Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

Nigel Slater Broad Bean And Dill Hummus

The local greengrocers have started stocking Gower broad beans and after last years failures to make an interesting salad out of them, I went in search of another recipe.

The following is an minor adaptation of a Nigel Slater recipe from his The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen book and I've reduced the amounts needed.

• 800g broad beans in their pods
• 2 tablespoons of good olive oil
• juice of half a small lemon
• Small handful of dill

1 .Pod the beans and drop into boiling water for 8 mins
2. Drain and then pulse to a coarse puree in a food processor
3. Add olive oil, lemon juice and the dill
4. Pulse until you it is almost smooth

The Computer Whisperer

From this weeks Private Eye

This Is Art

If you're getting a bit tired of diamond skulls, tracy emin and video installations, then feast your eyes on this oil painting from friend Liam O'Farell.

Its been accepted into the Royal Academy Summer exhibition and sold on the first day

Liams got a unqiue style and you can see more examples of work in his online gallery

Who Set The 160 Character Limit For SMS Messages?

160 characters seems a rather arbitrary limit, but according to the LA Times article Why text messages are limited to 160 characters, a lot of research went into this.

When the SMS standard was agreed, network bandwidth was was expensive, so uncapped messages would have cost too much and all the carriers agreed to a limit.

Three things helped them determine the 160 characters

1. Typing out random sentences always seemed to come in around 160 characters
2. Postcards often had less than 150 characters
3. Telex messages also only had 15o characters

From this they surmised that a message could be communicated in 160 characters or less

Could Google have caught swine flu earlier?

Interesting piece in Wired about how Googles Flu Trends team managed to miss the increase in searches from Mexico on flu

Makes the point that computers are often only useful once they know what to start looking for, although you think they might have picked up the trend below.



Read the full Wired article - Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early

The Joy of Words

Over the last couple of years, the TV and papers have loved to analyse politicians speeches to see which are the most popular words that are used.

Worldle allows you to do this for any piece of text - the larger the word, the more often it has been used

This is a breakdown of all the tags in my delicous account.

Want to sell more chips - stick a salad on the menu

New research indicates that presence of healthy dishes on a menu can lead some people to choose dishes that aren't necessarily good for them.

A a study, students were given two menus, one with salad and chips and the other with just chips. The menu with salad and chips was three times as popular.

You can read more at in the New York times article - Want Salad With That? Make It Fries