Composing

A Swarm of Nano-Copters

2012-02-01T18:48:00.000-08:00

This is probably the thing that will change the world more profoundly and shockingly than almost anything else over the next 5 years.

That's about the time it took smartphones to become ubiquitous in the developed world, and for business and culture to re-organize themselves around them. (If you're conservative, you can assume it took 10 years.)

Now imagine that nano-quadcopters (with video surveillance) hit hundreds of millions of cheap units in the next 5-10 years. What happens when everyone from concerned parents to nosy teenagers, criminals to police to political protestors have them. What happens when they routinely monitor traffic in the streets? Routinely carry out inspections of industrial infrastructure? Routinely patrol your house when you're out? When they're a standard tool of industrial espionage and gutter journalism? Where they guide automated cranes and architectural scale printers in docks and on construction sites? Where they monitor pollution and conduct ecological surveys in forests?

Nano-quadcopters and sousveillance are coming. And the world is going to be unimaginable.

An Idea For The Film Industry

2012-01-31T17:17:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer has an idea for the film industry :

Here's the idea. Set up a trust for the movie industry. A bank account that we can deposit money into but only movie-makers can withdraw from. When you download a movie via BitTorrent that you watch all the way to the end, deposit $5 into the account for the movie. When the owners decide to accept BitTorrent as a legitimate distribution system, which someday they are sure to, they can have the money. The amount of money in the account is always public info. So it becomes an important statistic, part of the "box office" for a movie. Then you'd probably find a funny thing happening -- independent movie producers who can't get distribution any other way will start promoting this site as a legitimate way to pay for movies. It wouldn't take long before the MPAA realized that there are a huge number of people who want the convenience of watching movies at home on their own timetable, instead of having to deal with the inhumane system the movie industry created for them.

Printed Record

2012-01-24T16:46:00.001-08:00

How awesome is this?

A 3D printed record that can be played on a toy turntable! And it was generated from Processing.

(WarpLink) Contrast : Pot Jockey

Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy

2012-01-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

Read this

I know I'm sounding like I'm just repeating the same story again and again. But what the hell else is there to do? This is now so blatantly happening. Another week, another story of a redistribution of wealth and power from the 99% (and government agencies that still have democratic responsibility to them) to the 1% wealthy elite.

So many people seem to vaguely perceive this. Many people are talking. But no one seems capable of stopping it.

Money quote :

This competition between banks and government explains the false accusations made that government credit creation is more inflationary than when commercial banks do it.

Sites Fixed

2012-01-22T18:18:00.001-08:00

Thanks to WebFaction support. My sites are fixed.

Cheap Control Panel

2012-01-20T19:11:00.000-08:00

My suggestion on SeeedStudios : Prebuilt Control Panel For Electronic Projects

Magic Mirror Kit

2012-01-20T09:31:00.001-08:00

What the hell?

Mediaeval Truths

2012-01-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

Laying to rest some myths about the middle-ages.

Perhaps I can champion neo-mediaevalism with fewer caveats.

My Sites

2012-01-18T16:41:00.000-08:00

Several of my sites (http://www.synaesmedia.net, http://gbloink.com, http://optimaes.info etc.) seem to be down giving database errors. Nothing to do with me. Probably something with the hosting service.

I'll post here when I find out more.

What Is SOPA?

2012-01-18T04:21:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia, Craiglist, Boing Boing and several other sites are going black today to protest SOPA. I wholeheartedly agree with them. But here's something I haven't heard mentioned yet.

SOPA is not about stopping piracy. Everyone (even the RIAA and friends) know that it won't stop piracy. Instead SOPA is an attack on the visibility of piracy.

I once called home-taping "civil disobedience against industrial mass-commercialization of music". And I believe it was. Copying is overwhelmingly supported (in practice) by the citizens of every country where the technology to do it is available. It is mass civil disobedience against a law which most people think is an ass.

SOPA is an attack on the public affirmation of that position. An attack on the "normality" of piracy. It stops me visibly and proudly displaying my disobedience and forces me into doing it (shamefully) in private.

And this is its main aim : to try to roll-back the perceived legitimacy of copying that has arisen because on-line "everyone is doing it". It's not about stopping pirates, it's about cutting off their "supply lines" of public support by criminalising everyone who "gives succour" to them.

Your Information Footprint

2012-01-18T03:21:00.001-08:00

Good video :

Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

Google Gives Up On Search

2012-01-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

I think this story is really important.

As Google adapt their search engine to be more personal and more real-time popularity contest, we see the accelerating rise of Netocratic epistemology. Remember, under Netocracy, the idea of a cannon of commonly accepted knowledge collapses into ever changing flows of hot-ideas. The search engines came in, promising to put all human knowledge at our finger tips, but what happens when they decide that filter bubbles sell better than "objective facts" and they've already put the rival institutions such as libraries out of business?

The Digital Divide

2012-01-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Hard to think of a more poignant example of the divide between those inside and outside internet culture than this story.

Mentufacturer - The 50s

2012-01-16T06:30:00.000-08:00

Drug Resistant TB

2012-01-10T20:21:00.001-08:00

Eeek!

Arduino WaveFlavours

2012-01-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

I've been porting my WaveFlavours synthesis technique to the Arduino.

Here's the project on GitHub.

And here's an example drone :

Arduino WaveFlavour Drone by Mentufacturer

American Fascism

2012-01-04T18:25:00.001-08:00

Read Vinay's important Tweet Rant

Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

2012-01-04T03:59:00.000-08:00

Thom Holwerda :

I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right. Surely, Free and open source software is important, and I choose it whenever functional equivalence with proprietary solutions is reached, but that Stallman/FSF nonsense is way out there.

But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic.

Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going.

In case all this reminds you of China and similarly totalitarian regimes, you're not alone. Even the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA, proudly proclaims that what works for China, Syria, Iran, and others, should work for the US. China's Great Firewall and similar filtering systems are glorified as workable solutions in what is supposed to be the free world.

The crux of the matter here is that unlike the days of yore, where repressive regimes needed elaborate networks of secret police and informants to monitor communication, all they need now is control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all manner of devices play a role in virtually all of our communication. Think you're in the clear when communicating face-to-face? Think again.

How did you arrange the meet-up? Over the phone? The web? And what do you have in your pocket or bag, always connected to the network?

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years - and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing - by someone else in case you lack the skills - becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we're boned.

WaveFlavours @ Sublime Loop

2011-12-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with a simple synthesis technique I'm call WaveFlavours. Listen to some work-in-progress at Sublime Loop. (BTW: for people who are seriously into the Sublime Loop this is hardcore minimalist : 8 mins of the loop unadulterated with other melodies etc.)

SublimeLoop (WaveFlavours) by Mentufacturer

Austerity Bites

2011-12-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

The reality of Greek austerity

Pen Colours

2011-12-28T05:40:00.000-08:00

Found the pen for my old Genius tablet which had been lost (in an unopened box) since we came to London from Brazil in 2008. It's fun to doodle.

European Stability Mechanism

2011-12-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

Not sure how much of a conspiracy theory this is but if it's even half true - and right now it seems horribly plausible - it's another extraordinary coup for disaster capitalism.

What Peak Oil Looks Like

2011-12-18T15:00:00.000-08:00

Arch Druid :

Thus our civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion,” the point at which the end of a historical process would be clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere else. A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing political systems across the industrial world into a rising spiral of dysfunction and internal conflict. With most grades of oil above $100 a barrel, economies around the world mired in a paper “recovery” worse than most recessions, and the United States and European Union both frozen in political stalemates between regional and cultural blocs with radically irreconcilable agendas, that prophecy has turned out to be pretty much square on the money, but you won’t hear many people mention that these days.

The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like, which of course has been happening here in the United States for some years already.

Banks And Social Networks

2011-12-16T22:45:00.000-08:00

Major Netocracy coming down!

And in the last year or so, financial institutions have started exploring ways to use data from Facebook, Twitter and other networks to round out an individual borrower’s risk profile—although most entrepreneurs working on the problem say the technology is three to five years away from mainstream adoption.

Update : While we're on the subject of Netocracy, here's Dillow on the irrelevance of politicians. Another symptom of the shift to Netocracy is the decline of the democratic nation state (a classic institution of "Project Man") attacked on all sides by networks. In this case, finance networks. (Look at Dillow even parroting the classic media-vs-state line : that voters have recognised the irrelevance and are bored with politicians.)

Obama and Indefinite Detention

2011-12-16T03:49:00.000-08:00

How bad is Obama? This bad.

Siri vs. Women

2011-12-06T09:47:00.001-08:00

Violet Blue is very good here :

But in his post there is something he only hinted at that I want to tease apart to show you why I think the problem with Siri really matters.

Apple’s engineers are clever enough to spend thought, effort and time to make Siri give us funny answers about hiding dead bodies.

But the same workers didn’t spare a single minute to make sure a variety of female sexual healthcare crises and emergencies have a minimum of equal consideration.

That is the thing, in all this mess, that I find most astonishing.

This is a real problem.

Read the whole story.

"Suspected Activists"

2011-12-05T13:17:00.001-08:00

Guardian :

A statement from the Occupy London camp said: "The reference to 'suspected activists' seems to demonstrate a disturbing loss of perspective.

"Activism is not a crime and the desire to participate in democratic decision-making should not be a cause for concern for the police in any free society.

"An institution that confuses active citizens with criminals and equates al-Qaida with efforts to re-imagine the City is an institution in grave danger of losing its way."

Asked about the document, the City of London police said their community policing methods had been praised.

A spokesman added: "City of London police works with the community to deter and detect terrorist activity and crime in the City in a way that has been identified nationally as good practice.

"We've seen crime linked to protests in recent weeks, notably around groups entering office buildings, and with that in mind we continue to brief key trusted partners on activity linked to protests."

Printed Dashboard

2011-12-04T08:37:00.001-08:00

OK. So this is an effectively an advert but it shows where 3D printing is going in mainstream manufacturing.

Flight Assembled Architecture

2011-12-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

Amazing!.

The thing about this is that there's no need for these to be Quadcopters. We could have automated cranes with this level of precision. Giant robot arms spitting bricks like enormous Pez machines, with in-built nozzles cementing them into place.

GrooveShark Playlist

2011-12-03T06:39:00.001-08:00

Some people just turned me onto GrooveShark. I wasn't quite sure at first but I found it had a load of music I like, so here's a representative playlist list of the music I'm into right now.

Original Pirate Material

2011-11-28T17:02:00.001-08:00

Pirate Utopias

These merchant ships were the engines of the emerging global capitalism, yet the sailors themselves were utterly excluded from the wealth they worked to generate. The decision to ‘turn pirate’ was thus a decision to wrestle back some autonomy, and when they did, life on a ship changed dramatically. Officers were democratically elected. Food was shared equally among men of all rank. When booty was collected the Captain only took two shares where the lowest took one – income differentials that would make modern CEOs faint. Loss of a limb aboard would be met with a payment of around £20,000 in today’s money – an amazing form of early healthcare.
So, far from being simple thieves, pirates were perhaps the original anti-capitalist protesters. The reason they were hunted down and suffered such savage public executions was because the powers of the day were petrified of the consequences of the pirates’ ethos.

Dance Music Is Alive!

2011-11-28T08:52:00.001-08:00

Good reasons (and links) to think we're in an exciting era in terms of electronic dance music. The "post-step" world.

And no mention of either hauntology or hypnogogic pop / witch-house / chill-wave. (Although as part of the wider electronic landscape they can't really be ignored.)

Banksters' Lies

2011-11-28T05:10:00.001-08:00

Surprised?

The Physics of Collapse

2011-11-28T04:58:00.001-08:00

Excellent systems model of how complex societies collapse.

Hat-tip : Jean-Luc Delatre

Facebook And The Evolution Of Social Software

2011-11-27T13:13:00.001-08:00

Over on a private group(!) on Facebook, I found myself writing this :

On the whole, I'm optimistic about "social software" and its capacity to put our cognitive surplus to good use. We still have Wikipedia and Quora and Instructables etc.

But I think something has changed over the last couple of years. Previously, social software companies were trying to make tools for their users, and advertising was just their funding model.

Twitter, Google etc. are basically geek companies making things that geeks thought were cool.

Facebook's - or Zuckerberg's, not sure which - genius is to be a great "learning organisation". It's very fast to pick up and apply good ideas from elsewhere.

What Facebook has learned over the last few years (from Blackberry, Twitter and Zynga) is how to make the most addictive feed possible for the greatest number of people.

I don't believe anyone at Facebook ever said "let's make people more passive and stupid". But I do believe that they said, "how can we simplify this so that even the passive and stupid people sign up?" (Which is almost as pessimistically cynical.)

What they produced was social software that acted like TV. A non-stop stream of gripping events, that are all about surprise, excitement and emotional shocks. (In this sense, the "good" political propaganda from, say, the Occupy movement is no different from TV's symbiosis with the radical movements of the 1960s)

Instead of putting the cognitive surplus to good use, Facebook just harnesses everyone's surplus to make the wall even more compelling. So that you keep coming back in case anyone you ever knew in your life might have wanted to say something to you or share a picture or a video.

Google+, while an improvement in some ways, is Google's belated realisation that this is the new reality of social software. Now the weird geek tools (Wave) and me too efforts (Buzz) are being put to rest, and Google is trying to build it's own ultra-compelling feed.

I'll Occupy!

2011-11-27T07:48:00.000-08:00

Why The Violent Suppression Of OWS?

2011-11-26T16:58:00.001-08:00

OK, dumb question. Why wouldn't there be a violent reaction to try to extinguish this movement?

Still, Naomi Wolf spells it out clearly :

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congress people are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Update : The Silence of Obama

Goldman Sachs Conquers Europe

2011-11-21T18:31:00.001-08:00

I just don't know what to say any more.

Teach Programming In Schools

2011-11-18T06:46:00.001-08:00

A petition to the UK government.

Post Democracy

2011-11-16T12:50:00.001-08:00

Aditya Chakrabortty :

Until this weekend, Monti served as an adviser to the world's number one investment bank, Goldman Sachs. As for Papademos, his biggest political intervention before becoming prime minister was to argue against the recent eurozone deal to write off half of Greece's debts – it should, he claimed, be a far smaller discount, so as not to hurt banks. One man was a banker, the other defended their interests, and yet the claim is that they have shed those prejudices in the past few hours.

Positive Money vs. The FT

2011-11-16T06:10:00.001-08:00

Positive Money have a good response to a critical comment in the FT that accuses them of naivety.

1% As Wealth Destroyers

2011-11-10T06:55:00.001-08:00

Monbiot good today.

Painting Robot

2011-11-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

This painting robot has THE MOST AWESOME SOUND EVER!

Go watch and listen to the first video. How beautifully amazing is that sound?

How Goldman Sachs Created The Food Crisis

2011-11-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

More reasons to hate bankers :-)

Seriously, the inventions of the financial sector have consequences in the real world. The problem is that no-one in the financial sector is responsible for assessing or avoiding negative consequences before launching new products. No one in government has effective oversight or enough power to prevent launches. And once the products are launched and people are making money from them, everyone is very reluctant to give them up. I'm sure there will be plenty of flakes ready to swear that these products are absolutely essential to motivate the production of food, despite the fact that agriculture is around 9000 years old these products have existed for barely a decade.

Here's my suggestion : whenever the financial sector wants to launch a new type of product, it needs to go through a public approval process before it's allowed. (Just like a new medicine.) The approval process should include both academics hired by the government, but also a completely public process where the descriptions, financial models, an dpredictions are published online and any interested party (blogger, economist, freelance mathematical modeller) can comment and raise concerns.

Charanjit Singh

2011-11-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

Wow! Indian electronica from the early 80s.

2011-11-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

Seumas Milne :

No wonder nationalist anger is growing. And all this to deliver a death spiral of spending cuts and tax increases that are sending Greece ever deeper into slump and debt. It makes no sense. Unless it's understood that it's not the Greek economy that's being rescued, but European and US banks exposed to Greek debt. To protect the rentiers and prevent their own failures from seizing up the European credit system, Greece has undergone the deepest ever fiscal squeeze in a developed state without the possibility of any compensating monetary stimulus or devaluation – because of its euro membership.

What If Greece Exits?

2011-11-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Guardian is pulling in opinions about what happens if Greece exits the Euro. Fascinating and disturbing.

Here are a couple of thoughts. What would happen if, instead of Greece, Germany unilaterally exited the Euro?

Presumably the value of the Euro would fall, Germany's reinstated Deutsche Mark might rise, it would pay a cost in exports. But, without Germany, perhaps the Eurozone could become more economically homogenous, with policies and devaluing currency more appropriate to its economic status.

A variation, what if the Eurozone was to split itself into two currency blocks? One of wealthier, industrial nations like Germany, France and the Netherlands. The other of the PIIGS and poorer Eastern European nations. The zone would strive to retain much of its political and economic co-ordination, but the two currencies would be allowed to float against each other, giving a safety valve to tensions between the productivity of different blocks.

Pirates And #Occupants

2011-10-31T17:50:00.000-07:00

Phil Hunt asks if #Occupy should be forming an alliance with the Pirate Party.

I'd suggest that spontaneous, ad hoc co-operation is probably better for all concerned.

I joined the Pirate Party because I saw Pirates tweeting from and about #occupylsx; plus a couple of posts on the consultation that were sufficient to convince me that Pirates were, generally, well disposed towards #occupy.

The PP should take that as an example of success. It doesn't really need to be more than that. Internet culture is all about loose coupling and simple protocols.

Heart Of Darkness

2011-10-31T15:17:00.000-07:00

Monbiot :

It's the dark heart of Britain, the place where democracy goes to die, immensely powerful, equally unaccountable.

Where Does Money Come From? (Revisited)

2011-10-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

I just came back from the excellent Positive Money conference today and can highly recommend that everyone take a serious look at their site, their analysis and their suggestions.

Here's the basic outline of the Positive Money analysis (which they've undertaken with the help of some economics professors and one guy from the Bank of England).

Q: Where does money come from?

Largely money is created by banks making loans. That is, you ask the bank if you can borrow some money; the bank says yes, and credits your account with the money and their balance-sheet with the asset of your debt to them.

That's it. That's how money is made in the economy. The money the bank lends to you DID NOT have to come from a deposit that someone else made with the bank.

Most people (including economists, bankers and politicians) find this incredibly hard to believe and assume it must be wrong. But no-one can give any other explanation for where money actually comes from. (Well, some is made by, say Quantitative Easing, but that's just small proportion of the total money in the economy.)

Q2 : What restrictions are there on banks creating money this way?

There *used to be* restrictions that said banks could only create some multiplier of the deposits they held.

And you can still read this story on some websites and even economics textbooks. Positive Money's assertion is that various deregulations since the 1970s have effectively removed these constraints. (There are still some, but they're mainly around the "clearing" of different banks' debts to each other. And, as long as all banks are not getting into serious debt with each other, it seems there's no real constraint on how much new money they can create.)

Furthermore, nowadays banks have adopted a sales culture where everyone is incentivated to sell as many loans as possible and, until the crash, this is what banks tried to do.

That's why your bank was always trying to get you to take out a second mortgage to go on holiday or buy a new sofa.

Q3 : So what's the problem?

Well, the first problem is that every pound created this way is "debt money" ie. when the pound is created, the person who receives it receives a debt. Mostly the debt is a pound + interest.

In other words, when money is created by loans, it means debts are also created. And because the debt includes extra interest, the size of debt created is *bigger* than the quantity of money.

So there is always MORE debt in the economy than there is money to repay it.

And that's why most people in the country have such a debt problem. It's not even economically *possible* to pay off all the debt. The money for it doesn't exist. And you can't create more money without creating more debt.

Q4 : Is that the only problem?

No.

The banks like to make loans because they make their income from the interest on loan repayments. But they prefer some kinds of loans to others.

In particular, they prefer *secured* loans. That is, loans which, if you don't repay, they have something to repossess.

So, they don't like lending to businesses with limited liability because if the business goes bust most of money was probably spent on wages and materials anyway, and the capital equipment is probably not worth that much when sold second-hand.

On the other hand, they LOVE lending to individuals to buy houses ie. giving mortgages, because if the individual can't repay, the bank repossesses the house which, normally, has held / increased its value.)

Positive Money estimate that of all the billions of pounds that banks create, only about 8% is lent to businesses that create jobs and produce goods and services in the economy, and the other 92% goes into the mortgage market or other financial products with "known" risk profiles.

And that's why :

a) house prices have increased much faster than wages in recent years (ie. lots of newly created money went into bigger mortgages for more expensive houses) and you can't get on the housing ladder.

b) it's been so hard to finance your usefully productive company (unless you have something to repossess like land or intellectual property)

c) banks bought so many packages of collateralized debt.

In conclusion :

Banks have been given the monopoly on creating money.

There is no oversight.

They have incentives to create as much money (sell as much debt) as they can.

There is always more debt in society than money to repay it.

Because money is created by and in private banks, they choose how it is allocated in the economy.

Because the banks prefer secured loans, the new money goes mainly to places we don't want it to go (ie. to inflating house prices and speculating on financial products) and doesn't go where we do want it to go (ie. to financing expansion by businesses that create jobs, goods and services.)

Economists, politicians, most bankers themselves, and certainly the general public have no fucking idea that this is how the system works, and most of them can't believe it when you tell them.

Q5 : So what can we do?

Positive Money's recommendation is as follows :

1) Take the power to create money (ie. to loan money that you don't have) away from private banks, and give it to the Bank of England.

2) Because you don't want the Bank of England to print money whenever it suits politicians, give the power to decide **when** to create the money to an independent committee. Probably with some fairly stringent criteria for when they should. Positive Money's own suggestion is that every month when inflation is around 2%, they should authorize the creation of new money. If inflation creeps above 2%, they shouldn't create more that month.

3) Rather than the new money being given to government or banks to allocate it should be given directly to the public in a slightly *progressive* form :

a) as VAT cuts. (Everyone benefits and you stimulate more economic activity)

b) by raising the threshold at which people start to pay income tax. (So the lowest wage earners benefit.)

I have to say, I think this is an absolutely brilliant blend of radicalism and realism. They've spent a lot of time thinking about this. (The analysis / book has taken their team about 18 months to put together, based on about 500 different documents. Apparently they asked the Bank of England for its own training manuals / documentation on how money is created and were told that there is none.)

Economic Complexity And Development

2011-10-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

This is a rather fascinating talk by Ricardo Hausmann on his measurement of Economic Complexity in terms of "personbytes" and its predictive value.

There's a lot I want to question and challenge. But well worth thinking about.

The basic idea is to measure the complexity of an economy by looking at both the range of things it exports (the more, the more complex) and the number of other countries who export the same thing (the fewer others per-product, the more complex it's meant to be).

Overall, this statistic is a good predictor of income and future growth.Some papers with his collaborator here.

Actual Examples Of Unintended Consequences

2011-10-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

This Quora question is worth a read.

A Decent Standard Of Living

2011-10-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

Vinay Gupta :

But there's no way around this: we're at four times consumption in Europe, and something like eight times consumption in America. Can you imagine us cutting our consumption, on average, by 80%? That's what we need to do. Maybe we'll get the Hail Mary pass on Nanosolar or Konarka, I think there's a very good chance we're going to get to the Cheap Energy, Cheap Information future, but even then, it's still going to be about a nine billion person split. I think we can produce a very good hexayurt out of about 100 lbs of paper and thick aluminium foil, all recycled and recyclable. I think the biosand filter and the rocket stove are pretty much ready for prime time technologies for our basic human needs, and the toilets are only a little further behind. And that's a standard of living, that and a cheap Android tablet that's been engineered to last for three decades, that's a standard of living which you can make sense of at nine billion, which is our likely peak population. We're going to hit seven billion right around the time this piece is published, and it's important to think about it in these big number terms, because that's the world we really live in.

RIP John McCarthy

2011-10-25T03:57:00.000-07:00

Another great loss. The inventor of Lisp has died.

Austerity Has Failed

2011-10-22T03:54:00.000-07:00

Robert Peston :

"The situation in Greece has taken a turn for the worse, with the economy increasingly adjusting through recession and related wage-price channels, rather than through structural reform-driven increases in productivity".

Or to put it another way, Greece's austerity programme is succeeding in impoverishing Greek people with little in the way of discernible benefits to the Greek private sector and the capacity of Greece to start earning its way in the world.

The protesting mob in Athens would probably not dissent from that view.

You think this might be a wake-up call to the ConDem coalition?

Guy Fawkes

2011-10-20T06:54:00.000-07:00

And, of course, while we're on the subject of new folkloric icons ... Guy FawkesUpdate : And compare John Robb on The Knights Templar as Fictive Kinships.

Julian Assange vs. Mark Zuckerberg

2011-10-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

Who Says Folk Rituals Are Dead?

2011-10-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

They're just being radically mashed up with 80s pop trivia and video-game characters. Check out this guy proposing to his girlfriend.

What is it, exactly? It's not folk. It's not pop. It's not kitsch. It's some weird pidgin amalgam.

Kubler-Ross and #OccupyWallStreet

2011-10-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

Venkatesh Rao writes a barnstormer of an article taking in everything from life-style design to #occupiers to Bruce Sterling's Dark Euphoria.

It is very, very clever. And pretty amusing. And, I'm sure, it's going to be a major meme all over the web for months to come.

Pirate Party

2011-10-17T07:23:00.000-07:00

So, I just joined the UK Pirate Party.

I did it for two reasons. First, this month they are having an open consultation, calling for policy suggestions in areas outside the core intellectual property / internet freedom agenda that originally motivated them. Secondly, I saw one of them tweeting from OccupyLSX.

Of course, it's great fun for me to make a bunch of proposals. Here they are if you want to vote / argue for or against them.

Get the money out of politics

Full disclosure of government deals with corporations

Teach entrepreneurial skills in schools

Remove commercial restrictions on suburbia

Mandatory carbon footprint labelling for "big ticket" items

Create a framework for "Traditional Cities" (Yeah, I know, this is a personal obsession, but you know I believe in urbanism as a fundamental quality of life issue.)

A "Personal Investment Allowance"

Mandatory energy / effect labelling for common household appliances

Put the Treasury's models online

More soon when I think of them ... :-)

Why Occupy London Stock Exchange?

2011-10-16T04:43:00.000-07:00

Must read article, lots of good stories :

Goldman Sachs wanted to employ London staff through a subsidiary firm in the British Virgin Islands tax haven. In April 2010 Goldman lost a legal action, leaving the government in line to collect £30.8 million plus £10 million in interest. But in a private meeting between Goldman Sachs and the permanent secretary of HM Revenue and Customs, Dave Hartnett, the £10 million in interest was simply waived, in what the Metro described as a, 'sweetheart deal.' Mr Hartnett, Goldman Sachs and HMRC have all declined to comment on the allegations although HMRC has said it 'could not respond to incomplete and therefore fundamentally flawed' accounts of arrangements.

One demand, I think, should be that the minutes of ALL government deals with private corporations should be publicly viewable online.

Scandalous BBC Reporting

2011-10-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of this morning's BBC main page (click to enlarge) :

Notice the absence of any reference to last night's successful continual occupation of Saint Paul's while top billing is given to some princess in Wootton Bassett. (Bleah!)

I went down there to take food to the occupiers, but was kept outside by the police cordon. I hung around with the crowd outside for a few hours while the police

a) forced a line of helmeted riot police through the crowd, up to the back of the steps. Ostensibly to "protect St. Paul's" from damage. Actually to encircle those on the steps.
b) brought in a number of vicious looking dogs to bark at the occupiers in a scary way. They didn't actually DO anything with the dogs. And clearly they weren't there for purposes of sniffing etc. Just to menace the occupiers.
c) fairly skilfully (I have to say), started reducing the occupied space. Pushed those of us in the outer ring into the road. Then pushed us all out of the road. I left soon after, as it looked like the police were very much in control of the space.

Seems, though, that that the occupiers survived the night and the vicar of St. Paul's has asked the police to back off. Now there's a call for donations from anyone who can get down there today.

Here's some video (someone else made) of earlier yesterday :

A Movement in Slow Motion from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Fox News Lies :-)

2011-10-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

Probably quite disturbing for the poor Fox journalists but amusing for the rest of us. Crowd chanting embarrasses Fox News and prevents them (mis)reporting Occupy Wall Street.

Watch Jeffrey Sachs!

2011-10-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

Just watch him now!

RIP Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

Forget Steve Jobs, the guy who invented C has died!

Google Turn Evil

2011-10-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

Google hand over Wikileaks supporter's gmail to the US government, without a warrant.

It was perhaps inevitable that Google would fall from its ethical aspiration. But the question is, what should I do? I started boycotting Amazon for little more than this : throwing Wikileaks off their servers. But it's not nearly as easy to disengage from Google as it is to stop buying books from Amazon.

I'm heavily entangled with its services. I rely on Gmail, Blogger (where I'm writing this), Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Application Engine (for Mind Traffic Control), Google search, Google Maps. I have a Google Analytics account and an AdWords account. I was planning to get (and develop for) an Android device at some point. I was just getting into Google Plus. How the hell do I "punish" this creature I've got so symbiotic with?

I can't just cut the knot cleanly. But I hereby announce that I am starting to disengage as and where convenient. And the long term goal will be to reduce my engagement with Google to the same casual occasionality that I deal with other large evil corporations and to attempt to provide them with as little monetary gain as possible.

To start is easy because I have very little monetary interest in Ad Words. I've just removed them from my two "commercial" blogs : Smart Disorganized and Platform Wars. Neither made me any money so it's no loss.

Let's see what I can do next.

The Origin of Money

2011-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Gosh, I'm doing a lot of internet surfing today. And it's not like I don't have dozens of other things to do ...

Nevertheless, I'm seriously enjoying David Graeber on the origin of money.

The Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander

2011-10-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Nice piece on Christopher Alexander.

The Only Useful Innovation

2011-10-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

David Leonhardt :

In finance, trading volumes have boomed in recent decades, yet it is unclear how much all the activity has lifted living standards. Paul A. Volcker, the former Fed chairman, has mischievously said that the only useful recent financial innovation was the automated teller machine. Critics like Mr. Volcker argue that much of modern finance amounts to arbitrage, in which technology and globalization have allowed traders to profit from being the first to notice small price differences.

IN the process, Wall Street has captured a growing share of the world’s economic pie — thereby increasing inequality — without doing much to expand the pie. It may even have shrunk the pie, given that a new International Monetary Fund analysis found that higher inequality leads to slower economic growth.

The Great EU Debt Write Off

2011-10-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

Read this :

This website presents the results of a simulation conducted by students at ESCP Europe Business School. The aim was to uncover the amount of interlinked debt between Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Germany; and then see what would happen if they attempted to cross cancel obligations.

The results were astounding:
The countries can reduce their total debt by 64% through cross cancellation of interlinked debt, taking total debt from 40.47% of GDP to 14.58%
Six countries – Ireland, Italy, Spain, Britain, France and Germany – can write off more than 50% of their outstanding debt
Three countries - Ireland, Italy, and Germany – can reduce their obligations such that they owe more than €1bn to only 2 other countries
Ireland can reduce its debt from almost 130% of GDP to under 20% of GDP
France can virtually eliminate its debt – reducing it to just 0.06% of GDP

There Aren’t Any More Rich Countries

2011-10-10T05:33:00.001-07:00

Naomi Klein :

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

A Conversation Among Machines

2011-10-09T19:03:00.000-07:00

Compare and contrast Marc Andreesen and W. Brian Arthur

Narcissus Search on Ars Electronica Blog

2011-10-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

Great! The Ars Electronica blog has added an article on the Narcissus (anti)-Search Engine that I've been working on with Aharon Amir over the last couple of years.

Narcissus takes the results from a search of a site or database but measures the "popularity" of the results (in our first example, by counting the number of times a result is clicked on). It then deprioritises popular results, pushing them first to the end of the page and then into a limbo where they aren't shown at all for a number of searches.

The idea is to make an artistic comment on the positive feedback loops that operate throughout most of our social media to reward success with further success. In contrast, Narcissus rewards failure and so helps searchers explore the shadows : alternative and disregarded ideas and opinions.

Work in Progress :-)

2011-10-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Shooting Banksters In A Barrel

2011-09-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

Daniel Davies (d-squared) tries to defend bankers against the accusation that they're responsible for the 2008 crash and continuing world economic crisis.

He doesn't do a particularly good job, but he elicits this great response from "Bloix" :

I’m sure I’m being naive in assuming that Daniel doesn’t already know this and is intentionally ignoring it, but here goes:

1) There was a bubble in housing prices. This means that people bought houses, not to live in, but because they believed that the house they bought would appreciate faster than any other asset they could invest in. The appeal of such appreciation was multiplied many-fold because houses are the easiest and most common investment for ordinary people that supplies large amounts of leverage. The ordinary buyer had no appreciation of the risks of leverage but well-understood its benefits. There was a lot of activity in buying up, flipping, and trading houses that had nothing to do with the need for shelter. This activity made a lot of money for a lot of people – real estate agents, mortgage brokers, inspectors, title insurers, and lenders.

2) Housing prices could not indefinitely go up faster than the rate of inflation because eventually there would not be enough buyers who had the income to qualify for the mortgages needed to on the higher home prices. Therefore, in the absence of “creative” financing, the run-up in housing prices would soon have stabilized and perhaps dropped a bit.

3) Mortgage brokers and lenders therefore created mortgage products that were designed to allow people to buy houses that they could not possibly pay for based on their income – balloon mortgages, teaser rates, interest only loans, even negative amortization.

4) If the mortgage lenders had had to hold the risk of these loans, they would never have made them. But they didn’t, because they could sell the loans to the banksters, who then packaged them in their creative products and sold them off as AAA-rated securities to insurers, pension funds, and the like. After the banksters took their large cut off the top, the money from these investors funded the loans to the ignorant buyers who were put into the creative mortgage products by the petty crooks who worked for the mortgage originators.

5) Without the market in mortgage-backed securities made by the banksters, there would have been no money to fund the creative mortgage products, and thus no possibility of a bubble anywhere near the size of the one that eventually burst. The whole point of the mortage-backed securities market was to keep the bubble inflated. Obviously it couldn’t go on for ever, but it was very, very profitable while it lasted.

6) The banksters either were world-class idiots or they were well-aware that the mortgage-backed securities they were selling to clueless institutional buyers were trash. As we know that they are not idiots, the only possible conclusion is that they were intentionally passing off trash.

People who peddle fake goods are usually considered to be crooks. But banksters who knowingly peddled enormously high-risk securities, while claiming that they were as safe as US treasuries, are walking around with billions of taxpayer dollars in their pockets. They own Congress and the administration. They write the tax code and dominate the Federal Reserve.

After smashing up our retirement accounts, destroying our pension funds, wiping out the savings of millions of people who bought into the rising market, and putting any number of us out of work, they sneer and pontificate and preen and strut their way across the major cities and TV screens and high-end resorts of all the world.

The only justification for the investment banking industry’s existence is that it does a better job of allocating investment capital for productive purposes than any other method of doing so. What we’ve just seen is that, far from allocating capital efficiently, the banksters allocated capital in a grotesquely wasteful manner for year and year, a manner that just happened to put huge amounts of that capital into their own individual pockets while leaving the institutions they worked for at risk of insolvency. And when that risk came to pass, the obscenely rich individuals suffered not at all, while the government bailed out the institutions.

So. Please. I don’t know anything about you personally, and I’m sure that you’re a wonderful fellow who loves dogs and is charming at parties. But the industry you are part of is a force for evil in the world. Everyone who is not dependent on that industry for a living knows it.

Code. Think. Make. Play.

2011-09-25T06:22:00.000-07:00

I just iterated once more on my personal homepage.

I rather liked the large-tiles I used for my Goldsmiths Portfolio so I'm experimenting with folding them into my more general web presence.

Synaesmedia.net still isn't meant to be a blog. It's a one-shot overview of who am I am, balancing reasonably up-to-date projects with a couple of classics for context, and an extensive list of where else to find me online. Hope that makes sense to new visitors.

Air Swimmers

2011-09-24T21:38:00.000-07:00

I must confess, I'm a total sucker for both the idea of these toys and their promotional video.

Basically bringing Festo-style technology to the masses. I believe that this could be an incredible platform for practical semi-autonomous robots. (Tele-presence, roving security cameras, inspection in dangerous environments etc.)

Another "Pont" Video

2011-09-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

Another "Pont" video

The Virtues of Government Spending Without Government

2011-09-23T04:18:00.000-07:00

John Lanchaster :

Quarterly GDP data don’t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK’s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US’s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you’ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn’t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government – any existing government.

OvniLounge Album on BandCamp

2011-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

I decided to do a little experiment with BandCamp. Although most of my music is available for streaming / downloading free via SoundCloud, I've basically run out of space-time there. And BandCamp looks particularly good as a site for promoting and selling music. So I decided I'd make a couple of things available through them.

The first is the original OvniLounge album. This is a set of tracks from around 2006, loosely themed as "lounge music for flying-saucer people". It is lounge, as in background, listening music. I think there are some strong melodies there (to my usual plangent taste). But it's also fairly OVNI (UFO in Portuguese) - in other words, weird and uneasy. It's an extremely COLD album, which despite busy chattering percussion evokes the chill of interstellar space. The beats are "raw from the DAW", untreated FruityLoops of heavy thuds and nervous rattling. Not at all danceable to your average primate. It's kind of IDM, but probably doesn't sound much like your archetypal IDM either. If I have to give some kind of pointer I'd say it's a bit like LFO or some of the interludes in an early Black Dog album, though I'm clearly not worthy of such comparisons.

BandCamp don't host free downloads, so you have to buy, but I'm allowing you to set your own price, starting at $3. If you like it, by all means feel free to signal this by paying more :-)

Tonight I knocked up a quick YouTube video for the first track (cut and pasted out of other YouTube finds, of course).

New Blogger

2011-09-20T05:32:00.000-07:00

Finally, Google have upped their game with Blogger. Both design and functionality.

Did you notice in the last post on my exhibition that the pictures are now in a gallery when you click on them?

Big Society in Action

2011-09-20T02:11:00.000-07:00

So, the UK government no longer feels it necessary to ensure people have enough food, and hands off responsibility to a charity.

This makes me VERY angry indeed. Someone posted that this is "collapse". But it's nothing of the sort. There is not sense whatsoever that the government can't ensure that there's enough food, distributed fairly enough, that no-one goes hungry. It can simply commit money to bulk buy enough food for the UK in the next year if it wanted to.

That it doesn't is a political decision.

Pictures From The Exhibition

2011-09-19T05:18:00.000-07:00

A couple of pictures from Machine Gardens at the Goldsmiths MFA end-of-year show.

Four Pieces

Green Cogs on a Black Background

Crank

Sound, Spaceship Earth and Fanged Noumena

2011-09-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

Solar Powered RepRap

2011-09-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

Great! Someone built a RepRap that runs on solar power (and doesn't need a computer, just gets the file off an SD card).

Sunlight on Translucent Machines

2011-09-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

The sun started shining on some of my Perspex machines and I had to grab the camera. Beautiful.

(All machines will be in the exhibition this week, but sadly none of them will look like these photos under the fluorescent lights)

RepRap Quality Improvements

2011-09-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

Its official, RepRap has now surpassed the commercial Fused deposition modeling 3d printers in machine affordability, price for filiment, and NOW build quality.

According to the RepRap blog.

La Mer Revisited

2011-09-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

Gisel is updating her site, and wanted to embed the soundtrack I did for the ballet "La Mer" in 2004. (A remix / transformation of the piece by Debussy)

It's already on SoundCloud but needed some retitling. So that seems like as good an excuse for a revisit as any :-)

Check out Gisel's stunning scenery.

La Mer by Mentufacturer

Will Hutton on Successful Capitalism

2011-09-11T04:20:00.000-07:00

Nice paragaph :

Successful capitalism is an incredibly difficult phenomenon to create and sustain. It depends on entrepreneurial flair, yes, but also on ideas, institutions and processes ranging from great universities to innovative financial organisations that do not always appear spontaneously by the operation of free markets. They sometimes have to be designed by public action. Great businesses and wealth flower in strong societies that equip their entrepreneurs to prosper. The framework which supports this costs money, and it is proper that the rich should contribute proportionally.

Gothic Cathedral Play Set

2011-09-10T01:07:00.001-07:00

This is nice. A Gothic cathedral playset for 3D printing.

RIP Michael Hart

2011-09-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

Sad. The Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg has died at the relatively young age of 64. Obituary here.

End of MA Show, September 15th

2011-09-08T04:36:00.000-07:00

I'm coming to the end of my MA in Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths.

It's been a lot of fun and I've had the chance to play with a whole stack of things I've wanted to get into for a while, including Physical Computing (Arduino + electronics, 3D printing and other desktop manufacturing technologies, motion tracking etc.)

For a while I was seriously thinking that I may go on to try a PhD in the same area, but I'm tending away from that now. (In which case I have to find something else to do with myself.)

In mean time, here's the joint end-of-year show, just down the road from Kings Cross station in London. Opening night is the 15th September.

Updating My Homepage

2011-09-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

I'm updating my homepage

My homepage isn't a blog, but I want to put some kind of marker on it, to indicate what I'm up to at the moment. You can glean that from this blog too, of course, but often where I am is swamped by things I'm thinking about and ranting.
Synaesmedia.net will be a view of what I'm doing, stripped of day-to-day chatter. (Although with links to it all on the side.)

New Blogger UI

2011-09-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Yea!

Thumbs up to the new Blogger UI.It's about time they revamped it, and I have to say, it's pretty good. Particular win is having analytics built in to the dashboard.OTOH, what sucks is that blank lines in HTML editor don't automatically become paragraph breaks in published text. WTF?

"All Your Pont" Revisited

2011-09-07T06:52:00.000-07:00

I'm continuing to update my Goldsmiths portfolio. Added a page for the motion tracking / projection mapping game we did in Paris.

Here's a link to the full portfolio

Flower Brush Revisited

2011-09-06T19:12:00.000-07:00

Flower Brush revisited.

At the beginning of my MA course at Goldsmiths I wrote a little graphics program I'd been thinking about for years. It illustrated a simple principle : painting with multiple dumb agents. Later on, thinking more about patterns and reading about William Morris and wallpaper design I realised that simply by making the brushes "wrap-around" when they went off one side of the canvas I could make far more interesting repeating patterns.

Soon after I'd implemented the change, I found SpoonFlower, which does on-demand printing on fabrics and uploaded a couple of patterns. You can see (and buy) them here.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to go back and find a new twist on an old sketch. There's more promise in the original Flower Brush idea than I've really done justice to, even now. But this feels like a good step forward.

2011-09-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

A follow up video showing a crank (turning rotary into reciprocating movement).

Once again, this comes out of my software and is cut on a laser-cutter.

2011-09-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

Zewp! is the anti-Gbloink!

2011-09-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

So here's a video of my latest work-in-progress : a piece called "Machine Gardens" for my end of year art exhibition in September. But I also want to take this playful experimentation into "programs-becoming-things" further. I'll keep you all posted.

Templar of Earth

2011-08-29T18:04:00.000-07:00

Say only

I understand and accept fully that the human race is harming the natural world by driving species to extinction, releasing long-lived pollutants, changing the climate and poisoning nature.

I understand and accept fully that the human race makes many suffer horribly and die in war, famine, injustice, poverty and oppression, and that we are failing to provide a good life for all of humanity.

I understand and fully accept that my own efforts appear unequal to the task of changing these facts.

I swear by the bones of the earth, the roots of the mountains to always treat those who understand and accept fully these Three Truths with dignity and respect, myself included.

Make a badge or banner, by any means, of this design.

You are now a templar of Earth. Display the symbol as you will.