Bank Holiday Monday - Kite Flying in Shoeburyness

I thought I'd blow the cobwebs away by taking the camera to Shoeburyness to take advantage of the good light we've been having. There's always some kite-surfers off the shore, and a school practices there, but today there were loads. I walked around and took some quite good snaps:

3D Despicable Me 2

Out on the 22nd June. I can't wait!

I've also found this clip of weapons testing:

New Lego - Bad Hair Day

I got some new series 10 today and looks very bad for someone:

An Amazon and a Gorgon (but it's all Greek to me!). I also found a shop which still sells previous series:

The Black Knight looks like he could start a fight in an empty room, and as the old proverb goes: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he becomes an Eskimo.

Oxfam Tuesday - Mobile Phones and Jimmy Cliff

I've finished my exams for the year yesterday, so I was more than glad when Mark asked me to do an afternoon shift at the shop.

It was upstairs, so I got to see Lee on my way out. He was serving a customer who I'd had some problems with a few weeks ago. One of the records he'd bought was scratched and he wanted to have it replaced. Fine. Normally I just either do a refund, find a replacement or have them pick out something of equivalent value. A happy customer is a returning customer. He was a bit funny with me, though, and wanted to listen to the record to see if it was scratched. I didn't know much about the hi-fi in the back and told him as much. He'd obviously told Lee the same story and got his way, playing some C&W stuff. Lee wasn't exactly happy with him either, but he was more philosophical than I.

Other than that, the shift was uneventful. I did get to play some old ska and reggae tunes on the player including this Jimmy Cliff classic:

When the shift ended, we were all setting off to leave when Cherie said that her mobile phone had just started ringing before she had taken her bag out of the locker. It was from someone who was telling her that they'd forgotten their sweater this morning. At one time, I said, people only used the phone when someone had died, or had accepted a proposal of marriage. Now it's whether they've got a headache. Or not, sometimes.

Source Code

Although it's been available through my subscription to LoveFilm for a while now, I ended up watching it on Film4 the other day.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who repeatedly lives the last eight minutes of another man's life in an effort to identify the bomber of a train before another, larger, bomb is detonated.

It's a romantic sci-fi/time-travel thriller about having second chances. The plot is a good one (a kind of techno-thriller version of Groundhog Day) and Gyllenhaal handles the role competently, but the support is good too, especially his "handler", played by Vera Farmiga. A superior pizza movie.

Oxfam Friday - "I thought this was the music shop?"

Another Friday morning at the shop, but this time on the bottom deck as June was in Linconshire, visiting.

Georgina was upstair playing a 1980's hits collection (she has a thing for Rick Astley). Most of it was trash, but there was the odd gem:

Weird hearing it IN German.

You do get the odd customer as well, and today was no exception. A chap came in, confused somewhat, and asked for "Dave or Ryan". Dave's our music expert, and Mark seemed to know who Ryan was, but this chap was after a guitar strap as his had broke the previous night at a gig. We couldn't help him, but "There's always the  the music shop next door (Allegro Music)". "I thought this was the music shop!!", he said. "No, mate. This is a book shop. It's the books on the walls that give it away", and he departed, perplexed. Seriously.

Being downstairs amongst the hoi polloi, I got to witness the low intensity conflict between Michelle and John "I don't look for trouble, it finds me" McCarthy. They were arguing over shelf space again when Mark waded in and sided, as much as he could, with John. After it had died down, John remarked to Michelle, "Look, there's a bit of space on this shelf.", to which I warned him that if he didn't watch himself he'd end up going through the front window, "lying sprawled on the pavement outside surrounded by broken glass and copies of Ulysses!"

Tuesday - Iron Man 3 in 3D

Being cheap Tuesday at Empire cinemas, I thought I'd take a rest from my studies and go and see Iron Man 3 in 3D.

Dunno. I thought the plot was a little all over the place, trying to be complicated and instead just being long winded. I also don't think that references to The Avengers helped either, because the assumption is that you saw that film (Is this Avengers 1.5 or was that Iron Man 2.5?). Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) was as cute as ever, even more so when she's annoyed, but it felt as if they were trying too hard. Ben Kingsley was really funny as The Mandarins' alter ego, and he stole the scenes right out from under Robert Downey Jr. Guy Pierce was also enjoying himself as Stark's nemesis, Aldrich Killian.

The problem I had with all the suits was probably the engineer in me: I wanted to know what they were all for and how they worked. Maybe more is less in this case. As for it being in 3D, well, that was a treat, but it didn't seem to add to the occasion much.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Yesterday I attended the presentation given by Amnon Eden and David Pearce at Birbeck hosted by The London Futurists.

The initial part of the presentation, given by Amnon, a lecturer in Computer Studies at The University of Essex, was a review of the book, a collection of academic essays regarding what the singularity is and the current state of research into the subject. It was an interesting talk, especially one of the criticisms written by Eric Chaisson from Harvard. The talk was mostly regarding the machine aspect of the singularity, and he showed this video of a DARPA experiment:

The second part of the talk, by David Pearce, was about the consequences of enhancing human intelligence and that trying to enhance machine intelligence may be flawed by the inability to overcome the binding problem. This is where our brains take sensory input, shapes, textures, colour, etc., and create an inner representation of the outside world, something that is a fundamental part of consciousness but is difficult to program into a machine.

The presentation was very good and the Q&A lively, as usual, but marred somewhat by the heating in the basement, which was oppressive.

Oxfam Friday - Barn Owl, Charlie Parr and The Duritti Column

Doing a Friday morning shift at the shop, which was a welcome tonic after another week of college work, I was upstairs and played a few freebee's I had lying around Chez Lemon.

Although the best was the old blues album, with the usual haunting track by Robert Johnson, the most interesting was Strange Brew, with tracks by Barn Owl (The Long Shadow) and Charlie Parr. I couldn't find a decent video of the track I listened to (Jesus is a Hobo) on Youtube, but I found this instead which is pretty good.

I also listened to The Durutti Column, a Manchester post-punk band that never got the same recognition as New Order or The Smiths. This has got Johnny Marr in there somewhere:

New Lego - Revolution

I've got some new lego from series 10, and it's revolutionary!

He doesn't look happy. Maybe he needs a cup of tea?

As you can see, I also got a grandad and a baseball player.

New Lego - New Series

Series 10 of the current run of Lego Minifigs has been issued and I've got two new ones, a Centurion and a Skydiver:

The Roman looks like he's about to poke someone's eye out with his Gladius.

As well as the usual type of figures there is a remote chance of finding a unique figure, Mr Gold, one of only 5000!

Oxfam Friday - New Bands and Old

I did a morning shift today up on the top deck and, after a week of frentic college activity, it was a fine tonic. I played one of the freebee albums off Mojo magazine from August 2009 called New Harvest:

And a jolly fine selection it is. One of the best tracks is also the first, Fools from The Dodos:

There was also fine tracks by Ventiver, D.M. Stith (Thanksgiving Moon, which is delightful), Iron and Wine, and this one from Akron/Family:

They did Gone Beyond a while back which was was a joyously riotous.

Dave, our music expert, has put some collectable 7" vinyl in a box to one side and I was leafing through them when I spotted some old Smiths singles, including this classic:

And it's the original issue, with "Jeane" on the B-side. There's been a few covers over the years, but I rather like this one from The Skints.

Camden - The Game

DriveThru RPG are promoting their new card games site called DriveThru Cards. You can either download the cards, and print them yourself, or order them printed from the 'States, for a rather hefty postage. One of the free one's available is Camden, based on the market. Yeah, that Camden.

It's a tile-laying game from Gamesmith. Seems okay, and any game based on a place I've actually worked in must be worth a look.

Talking 'bout the End of the World - Assessing Major Risks, with Anders Sandberg

Today, I've been up to Birbeck to see the lecture by the affable Anders Sandberg regarding existential risks to the human race i.e. what's going to be the most likely thing to make us go the way of the dinosaurs, and how can we prevent it.

Anders works for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and the presentation was a very wide ranging talk on risk assessment for the human race.

In particular, he showed that most of the risks in the past have been self inflicted, or intrinsic, notably disease, war and totalitarian regimes. The best way of combating the last two is good, transparent and accountable government. Easy.

He also showed that when measuring the occurrence of disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, there's something he called a "Large, Long Tail". If you look at a graph of the incidences of, say, meteorite impacts, there's a large number of small ones, and a small number of large ones, but that this "tailing off" of numbers is a lot larger and longer that people suppose.

He made a comment on one of his Oxford colleagues, a quantum physicist, who believes so strongly in parallel worlds that he always buys a lottery ticket because, even if he loses in this universe, in another he's won!

Overall, it was a fine and entertaining lecture on the fifth floor again, with a lively Q&A afterwards.

Wrath of the Titans

A sequel to Clash of the Titans, this has an actual Titan in it, Chronos.

Perseus is forced out of retirement to rescue his father, Zeus, after he has been imprisoned by Hades, Lord of the Underworld, and Ares, God of War.

Although a good pizza film, it is inferior to the last one. Neeson and Fiennes seem to enjoy themselves as brothers Zeus and Hades (good casting getting Ralph Fiennes to play the morose God of the Dead), and the special effects are up to scratch, especially the Cyclops's and the amazing labyrinth. However, the film seems to be shorter and have less effort put in to it.

Oxfam Tuesday - All Conquering Literature

I did a morning shift at the shop and Anne had left John in charge, so much giggling ensued. I'd no sooner took my coat off than he was pointing out to me that last week his section, Literature, pulled in more money that Michelle's Fiction! "You're in trouble already", I said. "It's only by £3.50", he pointed out, to which I rejoinered, "About the price of a Booker Prize winner!" (the agreement he had with Michelle was to give her some Booker Prize winners that were popular, noteably Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel).

He'd also sold me a couple of Penguin Specials:

Not wartime, but not bad.

Emmet

While in discussion with a fellow student, he pointed me in the direction of something called "Emmet". It's a plug-in for, well in my case Notepad++ (at college) and Brackets (at home). What it does is, at the touch of a shortcut key, transform something like this:

div#main>ul>li*3>a.link

into this:

 <div id="main">
  <ul>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
   <li><a href="" class="link"></a></li>
  </ul>
 </div>

Very handy, and the syntax is similar enough to CSS to be able to remember.

Sunday Games Club - Orbiter, Fiefdoms and The Last Council

For a change, I went along to the London Playtest meet-up at the Jugged Hare pub near Victoria Station:

It's a nice pub! The group was upstairs and is unusual in that the games played have not yet been published.

Fiefdoms

This is the first of two games by Adam Taylor.

It's a little board game with dice dictating which row and column you can place either workers or armies (the little man figures borrowed from Carcassonne, called "meeples"). Armies can attack one-another and the game ends when someone runs out of armies to place. You win by the points you've scored placing your pieces on certain tiles. A nice little game and easy to play.

Orbiter

Another game from Adam, this was a card game with robots. The robot cards are arranged in a grid, with a planet card in the centre. An indicator circles the planet controlled by a 4-sided dice:

It was a really fast game, over in a few minutes, and fun to play. The point scoring was a little complicated, however (maybe a problem if it's aimed at kids), and one of the players couldn't make a move on his first turn, which seemed a little dissonant. These were minor quibbles, though, and it has real promise. Adam runs a small web site which publishes games for download.

The Last Council

After a small break, and a shuffle around, I played The Last Council designed by J.P. Treen.

It's based on a post-apocalyptic local council meeting (a certain amount of black humour is involved) with the players battling dwindling resources as well as each other.

J.P. said that each time he'd had it play tested he'd had to alter it and it is quite a complex game. It's quite a good game when you get going, but play was cut short by discussions about the game itself. Shame.

Rectify

A while ago, there was a TV series called Life, starring Damien Lewis, who has gone on to do Homeland with more success. It was about a man who'd been jailed for a multiple murder and released on DNA evidence. In a similar vein is Rectify from the Sundance Channel.

Now, I'd never even heard of the Sundance Channel, but this looks quite good. A slow burner.

Insurance

Amongst the post this morning was the house insurance details, renewed every year. Normally, I pay it no heed, but I just happened to glance at the booklet enclosed with it that details changes to the policy.

...the exclusion relating to War has been amended to add mutiny and military rising...

Mmmm... bit odd, but nice to know.

Thursday - Python User Group Meeting

I haven't been to any of the Skills Matter meetings for a while, not since last year at least, so I thought I'd go along to a user group meeting that I'd not attended before. I've used Python a bit for automating tasks, but nothing too heavy duty.

The first talk was just a warm up. Paul Brian tried to talk about... well, nothing in particular, really. "Relying on frameworks too much is a bad thing", "Learn to be better coders"... Platitudes, essentially. He threw in some comparisons with the advent of the printing press, which was poorly thought out and seemed meaningless. It put me in mind of an old expression: better to stay silent and let people think you are a fool that open your mouth and remove all doubt.

The next was a bit more entertaining. Kris Saxton talked about using the Salt framework to manage automation across multiple servers. He demonstrated simple tasks and, in particular, rollout of code automatically across multiple servers. Nice.

I departed towards the end of his talk as I had a long way back home and it was a pretty full day, anyway, so I missed the talk by Emil Vaughn on Cython, an enhanced version of standard Python.

Tuesday - At The Pictures To See Oblivion

With no shift at the shop, and trying to take a break from college work, I went to see the new Tom Cruise movie, Oblivion, at the Empire on the Bas-Vegas Strip i.e. Festival Park.

After an alien invasion of Earth, and war, two people monitor and maintain drones in preparation for leaving the planet, but all is not as it seems.

Kind of a disaster aftermath movie, the special effects are very good and I especially liked the design, which was all minimalist: the "bubble" aircraft and the drones impressed, but the cool house in the clouds appealed the most. Cruise does a good enough job, but Morgan Freeman acts him off the set easily enough and it's the ladies, especially Andrea Riseborough as his partner (although Olga Kurylenko is pretty good as well), who really shine, as well as being good eye-candy.

The plot is serviceable enough, although a machine intelligence who can't do basic airport security seems a bit implausible, and the depiction of a devastated Earth sends the odd shiver. That's the thing I came away with: the coldness of the movie. From the minimalist architecture and design to the barren wastes of the planet. Worth seeing, though.

Iron Man 3

Delayed due to a funeral, it should be out next week:

It's in 3D, for the first time, and quite right too. Yummy!

Nice to see Gwyneth wearing a suit.

Prometheus

Sort-of a prequel to Alien, an expedition ship, The Prometheus, lands on a alien planet looking for the origins of life.

It's been so long since there was an Aliens film (I don't count the AVP films as they were crap), that just the existence of the film, and that it's Ridley Scott directing it, is enough to get my attention. It's all a bit grisly, as you'd expect, but it does have great special effects, with all the Giger touches, and a few answers as to who the big aliens were in the original film. You won't want to eat any calamari for a while, though.

Internet of Things

This evening, I went along to a meeting of the Internet of Things (IoT), London. This took the form of a show case of technological innovations as part of Imperial College's Urban Prototyping Festival.

There were drinks and dim-sum (nice) and it was generally urbane and hi-tech. One firm, Quick2Wire, had a set of small boards that they used to daisy-chain sensor boards together:

The board at the top, an interface board, is attached to a Raspberry Pi (very popular at the moment). Off this is a kind of "booster" board called a Port Extender, which also does some signal processing, then the next board (an A-D converter) has a light sensor. When you covered the sensor, the light bar on the interface board at the top decreased. The second extender at the bottom interfaces directly with another display, worked from the PC attached to the Pi. The advantage of using the Raspberry Pi, as the chap doing the demonstration told me, was that it could multi-thread these two tasks as it was running Linux.

Another display was from the Open University. This showed the contents of their My Digital Life course, which looks pretty cool.

Students are provided the hardware and download a version of MIT's Scratch, which I mentioned in a previous entry, to program. All-in-all, quite impressive.

I had a quick walk around and had a brief look at the other displays, but they were very much of a muchness. It was all a little bit mundane; middle class and domestic, I thought (more than a few projects were for energy saving). I had thought that the future would be a little grander than this. Maybe when the technology got smaller, the ideas did too?

As for whether these things will result in a resurgent U.K. economy, it's worth remembering that the bulk of these (all the above, for example) are made in China. Only Arduino boards are made elsewhere (Italy). Again, as so often in our history, we may have the ideas, but others will take them and build on them. In the past that was America, now it's the Far East.

A14 and The Living Dead

I was heading back from Wales after visiting relatives and to get back to Bas-Vegas I travel down the A14/M11. Someone has put some graffiti on an old disused building which epitomised the news awaiting me when I landed:

I have often wondered when Mrs Thatcher would finally shuffle off and join her husband in that great golf club in the sky, assuming there is one and that's where she's gone. Although I'm not quite as acerbic as Pete Wylie, as an old socialist, I couldn't abide the woman. She tried to make this country live in the past, and that's always a mistake. The future may be a frightening and uncertain place, but you have to face it and either shape it or be prepared to be shaped by it.

There was a documentary by Adam Curtis about the subject called The Attic, part of the Living Dead series.

I quite like the bit at the end where she falls asleep half-way through one her own speeches.

As for her legacy, well I think we have a more self-centred, venal society. As Oscar Wilde once put it, we know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". Whether that would have happened anyway is debatable, and maybe she just happened to be in charge at the time, but she didn't do anything to prevent it. She divided this country, or reinforced the divisions that were already there, rather than trying to overcome them. The graph below, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies via The New Statesman website, shows inequality of incomes on year between 1979 and 2008.

As for her much vaunted popularity, you've got to remember that Churchill lost more elections than he won and was a terrible peacetime politician (one of the worst Chancellors of the Exchequer of the 20^th Century). My grandmother, of that between-the-wars generation, said he was a war-monger (he was in charge of the Galippoli campaign, in which many men from my home town died). Tony Blair won three elections and look how he turned out.

Another thing that has occurred to me is that previously Prime Ministers and other politicians had looked upon their role as a duty that came with being one of an elite, either socially (with the Conservatives and Liberals) or intellectually (Labour). Mrs Thatcher was neither (a grocer's daughter with a Chemistry degree). She seemed to have one eye on her place in history, and this seems to have infected subsequent leaders, especially Tony Blair. This falls in with Churchill's view of history, that it is a history of Great Men (or Women), a simplistic, cardboard-cutout view. This is only one view of history and misses out, or minimises, the others which are just as valid if not more so. Plus when politicians do this they seem to forget why they are there: just run the damn country without screwing it up. That would be enough of an achievement.

Oh, go on then, Pete, if you MUST... (sorry for the language, but he's a scouser).

Coda: amidst all the comments from both right, left and middle is this fitting piece from Russell Brand, via Boing Boing, in the Guardian.

New Lego - An Oscar!

I got some new Lego the other day.

This is still series 9, so the odds have increased to 16 - 3 (just over 5 - 1) against me finding another one I haven't got. Not as good odds as the Grand National winner this year (66-1!). I also got some from series 8 as well the other day:

The one on the right looks a little ruff!

GUTS

Many moons ago, I used to play Quake, one of the oldest FPS's. I wasn't particularly good at it, poor reflexes, but it was one of the first games which allowed "modding" (modifying). Mods are custom patches to the game which allow you to change it. Typically, these are extra maps to roam around in or "skins" allowing you to change the look of your character in the game, but there were some very clever mods, such as 'bots that created artifical opponents for you to play against, that were good enough to be included into the main game by the developers. I did one or two maps for Quake that were so-so before I gave up, as I'm prone to do.

Fast forward to today and I got a little message through Steam that there was a modding editor for Torchlight II available, called GUTS.

So if you've got the game and you fancy having a go, why not try to change it!

Oxfam Monday - Socialism! (and Reindeer)

Open again on the Bank Holiday, I did a "full" double-shift (10:30AM - 3:30PM). I was upstairs to start with (yay!) and I hunted around for something different to play, or at least reliable. In doing so, I found one of those rare jewels of an album called "Son of Evil Reindeer", by The Reindeer Section, a kind of Scottish Indie supergroup formed from other bands around at the time as a kind of one-off. They did two albums, but this is the one I liked the best.

I also got to play some early Louis Armstrong. Obviously, I couldn't find film of any of the tracks, but I found this one which is rather good.

I ended the shift downstairs amongst the books and got engaged with two regulars who were talking about a debate one of them attended regarding socialism and the Labour Party. It was fascinating stuff, but the attendee said he felt that the debate had descended into a kind of "theological" discussion. He also told us of a debate he attended by C.L.R. James.

Budgie Video

My brother-in-law has posted a video on Facebook of my sister's budgie, Faure, playing with his toys. Not to be outdone, I've made a little video of mine doing their little hat trick:

You wouldn't believe how long it took me to do this!

Good Friday = Oxfam Friday

Yes, folks, we were open all hours today (10:30AM - 3:30PM). When I arrived to do an afternoon shift, John and Michelle, mortal enemies normally, were engaged in heated discussion. Turns out they were hammering out an agreement regarding each others surplus and, as usual, what defines "literature". John has wandered over into Michelle's area a little as he now has two sub-catagories, classic sci-fi and transatlantic literature. No sooner had Michelle departed than Anne pulled him over and pointed out to him that if any agreement with Michelle turned sour she wasn't going to be too pleased to have to sort it out. I mentioned to him afterwards that he was in trouble with two women today, all before one o'clock. He did manage to make an odd sale though. Someone wanted a lot of old Penguin books to make their wedding book-themed and were going to have old paperbacks as decorations for the various tables. £30 for as many copies.

I also spotted some old W40K Codexes that someone had donated and bought them. There were a little worn, but OK otherwise and averaged £4 each. Nice:

The Return of The Man With The Expanding Brain

Today I went along to to see Andrew Vladimirov give his second lecture in what looks like becoming a series entitled "Hacking Your Wetware", hosted by the London Futurists.

For a change, we were up amongst the Gods on the fifth floor of Birbeck College, rather than the basement. This was because there were fewer attending, fifty-odd as opposed to a hundred-and-fifty-odd. Cosy, plus what would have been a view had the weather been more pleasant:

The presentation was very similar to last time with Andrew blasting us with brain biochemistry that would have Crick and Watson reeling. For those who didn't attend last time, he gave a recap, concentrating on the criteria he uses for gauging whether a particular method is effective in enhancing the brain's intelligence. To use an electronic metaphor, increasing the strength of the signals, increasing the number of signals and reducing the noise interfering with the signals.

His talk this time was to do with physical methods rather than chemical. He detailed auditory and visual methods, including ultrasound and the use of infrared lasers, which you stick up your nose. This is because that's where the bone of the skull is thinnest and it's also quite close to the Hippocampus, the part(s, you've two) of the brain that govern the processing of short-term memory into long term.

He then detailed transcranial electrical stimulation, beginning with direct current (tDCS). This is an old method, one originally worked on by Charles Darwin:

You stick a cathode on one side and an anode on the other and put 9v across your head (there's a bit more to it than that, but not much). Done right, there are some measurable results. He then detailed the use of alternating currents, both waves (tACS) and pulses (tPCS). He finished by giving a demonstration of measuring brain waves (his) when stimulated by certain auditory frequencies, specifically the "Om" frequency:

This is supposed, by Eastern mysticism, to be the sound that created the Universe and he's detected it's effect on the part of the brain that's associated with a deep, meditative state.

All-in-all, it was an informative and entertaining presentation.

Oblivion

Pretty much from out of nowhere, there's this intriguing new film out next month:

Might be pretty awsome in 3D!

Banlieue 13 - Ultimatum

The heroes from the first film are called upon to save District 13 again:

Pretty much a repeat of the first film, but with a simpler plot. David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli reprise their roles and the action is as intense as the first, with a lot of martial arts and parkour.

I don't know about you, but I find it oddly comforting that the French love martial arts almost as much as we do, and some of my favourite action films come from across the Channel, especially Brotherhood of the Wolf.

Alien Invasion - on Rollerskates

I've got two new Lego minifigs today, an Alien Invader and a roller girl:

They both look angry enough to start a fight in an empty room.

Here's a thing. How lucky was I that I got these two, which I didn't already have, given that I already had ten unique figures and there are sixteen in this series? It should, I recon, have been 8-3 each, or 5⅓-1 together. Now the odds are 4-1, so should I get two at a time or one? Would it make a difference?

College Thursday - Pope Eric

One of the chaps on the course is Roman Catholic and we've been discussing the recent resignation and election of Popes. He was saying that, in theory, any Catholic can become Pope. I couldn't resist and for the last few weeks I've been calling him Pope Eric the First, but Pope Francis got the job in the end. By coincidence, the third season of The Borgias is out in the 'States after Easter.

Cor, blimey! It was all a bit racy in Rome!

Oxfam Tuesday - Hat's Off To The Thief

Anne asked me to do the afternnon shift at the shop. It was absolutely freezing upstairs and I spent most of the shift slumped against the radiator, which was turned on full blast. Lee had left a soul/blues compilation on the CD player and it had some rather good Nina Simone:

The most annoying thing about the shift was that we had some old 78's pinched. Dave had put some on a shelf near the till and a rather shifty-looking chap was examining them. I told him that there were some more nearby, but he said that he didn't like the look of them as they had price labels on (Hmmmm...). Anyhoo, another customer asked me to look for something away from the till, and when I looked around he was gone, along with the 78's. Bizarrely, in his haste, he'd left his hat, so I stappled a note on it to the effect that whoever wanted the hat back had stolen the 78's, a description of the culprit and his possible accomplice (the woman who'd distracted me at the too coincidental moment).

After today's bad luck, I wonder what will the rest of the week be like?. Maybe I should ask a fortune teller?

Snow Time

It's been snowing at Chez Lemon and Essex has a light covering, like the rest of the East Coast. I wonder what the traffic is like...

Saturday - Touristing in London Town

I thought I'd blow the cobwebs off a bit today and went for a walk in London.


View Larger Map

It was all a bit meandering, but one shop I do like to browse is Daunt Books in Cheapside, not far from St Mary-le-Bow Church. It's one of the few independents left in the City and has a delightful sprung floor, like walking on the deck of a ship. I bought a pub guide to London, published by CAMRA:

I walked down Fleet Street and took in some of the architecture, notably the art deco of the Daily Express building:

I noticed that there seem to be a lot of clocks in Fleet Street:

The first is Gog and Magog outside St. Dunstan-in-the-West and the other The Royal Courts of Justice.

Oxfam Friday - It's Gonna Rain!

Mark asked me to pull a shift upstairs this morning, which I was more than happy to do. It started lashing it down towards the end and I had to walk back through the rain. It put me in mind of this:

Steve Reich is a composer of the minimalist school (like Philip Glass, more famous for his piano compositions which turn up in movies). I'd heard of the piece before as it's cited as an influence on modern sampling, but it cropped up on Howard Goodall's BBC series The Story of Music. It was made in 1965, but it sounds like it was made last week.

There wasn't much trade in the shop, but I managed to play Ibrahim Ferrer's Buenos Hermanos all the way through:

Dates

Date formats are a bit of a problem in software and xkcd has published a little cartoon to explain...

So now you know.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Yup, another Nick Cage film. Johnny Blaze is asked to guard a young boy who may be the key to removing the demon possessing him.

With a plot that must have taken all of twenty minutes to write, Nicolas Cage again gets acted off the set, this time by Ciarán Hinds and Idris Elba, and, to some extent, by himself as the demon. There's a fair abount of bangs and crashes and good stunt work, but there's the feeling that this could have been a much better film in the hands of, oh, I don't know, Johnny Depp? Still, it's better than watching Keanu Reeves trying to be Klaatu.

A Trip To Greenwich To See The London AI Futurists

For the inauguration of the new London AI Futurists, I attended a meeting at the Forum in Greenwich.

I took the DLR from Stratford to Cutty Sark, which took me through Docklands:

I must have been about seven or eight when I was last in Greenwich. It's a bit like a theme park, with Sainsbury's, M&S, etc., but that changed rapidly as I walked down the road towards the Forum.

The meeting was titled "Human Uniqueness or Simply Repeating Patterns?" and was given by a rather nervous German called Rob Wenzel.

His idea for the future of Artificial Intelligence was to model human personalities via the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator system. This gives sixteen broad types, each one matching another as the "ideal" partner. Thus an AI can be matched to an individual person and we could then relate to them better. Yes, folks, Genuine People Personalities (Marvin the Paranoid Android) might be a way of implementing AI for real. What was dissapointing was that Robert did not go further and explain his ideas for how it would be implemented, only that they serve as a guide for the future.

On the way back I passed through North Greenwich on the way to the tube station and saw the cable car system across the Thames near the Millenium Dome.

It was a long weary way home as the District line had engineering works and I was glad to get back to Chez Lemon.

The Eastleigh By-election

I'm a great one for statistics and the recent by-election (admit it: do you know where in Hampshire Eastleigh is? It's a suburb of Southampton, basically) had made me curious about the voting turn-out and the results.

	2010			2013
Party	Votes	Share of Vote	Share of Electorate	Votes	Share of Vote	Share of Electorate	Change from Previous
Liberal Democrat	24966	46.53%	32.25%	13342	32.06%	16.93%	-46.56%
Conservative	21102	39.33%	27.26%	10559	25.37%	13.40%	-49.96%
Labour	5153	9.60%	6.66%	4088	9.82%	5.19%	-20.67%
UKIP	1933	3.60%	2.50%	11571	27.80%	14.68%	498.60%
Other	496	0.92%	0.64%	2056	4.94%	2.61%
Total	53650		69.30%	41616		52.80%	-22.43%
Electorate	77417			78818			1.81%

Source Wikipedia.

The first thing you notice is the massive drop in turnout, more than 20%, even though the electorate has increased slightly. This gives lie to the supposition that immigration issues, which UKIP campaigned on, have made people vote who hadn't previously. It may well have turned people off voting. In more general terms, though, you can see that the successful candidate only represents one in six of the electorate. Democracy in action.

Secondly, you can see the massive increase in votes for UKIP, which has been made much of in the press. If even half of the UKIP vote had gone to the Conservatives, they would have got nearly 40% and won, so it's easy to see why Ed might be smiling at this point. However, the Labour party might have to deal with UKIP on their own turf.

New Lego - Waiter!

While in Chelmsford today, I got judged and served!

The waiter reminded me of this old Madness number:

Have a nice weekend!