Cambridge University's Sustainability as world leader?

Three things lead me to question the sanity of the powers that be in Cambridge University

First of all, always recall that there is no Cambridge University. It is an emergent phenomenon, a hologram made visible only through the lens of the Scholars, the Colleges and the Departments.

The Colleges are a mix zone, where social things happen, and housing, care and feeding of scholars occurs. Departments do research and teach. At least they have been for 800 years. This is all changing, very very quickly, without any evident thought of the unintended consequences.

1. Pay

I'm not complaining, but note bene - I am paid 2 bands up in the prof scale in recognition of being FRS and FREng. However, in Cambridge, what this translates into is that I am paid below the average professorial salary in the top 20 universities (ranked by pay) in the UK - these are'nt dodgy universities but include most of Cambridge's direct competitors. See
this tool if you want to check (and infer my pay:-)

Does this matter? sure;y the honour of working for cambridge is enough? sure, if you can live in Cambridge, or near enough in commute terms (strictly within 12 miles of Gt St Mary's church spire, or an hour's horse ride, originally) - good luck with that - and the modern scholar isn't a lone monk. They have a family, kids etc - the colleges no longer accommodate them. Nor do many of them work near a college so even dropping in for lunch is pretty unlikely.

2. Land Use

the university is hell bent on filling in all the gaps down by the station leading out to Addenbrookes Hosptial, and out in west cambridge, leading to the M11. Yes, we need more new good lab space. We also like the environment of Cambridge (elegant old buildings surrounded by park space like Midsummer Common, or Parker's Piece, or the Botanical Gardens). So why do we have to put up with this vandalism ? This includes stupid failures to even think about wind tunnel effects (we're in Cambridge with horizontal freezing rain on some days. How nice is that?).

3. Transport

Transport around Cambridge is ok (by bike) but useless if you live in an outlying village and have to drive in (and your kids to school). Compare with london - where people can get around....although they might have to live in Plaistow for an affordable home on a london academic salary...

house price by london tube station

So there will be jobs in lots of high rise buildings no-one can afford to live near, can't commute to and don't like. No shops, restaurants, pubs, green space, school, nurseries, adequate bike routes, etc etc

Mass Observations

today I finished a 2nd book on Mass Observation

Book the 2nd was Worktown subtitled nicely "The Astonishing Story of the Project that Launched Mass-Observation", by David Hall

Book the 1st was Dark Matter&the Dinosaurs, subtitled The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

Both of course are beautifully written accounts, one of the working class in 1930s Bolton, in their every day life, and the other of every day life&death at the end of the Jurassic amonst giant lizards.
Both are ended by dark events, the first by the 2nd world war, the second, by a 10km radius comet that struck the Yucatan coast at 20 Kilometers a second and wiped put about 85% of life on earth.

Both contain interesting theories, but more interestingly, make commentary on methodology- the first is on how to infer new possible models for the Cosmos based on very indirect obsservations - the second, based on how to understand everyday working people based on overheard conversations in the pub.

Both include a lot of sex as well, which is surprising, in a good way.

dangerous cult movement

people may have noticed (although they could be forgiven for not) that I've joined the movemberment

Little did I realize that this is a subtle and devious way to get people to look rediculous (more than white middle aged men with dreadlocks, or comb overs) and indulge in very expensive habits but also to need to seek relationship counselling and other support to cope with their loss of self esteem.

the whole moustache thing is incredibly competitive, mad and macho (mostly)

and while it may be literally truem I cannot say it is growing on me, figuratively.

cambridge goes west

so i've dipped my toe into cambridge (including the river) twice in 5 decades -

first time was traditional experience of being at Trinity College, living right in
the middle of it all surrounded by the full on college and university expeirences of social and academic life mingling via the rich, messy ways they do.

the second time has been very department-centric, in the computer lab just after (15 years ago) it moved to the newly occupied West Cambridge site.
At first, this was a great experience, still zooming back to town for events in college(s) and doing formal halls here there and everywhere, attending seminars on everything under the sun (and the far side of the universe). Excellent.

However, in the past few years, West cambridge has gotten more and more distant from town, and has become more and more of a hi-tech island, isolated from the University, indeed, from time to time, almost cut off by buidling work As I type, the normal cycle/footpath route into town is blocked (and has been for months) by annoying building work o nthe new physics of medicine building. Plans for new bus ways to Cambourne look all set to massacre the area again. The proposal to fill in the Paddock in front of the Vet School threatens us with a wind tunnel (without recourse to the nearby Whittle lab) and no greenery to stare at when lost in thought, and yet more glass/metal buildings, hey, we might as well be in downtown Cambridge Massachusetts, not rural Cambridgeshire, England. West Cambridge, 15 years in, still has zero shops, zero restaurants, zero social spaces worth talking about, zero pubs, zero Cambridge style. It is pretty terrible.

The treatment of the (I believe) 3000 or so people that work and study here is 2nd class - I do not hold out a lot of hope that future developments will prioritize people - they will be about "impressive" builds (stupidly, given we don't have the money to compete on that basis with the likes of Harvard or MIT), rather than nurturing the social, the heterogeneous, messy, cultural weirdness that makes Cambridge University what it is (or should I say was, as it is vanishing).

This is not a good thing. And I am not saying this coz I am unhappy here - its great. It is just not as great as it was in several ways.

True Cycling Advice

1. turn left on red at 4-way (take a cue from the US) -
i) make sure no cyclists are trying to cut on your inside
ii) make sure no cars going across (it is their right of way)
(check there's no filter light for oncoming to turn right!)
iii) make sure no pedestrians, pets or children within 10 meters
iv) make sure no boy racer nutter is acccelerating behind you to turn left the nanosecond the lights go amber
v) just go.

2. going ahead a t a junction when light is red -
i) Make sure no pedex action
ii) make sure no trucks with extra wide loads crossing
iii) if green box, go to far edge
iv) if yellow box, go about 20% into it
v) when no traffic crossing, just go

3. there are laws, then there's reality:
90% of car drivers ignore green box (its same as yellow box for them)
50% of car drivers turning turning either way fail to signal

this doesn't justify anything, but sure makes you feel less bad:)

4. always have good visibility clothes,
and reasonable (not ultrabright) lights.

and make sure your brakes work.

and own the road space (lane) you are in,
don't hog the kerb, or the parked cars.

everything else on the bike is optional.

5. if you see bad car/bus/taxi driver behaviour
and have a camera (phone)
and feel like you want to take a picture to have evidence
to give (to police, or your mum or your pet cat)
check your escape routes, as some drivers become violent
when their evil is being outed.

cycle carefully.

Peer Production and Post Capitalism - between snark & a boojum

Reading about Post Capital and the proposal by Paul Mason to restructure society around peer production to get rid of the:Precariat which appears not to be able to rise up, on account of Acquiescence causing all such occupy/indignados movements to fizzle out, despite the rediculously offensive Capital++ details.
(indeed, there's a whole other blog entry to be written about how the post modern disruption by surkov is remarkably similar to the US employment of shock doctrine, and the EU follows like a poodle....

Anyhow, I have to disagree with Mason's key idea, which seems to be based on the same false premise as Charles Stross' accelerando, that information markets can exponentiate in "value", and have zero marginal costs, so replace capital or labour systems of value.

The problem is that you cannot eat or drink bits. Bits of information do not fend off rain, snow, tides or enemies. Knowledge doesn't keep you warm, although it may reduce the chances you catch diseases.
The problem is that a knowledge economy is built on the same quicksand and lime as the whole financial service industry - indeed, the financial service instruments are exactly that - pieces of (often faulty) knowledge (algorithms for trading), that do not link either to time (labour) or wealth (capital). In the end, humans have to trade time for money, or money for time.

Plus Mason makes no proposal to solve the social inertia, that humans are either driven by greed (for more toys) or by altruism (wish to be liked == greed for more social capital). A new economy needs to have a sound social basis. Even Russell Brand had at least a better stab at that. Maybe we could just revisit socialism (with modern technology) and see how syndicalism might be made to work (it nearly did in Spain until Franco backed, by the Nazis and unopposed by the Brits or the Russians for shameful reasons, killed it. In a modern world, such a movement might be able to resist the IMF.

The Turing Institute for Data Science

trying to work out which of these two pictures will represent the sort of work the ATI will do most

1/ tamagochi hive mind
or
2/ astro turf wars

answers on a post card...

the naked eye aint wot it used to see

John Berger's ways of seeing  tv series was amazing - not just politically, but visually. everyone should atch it while they can (its >25 years old - makes new kids on the block look very naive) - its a polemic, genius art meets politics piece of criticism which is so much better than No Logo or Shock Doctrine. although I liked those too, albeit they were polemical, but with design instead of added art - hmm - maybe i'm just a polemicophile.

meanwhile, the four eye sage continues. Lft eye has accreted weird stuff in cornea so need laster treetment to restore it to pristine post-cataract post-detached-torn retina state. but the right eye now has vitreous partial detachment, so  might have to go thru same old retina shit if the macular/retina decide they like my vitreous more than my eye sight. great. we'll see. literally. and figuratively. and visually. and metaphorically. and luminously, and demonstrably. the outlook is temporary. the view from in here is, hmm// why dangle. floaters and shiny flashes cross the field, and I am not watching a thunderstorm or a plague of paparazzi.

how long does a vivid imagination outlast a visual reminder? the word, imagination: why is "image" in it? that's my currency. i don;t want to retire, even if it was to play blind lemon pledge for a few years (cue martin simpson joke name for blues guitarist) - would learn to play like this, maybe
ddb

s/IMF/potlatch/globally

There's been some (social) success in micro-loan systems in bailing out developing areas of the world, however, the macro-loan business run by the european central bank and the IMF and other neo-liberal agenda organisations is unacceptable.

Why don't we start a macro-loan potlatch?

Potlatch is a mutual system of gifts which bonds societies together - described in anthropology literature, it existed in particular in the Pacific North West of America between native tribes, and resulted in less war, as well as marriage exchanges (ok, so not necessarily all good) - this would fit the exact  same goal that the EU was created for, but without the complex burocracy and mission creep. Also, without the centralisation and mission creep/capture by capital - instead it would be a syndic. Norway could bootstrap it for Greece (but note, it would not be government or financial service agencies - it would be people-to-people, peer-to-peer)

I think such a mechanism could actually realize a techno-anarcho-syndicalist end-run on the whole neo-con/neo-liberal agenda - if you look at the disposable wealth one could offer, a set of a few million brits could, for example, extend a couple of trillion pounds quite easily. but it wouldn't be brit-to-portugal, but interest group to interest group....

needs some wiki-rules to prevent misbehaviour (but given how much the centralized banks and their alleged regulators like the FSA and the credit rating agencies completely screw up, a child of 3 could come up with something fairer and more stable...

time to invade everyware

My Manifesto for May 7

1. Austerity was always a nonsense idea - Keynes was right, Hayek wrong - during times of trouble, especially when there's the lowest interest rates in history, the government should borrow to run big infrastructure projects -the obvious one in the UK is to build about 500,000 houses per year for the next 10 years. The Harvard economists withdrew the empirical study paper that purported to support austerity (after it was shown to contain trivially wrong spreadsheet calculations) - it is no shameful thing to admit that the governments of Europe (esp. Germany) were wrong in following a bogus policy.

2.  Do not leave the EU- the CBI says so, and it is obvious that all the evidence (from trade and other places) is that we cannot afford to leave - we would cripple our economy. Drop the promise for a referendum, which is just a fig leaf for tories to protect against UKIP - confront the stupidty of UKIP with the sanity of the EU. The EU does not interfere in our sovereign law (proven) and is mainly a net massive contribution to our wealth. And political stability and peace. Sure, a few europeans come here to work and live - see next:

3. Do not change immigration policy. It is fine. there are more people going to the rest of europe on health tourism trips than come here by a factor of 10. THere are nearly as many people emigrate to warmer climes in Europe than come here from old eastern block, now EU, countries. The people that leave are old, expensive NHS drags. The ones that come here contribute massively, didn't cost us anything to educate, and do not especially work for less -t hey are too well educated to take the low end jobs.  Stopping them coming here would cost us money, significant amounts of the education and health services would collapse too. Point out UKIP only say this because they are racist. Point out that there is already a points system for non-EU people who want to come here - its almost impossible to get a work permit for a non-EU immigrant even if they have a PhD in the right topic. Ludicrous nonsense is made up about this. We should also be able to stand more asylum seekers from dangerous parts of the world (syria etc) which might make some of our radicalised people think we aren't actually against them.

4. Scrap trident. Being able to nuke Iran after we are a smoking crater is dangerous nonsense as well as being genocide. Money saved would also help with some of the next few things...

5.  Build lots and lots of houses and other infrastructure. I am really not dogmatic about whether you need to keep the right to buy policy, but would just point out that if you added 5M houses in the bigger cities, the price of housing would fall to something affordable and lots of builders would have been paid, so would be able to afford them too...obviously.

6. Make all education (including higher) free for all. It was for ages - we weren't poorer when we introduced fees, we were richer - we can still afford it. Germany repealed fees. We should too. Scotland has. Everyone benefits from having a better educated population. However, re-introduce the split between more vocational (shorter degree programme) polytechnic degrees and more academic R&D, just for clarity of career path. Note, medical and law degrees should be offered in polytechnics.

7. Progressive tax isn't far wrong. It is probably about right. But it needs to be enforced fairly. Corporation tax likewise. Staying in Europe would help with this (pressurising Switzerland to stop acting as a tax haven and Luxembourg to stop acting as a corporate tax haven) - we should offer that the UK will shut down corporation of london and channel island loopholes in exchange.

8. Pay for the NHS upgrade/funding gap 30B is less than 500 pounds per person - who says this isn't affordable? They are wrong.

9. Pay attention to sustainable energy - we could borrow lots of money against a future we'd then enjoy, by building those two big tidal barrage projects and a bunch of offshore wind farms. There are some downsides, but in the long run, the geo-political reduction in dependence (or is it addiction) to gas and oil from OPEC and Putin's Russia would be a Good Thing for everyone.

10. Move towards social, digital Direct Democracy - the Liquid Demos experiments need to continue til we make them work as engaging. Grass roots movements are breaking out everywhere - give them decision making (hey, even tax raising) powers whenever they show responsibility  - this is the way to reclaim being the Mother of all Parliaments - so we could one day soon say:

"We are all westminster, now."!

post feminism or posthumous feminism - is hi-tech just the new rock and roll?

I've read a lot recently about appalling treatment of women in hi-tech companies (c.f. gamergate). I guess its only surprising if you assume the somewhat dubious rhetoric/narrative that the hi-tech world came out of some sort of Californian hippy past (a very weird narrative if you think about Hewlett/Packard, Microsoft, IBM, and why should Google and Facebook be any different?)
[n.b. education is not immune from this - viz, MIT,  Stanford, and I am sure where I work too...]

So then I started reading some jolly good recent autobiographies starting with
Beverly Martyn's revelations about John Martyn - what a git.
So then I got on to Viv Albertine's great dissection of her life - some hard times - mostly less crap guys, but still some.
Then I read Jah Wobble's Memoirs of a Geezer, which has some extremely funny moments, but some odd views on relationships, although some heroic  stand-in work, similar to John Lydon's tale of waywardness and argumentation, followed by some recovering family work.
Finally (well, most recently) I got Kim Gordon's Girl in the Band (which reminds me, I had read Patti Smith's fantastic Just Kids which is mainly a lament for Robert Mapplethorpe), and see some of the same behaviour.

** update ** - just finished Chrissie Hynde's reckless, self penned autobiography - quite the victim-tale as Beverly Martyn (or elss so, Kim Gordon) - looks like la Hynde was actually the perp in quite a few cases of mayhem, but comes over as caring a lot at least....and surviving (like Albertine) not just, but sucessfully with kids in tow/intact too....some rock tour/music details are quite interesting, although if you really want to know how the music industry works in technical detail, go no further than the master work by David Byrne on the perfectly, simply named, How Music Works.

So what's the common thread? These folks represent a sample of people bought up in US and UK counter culture over the past 50 plus years, and yet, 200 years after Mary Wollestonecraft, there's precious little evidence any of these icon's of our time paid a blind bit of notice to what she said.

So even if the hi-tech sector came out of the counter-culture (which it doesn't) their youth heroes and even mentors were basically a bunch of patronising arseholes.

Really Radical

I realize that the roots of the word "radical" are, errrr, just that - going back to roots. But I really dislike the use of "radicalization" to describe the brainwashing of poor western muslims back to the stone age (except, ironically, happily toting 21st century western weapons).

The idea of being really radical for me summons up the re-wiring of ones roots - the subtle, and careful replacement of medieval assumptions with more nuanced behaviours and affordances, permissions and obligations. There are plenty of examples - having just come back from China, I caught up on some of their history (from 13/14th century) and it is a similar story to ours - highly hierarchical societies with a very strict caste system, a priesthood and a royalty, and 11 strata - every detail of behaviour prescribed - penalties for breaking rules could result in everyone from the top 9 strata in your family/entourage being executed - reading about the Peasants' Revolt in about the same time in England, much the same here.

Moving on through the "Englightenment, the 19th and 20th century saw may radical ideas enacted.
People could take the weekend off.
People got a say in how things were run.
The definition of people included folks from any walk of life, men, women,
non-christians.
We got the right to a fair trial (innocent before being proven guilty).
We got to live in peace without interference in your behaviour in your own home.
We got to expect a fair go at education, health, safety, entertainment, fulfilment.

Along with these fundamental rights (and there are a lot more we enjoy)
we got the right to talk nonsense in public. We got the right not to expect the Spanish Inquisition (literally and figuratively). We got Satire. We got to enjoy (or find excruciating) difference. Diversity. Tolerance. Misdemeanour. Letting your hair down. Eccentricity. Daftness.

Long may we persist - I like to think we were heading towards Iain Banks "Culture" philosophy, and a jolly good thing to.

Meanwhile so-called "radicalized" religious "fundamentalists", hear this: you aren't fundamental or radical. You are superficial, ignorant and lacking in any human spirit.

The Revolution Will Not be Branded

Struggling through Russell Brand's tome whose basic flaws this review nails (poor writing, repetitios, long windied and not terribly funny).

However, there are several ill-matched tropes in the book, which for me, ultimately, completely undermine what might otherwise have been a useful contribution to the debate on what should replace western capitalist "democracy":

1. Mixing up his own already fairly public personal voyage with a rag-bag of quite interesting critiques of the situation in which we are in, largely by other people, distracts from the impact.
I don't care that he's a recovering substance abuser. It isn't relevant to the argument, no matter how much he tries to make of the analaogy between his own and societies' addictions. The personal solution doesn't work for society, and the social problems don't gell with his conspiracy of the illumiati-bus load of ultra-rich. You can't blame other people, no matter how wealthy for your own poor choices. Re-organising society from the bottom up isn't just a matter of better ad-blocking.

2. Repeated use of 4 letter words, both for emphasis (ok use of F word and invective/dismissal of individuals (not ok use of C word), will piss of a lot of readers who are  from a more genteel world, or perhaps are just women, or just think the author should use his imagination to come up with less lazy cusses (think, arab curses, for example - may your mother's milk be long life).

3. Religion - so I see where he's coming from with the personal/spiritual aspect of life - there's a brilliant bit in Ursula Le Guin's genius novel, The Dispossessed, when someone from the capitalist planet asks the visitor from the Anarchist neighbour world "so you don't believe in god?" and he retorts that they are perfectly capable of thinking in the spirtual mode - its just one of seven ways of thinking. (Wish Le Guin had listed the other 6!)

The problem is that he didn't get the same level of expert advice or even decent sound bytes on how you might link social, and economic re- organisation with a spiritual structure that doesn't just end up being the same old organisation with priests and temples, hedge fund managers and casino banks, presidents, senators, lords and  white houses.

Oh, and he picked the wrong kind of yoga.

Some further thoughts
i). Brand is somewhat in-awe of "experts, to the extent where he magically places Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty together on a pedestal - as far as I know, Klein is no more "quafid" than Brand to comment (this is not a criticism of Klein (or Brand) - anyone can read up this stuff) but Piketty has "paid his dues" so is an expert (for what its worth) - what makes Piketty and Klein worth reading is that they put their evidence up for inspection - their books are copiously well supported by facts.

ii) Crucial point is that its clear at some points (about midway through the book, for example) that Brand doesn't live the dream quite - when talking about Bankers Bailout he doesn't join up with the discussion of cancelling indivuduals' debts - the argument used by the right wing is that "if we cancel everyones' debt, they will just stop working so hard, and run up more debts". So if that argument applies to the Hoi Poloi/Jane Q Public/The Great Unwashed, how does it not then apply in spades to bankers? The austerity imposed on great swathes of Europe in the name of sorting out the crisis, which was largely bought about by covering failed casino banks and stupid lenders (not borrowers) is one the most awe-inspiring con-tricks of all time. As some of the smart people are quoted as saying in the book, it was transfer of wealth from the poor (who were also borrowers, to the rich who were already coining it from gigantic bonuses and outrageous interest rates.

The Shakespear line  "neither a borrow nor a lender be" sure is bad advice. Pick one, and make sure its a lender. (Brand does quote various olden time cultural and religious proscriptions against lending, to, errr, give him, errr, credit :)

iii) the book should be free (as well as buyable) - this is known not to affect sales of good books, but sets an example - my colleague, Ross Anderson, wrote the best book on security engineering, and got his publishers agreement to make it free online too without any detectable negative impact on sales (in fact, likely the reverse).

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...