A year cutting kindle in, ok so far

So just over a year ago, I bought a kindle primarily so that I could travel on holiday for 2 weeks with carryon luggage only (to avoid paying cheapo airlines a rediculous fee for a checked bag) - I now mainly read on my kindle (paperwhite, in case you care) due to slightly weird eyesight that makes contrast with a modest backlight perfect....here's the years reading - a few books are ones I'd read but wanted to re-read (nostalgia on hols) and I have read a few things on paper ...though I share this stuff with anyone else in my household (kindle account lets you have a decent number of devices with concurrent access)....

you want views on any of these, just ask -

Revolution 
Russell Brand

Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored 
John Lydon

Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics) 
Hannah Arendt

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age 
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

The Rosie Project: Don Tillman 
Graeme Simsion

WE (Timeless Wisdom Collection Book 
Yevgeny Zamyatin

Head of State 
Andrew Marr

Perfidia 
James Ellroy

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else 
James Meek

How to Speak Money 
John Lanchester

The Children Act 
Ian McEwan

The Bone Clocks 
David Mitchell

Carmilla [with Biographical Introduction] 
Le Fanu

How Not to be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life 
Jordan Ellenberg

Across the Spectrum 
Marion Zimmer Bradley

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 
Haruki Murakami

Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch 
Nick Davies
Update Available

A God in Every Stone 
Kamila Shamsie

Eleanor Marx: A Life 
Rachel Holmes

Upstairs at the Party 
Linda Grant

Infinite Jest 
David Foster Wallace

How to Build a Girl 
Caitlin Moran

The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next Book 
Jasper Fforde

One of our Thursdays is Missing (Thursday Next) 
Jasper Fforde

First Among Sequels (Thursday Next) 
Jasper Fforde

Something Rotten (Thursday Next) 
Jasper Fforde

The Thursday Next Collection Books 
Jasper Fforde

I Shall Wear Midnight: (Discworld Novel 
Terry Pratchett

Wintersmith: (Discworld Novel 
Terry Pratchett

A Hat Full of Sky: (Discworld Novel 
Terry Pratchett

The Wee Free Men: (Discworld Novel 
Terry Pratchett

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike Book 
Robert Galbraith

Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil.. 
Amanda Vaill

One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel 
Julian Cope

The Three 
Sarah Lotz

Lagoon 
Nnedi Okorafor

In the Light of What We Know 
Zia Haider Rahman

Tigerman 
Nick Harkaway

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys,.. 
Viv Albertine

The Thrill of it All 
Joseph O'Connor

The Bees 
Laline Paull

This Book Will Save Your Life 
A.M. Homes

The Machine 
James Smythe

Ancillary Justice: 
Ann Leckie

Capital in the Twenty-First Century 
Thomas Piketty

Europe In Autumn 
Dave Hutchinson

Frog Music 
Emma Donoghue

Orfeo 
Richard Powers

The Luminaries 
Eleanor Catton

The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the.. 
Arun Kundnani

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch 
Lewis Dartnell

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and.. 
John Coates

Swimming Home: Shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 
Deborah Levy

Redeployment 
Phil Klay

The Edible Atlas: Around the World in Thirty-Nine Cuisines 
Mina Holland

The French Intifada 
Andrew Hussey

Cat out of Hell (Hammer) 
Lynne Truss

The Black Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel 
Benjamin Black

Singing from the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs 
JP Bean

Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software 
Vikram Chandra

Worth Dying For: (Jack Reacher 
Lee Child

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most.. 
Luke Harding

Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other.. 
Keith Houston

The Muller-Fokker Effect (Gollancz S.F.) 
John Sladek

The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) 
John Sladek

Roderick (GOLLANCZ S.F.) 
John Sladek

The Time Traveller's Almanac: The Ultimate Treasury of Time.. 
VanderMeer

Plastic Jesus 
Wayne Simmons

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the.. 
J. Craig Venter

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace 
Ronald J. Deibert

Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making 
Gerd Gigerenzer

Autobiography 
Morrissey

Eminent Hipsters 
Donald Fagen

Doctor Sleep: Shining Book 
Stephen King

Raising Steam: (Discworld novel 
Terry Pratchett

SHORT FICTION FLANN O'BRIEN EBK (Irish Literature) 
Flann O'Brien

The Goldfinch 
Donna Tartt

The Circle 
Dave Eggers

My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall 
John Major

Becoming a Londoner: A Diary 
David Plante

Bleeding Edge 
Thomas Pynchon

MaddAddam 
Margaret Atwood

The Other Typist 
Suzanne Rindell

Perfect 
Rachel Joyce

The Long War (Long Earth 
Terry Pratchett

Dust: (Wool Trilogy 
Hugh Howey

Shift: (Wool Trilogy 
Hugh Howey
Update Available

Wool (Wool Trilogy) 
Hugh Howey

The Year of the Flood 
Margaret Atwood

NW 
Zadie Smith

The Adjacent 
Christopher Priest

The Testament of Mary 
Colm Tóibín

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics.. 
Jonathan Haidt

Theatre of the Gods 
M. Suddain

Kiss Me First 
Lottie Moggach

The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike) 
Robert Galbraith

Lexicon 
Max Barry

The Panopticon 
Jenni Fagan

Bad Monkey 
Carl Hiaasen

Neptune's Brood 
Charles Stross

DevoMax ++ - Bring Back Elected City Governments

The repeated mantra about why Scotland came close to voting for independence seems to be that it wasn't about an increase in the broadbase support for Scottish Nationalism per se (or the SNP in particular) but much more increasing distrust of the UK's centralist, and hardly representative powerbase - for example, in the FT "the depth of popular discontent with Westminster rule. "
or the Guardian "a much broader loss of faith in the ability of existing institutions of governance to protect people against unaccountable power." [ some data:- on why people voted, and who )]

That's right, I think. In this intelligent, well-mannered, informed and empowering debate, the Scottish made the right choice, because they will now wield more power in the UK than their population superficially should allow. But this is because they spoke for a lot of the rest of us (in what was going to be the R-UK:-) - and hopefuly this can continue.

Cameron has proposed a stupid solution to the West-Lothian question, that matters pertaining to the R-UK would only be voted on by R-UK MPs in Westminster. Wrong. Probably constitutionally wrong, but pragmatically untenable in any case (where are the borders in matters of state within a state, to be drawn if other than arbitrarily?).

No, the solution is DevoMax for all. And bottom up. And start with Cities (where most people live). London needs an elected body (not an elected anti-body like its Mayor who is coloured the opposite of the majority of boroughs). How can a city of 10M people with a GDP and population that would make it the envy of several EU countries, not have an elected government? The one that used to exist (the GLC) was dismantled by Thatcher in a piece of vindictive politics  that made no sense in terms of practical organisation. London needs coordination, but not through a set of residual bodies and a dctator, but via democratic coordination. Bring back the GLC.

What goes for London obviously goes for any large city, certainly Birmingham and Manchester and....so on. The home counties can go figure. They also have reason to feel under-represented in any case with lack of resource for country transport, agricultural policy etc etc

I like that the Scots showed they don't all hate us. I love them, and I don't think it was about that. They hate our "Lords and Masters" in Westminster, and so do I right now. Bunch of chancers who don't care for other than the Big Money lobbyists who take them on nice holidays. I like a nice holiday myself, but I have to go earn it. 

The Western Intelligence Caliphate

The animated infographic in the wikipedia article on the Caliphate is quite alarming, but then its history. More alarming still is the fact that despite the West's "awesome" and shocking weaponised internet, it is abundently clear that they really hvae virtually no power (or knowledge which would lead to power) to tackle the Existential Crisis that is.

Why is this?

Well if you ask me (and I know you didn't) it's largely down to a continued failure of understanding people, and a continued belief in technology (and capitalism, which are basically a dual anyhow) which is sad, given how many times we have had demonstrated, recently, the limitations of both.

gaza

In a fairly thoughtful article by danny finkelstein, the argument is made that the recent Gaza Offensive was the only option open to Israel in the face of continued missile attacks from Hamas. The points are made
1) what government would survive its own electorate's anger if not responding this way?
2) would any international response to Hamas have occurred in any case, had the Israeli's held off?

Well the answers to these questions are in the nature of the problem - it isn't amenable to  "point solution" - sorting out such problems (e.g. Ireland, South Africa etc) requires a process - the process involves steps, which sometimes go backward. Since 2000, Israel has repeatedly only taken steps backwards. Before then it had taken a few tentative steps forwards.

Two answer the questions 1&2, the reality is that Israel has put up with more deaths in the past without such a vicious response, and now as it improves Iron Dome, it can minimise these without disproportionate retaliation, largely against civilians in punishment for having the temerity to vote for Hamas (which was largrey a response to Israel's earlier intransigence in any case). And the international community would respond - not necessarily to support Israel directly, but you could easily imagine the forces for reason in the Arab world pressuring Hamas or even replacing it with more moderation in the presence of some visible positive steps from Israel.

Not any more (for a while at least). In fact, sadly, quite the reverse. As the shared religious text has it "ye reap what ye sew".

Big Bad Food

latest debate about Big Food making Big People - article about this in press recently says "government regulation of food industry would be interference in the free market" as an excuse for not intervening in the advertising of causes of obesity to children (amount of sugar hidden in some goods) - the market for food is not free, and even if it was its already regulated for safety for short term problems (e.g. food poisoning / sell by dates) so why isn't this just part of the exact same regulation? Misrepresenting things too is normally not regarded as something that happens in a "free" market....

usual disclaimers apply - if you aren't a free thinker, when you read this, you may find it difficult to digest:)

3rd world war

the rise of the right across europe in the recent elections is a bit scary - when you look at their sophistication, but also their historically rooted, and yet mutated motives, the psychic resonance with the past is worrying:

1. we were all ripped off by the international bankers - we (e.g. Precariat and Middle Class) bore the brunt of the (nonsense) austerity measures, when productivity and risk in the real world were good, and only the casino banks were really in trouble - instead of solidarity against the old school evils of untrammelled capitalism, we now have the spectre of the far right who are anti-intellectual (sorry, but I doubt they've read Daniel Kahneman or Thomas Pikkety)...couple with

2. the enemy is no longer the banker who is a jew, but the muslim who has become a fanatic. Who made him that fanatic? We did, but not objecting to the demonisation that the Blair/Bush new liberal nutters unleashed on our behalf

Reading The Muslims are coming and The French Intifada, for example, one can see that this was by no means inevitable. Even now, some peace and reconciliation process is conceivable. But not by the new righter-than-right by any means. These guys are much more dangerous than they realize.

Who has really failed us? both the small "c" conservatives and the liberal left. Both have been obsessed either with the axis of evil, or running scared of the IMF. Both are spineless, gutless, and (in the words of Marx) we should combat their liberalism as it has led to this appalling state of affairs and affairs of state, and it is not funny.

I predict more than a riot.

creeping precariousness

reading the precariat charter and its increasingly obvious why the usual tension between conservative and socialist parties is failing everyone. to translate this into UK University "employee" terms, the increasing casualisation (e.g. uncertain contracts of research assistants, unspecified hours/duties of faculty, not to mention anciliary staff - e.g. in our canteen on zero hour contracts) isn't being fought by any political incumbent group...

pathetic lip service by the tories and even more pathetic by labour, just doesn't cut it-

here's a simple example why even (what Guy Standing calls the "Salariat") the senior academics aren't immune from this creeping evil:-

each year, I fill in a Time Allocation Survey, where I  am given a random week to choose, and I write down the hours I spend on a variety of tasks, loosely grouped into teaching, research, administration, including preparation etc

so then this is collated and normalized to some standard euro-week (e.g. 37.5 hours) to avoid revealing the fact that we're working more than legal hours (under working time directive etc)  - for me, I can't find a week in the last 10 years of filling in these forms where I see less than 65 hours.

I don't mind "working" 65 hours  - actually, (as per Standing's book) a lot of this time is "ludic" or something some people wouldn't regard as work, but do pay me ok for - on the other hand, a bunch of stuff people do regard as work (pointless timesheets for euro projects) is not accounted for in my list of duties

lets not even get started on billing my time on research contracts

then there's the erosion not just of our salaries, but of the terms&conditions (e.g. pension scheme - our pathetic union bargained away parity with civil service and medics 25+ years ago in exchange for retaining a final salary pension - well, good luck with that thin end of the wedge, and that's going too slowly).

The conservatives who welcome this flexibility do so under some false notion that the ability to move jobs at a moments notice, or be moved, more like, means people are motivated to work harder - no evidence whatsoever of that - the uncertainty just means people spend more time worried/stressed, which is the opposite of conducive to effective thinking/working.

The socialists think that everyone should be doing labour, and have no respect for the fact that most people spend most their time doing things that matter, but aren't 19th century industrial revolution style factory-make-work any more, so the majority of our effort (e.g. caring for relatives, counciling stressed colleagues, helping plan stuff, clearing up after a staff party) is not accounted its social value.

The charter (linked above) calls for a new Voice for this (i.e. a renewal of collectives that can speak (and presumably bargain) for us - this is interesting - the various movements (indignados, occupy etc) are namechecked as emergent pieces that might lead to such a thing, which would be good - one thing (seeing the many people going through UK University right now, exiting with debts higher than I ever had in my life, with, in some cases, several years of unemployed or unpaid employment to look forward to), the constituency for such a movement is not  the proletariat anymore (if there's much left of such a thing anyhow), but contains a large fraction of pretty well educated people (even more so in, say, Spain and Greece).

Interesting times....

Global Eyes-ation & Stuff

Latest readings from the University of Fenland include:
1. How to rebuild the world from "scratch" if not everyone and everything is destructed:- The "knowledge", but not for london cabbies:)

2. Arguably more useful, and certainly more, how to cook&eat your way around the cuisines of the world - a bit quirky, in the best possible way, and v. funny
The Edible Woman^H^H^H Atlas

3. Do you know the origins of the terms Bear and Bull, as in markets? It seems no-one is sure, but it seems also that they correlate with Anabolic and Catabolic
processes in the human body, in a Bad Way, (as in the oscilliation between dog and wolf (Quebecois for Crepuscule too - entre chien et loup)) - read
the dog ate my home loan:)

4. Any book that accuses the labour party of a century of stupidity, but is somewhere to the left of karl marx must be worth a read - this is better than that - its radical in the best possible way:
feeling precarious?

5. Barely fictionalised accounts from the front line returnees - this is the effect:
redployed

6. while this is most of the cause - a cause not worth fighting for at all - the muslims aint....coming, that is

Bibliometrics and Science - Failure to Understand the Basics of the Discovery Process

SO I've read yet another well meaning article on bibliometrics (like the H-Index) and why they might be ok for evaluating groups or sub-disciplines (disagree) but they are definitely not ok to evaluate individuals (agree, but for different reason).

This time, this paper on Bibliometric Indicators of Young Authors in Astrophysics: Can Later Stars be Predicted? hit the twittersphere, hence caught my attention.

Look, all these papers treat the research publications world like some high school statistics project. Ok, why not raise the game a bit.

Let's suppose that scientific discovery is a complex natural phenomenon. Let's suppose there is such a thing as progress :-)

OK so what would the time series of discovery look like? My simple minded hypothesis is that it is (like many other natural processes in a complex world) a self-similar arrival process.
So how do we characterise such a time series? well, it isn't captured in a single statistic like "mean", or even two (mean + variance) - the point of such, essentially fractal structures in time, is that they are characterised by very complex descriptors, and, crucially, prediction is hard - exactly why the weather, and associated phenonomena like flooding, and volcanic eruptions, are hard to predict on an individual basis, although, collectively, we can model broad trends. Surprise surprise (literally and figuratively:)

So science doesn't depend on a random walk in a well structured but sparse or even poisson point random space, where walking faster gets you more results. Nor does success depend on hard work (more sweat, more kudos). While a slightly more random walk might get you an inherently more surprising result, it isn't necessarily going to yield more results. And more work only pays off after the discovery, when you want to present it properly (I am sure history is littered with holes made out of discoveries that were cool, but so badly reported they were ignored and lost).

So predicting the next big discovery by a specific scientist is a bit like saying that a raindrop is going to fall on a particular rain gauge at a particular minute of a specific hour on a special day. OK if you are the bookie setting the odds, but I wouldn't bet on it.

writing like its in the bag

there's this type of informal writing that just missing the goal, the target, like it wants to enagge with you visciously, but the speaker hasn't quite got the peg to hag the metaphor upon, and some words are just de trop, perhaps naive manque.

normally, as if there is such an as if, the problem comes around to framing, err, the problem - sometimes, the audience is abused, left holding their misapprehensions in their handbags, but usually, its just that the writer can't. that is. write. for sh. it stand's to reason, isn;t it, that some people just don't have the gift of the grab-all, the momentricious blue steel glare made of pure glyphtitude, that indietinguished suits you SIR epidemic enthusiasm for exapansionist gestures. oh dear, there i gove again.

Towards an Inviolable Internet

Resilience and Privacy - Jon Crowcroft 18.3.2014

Building an inviolable Internet

1. We want generational computing:-

Sublime reason
i) According to Vikram Chandra (geek sublime) there are 300,000 Sanskrit manuscripts
on palm leaves...  vanishing at the rate of several a day due to corrosion

Trivial pursuits...
ii) my life bits  - formats, kids - grandma's degree from st Petersburg 1971 etc


=> Resilience - tolerant to faults/flaws -> Integrity

2. We need information resource availability and correctness "5 nines" & better:

Seriously
i) the internet is my memory bank
my house deeds
my bank
my shopping
utility controls

Trivially
ii) and a source of end of endless pub disputes about facts

=> Availability

3. We have been sold centralised systems (the Cloud)
which aren't incented to do 1 or 2....

i). we can suddenly lose data if a central company goes broke (loss of generation)
ii) our DSL line is down or cell phone coverage is poor...(loss of availability too)

4. We'd like Confidentiality - privacy....(why - see later)

Trivially
i) Central cloud services are tempted to mission creep
targeted adverts and analytics (market research undermine confidentiality
accidental breaches leak massive data sets to the entire world

ii) Government mission creep leads to massive surveillance


Q. Are there alternatives?
A. Yes

1. Encrypt all human related data when stored as well as when transmitted
=> trustworthy encryption software
=> key management complexity
=> can we extend encryption to "safe" processing?

2a. Own the storage - whether in home, pocket or cloud
=> payment if centralised [because central cloud server no longer has analytics/advert revenue)
=> what are costs?
actually, a lot less than you think -
take google+facebook revenue/number of users (conservative (high) estimate
=> 3 euro per month  << internet access bill for broadband or cellular
=> could bundle with network access
=> Problem - central site is still open to
Coercion, Corruption, Connivance with Big Bad Agencies...
(coerce to weaken crypto or reveal keys etc etc), so how to tackle that...next, decentralize:
2b. alternative:
Decentralise - i.e. peer to peer
=> what are the incentives?
actually mutual benefit, but
could pay (much less than 2a, due to lack of need for big servers
soem electricity cost increase to home server (<< 2a)
=> what are risks?
store some other person's bad or embarrassing data
encrypt
=> efficiency
interesting approach is to "code" data so k/n is sufficient to recover all
much lower overhead than central (full) copies
=> Mutually Assured Destruction
Eternity service was envisaged e.g. to store
e.g. BBC + VOA + Al Jazeera on same servers
can't remove one without removing all:)

3. regulatory, legal and economic  control of breaches (sever penalties)
you would have different terms & conditions with central encrypted storage provider
or peers...


4. Ethics:- "You have nothing to hide, so you have nothing to fear"
This statement is nonsense -
The problem is that something on the Internet is not just not hidden,
it is effectively broadcast. This is problematic

a). Social
It is human nature to present different persona to different people
Removing this right is psychologically toxic

People have different points of view - this is normal

b) Personal
We live and learn - we have the right to make mistakes
(even to commit crimes and misdemeanours)
and have them forgotten (mainly) - many such
"embarrassments" -
minor drugs offences, terminated pregnancies
treatment for STDs, depression

c) Government (and law) change

Do you want to go back to the chill of not discussing socialism in McCarthy era USA (the real cold war)?

or civil rights in southern states?

or workers rights in 1930s England?

or if you are right wing libertarian, the removal of coal miners excessive union power under Thatcher?

or the government of South Africa having discussions with  Mandela in prison about handover of power , or of England with IRA about northern Ireland peace agreement?

d) Who polices police?
LovInT incidents

Worse - again, one click leak of all data  -
could release location of abused partners
to dangerous men, or of people under witness protection programmes
or of information that was gathered for intelligence,
but not intended as meeting laws of evidence (i.e. insufficient
for court, but bad enough for newspaper).

Conclusion.

Recent revelations mean that the governments (esp. of UK and US) have
"weaponised the Internet" against civil society.
They have broken the social contract about
what is reasonable to do, and the Internet must be fixed

To do so will mean that it becomes much harder for government agencies to track genuine bad guys - this is their fault - had they stayed within bounds of lawful intercept and civil society's understanding of that, there would have been no need to make the Internet and the Cloud inviolable.

The NSA and GCHQ  have forced that requirement on civil society and will have to work with the consequences. That is, after all, their job.

I beseech you from the Vowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken about Big Data

A. Just because you already have our data in the bAg, doesn't mean that you shouldn't delete it forthwith and cease and desist messing with our privacy

E. I bEg you, stop beggaring us, by selling our Big Data cheap (we care what you do with care.data - use in the NHS, fine, use for Big Pharma, without and decent cheques and balances, no way)

I. My data isn't bIg - i am small and insignificant - so why include me? havn't you heard of the central limit theorem (and the statute of limitations:) ?

O. All this data, without a purpose is just a bOg, a swamp, a mess - where are your schema?

U.  much of the data is bUg ridden. just because you collected it off of the Internet doesn't tell you much about povenance, validity, accuracy, timeliness, etc

So as with Cromwell (an with apologies to Rimbaud), I beseech you from all the vowels
Bag, Beg, Big, Bof Bug off our data.

mashups and simulations - time travel and robot laws

two ideas from the Free Plotware Foundation today - two for the price of 1

1. in the future, there will be artists who compose mashup installations from pieces of your life using time machines to segment and re-loop, add paradoxes, and alternate paths as they (and maybe you) wish - this will be the most popular art form of the 20th century until it is destroyed accidentally by an A bomb

2. it turns out that we live in a simulation - we knew that. but who knew that god's programmers were playwrights?

basically, the gods give us a bunch of ethics (think "the 10 commandments")
and then ask the playwrights to see what goes wrong in one of two ways:
i) communication failure (comedy)
ii) semantic error in node's code (tragedy)

the reason is that the universe is too short lived to run any verification of the systems of ethics, so they try them out in lots of random settings instead (la cage au folles, the duchesse of malfi, - did you know that in some ethical frameworks, Macbeth is a hilarious comedy?).

Think "Asimov's 3 (nay, 4!) Laws of Robish" only writ on a bigger canvas:)

T&C

By the time you have read this,
you will have agreed to the terms and conditions
that I set for dialogue with me,
within me, and without me.

The providers of this,
and other channels of communication
pretend to believe that they have some notional
 control and ownership over things that happen
on the channels they provide.


They are wrong. Historically, ideas trump contracts,
because the social contract they sit within
 is obviously a super-class for any other
 kind of contract that could ever have any currency.

The world in which we live (in) has delivered
 zero-cost copying, so
 information doesn't "want" to be free  - it is free -
people that block its flow are committing crimes against nature.

this doesn't mean we have no privacy -

privacy is the tool for de-tox in a world
when we can't cope with getting our head around differences.

So if you can't deal with the difference
between you & me, between them&us,
then you've invaded my privacy

But if you want to stop me saying stuff,
then you've stolen my voice.

These are my terms and conditions
and if you violate them, you may find.

zero-click enabled. too late, you've agreed.

glastonbury 2013

weather verdict: best ever:) only 1 day of rain - 4 of sun! redoculous-  ended wearing sandles shorts/t shirt (don't even blink:)

was seeing steve winwood doin a version of this song,?
somewhat like this arrangment...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSn2Y-b6wI
(see this version 28 mins in, from 1969 - scary!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfAHsiTHWfQ

Fatou Diawara was even better, as were Chic and rita traore....and the congos
(brief catch of their roots reggae)

james blake and cat power and Bobby Womack -
that made a great sunday nite actually, as it was so BASS centered!?
you couldn't help but _feel_ the low tones - have to say this is something you cannot reproduce on iplayer (you probably don't have a 16*18" speaker system anyhow:) so you had to be there....

beady eye (who were a surprise show) were really quite good....

as were, ben howard and elvis costello and rufus wainwright
and sinead oconor was scorching - shame didn't see her whole act...

didnt think much to vampire weekend (as usual)
but Alt-J were good...
and laura mvula was pretty good (little bit I caught)

liked the Staves a lot
and quite like grrl band Haim, (from LA)
and I liked the last 2 songs from The Heavy!

arctic monkeys were v. good (as expected)?
as was billy bragg

dizzee rascal and publc enemy were ok (if you like that sort of thing)

tom tom club were fun (as expected)

goat were weird and the xx were a bit dull (saw a tiny snippet of them)

shame to miss nick cave, as I think his live act is stellar....

but the stones really really stle the show - especially frm poor Primal Scream
who were lookin like a pale shadow:) - version of midnite rambler and can't you hear me knockin with mick taylor - scary - when sympathy for the devil drumconga intra starts, primals vanish in the dust in the rearview mirror.....

an some people claimed you don't get much for 200 quid - i'd say that its a
bargain!

sex & drugs and rock and roll

spot the missing song...

So the obvious eponymous stuff on drugs

 (but not necessarily War and Free Love) would include:-

JJ Cale - Cocaine - sort of a love affair with drugs

Lou Reed - Heroin (was the heroin chic song)

The Stones - Sister Morphine - is pretty distressing wake up call...

The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (ok, probably has some free love in - not sue about war)

Note John Martyn's Solid Air

is about drugs (actually about the death from an overdose by

Nick Drake)....has extremely cool mix of acoustic guitar, awesoem double bass playin

and rather clver singing (try it - you really have to take care with breathing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmSPv-rtSQ

The quintessential war/drugs song (but lyrics might not quite add up) is

Voodoo Chile, by Jimi Hendrix -

 it is THE soundtrack to vietnam (more so than the overplayed "machine gun)

and while sounding tangential, is probably core to any narrative 

of this topic...of course, was revolutionary use of electric guitar in several ways

Stevie Ray Vaughan does a great cover

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEJh2FFUUoU

Of course, the sound track to free love in Haight/Ashbury back in the day was

The Grateful Dead's Trucking....is possibly interesting in its boringness (I don't rate it 

as a Dead song at all  - I much prefer songs like Box of Rain (a kylie fave)

and also Sugar Magnolia (two drummers) - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkKuhAxcH7g

or Scarlet Begonias which has to have one of the most drugged out love lyrics ever

"The Sky was yellow and the sun was blue,

the wind in the willows played tea for two"

yikes - what were they smokin?

here's the Talking heads doing a stonking live version of Drugs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOiDdXwdLH8

i'm trying to track it down, but a really cool spoof

 of all of the above was a liverpool band called

ALberto y los trios paranoias, who did a magnificent pomp drug song called 

Mandrax Sunset Variations part III - here's there cover of Anarchy in the UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oTj4BBpiIk

Kevin Ayers did a nice song called

Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkNtZXd_LTM

also his song "may i"

is really nice free lovish

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhH7pNZn17Q

then frank zappa did stinkfoot, which I claim is druggy etc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l56BvNtEbdc

(check out the vibraphones and cool animation at the end)

extremely musically accomplished:)

Kaleidescope (on their fabulous "When Scopes Collide" album

did a lot of stuff, but I think Elevator Man is probably relevant here:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezBBceANnKc

is very cool use of weird drums and strange harmonium

Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl is def. a free love song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XWHF27R0AA

was interesting coz of the added "grunge" guitar - bit of a contrast to his acoustic stuff&CSNY

here's a video/chat about a Toureg  band from Mali who write songs of resistence:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MHAKNL-Vkg

I love Fatou from Mali too - she was playin & dancin in london a couple of weeks back but I missed it rats!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82BifytoYY

not sure about war/drugs/love angle - say more if you want more details or different stuff altogether

homeopathic networking...

a few billion people now use the internet, some of them via IPv6 - but IPv6 has 128 bits of address space  - this is WAY too much

homeopathic networking would distribute just 1 address amongst all the users - this would clearly work really really well, especially in reducing spam.

DDoS this:-)

4% Intelligence fermi, and expansionism

Just reading the 4% universe (thanks to Steve Hand for loan) -

in this, it appears that state-of-the-art cosmology claims that
 dark matter + dark energy must add up to around 96% of the Universe...

I would claim that there's a societal analog which is that
it is perfectly clear the intelligence of crowds is vastly less than
the sum of the intelligence of individuals in the crowd - in fact a group
of more than 2 people decreases in intelligence faster than 1/group-size

i.e. 10 people acting togther have less than 10% the intelligence of one indvidual.

So where has all the intelligence in society gone?

Easy, as with matter and energy, it is dark intelligence

As society gets large, just as with the expanding universe, we have to invoke some sort of social force that controls the rate of growth, that is the analogue for gravity in the Universe. So all the intelligence is used up just keeping things together. There's no real solution for this - this is why
also, we have not met aliens yet, nor will we ever - once a society gets big enough to escape its home planet, it is necessarily too stupid to manage it any more.

Finally we have a scientific explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

Eye Robot - torn, detached retina, cryo&vitrectomy&gas bubbles - my life so far

Eye robot: - the  couple of months s of my life have been dominated by two eye operations - first for
cataract, second for torn and detached retina

If you are sqeamish about stuff like this, do not read on....

In June ago, after a 1 year wait, I had a succesful operation to replace the lens in left eye with intra-ocular fixed focus (near, for reading) plastic one - for 6 weeks, this was great affording better (and binocular vision) for the first time in 35 years...

however, then went on holiday in crete - about 2 days in, started getting  shadow over half the vision in the left eye - went to see GP and called up UCH (where the cataract op was) and they said might be a problem but couldnt really tell....so I let it lie for ten days

[ I should add that I was swimming 2k a day in slightly wavy seas, and had been on a 200k bike ride a week before....but I had specidically asked UCH people if it was ok to cycle and swim and the y said, yes, after 4 weeks...)

Got back from crete got appointment next day at UCH -
curiously enough, saw the very same surgeoon who referred me for the
Cataract operation a year back, which was finally done 2 months ago...
he said "oh could be coz of that, but could just have happened"...

Anyhow, he immediately referred me to
Moorfields Eye Hospital with suspect detached retina -

Moorfields do half a day of staring into my eyes
with all sorts of Sci Fi weird technology and
say "you have 5 or more tears in your retina and detached
areas on both sides and you need an operation right now",
(I ask "is it because I had the cataract op,
and two of them say "in all likelihood, yes" - its a 1% chance but I
got unlucky)...

So I go into the operating theatre under local anaesthetic
(coz I am crazy right and want to see them operate - ha the option of
general anaesthetic, but I dont like those)...
and they do 1.5 hours of poking around in my eye with a light,
microscope, laser and cryogenic gadget to find all the tears and seal
them up, then they remove the vitrous humour :-

(not humerous at al -
This is the liquid that  fills your eyeball
and normally keeps it all in nice shape -
this is probably the cause of the
retinal tears and detachment -
for 1/100 eye operations, the liquid
mysteriously gets more viscous, and starts to pull at the retina
whenever the eye moves around, and can result in what I got...)

They  replace the liquid with a gas bubble
which is designed to push the retina
back onto the inner surface of the eye,
but takes about 2+ weeks to do so -
because said gas is pressurized,
I'm not allowed to fly for 3+ weeks
(as the eye would, basically, explode:) -
nor can i see much out that eye,
as the gas isn't really the same refractive index
as the normal liquid in the eye...

After 2 weeks (i.e. 1 week from now) the gas is absorbed and
the eye generates new vitreous humour (this time, more humerous)
and it should all be working ok - what they say is
that they can't tell how much damage was done in the tears
(and fixing the tears doesn't repair so much as "weld" the gaps shut)
and how much retina will be operational at that point,
so I am basically in the dark almost literally
until late next week

The most tedious bit has been having to lie on one side for a few days
("to help the gas bubble push the retina the right way) -
i didn't draw the shortest straw here
as some people have to lie on their face for 2 weeks, which precludes
reading or TV - I just got three days on one side so books
and olympics final medals and closing ceremony  were an acceptable
passtime...

I'm on an array of antibiotics, steroids, and various special eye
drops to promote repair, all of which seem to entail causing
severe soreness and light sensitivity....oh joy - only a week more of
most of those tho....

So I missed the conference in Helsinki this week  -ironically,
if i had decided not to go to that at all in the first place,
we;d have come to greece in our normal time and maybe the retinal
thing might not have happened (though I suspect it would have).

If I'd gone to Chania Hospital and they'd operated, I'd have been
stuck in Crete for 3 weeks (insurance would have covered it) which
would have been ok (assuming that they have the right gear for the op)
anyhow, those are all "might have beens"...

Am able to get around (even cycle if I choose routes carefully) and
certainly driving is ok - will be ok even if I lose some left eye
sight....

http://www.moorfields.nhs.uk/portal_repository/files/meh_leaflet-retinal269490.pdf

A good article about the gas they put in is here:
http://www.cohk.org.hk/download/V14N1-p8.pdf
I had SF6 (1-2 weeks before absoprs/dissipates)

A good blog entry about what it looks like to see through the bubble as it dissipates:

http://losingvisiongaininginsight.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/bubble-bubble/

As it says there (but they didn't advise at the hospital) you start out looking through a nearly opaque bubble that fills the whole field of vision. Over the next 2+ weeks, the bubble slowly shrinks as the gas is absorped into the bloodstream (presumably it diffuses into the veins that supply the retina) and the bubble also becomes less opaque, but becomes quite annoying as it bobbles around a lot in a jittery way and also distorts the vision in the area it covers - it appears to float around the bottom of the eye but in fact is at the top (remember basic optics) - if you remember the old 60s TV classic show, The Prisoner, it looks like a dark version of the bubbles chasing people out to sea when they try to escape from "The Island" (aka Portmeiron)....

Since my right eye vision is almost ok, it gives me a headache (poor eyes and brain are trying to restore binocular vision but not quite getting the right info yet)

As of today (friday 24 aug, just under 2 weeks after the operation) the bubble is down to about 10% of the vision area - the main area is slightly wavy, but looks like I have nearly 100% - focus is about what it was 8 weeks back before all of this but after the cataract op - i.e. reading without glasses may be ok - need to wait a few more days to tell....

Update: As of Monday 27, bubble is gone - image is stil wavy - I am assuming this is due to the 5 repairs/buckles on the retina where it was torn and cryo-welded back together - wonder if that will get sorted by the brain learning the inverse function? Reminds me of the story that El Greco (the painter) may have had eye trouble like this, at least people infer that from the distortion in his view of faces in his paintings...

Update: As of Sep 6, have still got wavy sight but can read 10pt text at 20cm from screen with that eye, so brain is doing something I think!

Update: As of Oct 9, wavy sight mainly gone - have had some pain (eye strain) as left eye focal depth was altered so with or without glasses (bought for the lens for after the cateract operation, but not for the vitrectomy effect:), poor old brain is telling eyes to try and focus (which they can't do any more) - for most the month had lost binocular vision, but it seems to be coming back, which i assume menas the left eye is healing and coming back into old form factor/shape/size - night vision is good...

Tomorrow, off to Moorfields for "final" checkup...

What puzzles me is the tech. they use to look at the retina which is
basically bright lights and a magnifier - there's no scanner/computer
imaging tech, which seems quite primative - it does seem that there's
a LOT of "interpretation" necessary by the opthalmic surgeons as the
retina have a lot of glitches naturally as you get older...so am talking to various people about slit lamps and opthalmoscopes - seems they are rather ancient and there ought to be a way to use modern image intensifiers and priocessing cheaply - looking at the various historical things about opthalmoscopes, it seems they were invented by no lesser beings than Charles Babbage (of difference engine fame) and Helmholtz! Smart chaps, but somewhat ancient historical figures now

it seems there might be room for new computer based diagnostic assistant tools
plus Moorfields could update their leaflets on this operation to add a few useful hints.....when I go in, I'll try to remember to bring them an FAQ:) - something like this
------

detached retina/vitrectomy/intra-ocular gas bubble FAQ

comments:

bubble in vision more annoying at 50% -
        wearing eye patch advice?
wavy vision -
        would be nice to know prognosis/long term
scratched cornea (as well as infection:) -
        good reason to be v. careful with drops

questions:
any excercise (particular things to look at)
        to speed up brain/eye retrain?
chances of re-detach -
        not independant - in other eye?

vitrectomy:: interaction with focus...?
        new glasses/prescription (again!)

use of slit lamp to examine inside of eye -
        can you do better? (e.g. image intensifier/digial image processing)

-------
cataracts:-

advice:

could be more careful - e.g.
        don't cycle 200k or swim 2k in waves

questions:

peripheral vision -
        more annoying (focus?)

----------

Sep 8 - last day of eye drops- that's a relief - don't like steroids at the best of times.

Ethical failure in moden public life

It seems that "anything is ok if it's not illegal" is the modern mantra.
Bankers, MPs, Journalists, Tax Avoiders, who knows who else, do these things then bleat "but it's not against the law" as a defence.

Look, young people today 10s of thousands in debt and no hope of a decent wage/job, no decent chance of a pension worth a damn, looking at having to pay for care in old age without savings, no hope of supporting their kids in Uni or later life, little chance of having decent accommodation, they are going to put you all up against the wall and shoot you, you idiots. That's what happens to robber barons who starve the serfs. And they deserve it.

Do the tory friends (and new labour, and so called liberals) not realize the level of resentment that is building up? are they so utterly out of touch that they don't appreciate how each new scandal is another nail in the coffin of polite democracy? do they not get how the riots are a symptom of something much much heavier to come?

When you align unfairness in society with a generation gap, you are stockpiling a whole raft of trouble for when the dam breaks.

And you can quote me...

opticks at first hand (sight)

Over the last 12 months, my eyesight got steadily worse in one eye, by 6 diopters. This was diagnosed as a cataract, which initially just changes the refractive index of the liquid in the lens of the eye (before eventually crystallizing and becoming opaque). The amount of light getting through slowly decreases too, but focus is the obvious thing that goes first. So yesterday I had the operation to replace the natural lens with an artificial implant. Because I spend a lot of time reading (paper and on screen) I asked for the fixed focus lens to be a bit nearer than the horizon - this means I have slightly fuzzy vision at "infinity" but can read a book at 30-100cm which is better than I ever had before this! What is interesting about this technically is that its an opportunity to observe optics in action "at close up" - when they remove the natural lens (with ultrasound piezo-electric crystals), you basically get a very fuzzy (un-focussd) image - during the operation, under local anaesthetic, you can see some things (I think they try to knock out the eyesight with the strong anaesthetic injected into the eye, but I have a lot of resistance to painkillers (as I discovered when I had 6 shots of diamorphin after a 70km bike collision gave me an open fracture (now repaired with titanium bits in my leg)). Anyhow, so aside from seeing these huge needles poking into my eye, I then got to see this guy slipping in the new lens. Then they put a patch on overnight, so all was opaque, til this morning when I took it off and voila - the bright new fixed focus world! As good as the surgeon's (a Mr Brazier) word, I now have perfect focus at decent reading distance in the left eye, and accommodating vision from there to infinity in the right eye. Newton stuck pins in his own eyes when working on optics - but it sure is interesting to see all this from inside one's own head. Two things are interestng - one that nature just does evolve stuff like cameras; and second, that physics inside one's own biology doesn't work any different from in the lab:)

time, consciousness & travel

Consciousness is a weird thing - its obviously an illusion that we perceive a timeline that our existence travels along. There's no particular reason why there should be a narrative arc - from time to time (pun intended) our mind wanders away from this arc (reminiscing about the "past", or speculating about the "future", not necessarily in that order - reminiscing about false memories, or living one second ahead of what's actually occurring, and so forth). So while we are all time travellers, mostly travelling at the same rate as the rest of the world, we are occasionally travellers in time, but also in parallel worlds (alternative realities - given we only have our point of view to trust, then these alternates are just as valid as consensus).

Now when it comes to travel in space, time travels slowly (especially waiting in lines at airports:) Perhaps the reason no intelligent aliens have visited us is that the further you go, the longer the security line is, and no intelligent race exists with a long enough life to make it to the head of the line, before embarking for this other earth. In all consciousness, you'd find something better to do with your time, wouldn't you?

All this is intimately connected with death. In the 4th dimension, your narrative arc is still there. But after some point (the point of death, where we are, as Kurt Vonnegut said, all most punctual) the narrator has lost the plot. So for travellers in time and space (or their wives or companions) it seems like this would be the single biggest barrier to visiting the neighbours. This is why we see no aliens, nor people from the far future or the distant past. Not because its technologically impossible, nor because they aren't there, but because it's dead boring.

the conservatory law of memory

Wandering in a conservatory recently, I became nostalgic for the time I used to visit Kew Gardens quite frequently as it was just a 20 minute train ride away from my home.

It occurred to me that perhaps there is a conservation law of recall. Perhaps you can only recall things so many times. Perhaps, just as with Computer Solid State memory, and with rechargeable batteries, human memory can only take so many "read/verify/rewrite" cycles - after all, as we now know, memory is not a vault. It is active, and conserved by being used. However, it is not immutable - usage makes it alter (see the Julian Barnes novel A sense of ending for a very fine evocation of this.
Trying to remember too much is like holding a favourite watercolour under the tap to wash off the dust of ages, only to see the paint swirl into new shapes, or hunting for herbs in the spic erack full of bottles with faded labels, using a scented candle to try to read what they say.

So entropy applies. This means that too much nostalgia will lead to dementia. Perhaps the rise in Alzheimer's is not really due simply to people living too long, but is a side-effect of having the ability to recall so much so easily at the tips of your fingers on the interweb. Perhaps nostagia is killing the past, a piece at a time - perhaps the Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is not a fiction, but an epidemic.

synaesthesia of a different kind

I spent a hundred lengths swimming in Malaga last week confused about the first 5 primes and the 5 vowels

sort of like mad math version of
voyelles

he Long Tail of Research, Full Economic Costs and Government Cuts - Journalists see here (FIA?)

Research value in the long tail is an interesting idea - so industry and shorter term pressures on results do produce applicable ideas, but it seems to me that not only is it harder to attract such funding from industry for longer term (5-50 years) research, but that it is way way harder to predict (and to attribute/measure impact after the event) results, which is why government funds things.

So if we look at the distribution of funding over individuals in Universities (or labs that do long term research), it too is heavy/long tailed.

Now with the cuts in funding to many areas in the UK, the thing that goes first is the thing with least measureable outcomes. And money concentrates at the top of the curve.

A while back, UK universities agreed to seek Full Economic Costs for each and every thing they do, from all funding sources possible. What effect do you think this has had? Well, my guess is it has made it even harder for long term basic/foundational researchers to get funded, and easier to get money for short term people (like me:). Now, an interesting question is "how has long term research survived recently, then"?

Answer. FEC is being recovered at >100% for the people in the short term areas, and siphoned off for cross subsidy for long term. i.e. we're doing something he government used to do by stealth.

However, this is probably not legal - certainly if you bill more than 100% to EU, even if you deliver the work, you are working more hours than european law permits (almost certainly true for most UK universities, and other large state systems like the NHS, and education in general).

But worse. It is distorting, and creates an incentive for the government to go on under-funding long term work, because they don't see it vanish quite so fast as it is kept limping along under cover of succesful short term work.

Some journalist (THES maybe) should ask for the costings for some universities research projects and the charges made by PI name (under an FIA request) and see how often the time adds up to > 100%. Note, some of those PIs are supposed to be doing teaching as well. Some of them don't even actually cost any money at all, if their posts are endowed, or they are emeritus.
(If you think that the funding agencies would do this, think again - the EU and UK National agencies aren't going to be swapping data bases, for lots of ok reasons).

Footnote:
It is noteworthy that (rumour has it that) Intel has decided to shut down its "embedded" lablets (Seattle, Berkeley, Pittsburgh) after a successful decade of interesting research, but few results that benefited the corporation mission/goal/objectives, even if the ideas did see a lot of cool publications and may well have been useful elsewhere. And other such labs funded by other temporarily enlightened corporations may have benefitted Intel in turn . Despite its best ever financial quarter, it isn't that surprising that Intel finally called time on this disruptive experiment started so nicely by David Tennenhouse. It is the job of governments and state subsidy really, and why we charge profitable outfits like Intel tax. ANd why we give them tax breaks when they donate money to long term research.

more newspeak from uk coalition

"The ministers pointed out that the new fees regime, under which students could be charged up to £9,000 per year, could mean the government increased its investment in the higher education sector." - in
bbc report

i love this - they cut tax for the rich, cut welfare for the poor, and then claim that requiring universities to charge the public more amounts to more investment! the universities (they seem to forget) are not civil service organisaions - they are independent by charter so "government investment" is ONLY that money that goes from the treasury to the university, and that has decreased. Fees are not investment either - they are just part of the cost of delivering the service - investment would imply expanding the service, which is exactly the opposite of what is just starting to happen. I wish the press would stop reporting stuff as fact when the government issues statements, and simply report it with words like "claim" and then put the facts next to the government-speak

Some libdems claim the vice chancellors are to blame for high fees. hmmm - blaming random parts of your constituency is usually the sign of a government on its way out - these guys sure have started early given their modest "majority" - here's how we're going to "increase" teaching to poor people:- I've another idea have them all join the polis for a year, and get paid to beat up students, then they can afford to go to Uni, and furthermore, could defend themselves...

i'll say it again: blaming your constituents for problems is a sure sign of a government on its way out. and they don't exactly have a true "majority" either.

talkin bout a revolution...

Age and Class

Age:-
- Young people have nothing to look back on, and everything to look forward to
- Middle aged people have nothing to look back on and nothing to look forward to
- Old age people have nothing to look forward to, and everything to look back on.

Class:-
- Working class people don't look up to no-one, don't look down on no-one either.
- Middle class people look down on working class as they have no aspirations.
Middle class people look down on upper-class people as they got there unfairly. Middle class people are so up-themselves.
- Upper-class people don't look at middle class people and don't even see working class people.

with apologies to Barker, Cleese and Corbett.

The Silent Soprano, a Comic Opera in 3 Acts

The plot.

The younger sister of the phantom of the opera takes revenge on the lead singers, by stealing their voices and selling them to a troop of monkeys who are in town for the annual fair.

The monkeys, now possessed of speech, find gainful employment as bankers and the financial service sector sees a huge turnaround.

The opera singers find that without a voice, they stop bitching and backstabing and cooperate to try to get work - the prima donna decides that the show must go on, so they start to perform the world's first Opera in Mime - it is a tremendous success.

However, yearning to be heard, a young understudy baritone succeeds in stealing the voices back from the monkeys, wreaking havoc with the world's economy, and re-introducing turmoil and strife at the Opera House.

He is universally condemned and in the final scene, he is forced to give the voices back to the monkeys and then beaten with blank music manuscript paper until the staves and clefs leave indelible marks on his face and hands.

The tunes.

Phantasmagoria I&II from Jeff Buckley.
etc etc

The Libretto

short, and sweet- the monkeys could, for example, recite lines from the Enron trial transscript.

roll over linaues

john daugman informs me that
In the 'Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge'(c.f. Jorge
Luis Borges in Book of Imaginary Beings
animals are taxonomised thus:
(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

much better than Fire, Women and Dangerous Things

maybe bass players are actually cool?

a lot of famous bands split up and their constituent parts can never capture the quality in their subsequent outings - what has johnny marr done since the smiths, or john squire since the stone roses? some ok stuff, but nothing quite so cool

but think about paul simenon post clash, jah wobble post PiL, mani, post stone roses, or jaco pastorious post weather report.....some very respectable work with the good/bad/queen, solo albums, primal scream, joni mitchell, etc etc....

so maybe we should stop being rude about bass players...

economics 4.0

just reading a review of a slew of new books apologizing for the collapse of the "free" market and having just seen sight of a new paper by Andrew Odlyzko, outling some thoughts towards a model of Gullability and a talk by Michael Mitzenmacher about
Information Asymmetries in Pay-Per-Bid Auctions: How Swoopo Makes Bank,
I'm not only more and more convinced that Economics is sub-dismal in terms of science, but I am increasingly hopeful that a new discipline is emerging that sits on the intersection of modeling (computing/maths), social networking (including game theory, but allowing for opinion dynamics), and that it might have prescriptive consequences that are based in explanatory descriptions of how the economic world actually, operates and what the real, effective levers are for altering its behaviour in favour of humans who inhabit its spheres.

The behavioural economic models are half way there but lack predictive value. The old free market, Adam Smith fictions are demontrably nonsense (humans are not selfish rational players, and no market in reality is efficient or transparent in terms of information for many obvious reasons) - the two papers/talks above explain why people start to behave less and less the way market-nutters would like them to, just at the worst possible time. They also explain how systems can operate no-where near clearing price (marginal profit) without needing insider trading or other things regulators would like to think are necessary but worse, sufficient to keep the world turning on its monetary axis.

No, there's hope. Not much, and its possible no-one is listening, but maybe .....

torrid content providers

just read this note about who publishes what on bittorrent portals and why

much like a lot of the dark underbelly of the internet, its a bit of a sordid mess...

if it isn't fake content by copyright protectionista, it's likely to be
self-advertising by big sites or porn or malware perveyors....

http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2327

Incurably informed

is it possible for a news item nowadays to be anything other than
plain dead or hysterically reported?

we've seen the gadzooks reports about Climate Change (or not), about banning flights during the Icelandic Eruption/Ash Cloud, and now its the H1N1 pandemic - the metareport is that it was over-reaction

Ask yourself this:
If climate change is true and we dont do anything, and Manhatten and Amsterdam are underwater in 2050, what will the papers say then?

Ask yourself this: if one single plane crashes with ash-clogged engines, and the airline goes broke under a class action because their insurance wont pay up, and everyone who flew on other planes sues because f post-traumatic stress, what then?

And given H1N1 is replacing the other flu virus as the most likely candidate for the seasonal flu this coming winter, what if we hadn't prepared at all? What would the public, the community or journalists write?

Anyhow, the lesson is this - we now have a global media which has positive feedback loops between components all around the planet. There is simply no mechanism to break the loop so that any story that has the least interest simply magnifies in the echo-chamber, the hall fall of mirrors, the lasing chamber that is the Inter-web.

This is bad - there's only the next story, and the next that kill previous stories, not any refutation or simple boredom.

In some cases (e.g. reporting suicides) there used to be reporting conventions (started by the CDC) because it was recognized that epidemics of suicide were triggered by over-emotional reporting. This has (fairly recently in the UK) died, and in fact in the case of terrorist suicide bombing, it was always largely ignored despite ample evidence that the poor dim, over-hormoned moody adolescent boys who were most the early recruits to this terrible plague were victims - care in reporting has never been more important, and never been more absent.

We need to fix this - I have no idea how (short of Chinese censorship which has other problems:(

3 strange election "threat" stories/lies

Lie 1. a hung parliament will lead to economic disaster
This is trotted out by labour and tories alike and their lackies (or paymasters) in the press in some attempt to alter people's voting. This is bizarrely misguided.
I dont see why I would chose to vote for a scaremonger who said this,
or if I had already decided to vote libdem because
I can see Cameron for the sleaze he is and
am fedup with Brown's bumbling,
how is this _general_ statement going to alter my personal _specific_ decision?

My vote will be cast primarily because of selfish belief
in what policies might work for me
(including likely ones in a blanaced or libdem led parliament),
and partly because of the particular candidate
I am presented with in the constituency I vote in.
The line in the papers today (and much of the last week)
about not voting libdem because of the worry of
noone having a clear majority is more likely to make me vote libdem
(I wasn't going to - I usually vote green)
now just because it shows how stupid the alternatives are.

Lie 2. libdems will screw up the economy

Cameron, in a fairly mild Paxman interview, asserted with absolutelyu no arggument of substance, that Vince Cable is not the soothsayer. Excellent - I don't want a soothsayer in charge of the economy - thak you Cameron. Thatcherite/Reagan style laissez-faire governance, and Blair's refusal to reverse the trend of no-go regulation have led to the mess we are in - this is down to Cameron and Brown to present an alternative - neither of them have said anything whatsover to make a claim to fixing the underlying problems. Please go away and let someone new have a go - they actually cannot do worse than either of you and your legacies.

3. Cuts in health/education will not harm "frontline" services

Labour are brining in cuts already in health and education. Tories want to accelerate them. This is neither necesssary, nor is it possible without actually harming the health and education, and therefore economy, of the nation. The so-called efficiencies are not there to be made - we have had nearly 25 years of market driven efficiencies in the state health and education areas, and they are lean, mean, slick machines (unlike the government itself). If there is a place to make savings, it is in Whitehall, not in Hospital or School.
But I dispute savings are needed. Sell off the now largely owned state banks, and
think about sustainable economics instead. There are people up for election (clue: not red or blue) who have some ideas here that need trying.

political posters for your home

This site is useful (thanks to Bad Science for pointing it out!):
http://politicsposters.co.uk/pdf/Holborn-St-Pancras-policies.pdf

concentration camp

so I'm reading an amazing novel called Redemption Falls by the Irish novelist, Joseph O'Connor (it makes the Road look like a Bing/Bob road movie)...set just in and after the american civil war (there's a beautiful oxymoron - no war is civil, but civil wars seem to make other wars look like street fights) - in it, there's reference to
Andersonille prison camp

now I was always told that the lovely british invented concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer war, but it is clear that the chap who ran this camp shared a lot with the Nazis (he was hung, but claimed he was "only following orders"). I suppose people might claim the people in the camp were PoWs, not civilians....but it was a civil war, so what's the difference?

nosegay stories

thinkin about Wallace and Gromit for a moment, I have to say that I think the story is a cover for an old gay couple - just look at Wallace for a second and think about it - he dresses up in funny old clothes, pretends to be a giant rabbit, has gentleman lodgers and his "relationship" with the (admittedly bi-) Gromit is never made that clear is it - ok so they have separate rooms, but so do lots of hetero- old couples I know:) - Wallace even has a fling with Feathers McGraw but then goes back to his faithful Gromit (who also has a fling with Fluffles of course in A Close Shave, but its clear to me even then that she is really just Gromit's bit of Hollywood star type poodle...

it is clear that when Wallace is "attracted" to female like Wendolene, she is a mother figure and when he falls for Lady Tottington (in "The Curse"), she is actually a guy in drag (you've never seen a real woman talk like that, have you? :-) And as for Piella Bakewall (reference to the "thinking man's crumpet" of the 1960s), she is also obviously a drag act - really

the whole thing is as plain as the pie on your face...

Why I shan't be voting labour (not that I did before)

Like many people, I suppose, I was quite excited when after the Thatcher/Major misery years, Labour finally took over under Blair. I hadn't voted for them (I generlaly vote for an MP not a party and there were good other candidates both Lib Dem and Green in my area) but I wished them well - as fellow travellers with apparently at least some common goals.

Ha. That was a gross, baroque and grotesque misunderstanding.

We now have a worse divide between rich and poor, we have used ill-gotten gains to boost the NHS and higher education, but the root cause of ill-health and societal ills (poverty, ignorance)are wosened because of the divide.

The underlying model of the economy was even more extreme laissez-faire free market than under Thatcher. This is now laid bare in all its stupidity, but noone is actually revisiting the alternatives or coming up with any novel approaches.
But there's worse.

Without any real justification, fundamental rights have been massively eroded by these idiots. Under Elizabeth the first and during the 2nd world war, the existing habeus corpus and right to not be held without charge was sufficient, but for obscure and ill-argued reasons, the UK now has one of the worst systems in the so-called civilized world of weeks of detention without trial.

The same sort of stupid technophobic and illogical thinking has led to a plethora of tiny right-erosions including annoying things like the digital economy bill and acts of moronic proportions like the loss of private data through criminal (well it ought to be) incompetence in government agency handling - despite this, a constant push to more and more centralisation of data and control.

We colluded with the CIA in torture - not only unethical, but counter-productive since it lends our enemies an actual justification (see under just war)

We continue to contribute to an unjust war in Iraq, and a pointless war in Afghanistan.

The list goes on and on, and just gets very depressing.

The Tories represent no alternative whatsover - their economic ideas are pathetic (see the recent chancellors-in-waiting debate on TV for how daft they are). They are clueless on class, and irrelevant on Europe.

I'd encourage people to vote with their conscience - we might gt a hung parliament, that might lead to a change in the voting system which might give a chance to some fresh blood to work its way into the moribund system.

We need some massive overhauling in society, economics and environment - none of the main parties has the ability or structure to tackle any of these other from the tired old postures of the past.

Time to die.

city of music - 4 books on rock music & cities (especially London)

This is my view of these 4 books I just read about music - I love music- also I love london - I have lived in london (mostly) for 50+ years - I am from Camden Town - I went to Gospel Oak primary school - I went to the ROundhouse every sunday for over 10 years. I saw Dingwalls come and go and the Electric Ballroom at its ska best, and the Music Machine at its metal worst,, and all the pubs (hawley dublin castle, underworld etc etc) and dives and market nonsense and fun. Its still fun. Its still a live wire - don't believe any old farts who say "it aint like it used to be" - god, william gibbson namechecks it at the start of his fairly recent Pattern Recognition, even, because of the (serious - i.e. games, computing) new media design links -

Of these 4 books, Gillett is about why rock music comes out of cities and sounds the way it is and is scholarly, respectful and true.
Du Noyer's book is very good, but a tiny bit patchy (understandable - a complete work of this scope (entire history of london is more than 2000 years!) would be 10 times the size, but has some gems of much older links between east end music hall, via mime and the gay scene to glam and new romantic (think lindsay kemp, bowie, spandau) and on - this is a lovely cultural piece which is very london.

Barry Miles piece is fantastic - my mother used to go to the Gluepot woth BBC people in 1948, so it is awesome that this guy can mention that in the same breath as the Blitz and Heaven. I also LOVE that he has such a positive outlook on counter culture and its longevity. One thing about Gillett and Miles is that they both actually DID something (not just write) - Gillett of course was a great world music advocate and apparently relentlessly nice guy. Miles did Indica books (which ended up as Compendium in Camden, but now alas gone) and arranged many serious counter-cultural events too. Du Noyer and Kent are (mostly) journos, but both with v. good writing credentials.

I was very disappointed in the Apathy book - aside from it being an interesting personal piece, it is just that - it doesn't give a lot more insights into the stars that Kent hitched his rise (and fall) too (reminds me of Neil Gaiman:). He also admits without realising it to completely misunderstanding the different parts of london and the way they affect the different people (Stones, Bowie, Siouxie and the Banshees, Dr Feelgood) and why they are different from people from Manchester who he adopts at the tail end, and Bristol, who he seems ignorant of, or NY or the Laurel Canyon gang he fell in with for a while. Nevertheless its worth looking at if you were here or there then and can remember some of it.

But in reading preference order, I'd have them:

barry miles - london calling

paul du noyer - in the city

charlie gillett (rip) - the sound of the city

nick kent - apathy for the devil

category errors

when sam harris (e.g. see the google talk uses examples of religious groups
making immoral decisions, I think he is making a category error of the same kind that Nick Kent does when write about rock music (e.g. see this review of his apathy)

it isn't religion - its something anthropologists could easily describe and is a behavioural pattern.

it isn't rock music - its a lifestyle thing - basically NME in 1972-1977 was a lifestyle magazine - those of us who liked music (often the same bands, e.g. CAN, Zep, Pistols, etc) had criteria that we shared - critics like Kent were bewitched by personalities - sometimes, the personality was necessary for the individual to make that kind of music - often not - like the myth of van gogh's madness (in his letters to his brother he frequently described how it GOT IN THE WAY of his art), the destructive behaviour of the various megastars and burnouts he described is interesting, but not because it led to the music or the music was about it.

just so, the behaviour of cultures or social groups (e.g. to oppress women or to encourage suicide bombers) is not a feature of the religion - the religion is window dressing, life style etc - the decisions are made for social reasons

as a scientist, it behoves sam harris to do better - telling people that rational objective thought might lead to better moral decisions doesn't really help - it is like telling keith richard that giving up smack might make his playing in the stones more reliable. it is completely and utterly irrelevant.

it is beside the point.

it is a blues in Eb minor with lyrics from the koran and an album cover with photos from prophets in hell

it is bankers telling the government that increasing tax or NI is a bad idea.

it is beyond the pale, round the bend, up the wall, and thoroughly so.

this blog is now going down for repair

I can't safely post in the UK anything that might be construed as "menacing"
by some arbitrary (literally) putative reader, so there is now no longer
any point in this blog - see this fine article in
The Lawyer for why

it's another sad day for the UK

adultery is a two way street...so

so why in primative cultures (dare I say religions)
are women stoned for adultery?

most of these cultures (dare i say religions)
women are regarded as goods and chattels

so how can they be responsible?

surely, the men who commit adultery
are the only ones who could
be responsible
as they are the one
who have strayed

and, if the women are as cattle
have not the men committed a worse sin
than merely stealing another man's goods?

It'd be nice to here
a cleric's response
even if only
to laugh instead of cry

dismal letter

20 "eminent" economists tell the government to do something about deficit asap or else.

why do we listen to economists?
why have we let them out of purgatory?

they got us in this mess with their advice on free markets...

until they have a root and branch clearout,
I'm putting them in a box with blair's cabinet for iraq/bush support,
and with thatcher for destroying a generation of lives in mining communities,
and that's a pretty bad place to be

frankly, the CRU guys incompetence at keeping data and analysis and personal comments sqeeky clean is a blip on the radar compared to these bozos and bastards.

beyond belief

post chilton the blair apoligist supremo is pursuasive that his leader didn't mislead (so to speak).


Come on - you cannot have it both ways - if he didn't, then he sure was incompetent taking such poor intelligence advice.

once again:- either blair and his gang are guilty of gross negligence in not taking more care over such important decisions, OR they were unethical in extreme.

That is the reason people are slack-jawed in amazement once again at the parade of
war-apoligists.

afghanistan - sure - necessary - almost as clear cut a case as the falklands.
iraq - unnecessary, disastrously planned in any case for the aftermath, and
an appaling waste of lives and opportunities, now leading to a less safe world.

there's no point flogging a dead horse over this any more tho - basically
you are either pro-blair or you are with us. you are either wrong or right.
you're preaching to the deaf or the converted...

UK gov trains us to think the unthinkable, daily

One of the reasons that the Chilton enquiry is getting some press, I think, is the whole "45 minutes to launch WMD" story - the problem with the story in the first place is that it was written by politicians and civil servants from a generation of people bought up under the threat of armageddon - but this was the first generation to experience this chilling thought, that a finger on a button in Moscow or DC could end the world.

Now, people are routinely hearing about "horrifying" or "terrifying" things on the news (natural, like Tsunami or Haiti quake, or human, like Bhopal or Beslan)- far from becoming completely numb to these things, rather, the population that bothers to think can now think in terms of plausible risks and limits to damage. This means that the general, critical thinking part of the population doesn't just freeze, when some bogey-man alleged threat is invoked - they stop to consider it compared to other threats (e.g. did saddam hussein have missiles that could reach beyond the middle east? nope.) and rank it in their thinking - as Martin Amis said on TV in the 30th anniversary shindig for Newsnight, "more americans drowned in bathtubs last year than in all the terrorist attacks on the USA" (I'm not sure he's right, but he's certainly in the ballpark).

No, fact is: governments better get used to the fact that anyone under 50 can consider a spectrum of armageddons, ranging from the War with the Machines from T2, down to a couple of pre-teen kids torturing a couple of other kids nearly to death, and seperate out reality from fantasy, and rank the risks.

We don't stop thinking anymore when we hear "armageddon"
This isn't the Cold War, and this isn't the Middle Ages.

redistribution of wealth in the UK under labour

appears to mean
take money and jobs from the people
and give the money to the banks and the jobs to other countries.


when asked (e.g. on QUestiontime on TV this week) why does the government let
Royal Bank of Scotland (80% state owned) lend money to Kraft to buy cadbury
government ministers (and of course tories) say
"oh, but if we intereed in what the banks did, it would mess up the free market and financial service industry which is so succesful at creating wealth and blah blah blahh


well
1. they messed up the free market by borrowing 150billion pounds from china and putting it into failing businesses (those banks)
2. those banks were not sucesful at creating national wealth, only wealth for a small number of people. other countries that didnt do this had JUST AS MUCH wealth increase
and had a better distribution of that increase over the population.

this is proof positive that the government are unfit to govern since they don't represent the people, not even as shareholders in the banks they bought "on our behalf".

anyhow, if i was (say) a rich bastard who owned a steel mill and a bank, would I let the bank invest money in a competitor steel mill and have it buy my steel mill at a knock down pice, asset strip it, and move on? no i wouldn't. so why did Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling let RBS do this?

The answer is they are too scared to do ANYTHING - they even looked like frighted rabbits in the headlights nowadays.

maybe they will copy Obama, now he's moved on from healthcare to wealthcare reform ....but i'm not optimistic.

billy bragg is right - the government and RBS are irresponsible, imoral, unethical, lying, short term thinkers behaving like robber barons.

Billy Bragg protest about RBS bonus is absolutely justified

value chain:-

sell of Cadbury to foreigners (just for 1 example) - make more people unemployed - sell of their houses - some of them to foreeign investors - some of them probably to MPs who use them as second houses and claim them as expensies.

profits (abroad) made by bankers, go to their bonuses so they have more money to buy more assets from the more unemployed layed off b the richer government in cuts in public services - banks bailed out by public momey

look, RBS is about to announce 1.5 billion in bonuses - this is the amount the government is cutting higher education&research this year. How short term, bone headedly stupid is that.

UK PLC - bollocks - we aren't a PLC - the government is not taking any liability, and is selling off our assets as if they belong to a private sector and rich minority, a sector that proved itself incompetent and corrupt many times over

now we see RBS is asset stripping British companies, selling them off to the US, and then making a fast buck to pay its bonuses - how stupid is this - an 80% UK taxpayer owned company is helping make UK taxpayers redundent (i.e Cadbury's workers), so they can't pay tax and the other ta payers will be supporting them on social security
so the bastards at RBS can get bigger bonuses.

billy is right to be angry. so am i. i predict a riot.

HR, worse than cockroaches

worse than lawyers and estate agents (realtors, for US reader), HR people makework
and they make pointless work

a friend of mine is applying for lots of jobs in charities - they seem to be completely infested with HR - Bullshit - basically, all the "job specifications" are 99% boilerplate and only 1% actually talk about the actual work - i.e. what is involved in terms of day to day activities and what is required in terms of specific skills - the rest of it, stuff that anyone who could actually carry out the activities and had the requisite skills and knowledge would, by definition, be able to do in their sleep, makes up 9% plus of any form, and is all boilerplate (i.e. required zero effort by the HR person responsible, zero thought, zero knowledge of the actual domain, zero skill, probably even involved copyright theft since a lot of them look the same so are probably nicked form other companies or other sites on the net) - its shocking - I've seen this creeping madness in staff appraisal schemes in academia and industry, but now it pervades the whle lifecycle.

It must be stamped out - these folks don't even deserve a berth on the B-Ark.

HR = Hateful Reflux

taxing patience, taxing bankers...nowhere to run

boris johnson (erstwhile mayor of london) claims 9000 bankers will leave london because of a) 50% tax, b) tax on bonuses.
So where will they go? certainly not china or india, who wouldn;t have them, and probably not america now that Barack Obama is thinking of introducing the same thing
(see NY Times today) or gernany or france where merckl and sarkozy both think Brown's tax is not such a bad idea at all

I like this - the banks thought they could get away from national regulation by being global - they forgot the G7/8/30/blah are global too - we can follow you, anywhere, even through solid air.

taxes on stupidity really need to be made more coherent too, though - we need to tax people who run large miliatry budgets, and tax exports from regions running (real) piracy
I can see a whole new emergence of control by the "outland revenue service" (ORS:)
tracking down miscreants (a bit like Al Capone, jailed in the end for tax evasion rather than just being a gangster

after all, what is the difference between organized crime and merchant banking?
(that's a rhetorical question, btw, but if you want me to answer it, the answer is
"absolutely zero").

holding on to longevity by fingernails?

so its generally acknowledged that all mammals have the rough same number of heartbeats in a lifetime - seems to be a result of the physics of scale Iguess

but what about the number of times you shed/replace skin, or grow new claws/ fingernails?
is that an invariant too?

I think we should be told...

US healthcare update

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/healthscatter2.png

seems pretty simple to me..

why don't birds freeze?

given their altitude and wind chill, I'd expect them to fall out of the sky and land on someone's head...but they don't do that very often - they have very little mass and therefore little heat capacity - how do they not just turn into a lump of ice eh?

Pere Ubu (well, the singer, David Thomas) said "I think the birds are a good idea" and he wasn't talking about the band either, but are they? I think they are as innumberable as bees and as indecipherable as
cryptozomes.