Here's Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2014 conversation on The Well. So I will try this year not to let it get me too wound up and just lurk.
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/473/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html 

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Anyone else fancy this?
http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?546239
https://www.facebook.com/events/230888010414550/
Fri, 31 Jan. Autumn Street Studios, Hackney Wick. 
Live: Flako, Throwing Snow
DJ: Synkro, Ital Tek, Jonny Dub

Alight (Throwing Snow) - Iridis, Synkro - Lost here, Ital Tek - Control, all come highly recommended. And also Akkord and Indigo - Storm.

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9 Reasons Why 2013 Was Not The Best Year In Human History
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/16/3034511/climate-bad-news-2013/

If news about the world's environment scares you, please look away now. Nothing new to see here, move along. It's all doom, but you knew that already. This post is just troll bait. It's not my fault and anyway I won't be around to see it. Carry on regardless and continue to enjoy your SUV and 3rd world fine green beans while you still can. Maybe a 3rd runway and fracking will let us keep our collective feet on the accelerator pedal long enough to do, ugh, what?

Globally, we've probably hit peak kids and the birth rate is now below replacement levels ( Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24835822 ). But people alive now will live longer so total population will continue to grow for a while. It should peak at approximately 11bn and maybe we can grow enough food to avoid too much chaos as it falls back to a sustainable 3bn or so in a few hundred years. It's going to be a bumpy ride but we can get this sucker down on the ground in one piece for a soft landing that most of us walk away from. Or maybe human nature means the best we can hope for are pockets of sanity and not too much attention from the four horsemen.

Here's some stuff that may have happened in 2013 according to the article.
1. Global CO2 levels hit 400 ppm for the first time in recorded history.
2. It's getting hotter, faster. If you think that's on pause, you're looking at the wrong stats.
3. A huge number of animals and plants face extinction.
4. The world suffered deadly heat, drought, and wildfires.
5. Choking pollution shut down population centers.
6. Countries suffer disasters, but still commit to doing even less about emissions.
7. Sea levels broke records, amplifying the effects of storms and floods.
8. Much of the world is going double or quits on fossil fuels.
9. We are woefully under-counting methane emissions.

And I'll add to these,
10. We hit peak fish.
11. A few more multi-drug resistant bacteria appeared

And there's the catch with limited models and modelling. Perhaps population growth doesn't catch up with us, but exponential growth in resource use, energy use and pollution generation still does.

Here's a sound track from back in 1971 in a previous period of strong environmental consciousness. Marvin Gaye's "Mercy Mercy Me" (And it's got a saxophone solo) Marvin Gaye - Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) (Lyrics) Back then, we didn't think we'd last 10 years. Here we are 40 years later and it's all the same, just more so. The models can to be quite good at showing trends but they're not good on timescales. Perhaps in 30 or 40 years time our kids will be having the same conversation with their kids. "We got away with it so far. But it looks like you're screwed. Here's what they said in 2014 and it's still true, just more so."

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One of the joys of New Year's Day:

Getting "Happy Birthday" messages from minor social media systems and forums where you put in your birthday as 1/1/1970.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Jon Lebkowsky has been on social media hiatus for some time now. So I wonder if there'll be a "Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky - State of the World 2014" for me to rant at this New Year. 
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/459/State-of-the-World-2013-Bruce-St-page01.html

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The Bechdel Test

"Does a work of fiction feature at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test

Very, very few pieces of modern entertainment and fiction pass this test. Why is that?

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Happy Wet Solstice!
London Sunrise 08.03, Sunset 15.53, Solstice 17.11 UTC/GMT.

I would have spent the day down the wood but it's windy, wet and miserable.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Scientific Data Disappears At Alarming Rate, 80% Lost In Two Decades. Another data point in the weirdness that is exponential growth. 

So. Data generation is rising exponentially. Total long term storage is rising exponentially, but slower. So it's no surprise that the rate of forgetting data is also rising exponentially.

Yes, folks, we're forgetting more data than ever before.

And that's before you hit the problems of obsolete data formats and data storage mechanisms; EBCDIC data on 8" CPM floppies? Displaywrite 4 on Zip disks? And then there's storage that self destructs. Silent movies on celluloid is one thing, but even CDs degrade eventually.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/12/20/0314239/scientific-data-disappears-at-alarming-rate-80-lost-in-two-decades

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Tor, Paperback
[from: Librarything]

Tor Teen (2012), Hardcover, 384 pages
[from: Librarything]

Tachyon Publications (2013), Paperback, 240 pages
[from: Librarything]

Pavilion (2007), Edition: New edition, Hardcover, 286 pages
[from: Librarything]

Massive London Cycling Protest, 5pm today, TFL Blackfriars rd. Lie Down and Die for Cycling Safety. http://stopthekilling.org.uk/ #TfLDieIn

https://www.facebook.com/events/568751353179586/575917182463003/
http://lcc.org.uk/articles/cycling-protestors-organise-die-in-outside-transport-for-london-office-in-southwark-on-friday-29-november

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Gosh, is it that time again?
William S. Burroughs - A Thanksgiving Prayer
John Dillinger died for somebody's sins but not mine.

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Ping
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AOL, sorry, Winamp finally reaches the end of the line

Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013
http://www.winamp.com/media-player/en

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Seriously. I've repeatedly tried and failed to find anything as good as Winamp Pro and it's one of the very few bits of PC software I've ever paid for. So what now? Looks to me like that's another bit of software I'm going to be carrying on using long after it's died until it finally no longer runs because Microsoft broke some backwards compatibility with Windows 9.5 or something.

It looks like 5.66 is the last release, so download a copy now.

The next question. What are the alternatives and are they any good?

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BoingBoing points to a website that auto-generates descriptions of imaginary pieces of Art based on the dataset of the Tate's catalogue metadata.
http://boingboing.net/2013/11/12/88-nonillion-imaginary-artwork.html
http://www.shardcore.org/cgi-bin/getArtwork.pl?id=18c_1d6_5e_1b_45_3b_1_2_1b_105_20b_147_e_3_15_
http://www.shardcore.org/shardpress/index.php/2013/11/06/tate-data-explorer/
http://www.shardcore.org/shardpress/index.php/2013/11/12/machine-imagined-artworks-2013/

Well, how very Borgesian! We can perhaps imagine the Museum of Babel; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) viz. an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival and one example of the universe of all possible art objects. Even though most of these look like a 3D model of a cat designed by Picasso, some say that every existing piece of art is curated somewhere within the museum. However if the museum is itself an Art, we must postulate the Museum of all possible Museums in a Cantor-ian redux. What troubled Russell and Whitehead and as Godel ratified, this leads us inexorably to the conclusion that all museums must contain Art that cannot be described using the system of artistic analysis implicit in their catalogues.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

That's 2 years without cigarettes. And pretty much zero nicotine.
[from: Google+ Posts]

'Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
'He’s a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

Remember, today; "Never again". Never.
[from: Google+ Posts]

BT Sport covering mon-tue testing.

And there's a hint that Julian Ryder has jumped ship from Eurosport to BT as he's written a preview for them.

http://sport.bt.com/moresporthub/motogp/motogp-showdown-expect-the-unexpected-S11363846885196
http://sport.bt.com/moresporthub/motogp/bt-sport-to-cover-live-motogp-testing-S11363847629122

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