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A couple of days ago I made the Hairy Bakers' brown ale bread. It's pretty nice (but I recommend you only use half as much cheese as they do!).

It's the kind of bread that goes best with a nice light soup so here's what I made, it's nice (serves 2 or 3):

• 1 onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/4 cabbage
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1/2 cup brown ale
• 1/2 tsp fennel seeds
• 1 cardamom pod
• Some veg oil and marge

Warm up the veg oil and marge in a big pan, while you chop up the onion. Add the onion to the pan and leave it for a few minutes on a low heat, to soften - don't let it brown. Peel and chop the garlic and add that half-way through.

Add the cardamom pod and the fennel seeds to the pan and stir it all around. Rinse and roughly chop the cabbage then add it to the pan. Also add the brown ale and hot water, just enough to almost cover everything.

Bring it to the boil, put the lid on and turn down to a very low heat. Let it bubble for 15-20 minutes.

Take the pan off the heat, add the frozen peas, and stir it all around. The frozen peas will have lowered the temperature enough to be safe for the blender. Put about three-quarters of the mixture into the blender and blend it until nice and smooth (won't take long). Return this all to the pan - so you should have the smooth liquid combined with the remaining lumpy bits - that makes a nice texture.

If necessary, put it back on the heat to warm it up slightly, before serving with brown ale bread and butter.

xkcd hits the nail on the head, re voting machines:

This is based on yet another voting-machine cockup. All these stories tend to come from the US, let's hope that UK officials understand that paper voting is demonstrably safer and better than electronic voting for all sorts of reasons.

I've updated my SuperCollider "MCLD UGens pack" with some recent additions. Here's what's new:

• GaussClass.kr - a Gaussian classifier
• SOMTrain.kr - updated Self-Organising Map learner
• FFTSlope.kr - calculate the spectral slope of a signal
• PV_Conj - find the complex conjugate of an FFT
• ListTrig2.kr - a variant on ListTrig, tweaked by nescivi (thanks)

Download links: download for Mac or download for Linux.

We've just come back from a weekend of fun in Edinburgh - here's what we saw:

• Sarah Millican is the top tip, her stand-up show was absolutely brilliant all the way through. Very nice interaction with the audience, and her material was really strong too, everyone should see her if they can.
• Also really highly recommended is Eco-Friendly Jihad. The title makes you expect something aggressive or at least preachy, but surprisingly, it's a very gently-spoken Irishman. Yes of course there's politics in it but very friendly and funny indeed. It's the first thing we saw when we arrived in Edinburgh and we were surprised at our luck in hitting upon this one - do see this, it's great.
• Count Arthur Strong was very funny. Sometimes it baffles me how some old bloke tripping over his own malapropisms and terminally distracting himself could be so funny. This show didn't have any of the really hilarious moments that the radio show sometimes achieves but it was good to see him in the flesh.
• Much less good was Olivia Neville. I picked her show due to Lancashire loyalty, but unfortunately it wasn't a very funny half an hour: there were some nice moments but they really failed to build to anything laugh-out-loud. As Philippa said, the fault was in the writing - many of the sketches had potential to add up more than they did. It's a shame because there was clearly a lot of work put into the (solo) performance, with a very good conjuring up of the extra people in the scenes.
• Also poor, and MUCH more annoying was a four-person show where some people call a conclave and elect the new pope. The show was basically just some people messing around for a while, with some half-arsed stupid ideas based on some of the silly things about Catholicism. The Catholic faith has many weird things about it with lots of comedy potential (e.g. bizarre patron saints), but putting them on a Powerpoint slide and being mock-serious about it doesn't add up to comedy material. Entirely half-arsed.
• Back to the good news: Wisecrackin' Midsqueezin' Behemoth was really entertaining, full of really funny things and really well-executed! Hooray. The appearance of Banksy was one of the best bits. (BTW the link is to a review of their previous year's show.)
• Ed Byrne was great. When you see people on the telly you can never be sure how well they work in real life. Ed Byrne is witty and affable, with a lot of intelligent material, really deserving of the big venue he was in and used it well. Unfortunately we drew the short straw and ended up in almost the worst seats in the house, craning our necks around pillars if he moved. Ah well.
• It Is Rocket Science was another very friendly show, a sort of combination of comedy and history-of-science lesson, with some really cute shadow puppetry helping to illustrate proceedings. Charming and enthusiastic, and definitely reminded me of some of the popularising-science folks I've been a bit involved with recently. And the shadow puppetry really was good!

We also happened to see some great art. The "Stills" gallery on Cockburn Street had a great roving library where I read about the prehistory of cooking. But best of all was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's show in the Fruitmarket gallery. They have done some amazing sight-and-sound installations, the best being Opera for a Small Room:

OK, from the picture it just looks like some old speakers and some old records. But it's a sort of animatronic installation involving automated record-players and some other audiovisual surprises. Basically beyond description. But really really excellent.

Man On Wire is an amazing film, much more than just watching Philippe Petit's once-in-a-lifetime high-wire act. Besides the "bank heist" plot of how they ever managed to smuggle a ton of wire-walking equipment to the top of the World Trade Center - fake IDs, sneaking past security guards, dressing as construction workers, the whole shebang - the story of the motley little group of people that somehow made it happen is much more suspenseful and affecting than you'd expect. Petit's best friend and his girlfriend (in particular) tell the story of their involvement really movingly, plus quite a few other people (I didn't work out exactly how most of them got involved in it!). There are some really funny moments too, e.g. the account of the New York cops who tried to get Petit off the high-wire...

I definitely recommend seeing this. We had a free members' preview screening at the Phoenix Cinema this morning, and the place was as busy as I've seen it, it went down very well.

"Get it out of your head and into the machines. Stop talking stop arguing. Let the machines talk and argue. A tape recorder is an externalised section of the human nervous system. You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture. Whatever your problem is just throw it into the machines and let them chew it around a while. There is of course the initial problem: programming tape recorders is an expensive deal any way you wire it."

[WS Burroughs; The Ticket That Exploded; p136]