The Blog




Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are universal characteristics of the human condition.

http://guerillascience.org/book/

Were it not for our supposedly ‘base’ impulses, we never would have achieved many ground-breaking scientific discoveries. Hedonism has been integral to intellectual progress.
 Sex Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll – Guerilla Science »
Guerilla Science create events and installations for festivals, museums, galleries, and other cultural clients. We are committed to connecting people with science in new ways, and producing live experiences that entertain, inspire, challenge and amaze.

[from: Google+ Posts]




Apparently the CMax II is for sale.
http://bikeweb.com/files/images/cmax%20leaves%203%20small.preview.jpg

Sale details here. http://bikeweb.com/node/2909
Bike details here: http://bikeweb.com/image/tid/114

T-Max III, Volvo seat, occasional 2 seater and large luggage area. Faster (maybe!), safer, warmer, more comfortable than a conventional T-Max.

Not sure I can afford it. It's likely to be priced to reflect the work rather than cheap because it's unusual.

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“It was the year they tried to Immanentize The Eschaton.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/immanentizing-eschaton.html
 Immanentizing the Eschaton »
“It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton.” With those words Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea kicked off their brilliant parody of American conspiracy culture, the Illuminatus! trilogy. When I heard last...

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I hate it when good services on the internet go dark and disappear.

There used to be a wonderful tool for exploring music space at http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/ It gathered data from last.fm and Discogs about related artists and presented it in a Java applet spider diagram.

Now it redirects to an EMI Hosting holding page and that sucks.

There's analternative one here http://www.liveplasma.com/ that's not bad but it's not the same.

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Well, well. So the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless, unscientific bullshit. There's a surprise! I wonder how many other cod-psych tests are the same and have about as much 2014 relevance as astrology or palm reading.
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless
via http://boingboing.net/2014/07/16/myers-briggs-personality-test.html
 Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless »
It's no more scientifically valid than a BuzzFeed quiz.

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John Doran (TheQuietus editor) playing DJ in an open air car park just off Old Street. Wed evening, 16 July. I think it's free but not sure.

http://thequietus.com/articles/15674-red-market-subject-wednesdays-dj-programme 

https://www.facebook.com/events/298139427021855/
http://www.subjectyourself.co.uk/
http://www.redgallerylondon.com/
 The Quietus | News | Red Market: S U B J E C T Wednesday »
The Quietus' John Doran and more announced to play open-air venue

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Utopia returns on UK Channel 4  on Monday and Tuesday (14/15 July) next week. Don't miss it.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/utopia
 Utopia - Channel 4 »
When a group of strangers find themselves in possession of the manuscript for a legendary graphic novel, their lives brutally implode as they are pursued by a shadowy and murderous organisation...

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Ace (2014), Hardcover, 368 pages
[from: Librarything]




Today's neologism is :-

Apocaloptimist

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/01/seven-good-reasons-to-be-an-apocaloptimist
 Seven good reasons to be an apocaloptimist »
Andrew Simms: The climate clock is still ticking – yet there are incredible opportunities to make things better

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Is your favourite site blocked by your UK ISP?
https://www.blocked.org.uk/

There's at least two things going on here.

1) Sites blocked by "Adult Filters" that are defaulted on by the major ISPs but can be turned off. This might be an obvious porn site but could also be collateral damage. For instance These have included a website selling Porsches, a Jezebel article on post pregnancy care and the women's rights website SheRights.com

2) Sites blocked because somebody, somewhere disagrees with them. This is often because the site has something to do with sharing paid entertainment such as the Pirate Bay or New Album Releases. These are blocked regardless of whether you've disabled your "Adult Filter".

You can often get round these blocks via automated proxies like the one at https://immunicity.org/

Won't anyone think of the kittens? Thank goodness that Claire Perry and David Cameron are thinking of them for us. /s
 Are you being blocked? »
The government is promoting filters to prevent children and young people from seeing content that is supposed to be for over 18s. This includes pornography and sites that talk about alcohol, smoking, anorexia and hate speech.

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So, farewell then, Orkut
http://en.blog.orkut.com/2014/06/tchau-orkut.html

10 Years ago, there was a rush to invite your friends and sign up to each new social network (remember Ryze, Tribe, Pownce, Jaiku, Plaxo, Plazes, Xing, among others? [1]). +Marc Canter invited me to Orkut and I joined just days after it launched. For a a few months I created and moderated 4 communities and put effort into them, before drifting away. Then Google took it over and later combined the logins. And in the process I lost my profile and somebody else hijacked my communities. It took ages to recombine my profiles but I never did manage to retrieve the groups. Like this one. https://www.orkut.com/Main#Community?cmm=292 It's still got my words and the image I added to it.

I know Orkut gets ignored in the USA and UK, but it's still huge in South America and especially Brasil. And note of course that it is still much richer in terms of functionality than G+, especially around the communities. 

So where will G+ be when it's 10 years old?

Meanwhile the mailing lists I started on Yahoogroups in the last millennium are still going strong. At least 15 years and counting.

[1] Also remember RDF. FOAF[2], Semantic Web, the RSS 1.0 wars.
[2] DnaCheckSum as a proof of ID is nearly here! http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_dnaChecksum
 Tchau Orkut - Orkut Blog »
The latest news from the orkut team

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Series 2 of Orphan Black has been fairly irritating compared with Series 1.  But most irritating has been it's airing on BBC America in the USA 10 days before BBC3 in the UK. Which means spoiler headlines on several sites I read, at least once a week on what for me is next week's episode. If the BBC can do globally synced Dr Who, why not their other global properties? 

I see Utopia is coming back for a second series next month. Hooray! But will they have screwed it up because series one was perfect right up to the last 5 minutes. But then I've lost count of the number of TV dramas that had you entranced until the final wrap up which ended up being too obvious. eg, Shadowline. But not Fargo. That was just perfect!
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So who was flying a big drone quadrocopter above Stonehenge in the hour before sunrise on the Solstice day? It had two green and two red lights on it to show orientation and seemed to be pretty fast and powerful. Was it:-
- An enthusiast
- A journalist from a TV or newspaper
- The Police playing with their latest crowd surveillance toy
- The (Salisbury Plain) military playing with their latest recon toy

And yes, Stonehenge was a laugh. Just a bit different from '74, '75, '76, '81 when I've been before. Although crowd control was pretty organised, it's a fairly acceptable compromise that keeps a lid on the mayhem with the actual presence from the authorities being hidden in the background and pretty low key. That was an exhausting 36 hours though!

There's a certain amount of conflict between the people who just want to have a party and those who want to use the spiritual baggage of the place to change their brain state through the power of dressing up, music and dance. I lean towards the first, mainly because I don't really understand the second and keep trying to rationalise it. Getting upset because there are too many people not showing proper respect does seems a little pointless though, on that night, in that place.
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If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the excluded middle.
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The "Beckham goes to the rain forest" documentary on BBC was quite entertaining. But would you choose a custom Triumph Bonneville for that trip and then ride with almost no safety gear or even a jacket? This isn't Shoreditch High Street, you know.

http://blog.motorcycle.com/2014/06/10/celebrity/david-beckham-rides-custom-triumph-bonneville-amazon-rainforest/
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Where can I go to find definitive maps of UK council and district boundaries?

Because I've just run up against a problem where there's some fly-tipping practically underneath a "No Fly Tipping" sign. The sign is put up by one district council with one phone number but it turns out the site is well within the boundary of another district with a different reporting phone number.

If I follow this up to find the maps, I get put through to some obscure land registry department in the councils and still can't get the information. I've tried this with both district offices and the county council offices. As far as I can tell the Ordnance survey maps don't have these boundary markings either.

Meanwhile the fly tip waste is still there 2 weeks later. It's household builder's waste, some of it in rubble sacks. Why, how? It's on a Restricted Byway with quite a lot of walker, bicycle, horse traffic. And yet none of them seem to want to report it or do anything about it. So is this a society problem, council problem or landowner problem? Who's supposed to deal with it? And equally, who's job is it to maintain the track and keep the overgrowth under control?
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Is that it for http://last.fm ? It's 3 days now and counting and it's still down.
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From my privileged position I get to read Rudolph Rocker on Anarcho-Syndicalism, and laugh ironically at Dilbert making fun of the capitalist system. Without worrying too much about having enough to eat or having adequate health care.

Dilbert: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/LOTM-elbonians-via-gen-alpha.jpg

Rocker: The portentous development of our present economic system ... sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined a true relationship between men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Rocker

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Did you forget about Woodfest 2014 on Sat 14 June? Just off the A10, just N of the M25.

If you didn't get an invite then drop me a line.

https://www.facebook.com/events/234905970046933/
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I do have a special weakness for deep future speculation inspired by a lifetime of reading SciFi. It brings a little perspective to present day here and now issues. The problem is that my consciousness won't see any of it.

So what might the Earth look like in a couple of hundred thousand years? From the perspective of whatever hominids are still around; assuming they are still around.

If 200,000 years (Homo Sapiens) is too near term, how about 2 million (Hominids), or 20 million (Primates)?

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2014/06/deep-future-ultimate-destiny-of.html
 Deep Future: the ultimate destiny of humankind »
In the 1950s, we knew what the future would be: an age of prosperity and unprecedented wonders. Energy too cheap to meter, flying cars, vacations on the moon, and the conquest of space. Then, space heroes would return to Eart...

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