I have eaten the heart of a lamb.
Yeah, sorry vegetarian readers. That even freaks me out a little. Of all the offal parts, it seems weirdest to eat the one that beats. But it just struck me as I was shopping today that I have never eaten a heart. Knowingly, anyway. It seemed like an odd moral lapse. I believe that if I am going to consume animals, leaving bits is just disrespectful. “I’mma kill you and eat you all up! Except your hideous face.”
And you know what? Its innocent little heart was delicious. It tasted a bit like kidney, just a tiny bit like liver, but better than either. I cut off most of the tough white fatty bits, chopped it up and ate it with some fava beans and a nice… Sorry, with another stir fry.
Other ingredients, in approximate order of being added to the wok, were cucumber, leek, scallions, sugarsnap peas, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, aubergine (egg plant), and broccoli. It was wonderful, a deeply satisfying fry. So nice to get a really excellent aubergine – this one was like a purple balloon full of helium foam – but all the veg was good.
With the exception of the broccoli though, none of what I bought this time was organic. This is because what the supermarket had wasn’t local. I mean, even in the sense that European is local. Seriously, the organic avocados were from Brazil, the apples New Zealand! Clearly as a meat-eater I am by no means the keenest of environmentalists, but I cannot understand people thinking they’re being all natural and Earth-friendly while selecting food that comes with air miles.
Perhaps to counterbalance all the manly meat-eating, I also planted some flowers today. Petunias – surely the campest of all the bedding plants. A lovely rich blue-purple in colour. I’m not sure what possessed me. As far as I recall it’s the first time I’ve ever done gardening without being asked – unless you include houseplants. Maybe it was just for a complete change. I’d spent the previous forty-eight hours working on an article about “Big Data”, a fashionable concept from the world of business and technology. I guess I needed a bit of nature after that.
I’ll go into more detail some other time, but in brief: Companies these days accumulate huge amounts of data – almost because it’s cheaper now to store the stuff than to sort through it and decide what’s worth keeping. “Big Data” is the assumption that this can be mined for surprising and valuable insights into how the organisation could be improved. It’s not an unreasonable one I think, but possibly people get a little carried away with the potential. William Gibson retweeted someone today who put the sceptical view rather nicely:
Big Data, n.: the belief that any sufficiently large pile of shit contains a pony with probability approaching 1
Do the vast amounts of data created and accumulated in the course of business really contain priceless knowledge? Well, I guess you don’t know until you look.
4 replies on “A Little Lamb”
Bruce Schneier regularly talks about Big Data (though he doesn’t call it that) from a security/surveillance standpoint, and he’s against the idea. Only because the data often requires an actual human to sort and parse the data for any real value, and when you collect data on EVERYTHING it’s impossible to parse it.
In relation to the Snowden/NSA scandal, there are a lot of people breathing sighs of relief because the NSA isn’t actually listening to phone calls, and they really shouldn’t be. Why not? Because the content of the phone calls requires humans to parse, and they can’t spare the labor to do it. But the metadata (which they ARE using), can be parsed and correlated by computer algorithms, meaning that your metadata is actually being examined and used regardless of who you are but the content isn’t, which means you can be wrongfully implicated in something and the evidence that you’re not involved is never looked at because it would require a human. Not good. (NSA/Snowden opinions expressed herein are mine, not those of Bruce Schneier).
Bruce Schneier regularly talks about Big Data (though he doesn’t call it that) from a security/surveillance standpoint, and he’s against the idea. Only because the data often requires an actual human to sort and parse the data for any real value, and when you collect data on EVERYTHING it’s impossible to parse it.
In relation to the Snowden/NSA scandal, there are a lot of people breathing sighs of relief because the NSA isn’t actually listening to phone calls, and they really shouldn’t be. Why not? Because the content of the phone calls requires humans to parse, and they can’t spare the labor to do it. But the metadata (which they ARE using), can be parsed and correlated by computer algorithms, meaning that your metadata is actually being examined and used regardless of who you are but the content isn’t, which means you can be wrongfully implicated in something and the evidence that you’re not involved is never looked at because it would require a human. Not good. (NSA/Snowden opinions expressed herein are mine, not those of Bruce Schneier).
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