!

Donations made to Haiti via SMS might be delayed 90 days. This may or may not be a big deal, but just to be safe, I'm donating through the Partners In Health website.

I used to love reading my parents' old copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, my first introduction to what was techno-hippie culture. Anybody remember zomes?

I would love a good book of this kind, I hope this is the one.

Driving the RAV4 on the road near my house, a small Kenyan girl stands in the middle of the road, arms out from the her sides, chest puffed out. I just keep repeating to myself "I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar, I am not the guy driving the truck in Avatar..."

A friend of mine was in the same NYC studio while Paul was putting together some of "Memory Almost Full" [album released 2007] and his story is Paul was super nice and asked him if he wanted to come downstairs and take a listen to some tracks he was putting down. My friend obliged and once they were in the room Paul proceeded to sit behind the drumkit and overdub some stuff, singing along. After they were done Paul supposedly asked for "your honest opinion" and my friend could only come up with "Yes, Sir Paul, sounds great!" I told my friend he probably wanted to hear "Could use a tighter snare sound" or something.

From a thread entitled "I hate Paul McCartney so much".

America's secret immigrant detention centers

Ok that's sort of a downer. Let me find another Happy Holidays something or other.

Real Sichuan food at Chung King.

Fantastic Wired piece on Demand Media, a $200 million, profitable, growing-like-crazy company that produces original online content. And it's not porn. How? Algorithmically generated article ideas, written Mechanical Turk-style for about $15 apiece.

But once it was automated, every algorithm-generated piece of content produced 4.9 times the revenue of the human-created ideas. So Rosenblatt got rid of the editors. Suddenly, profit on each piece was 20 to 25 times what it had been. It turned out that gut instinct and experience were less effective at predicting what readers and viewers wanted — and worse for the company — than a formula.

Even the comments section has fascinating stuff. From a Demand writer:

We are paid in residuals, which means nickels and dimes trickling in over the long haul. But they add up. I clear about $1,000 a month at eHow, and as I build up my library there, I expect that income to rise by quite a bit.

Which actually ties in with someone Demand's cartoon character CEO said:

Long term, we’ll make more money by increasing quality.

And I bet he means it. Only, can a public company afford to think about the long term?

LUDU5 is a UCLA grad student gaming organization. High-brow, low-brow, films, shootouts.

- Erwin Schrödinger. Quantum mechanical quotes.

"Hosts ELISHA SESSIONS and MARK SINKER and their astounding guests burrow insensibly into the pulp and avant-garde science fiction of 1935-1975." Readings from and discussions of a bunch of science fiction short stories. There's a podcast link to the completed series, but, irritatingly, no link to see a list of all the episodes. So:

• Episode 1: John W. Campbell, "Who Goes There"
• Episode 2: Fritz Leiber, "A Pail of Air"
• Episode 3: Isaac Asimov, "Segregationist"
• Episode 4: Donald Malcom, "Beyond the Reach of Storms"
• Episode 5: Donald Wandrei, "The Red Brain"
• Episode 6: Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder"
• Episode 7: Frank Herbert, "A Tactical Saboteur"
• Episode 8: Howard Schoenfeld, "Build Up Logically"
• Episode 9: Robert Sheckley, "Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead"
• Episode 10: J.G. Ballard, "Track 12"
• Episode 11: Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah"
• Episode 12: Arsen Darnay, "Such Is Fate"
• Episode 13: Brian Aldiss, "All the World's Tears"
• Episode 14: Thomas M. Disch, "The Squirrel Cage"
• Episode 15: Ursula Le Guin, "Things"
• Episode 16: Arthur C. Clarke, "The Forgotten Enemy"

Wish they'd done a Zelazny story.

"Welcome to Akvopedia, the open water and sanitation resource that anyone can edit."
Compare to Appropedia.

Spot-on, unfortunately, e.g.:

The US public is rabidly opposed to paying higher taxes, yet the trend level of taxation (at around 18% of national income) is not sufficient to pay for the core functions of government.

In the interests of total uninhibited geeking out, I'm going to start doing all music-related Twittering from @lukasmusic. Don't get used to all the substantive news so far, it's mostly going to be me raving about new beats.

Politically, we agree on nothing, but k-punk is never boring, and never more incisive than when he is critiquing his allies on the left.

It's simple: there are two big, exciting, diverse American cities that you can explore forever and never get bored. One has New York weather, one has LA weather. That's it.

I don't think so, but I'm glad someone's trying.

We have our Monday meetings with field officers in a big meeting hall that happens to be part of an orphanage. The whole place was built well but is starting to fray around the edges. There's a bishop whose purview includes the orphanage; he drives a shiny sedan. I have seen him maybe half a dozen times, shaken his hand and said hi. I have never seen him exit the car. He drives into the compound, parks, opens his window, converses, closes the window and drives away. It's a beautiful car.

This is so contrary to my experience I have to mention it.

The increasingly urbanized youth are often reluctant to help with digging and hoeing ... "The consequence: A lot of land – particularly rice fields – is not exploited. This has increased the suffering of some families who have a hard time feeding themselves during certain periods of the year."

In the area of Kenya I live in, very little land is not exploited. For generations, people have had large families, and divided the land up among their sons. This has reduced the average plot size to below five acres. At this point, traditional farming methods do not yield enough to feed a family.

Senegal's situation, to be frank, seems enviable to me. They are at a much more sustainable level of population.

I remember that Ultima ending! It blew my young mind.

Buy my friend Anna's stuff! You've always wanted a stag on your wall, right?

Via dp, photos of dead albatross chicks and the contents of their stomachs

Composer John Adams turns out to be a fine writer on his new blog. I wonder if the lucky tagger knows where his work ended up.

A critique of, well, exactly what I'm doing.

The poverty of African peasants is not accidental: it is intrinsic to the peasant mode of economic organization. The very features that make the peasant mode of production appear attractive to jaded members of an industrialized society also make it unproductive. Large scale organization of specialized production, and integration into markets, are fundamental to the generation of income at a level that we now regard as necessary for a decent quality of life. We have been blinded to this evident fact by our own romantic attachment to the preservation of a society which is the antithesis of the modern.

I don't disagree with any of it. But the structural changes he's talking about require a really farsighted agricultural and industrial policy, which is not on the horizon. They also, in order to produce better lives in the near term, rather than in the glorious future, require a careful migration path. For most farmers, land is their only real asset. How will they be recompensed, resettled, reintegrated? These questions aren't even being asked yet. So I think there is a place for efforts to improve farmers' incomes right now, before any grand plans take shape.

The GMO thing is a red herring, I think he throws it in for shock value. The real issue is the move to efficient, large-scale farming.

Yesterday, as my plane taxiied to the gate, I saw a man bent over sweeping a red carpet. "Interesting, I bet that's where ..." the plane continued and my gaze passed over a rigid line of about 150 red-suited members of a Kenyan army honor guard. Kibaki landed right behind me, and his motorcade fouled traffic the rest of the night.

Today, in a developed-world bubble at Art Caffé, sipping wine and enjoying near-broadband. Art Caffé is frequented by expats and wealthier locals. The expats are mostly Westerners, with some Chinese people thrown in. My guess is that most of the Westerners are NGO workers and most of the Chinese people are working at for-profits. I wonder who will have the greatest impact on Kenya in the long term?

On taxi drivers: once you know the fair price for a trip, it's fun to hassle the taxi drivers hanging outside of tourist hotspots (Soi Rambutri in Bangkok, Westgate mall in Nairobi.) Really pointless though - the drivers know that if they wait two minutes, a bigger sucker will come along.

I was "interviewed" about One Acre Fund by members of the Global Swadeshi development forum. Very bright people with great questions, check it out.

Now that I enjoy cooking, will pick this up when I eventually move back to the States. Also recommendation in the thread for an $11 sharpener.

cheaper and even better?

Agriculture: not sexy, but important. Gapminder is a sweet data-visualization tool with some fascinating pre-loaded datasets, makes it easy to compare variables over time and between countries. But, dude, there is no way that Jordan harvests 23,333 kg of maize per hectare..

Yeah. No way.

Brett brings the fire. Hottest music visualizer of all time is this flame-based display. What's up with the all-Flash site though man seriously.

We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to a delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.

-John Cage

Sync THL between machines using Dropbox
It's been so long since I've had a reliable internet connection that I have no idea what they're talking about here. Other things that I have never used which confuse me: Spotify, Netflix VOD, Foursquare, etc. A lot has happened in the last 18 months! Or so I'm told.

The bridge between live performance and the infinite possibilities of digital music? Or just the best geek toy ever?

Gripping account of Aphex Twin and Hecker's set at Bloc Weekend from someone who shares my idea of good. Subscribed to Spannered.

For the most part the rave onslaught of Aphex built up and out from the front stacks, in densely packed clouds of bass with numerous changes of pace and turnabouts. All the while an insidious range of DSP flutterings, whooshes, cackles on the edge of hearing, and countless other aural smoke and mirror tricks played out behind. Occasionally a crisp sound would boom out from the back of the room, causing scores of people to spin round and look out for devilry going on behind their backs.

And unlike Aphex Twin, Florian Hecker makes legitimately terrifying music (see Sun Pandaemonium, which sounds really new.) I haven't really been excited about anything with afx on it since the Flow Coma remix, so maybe this bodes well.

I shit you not. It's like crazy Republican whack-a-mole right now.

Here's the thing though: in their minds, as long as what they say doesn't actually discredit them completely (this should, of course) then saying crazy things only helps them. It makes the right look more like the center, since it's now being compared to the far-crazy right.

Liberals are afraid to advocate anything that Republicans might use to tar them as "out of the mainstream", which completely cedes the debate. If you're negotiating to buy a car, it would be stupid to start by offering more than you want to pay, but this is essentially what Democrats often do.

Today I learned the sign language matatus use to communicate police presence along the road.

• Two fingers: Two police
• Hand held thumb up, as if to shake hands: Barrier ahead
• Fingers partially curled, palm pushes outward: Highway patrol
• Palm down, patting the air: All clear, feel free to drive over-capacity and over the speed limit

Good tool for checking domain availability.

If you've got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you've got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won't pan out, we're going to move on in search of something smaller.

- Seth Godin

The corollary to this is that there are a surprising number of intimidating but solvable problems out there.

These mixes look absolutely sick. The page design, I mean. The icons are so pretty.

Field directors


Field managers


Field officers


We're working on it.

We're in the middle of repayment. Wait, let me back up. One Acre Fund gives loans to small farmers, in the form of seed (maize, in Kenya) and fertilizer. We give them training on how to use it, they plant, harvest, and pay us back in cash or maize.

So we're accepting cash repayment. We have about $200 in our budget to give incentives for the groups that finish repayment first. Patrick (Kenyan field director) and I are sitting around brainstorming ideas. It's hard, because you want to give them something of substance, that'll generate income over the long run, that a group of six to twelve farmers can practically share.

Pigs? Too expensive. Chickens? Tough to share, and how do you decide who gets the chicks, or income from eggs?

We land on trees. Tree seedlings are super cheap and can be harvested for firewood or sold as lumber. We figure out how we can pay to transport the tree seedlings to farmers, and still have enough in the budget to give each group 200 tree seedlings. We choose a tree that benefits soil fertility, isn't so thirsty that it's going to starve other crops for water, and can be harvested in 2-3 years.

We're pretty pleased with ourselves, and settle in for the Friday field managers meeting. We mention the incentive to them. They nod politely. We ask what they think. They look at each other, then look at us.

"It would be good if we could provide t-shirts," Vincent says.
"Sorry - farmers would rather have One Acre Fund t-shirts than 200 trees?"

The field managers nod vigorously.

In Kisumu for the weekend, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Coming back from checking out a recommended but dismal restaurant (thanks for nothing, Internet!) cops motion angrily for our taxi to get off the road. A few seconds later, a late-model Mercedes rockets past.

"He's here!"
"Who?"
"The president! That is the president's escort!" our driver exclaims, grinning and leaning his head out of the car.

Forty to fifty luxury cars and SUVs fly past in formation. Ten or so of the cars have PRESIDENT'S ESCORT signs on their bumpers. Our driver tells us the SUVs are carrying MPs.

"Can I take a picture?" my friend asks.
"They will shoot you," our driver says, and then he giggles. "The big man!"

No need to install software for the one I'm using; just plug in a URL and go. Useful if you, say, want to watch I'm On A Boat feat. T-Pain in a country where it is "unavailable due to copyright restrictions." (I'm surprised Youtube video works, actually, since I'm guessing the Flash player isn't downloading video through the proxy.)

• A couple handfuls of small, fresh, spicy chili peppers
• Three or four cloves of garlic
• Quarter cup of white vinegar
• Tablespoon of sugar
• Teaspoon of salt
• 4-6 bell peppers
• One or two sugarcube-sized pieces of fresh ginger
• A blender

Stem the chili peppers, coarse chop the garlic. Add everything except the bell peppers to the blender. Puree superfine. Slice a few bell peppers, add and blend. Keep adding bell peppers to taste; you'll probably want to add a bit more sugar too.

I'm a huge Sriracha fan but I actually like this better. It's the fresh peppers. Eat it on everything.

Where credit is due: I originally started with this recipe. Now that I think about it, even adding ginger was Teena's idea, not mine.

Some notes:

• Recipe above is approximate only. Your garlic cloves may be larger than what I get here in Kenya. Your chili peppers may not be as spicy.
• Don't go too nuts with the garlic, and especially not with the bell peppers. This is all about the flavor of the fresh chili peppers, and the spice.