WaveFlavours @ Sublime Loop

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

The reality of Greek austerity

Pen Colours

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

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

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

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

How bad is Obama? This bad.

Siri vs. Women

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"

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

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

Flight Assembled Architecture

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

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

 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!

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

Surprised?

The Physics of Collapse

Excellent systems model of how complex societies collapse.

Hat-tip : Jean-Luc Delatre

Facebook And The Evolution Of Social Software

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!

Why The Violent Suppression Of OWS?

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

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