Just making a few cosmetic tweaks to my Goldsmiths page.

This is just coursework, but I guess as I evolve into an artist I need to think in terms of presenting a portfolio.

I like the "me composing" tag on this blog. But some people also like big pictures.

Apart from experimenting with input devices based on real pencils, and digital flutes, I'm still keeping half an eye on what's going on with magic wands.

Here's one that controls an LED candle.

Of course, I have a lot of thoughts and fantasies about doing a project in this direction. But not quite yet. I've got an essay to write, a masters project to do, and an application for the Goldsmiths DPhil programme to make (including a thesis proposal). Of course I want to play with it all : wands, swarm music, desktop manufacturing, magic. But I have to focus ... I think wands are out for the moment.

Still, they're coming. From someone.

Quite a surprising opinion in the Financial Times, which, despite I'm sure its ironic intention (though do you sense some genuine frustration from the author?) nails it :

It may go behind the paywall, so I'm going to quote it entirely because an extract doesn't do justice to the shape of the whole :

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e2bd35d8-5b37-11e0-b2a1-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1IkACR7nr

There was something truly depressing about last weekend’s TUC-sponsored mass march against public spending cuts. Some 250,000 people ambled through London, picnicked in Hyde Park, listened to Ed Miliband and totally ruined the day for the serious violent minority who were trying to smash things up.

You only had to look at the coverage the next day to see the damage they had done. News reports cut away from the havoc at Fortnum & Mason to show thousands of law-abiding public sector workers wasting their Saturday afternoon. Later that day Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, rounded on the rioters who had upset his otherwise genteel protests. Next week, he’ll be on the radio wondering how ministers can ignore such a potent display of political passivism.

For it does seem a basic rule of modern British democracy that if you are marching against something you’ve already lost. Parading one’s discontent through London is the political equivalent of a fly bashing its head against a window pane. Of course there’s a terrific sense of community on a march – 250,000 flies with the same headache; it’s hugely empowering. But short of handing out placards with slogans such as “Mildly Miffed” or “I’m so angry I walked peacefully through London”, it is hard to imagine what more the protesters could have done to signal their acceptance of defeat.

Like the suicide RAF mission of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s sketch, it is the futile gesture that makes everyone feel better. One imagines the heroic marchers being interviewed many years later for one of those wretched Reunion programmes they run on Radio 4 when Kirsty Young is on holiday. “Well I just didn’t want to be one of those who sat idly by, Sue. I wanted to be able to look my children in the face and say I did something.”

“So when the Tories were slashing budgets and ratcheting up your college fees, your mother and I marched through London.”

“Did you smash anything up, Daddy?”

“No, but we listened to a speech by the political editor of the New Statesman.”

It’s irresponsible to admit it, but this kind of peaceful protest is pointless. The system has all the shock absorbers necessary to handle a law-abiding demonstration. The next day ministers were already clear they would ignore the entire event, while insisting that they would be happy to discuss the issues with marchers, though sadly not over tea at Fortnum’s as it seems to be attracting the wrong sort these days.

It’s not that I’m advocating violence and disorder, just dispassionately noting that in Britain it is more effective. What last weekend’s thugs grasped is that ministers can’t ignore anarchists daubing the Cenotaph and bringing a bit of havoc to the capital. Once or twice they might be able to turn on the rioters, but not if it keeps happening. There’s nothing like stoking voters’ fears about the rule of law and the fabric of society to get the government’s attention.

You have to think of this in management terms. On key deliverables peaceful marching just doesn’t cut it. It’s all inputs and no outputs. But violent protest can be measured on key performance indicators. How many shops did you smash up? What percentage were banks? Did you manage to scare the Duchess of Cornwall? I’m sorry Dave; you are below target; do you want to nip over the road and vandalise that RBS?”

If you actually want to change things lawfully, you don’t march; you campaign; you write to your MP. Politicians pay quite staggering attention to their postbag. A lot of letters on a subject is all it takes to worry them and their definition of a lot is, well, really rather little ... A dozen letters will do it. I’m talking genuine letters, here, not the identical ones organised by campaigns.

But there’s no cred in writing to your MP. And that’s the point. Marching is as much about the marchers as it is about the cause. It’s about their need to feel they are doing something; something responsible; something lawful – something futile that makes them all feel better.

robert.shrimsley@ft.com

Johnny Chung Lee :

Now, I could simply make a kurmudgenly claim that the quality of professional/research/academic work has gone down. But, I actually don't think that's true. In my opinion, what is happening is that the quality of independent projects are getting better.... fast. Which, I think resonates with this observation of a "DIY Revolution".

Google's disgusting tax avoidance scam :

Here’s how it works:

- Google’s HQ is in Dublin, which has the lowest corporate tax rate of 12.5%.
- Google, however, wants an ever lower rate so it charges its European business a massive administrative fee by its Bermuda subsidiary.

And that’s how a profit of 5.5 billion Euros turns into just 45 million Euros that is taxable in Dublin.

More details here.

Philip Greenspun :

I can't remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.

Over on Quora I'm considering the hypothetical libertarian traffic planner.

I like to consider the case of a hypothetical "libertarian road traffic planner" (assuming a libertarian could be persuaded to take up such a job, but let's assume that she's working for a private city and the money's too good to resist)

The planner is faced with the problem that every morning and evening there's a major traffic-jam which means that the average drive-time to and from work is about two hours, when it should really be about 40 minutes. How can she reduce it?

Because the libertarian doesn't believe that phenomena have collective (or emergent) causes, she assumes the problem must stem from individual failure. She notices that certain drivers, who are perhaps a bit more skilful at driving, more aggressive in challenging other cars at junctions, are more decisive and less risk-averse under pressure, more willing to drive fast or cut corners etc, are able to beat the average and get home in about an hour and a half.

She therefore thinks she could cut 25% off the average drive-time if *everyone* could be persuaded to improve their driving. How to do that though? Obviously, people need to take more driving lessons and practice harder. But as a libertarian, she doesn't want to force people to do anything, so she'd better provide incentives to encourage them. Better yet, incentives in the form of removing unfair restrictions.

The obvious thing to do, therefore, is to eliminate speed restrictions. Allow everyone to drive as fast as they like. That means that the real experts won't be held back, there'll be a greater reward for their investment in their skill. And that, in turn, will create a greater incentive for everyone else to learn better driving skills too.

That, then, is our well-intentioned libertarian's response to road congestion.

Now suppose we need to argue against the libertarian? How would we do it?

a) We'd point out that traffic congestion is not a simplistic scaling up of individual failure. There are emergent, non-linear, turbulent effects when a lot of people try to access the same resources.

b) We'd point out that some of the interactions in driving, such as the challenges for priority at road junctions, are zero-sum games. Hence, one driver can't win the junction (and get home quicker) without the other driver losing it (and NOT getting home quicker)

c) we'd point out that not everyone can ever aspire to being as good as the fastest drivers. The elderly, those with certain physical disabilities. Those driving children who they love and want to protect will remain more risk averse.

d) we'd point out that the increased number of accidents caused by the increasingly risky behaviour of the "elite" will block roads and slow everyone's journey down.

e) we'd point out that this solution misses many other options that could improve the transport situation in the city far more dramatically (everything from, on the one hand, building more roads, to, on the other, providing more buses).

f) In short, we'd point out that IT WON'T WORK to reduce travel time except for an infinitesimal minority of super-drivers and will cause more trouble for everyone else.

Of course, the libertarian might simply be too ideologically fixated to accept any of these arguments. She may not accept that there are non linear effects in many-car-interactions. She may have heard that in real life there are no such things as zero sum games. She may have read some garbled account about somewhere in Holland where they took away all the road signs and people drove safer. She may think that any top-down scheme (such as road building or bus-providing) must of necessity be less efficient than her bottom-up scheme.

She may, in the last resort, fall back on saying that ultimately, average speed doesn't matter. The most important principle is to remove the restrictions unfairly holding back the best drivers. (Although this is weird in my contrived example as that's her job.)

So, basically any argument against the libertarian bifurcates on one of two trajectories.

1) A libertarian who doesn't care about the welfare of society as a whole, just the freedoms of those powerful enough to enjoy themselves, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.

This kind of libertarian is just special pleading for a particular interest group and there's no reason to take her more seriously than someone who claims to be the true heir to the Tsar of Russia and wants your help getting their empire back.

What's in it for you?

2) A second kind of libertarian who insists that the freedom she wants is going to benefit society as a whole (or at least, the majority of it).

In this case you can get down to details about *how* everyone is expected to benefit.

Does their argument make naive assumptions about how individual self-improvements scale up to general social welfare?

Does it assume that everyone can get the benefit of things that are actually zero-sum competitions for scarce resources. (Eg. "wealth" in the most vague and hand-wavey sense isn't scarce, but concrete opportunities for wealth such as "money" or "market share at this moment" or "jobs in this town during my lifetime" etc. often are)

Does it ignore or dismiss opportunities for "collective" solutions? Or if it accepts that some benefits are possible from collective actions, does it plausibly demarcate good from bad?

Etc. etc .

So what happened to the Egyptian revolution?

Great Simon Buckingham Shaum slide on academic discourse

Hmmmm ... I find myself feeling ... how shall I put it? ... "positive" that UK, French and US militaries are attacking Libya. Thank heavens we're going to save the poor idealistic, freedom loving, twitter / facebook revolutionaries from being slaughtered by the evil dictator.

And then I wonder ... huh? UK, French and US militaries attacking an oil-producing Arab country? And I'm feeling positive? Have I just uncritically imbibed several weeks of propaganda without noticing it?

What do readers of this blog think? Is this a justified use of force by the West? A war to actually support? Or is it just another scam? I really am pulled in two directions on this one.

Beyond Austerity

Wow! A printed flute.

My God! Not only has Smiley Culture died ... but he killed himself in Warlingham! Who knew he even lived there?

Update : Let's say "allegedly killed himself". Full story isn't out yet.

Another nice micro-musician : Gypsy Treasures

Imperial rebels against "knowledge tax"

Interesting to watch the political evolution within Anonymous. They're starting to have both teeth and purpose.

Essential TED talk about "filter bubbles". Watch it! (It's short)

Kevin Carson :

Bradley Manning, directly and indirectly, has probably done more for freedom than any single human being in years ...

... the cables Manning leaked — which were published on Wikileaks — played a central role in triggering the so-called Twitter revolution that started in Tunisia, spread to Egypt and much of the Middle East, and is now striking Qaddafi with hurricane-force winds of freedom. Among the cables which Wikileaks published were detailed descriptions of the Tunisian regime’s corruption, which galvanized local dissident groups into launching the movement that overthrew the government.

Something I've been trying to figure out how to do for a while. LED and optic fibre decoration + Arduino creates quite a living effect.

This is just a hacked together concept demonstration, but it would be nice to take it further.

I asked on Quora : Are there more Zero-Sum or non Zero-Sum games?

Synaptic Stimuli is an awesome image blog.

Bizarrely compelling video about positive visualisation in .. er .. clay pigeon shooting.

Thomas L Knapp :

QED, the US government considers you — whoever you are, wherever you may live, and to whatever extent you aren’t its active agent — its enemy and intends to treat you as such. Your freedom, perhaps even your very survival, depends on you recognizing this fact and acting accordingly.

Playing with pencils as input devices.

This is really cool.

Blogrolled : The Radical History of Hackney

Chess Board Tracker.

Here's a sad story from Kiva. One of my loans has defaulted. Looking at Kiva's explanation it seems like it's not the fault of the individual guy I lent to but the "field partner". Of course, Kiva don't themselves seem to know the full story and are investigating but it sounds to me like the field partner had been reliable for a couple of years but suddenly went bad? Maybe a change of personnel? Maybe a sudden economic crisis in Togo?

Kiva haven't done a terrible job in informing me, but there are more things I'd like to see from them. Firstly, more of an analysis of the situation in Togo. Particularly, is there some economic or political circumstance that's likely to have influenced this? Or is it looking more like corruption in the partner?

Secondly, although Kiva uses the web to make connections between the lenders and recipients of loans, they still act as gatekeeper. Is there no way to hear the voices of the borrowers in Togo about their experience with this field partner Could Kiva not at least have a "comment on this partner" option on the page which borrowers could use?

PayPal Freezes Account of Group Raising Money for Bradley Manning

So Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden.

During the hearing two weeks ago, Mr Robertson said his client could ultimately be extradited to the US on separate charges relating to Wikileaks - and could face the death penalty there.

In response, Ms Montgomery said Sweden provided "protection against that sort of threat and violation" taking place.

The European Court of Human Rights would intervene if Mr Assange was to face the prospect of "inhuman or degrading treatment or an unfair trial" in the US, she said.

Let's hope that's true.

I can see I'm going to get hooked on Altered Zones a kind of swarm approach to tracking American hypnagogic pop, chillwave, witch house, "contemplative dance" etc.

Here are a couple of nice tunes :

Giant Claw : I Know I'm Like A Ghost

White Rainbow: "Captain Sandwich Patrol"

There are probably hundreds more if I were to find time to listen to them ...

Why Wikileaks doesn't publish more leaks from Israel.

Watch "Why isn't Wall Street in Jail?"

Update : here's the article.

This Processing sketch running on an Android phone. Pretty easy using Processing for Android. (Not that you can "see" this as I'm muttering inanely in the video.)

I really like these works by Kanta Horio

Mysterious Computing 0.1b



Particle

Libratemo

Interesting discussion of the collapse of music gaming.

This is absolutely awesome if true.

Palantir appologise to Glenn Greenwald for any part they've played in trying to attack him and liberal journalists who support Wikileaks.

Curioser and curioser.

Update : Greenwald does an excellent job in explaining what's at stake.

Sublime Loop

A new musical / archiving project I'm working on.

The Sublime Loop has its own dedicated site. See there for more information.

Sublime Loop (Fairground) by Mentufacturer

Wikileaks points to "plans to bring down wikileaks" by a couple of security companies.

More Mechanical Turk madness.

What's wrong with the Big Society?

Another way of putting this .. there's a lot that's right about the idea of a Big Society where people get involved in running their communities in a more decentralised and autonomous way. But what's wrong is the context of "Capitalism" ie. an economic system with a dominant Capitalist class who are focussed on vacuuming up all the possible surplus wealth for themselves. As long as the capitalist is trying to extract all the surplus value generated by society (by requiring most people to work long hours to earn a modicum of comfort) there'll never be the capacity available for any community to live comfortably.

(More on Dillow, of course.)

Some pretty amazing uses of The Mechanical Turk. See video.

Stumbling and Mumbling :

Nick Clegg’s speech yesterday was either deeply ignorant about basic economic facts, or an attempt to talk down the pound.

He says he wants to “replace the old, debt-ridden economy with a new one, based on investment, export and sustainability.” The debt he’s referring to here, though, doesn’t seem to be merely government debt, but private sector debt too. He says “we are going through the sometimes painful process of unwinding a toxic legacy of personal, business and public debt.” And he wants “an economy where we sell our goods and services to China and the rest of Asia, instead of borrowing from them in order to buy the things they make for us.”

Now, let’s remind ourselves of a simple identity. Across the three sectors of the economy - government, domestic private and overseas - net borrowing must equal zero.

Update : more here.

I think I'm getting nostalgia for the 80s; at least the fucking BBC was politically correct in those days.

WTF?

"Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic, the French being arrogant and the Germans being over-organised," the BBC said.

It added that stereotype-based comedy was allowed within BBC guidelines in programmes where the audience knew they could expect it, as was the case with Top Gear.

Tonight I'm in love with an aesthetic :

It's partly about Lucky Dragons (check out the awesome Peace on Earth, Morning Ritual and Mirror Friends.)

It's also, old favourite, Threshold Houseboys Choir. And then it's also Hess is More's Biarritz in this Front Furniture Design video.

And, of course, Salem's King Night.

What is an Exhilerationist Regime?

Great! A role-playing game set in the world of PG Wodehouse.

It's a bit old, but I'm quite impressed by this article by Johann Harri about the pro-war left.

(See also : Eustonism)

My bike ... (sniff) .. stolen today, sometime between 2pm and 7pm, outside Goldsmiths.

BTW : Linux installation on the Asus is going pretty well. Wifi drivers worked without hitch. Sound seems ok. (Pure Data makes noises without having to mess about launching the jack daemon manually.)

The big issue seems to be Java applets in Firefox. May be related to Firefox 3.6 needing a very recent Java. However, I'm following Sun's instructions and it still doesn't seem to be having the right effect.

openFrameworks is a pain to install too. Not sure why that should be.

Robert Fisk :

When Tunisia announced that it was free, Mrs Hillary Clinton was silent. It was the crackpot President of Iran who said that he was happy to see a free country. Why was this?

Unboxing the Asus U33Jc.

I've needed a new laptop to do music and art for a while. I really like my Atom based EeePC netbook but it just doesn't cut it for real-time audio synthesis in PD / Supercollider and the like.

I like Asus and I like bamboo. (Everyone said "Get a MacBook." I didn't want a MacBook.) So this was a fairly tempting choice.

I'm not sure about this strange, tech. striptease of the unboxing ritual. But as that's what people seem to be doing these days (and I have a box to un, as it were), why not go for it?

BTW, it took forever for Windows 7 to configure itself. And I've spent the last 2 hours or so just creating a restore DVD. WTF?? Anyway, watch out for the next post which will probably feature me swearing and cursing as I fail to get Linux running on it.

Jane Hamsher :

It’s sad that this is what we have all come to expect when advocating for the civil rights of someone who has been identified as an “enemy of the state,” without benefit of a trial. But here we are.

BTW : having troubles with ThoughtStorms at the moment. You can still see it, but I can't update it.

Basically, it looks like some bots were creating user accounts even though they were blocked from updating pages. And so filled my file quota. I'm trying to fix it, but seem to have managed to break something. I won't break it further so you can still read the pages. But I need to do something about this.

Can one revolution lead to another? Microfoundations of Domino Theory.

Simon Reynolds on Chillwave while some guy sics Pierre Bourdieu on the hipsters.

I missed this breakfast talk on Personal Manufacturing. But you can now see videos of the Q&A session on the site.

I have increasing respect for Adrian Bowyer.

Fascinating. I just went to Kiva and found that they have no loans available. Apparently there are more Kiva funders than micro-borrowers.

The site says this is likely to be a temporary outage. (The equivalent of the Twitter FailWhale). But what does it say about the global economy? Is it a sign of a world-wide depression that there are so few entrepreneurs borrowing? Or a "savings glut" that so many people are moving into micro-lending? Are the Kiva partners proving to be an inefficient bottle-neck? Are entrepreneurs too risky a bet for Kiva to consider them?

Marius Kempe gave me just the answer I was hoping for over on Quora when I asked the question what harmonic / melodic / modal innovations exist in modern pop / rock / electronic that don't exist in classical music?

Ned Ragget :

So in the end when I saw that photo above and thought a bit, the truest comparison that leapt to mind was another band, now gone — Coil. In their emphasis on ritual and electronics, on the tactile and the contemplative, while the work of John Balance and Peter Christopherson still differs from Cargill and Keenan’s in many important ways, they arguably took different paths to similar end points, exaltations of creativity of the now that were also continuations of a secret history, of a time that seems more removed than it is, or more accurately a perceived time, a perceived past. And when there are always jokes that anything before one’s own birth or earliest memories is simply ‘ancient history,’ then Broadcast using the sonic starting points of the 1960s and otherwise would simply mean that they were working in just such a field in part, but never in the whole.

RIP Trish Keenan

The new global elite.

Quadcopters building.

Vinay's Shiny, Happy Death Cult.

Nirvana Cumbia.

Widget embedding seems to have failed, follow this link.

I love Hackney, London : A place that can contain everything from London Hackspace to The Last Tuesday Society.

xkcd : Highbrow science and art

More wikileaks links :

A suggestion for a distributed architecture.

Anonymous Infowar : Battle for a new Intelligence

I'm not particularly persuaded by Jaron Lanier or this article.

Nevertheless, there is something interesting in the debate he raises here :

The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns: low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other.

While many individuals in Wikileaks would probably protest that they don't personally advocate radical ideas about transparency for everybody but hackers, architecture can force all our hands. This is exactly what happens in current online culture. Either everything is utterly out in the open, like a music file copied a thousand times or a light weight hagiography on Facebook, or it is perfectly protected, like the commercially valuable dossiers on each of us held by Facebook or the files saved for blackmail by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

Personally, I don't think he's backed up the assumption that wikileaks's avowed objectives are unachievable or that we'll end up with silos of locked-down private data. After all, until recently, much of the US government's data might have been imagined to be more secure than it turned out. It's not yet clear that the US is punished for transparency whereas China is rewarded for opacity. China is one leak away from being seen as equally vulnerable.

Will that leak never come because of their better security measures? Because of their unwillingness to share data internally? Because of their less individualistic culture?

Or is it simply that it hasn't happened yet?

Even if China buys secrecy at the cost of major internal compartmentalisation, this could still be victory for Wikileaks, as Assange will have imposed his "secrecy tax" on it. Of course, China may be able to afford that tax. I suspect that in even the medium term it can't.

But most of the conspiracies that wikileaks is trying to tax / disrupt are between independent agents (eg. two governments, government and corporation, between separate senior managers). The fear of leaks then, is a fear of betrayal by your partner. The Chinese government may have its own employees locked down in fear. But it can't get into a conspiracy with Ukraine or Microsoft if it can't be sure of Ukraine's citizens or Microsoft's employees.

This looks good. Downloading now ...

Awesome!

Future kitchens

Impressively dynamic Icelandic / gothic statue in the national museum in Reykjavik. I think it's some evangelical saint.

Dave Winer gave his Blogger of the Year award to Julian Assange.

NakedJen is an evangelist for radical transparency. Jay Rosen says the news process is turning upside-down. And Julian Assange put both ideas together. He says let's know all there is to know. Let's tell the people who take us to war and destroy countries and kill hundreds of thousands, for profit -- no more secrets. We're not just going to suspect you're doing it, we're going to know. And maybe, if they know we'll know, they won't do it.

...

WikiLeaks is the America's Tiananmen. Julian Assange is the tank guy. We all hold our breath to see if we go all the way.

The best robots of 2010

Huh? Icelandic churchyards. Desolate windswept lava-fields. Crosses with light-bulbs. Plastic flowers. Gnomes.

Possibly the weirdest thing I saw on my travels. And this isn't an isolated occurrance. They all seem to be like this.

This is nice :

One thing’s for sure though, this new raft of watch accessories and the iPod nano being close to being jailbroken means that 2011 is shaping up to be an exciting year for nano owners and watch enthusiasts alike.

Someone spoke to a PR guy at the place where Bradley Manning is held prisoner.

Gone to Iceland ... back soon

Good post on the evolution of open-source hardware.

Jeffrey Goldberg :

As I wrote last week, there's very little Israel's right-wing government has done in the past year or so to suggest that it is willing to wean itself from its addiction to West Bank settlements, and the expansion of settlements bodes ill for the creation of a Palestinian state -- and the absence of Palestinian statehood means that Israel will one day soon confront this crucial question concerning its democratic nature: Will it grant West Bank Arabs the right to vote, or will it deny them the vote? If it grants them the vote, this will be the end of Israel as a Jewish state; if it denies them the vote in perpetuity, it will cease to be a democratic state.

The New York Times has a great piece on why global warming gives us cold weather by Judah Cohen. It's a good idea because you're always hearing people chuckling about "wot global warming?" or seriously assuming the cold winters we've been having is some kind of evidence against climate change.

Unfortunately, it's gone behind a paywall, but I think you should read it anyway, so I'm just going to quote the whole damned thing. (Sorry NYT)

THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.

All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.

How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.

For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.

Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.

But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.

Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.

It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.

Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.

Arguably the biggest physics story ever? First evidence that our universe isn't the only one?

I'm reading some absolutely fascinating articles about neo-folk, apoliteic music and attempts to build a fascist, green, anarchist synthesis.

Very confusing and scary. Like Michael Barkun's "improvisational millennialism" without the flying saucers (yet).

Fits right in to conspiracy theories and netocracy though, doesn't it?

Further thought. Is hauntology a kind of left-wing apoliteic music? With the myths of a cosy, Reithian, paternal modernism replacing the the folk-tradition celebrated by the rightists?

Wow!

Unbelievable how powerful the "vast right wing conspiracy which we pretend isn't there even though it's in front of our fucking eyes" is.

Let's get this straight. Vince says he's at war with Murdoch. (Which is the ONLY sane way for any politician to understand his or her job today. Ie. any politician who hopes to represent the electorate rather than a bunch of oligarchs needs to understand that he or she is in conflict with Murdoch.)

He's then turfed out of the job that gives him any power at all over Murdoch (ie. to block the deal to allow M. to buy the rest of Sky).

But he's left with power over higher-education (ie. all the shit that comes from trying make hugely unpopular cuts.)

Shame on Labour for making political capital by criticising Cable for this. They should have got behind him, emphasizing that Murdoch is the problem.

Q: You want to change the world?

JA: Absolutely. The world has a lot of problems and they need to be reformed. And we only live once. Every person who has some ability to do something about it, if they are a person of good character, has the duty to try and fix the problems in the environment which they're in.
That is a value, that, yes, comes partly from my temperament. There is also a value that comes from my father, which is that capable, generous men don't create victims, they try and save people from becoming victims. That is what they are tasked to do. If they do not do that they are not worthy of respect or they are not capable.

Bravo! I read this and wanted to cheer loudly.

Well done! Too often wanting to change the world is seen as either a youthful naivity or a sign of messianic self-importance. Julian Assange tells it like it is : it's the duty of all people of good faith.

La Bombacion - Funk Chicks (Bulgarian Chicks Remix) by La Bombacion

STOP PRESS : More music links.

Bulgarian Chicks (Balkan Beat Box) meets Baile Funk. I am literally in ecstasy over this. Via Generation Bass

Music links

I like this.

And all these.

Interesting rejection of fascism and neo-folk.

Glenn Greenwald :

That's the mindset of the U.S. Government: everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes. And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance. Many Americans plead with their Government in unison: we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us. Often, this kind of oppressive Surveillance State has to be forcibly imposed on a resistant citizenry, but much of the frightened American citizenry -- led by most transparency-hating media figures -- has been trained with an endless stream of fear-mongering to demand that they be subjected to more and more of it.

Update (a coda from same piece) :

Joe Biden not only voted for the Iraq War, but was Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 as the Senate authorized that attack, one which resulted in the deaths of well over 100,000 innocent human beings and which was launched under the strategic banner of "Shock and Awe," designed explicitly to terrorize Iraqis out of resisting through the use of a massive display of urban devastation. Julian Assange has never authorized any violence, never killed anyone, never advocated killing anyone, and never threatened anyone's death. Yet the former can accuse the latter of being close to a "high-tech terrorist" without many people batting an eye -- illustrating, yet again, what a meaningless and manipulated term "Terrorism" is; to the extent it means anything, its definition is this: "those who impede or defy American will with any degree of efficacy."

A typical day for Bradley Manning

More excellent writing about the wider context of wikileaks. This time on its implication for the US government's promotion of "internet freedom" as a foreign policy tool.

thiscantbehappening :

Assange's lawyers have said they have learned that the Obama Justice (sic) Department has impaneled a secret federal Grand Jury in Virginia to develop charges against Assange, most likely under the hoary and antiquated 1917 Espionage Act.

Because that act has never been used against a journalist or news organization, and because it would be fairly easy to make the case that Assange and WikiLeaks are performing a journalistic function protected by the First Amendment, legal experts say the government, to make any kind of a case, would have to prove that Assange had induced Manning to illegally turn over government documents to WikiLeaks.

...

Both Assange, in public statements, and Manning, in transcripts published by the magazine Wired, have stated clearly that there was no such relationship. Manning has said that he volunteered the documents out of a heartfelt whistleblower's desire to make public evidence of what he felt were war crimes by US forces, in the case of the Iraq and Afghanistan materials. There is no reason to think that his motive and methods would have been any different with respect to the State Department cables. There was no mention of his having been sought out or encouraged in his alleged activity by WikiLeaks, which only provided the vehicle for making any leaks public.

But with Manning having been held in solitary confinement now for more than seven months--first in a brig in Kuwait and now at Quantico--under conditions that are reminiscent of those that were used against alleged "dirty bomb" wannabe Jose Padilla, which drove him certifiably insane--it seems obvious what the government is up to.

Convicting Pvt. Manning on a charge of disclosing government secrets, stealing government documents, or even of treason, would be child's play in a court martial setting, where the jury would be composed of uniformed officers. Furthermore, it would not be much of a big deal, convicting a private of stealing and revealing government documents. But taking down WikiLeaks, and convicting Assange, who has been embarrassing the US and other secretive governments by doing what a real news media should have been doing? Ah, that would be a very big deal--one which would make a compliant US media even more compliant.

And to accomplish that feat, in the face of the First Amendment which guarantees Freedom of the Press, all the government would need to do is "prove" that Assange induced, or perhaps even paid Pvt. Manning to provide those documents.

Hence the torture.

In an article in Salon magazine, Glenn Greenwald reports that Manning is being kept in his cell, completely alone, for 23 hours a day. He is denied the right to exercise, has been denied a pillow or sheets for his bed, and is being administered anti-depressant "medication" involuntarily. He is barred from most outside contact, but one friend, David House, a 23-year-old MIT researcher who is a friend, according to Greenwald has said he has observed "palpable changes in Manning's physical appearance and behavior just over the course of the several months that he's been visiting him."

I suspect the goal in all this is to soften-up Manning, and to eventually "turn" him into a witness against Assange and WikiLeaks.

Again, in an American court--especially in a state like Virginia--a case of Manning's word against Assange's word would be pretty open-and-shut for a typical jury, which might be expected to show little concern about evidence that Manning had been tortured in captivity before being brought in to testify.

It is urgent that Americans who care about the Constitutional right to a fair trial, who care about the preservation of the First Amendment's freedom of the press, and who care about basic human rights and the need to outlaw torture here, in accordance with the United Nations Charter, demand that Pvt. Manning be released from his inhumane solitary confinement. He is an accused person, not a convicted criminal, and has by all accounts been a model prisoner. If the government thinks it has a case against him, it should bring him to trial with appropriate dispatch, and not try to pressure him into providing false witness against Assange. If it doesn't have a case, it should release Manning immediately!

(My emphasis)

Interesting theses on wikileaks.

Well done to The Guardian for giving further clarification of the case against Assange.

I guess this was a difficult decision to make, given that we need to keep supporting wikileaks (especially given the mounting likelihood of US legal action against it and Assange; further attacks from Bank of America; and the likelihood that wikileaks has important information to reveal about Bank of America or similar institution at the beginning of next year.)

At the same time, there are too many assumptions flying around that the accusations against Assange must be groundless, simply because he has the right enemies. And, worse, that his accusers must be part of a conspiracy against him.

Neither need be true. And the more we hear about the case, the less likely that really sounds. (Having said that, it could, of course, be a really clever conspiracy).

I'm inclined to believe it is a catastrophically unfortunate collision between Assange's behaviour, which was unacceptable if it's as reported, but nevertheless a behaviour which often goes legally unremarked in our society; and a Swedish legal system which is trying change that.

Does that mean that I think Assange should be extradited to Sweden for the charges to be heard?

Frankly, I'm in a fiendish dilemma. I think that, if guilty, it may be quite right that Assange goes to prison for his behaviour. And yet there is no government in the world that I would trust to be allowed to imprison him.

Dave Winer publishes WikiRiver, a river-of-wikileaks-news.

Guardian :

An analysis of local authority documents reveals that the number of council redundancies directly resulting from the coalition's austerity measures is expected to break the 100,000 mark by early in the new year, fuelled by the swingeing cuts announced this week to councils' budgets and the pressure to start cutting before the new financial year in April.

Update : Meanwhile, the government's smash-and-grab raid on the state continues, as it rushes to hand over serious powers to Britain's oligarchs.

A number of business heavyweights were appointed as non-executive directors to beefed-up boards of government departments to help the coalition implement its efficiency drive.

For the first time, boards will be able to ask the prime minister to sack permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servants, if they fail to fulfil their mandates, such as meeting departmental budget targets.

OMFG!

Cheap printed autonomous fliers.

We are racing towards a zero-privacy future.