The Blog




First coffee post of the year. It's the same old, same old.
http://coffeegeek.com/forums/coffee/general/508363

Go into any café anywhere in France, first thing in the morning. You'll be able to get a croissant and a "petit café crème". Get there early enough and you'll be surrounded by people having the same thing as breakfast on their way to work.

But what is a "petit café crème" and how do you make it? It seems to be roughly a single or double espresso, using a dark French roast coffee, topped off with a little hot milk, maybe 2:1 coffee to milk served in a small cup and saucer. That sounds simple but it's something that seems to be almost impossible to get elsewhere in the world. And the predominantly US coffee commentators don't seem to understand it or be able to explain the recipe. There's no good description in wikipedia as far as I can tell. Please note it's not a French version of a Cappuccino, Latte, Cafe Crema, Flat White. And it's the petit not the "café crème" or "Grand café crème" I'm most interested in.

People have suggested using google.fr to search for it, but all I'm getting is the same web pages returned.

So is there a good description, definition and recipe anywhere?
 CoffeeGeek - Coffee: General Discussion, What is a café crème? »
Posted Fri Dec 10, 2010, 6:35pm. Subject: What is a café crème? Widely served in Paris, as either a petit crème or grand crème. There's almost no information about this drink on the Internet. Is it the same as a café au lait, or something different? Thanks. back to top ...

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Anyone up for another lap round the sun?

http://io9.com/nice-solar-system-would-travel-around-its-star-again-1676928287
 Nice Solar System, Would Travel Around Its Star Again »
The main sequence star Sol sits at the center of a pretty nice system on the outer edge of a spiral galaxy. I did a full revolution on its third planet, and the view was great. Definitely up for another one.

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Following on from the list of 2014 lists. 

I wouldn't have found these without the best of year lists and it turns out they're really rather good.
* Grouper - Ruins
* HTRK - Psychic 95 Club
* Toumani Diabate & Sidiki Diabate - Toumani & Sidiki
* Tinariwen - Emmaar
* Moodymann - Moodymann
* Kangding Ray - Solens Arc
* Gazelle Twin - UnFlesh 

Music you owe it to yourself to investigate and you may not have heard of, yet.
* Al Dobson Jr. - Rye Lane Vol 1
* Throwing Snow - Mosaic
* Grumbling Fur - Preternaturals
And as far as I can tell, pretty much anything on the Mood Hut and 1080p labels. Especially Jack J.

Most over-rated (according to me). Mostly because they're SO PAINFUL to listen to.
* Scott Walker / Sunn O))) - Soused
* SDLaika - That's Harikari
* Arca - Xen
* Fatima Al Qadiri - Asiatisch. Nice idea but it just turned out a bit boring.

Best reviewing technique for when you need to be told what to think about all this stuff.
* TinyMixTapes. For instance, read the Beyonce review here.
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2014-favorite-50-music-releases-of-2014?page=1

Best musical comment on the SNP.
* King Creosote - From Scotland With Love

Music Genre that most needs to be clubbed to death and then cleansed with fire.
* PC Music and that whole QT, Sophie, electroclash, alt lit, happy hardcore, Eskibeat, K-pop, J-Pop, 8-bit thing. Seriously, it's horrible. How did that happen?
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The best list of the best lists of the best music of 2014,

- Dazed and Confused http://www.dazeddigital.com/best-of-2014
- DiS http://drownedinsound.com/lists/bestof2014
- DJ Broadcast http://www.djbroadcast.net/features/featureitem_id=433/Top_100_Albums_of_2014_100__71.html
- Dummy http://www.dummymag.com/lists
  http://www.dummymag.com/lists/the-20-best-albums-of-2014
- Electronic Beats http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/columns/audiocccult/audioccult-vol-30-the-shriek-of-2014/
- Fact Magazine http://www.factmag.com/category/endofyear/
- Fader http://www.thefader.com/2014/12/09/best-tracks-of-2014
- Gottwood festival (??) http://www.gottwood.co.uk/top-albums-of-2014/
- HypeM http://hypem.com/zeitgeist/2014/
  Best albums for specific moods.
- Juno http://www.junodownload.com/plus/2014/12/05/best-of-2014-top-30-albums/
- Pitchfork http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/
- Paste http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/12/the-50-best-albums-of-2014.html
- RA http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?2328
- Rob Booth https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152594669375095&set=a.10150577837775095.373247.626640094&type=1
- TinyMixTapes http://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2014-favorite-50-songs-of-2014
- TheQuietus http://thequietus.com/articles/16739-albums-of-the-year-2014
  http://thequietus.com/articles/16854-reissues-compilations-mixes-of-the-year-2014
  Obviously pretentious, or pretentiously obvious?
- The Wire (Maybe next month) http://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/charts/
- Thump/Vice http://thump.vice.com/words/the-50-best-albums-of-2014-50-41
- Vinyl Factory http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-releases/the-top-100-vinyl-releases-of-2014/11/
- WeekID http://theweekid.com/category/selected/best-of-lists/
- XLR8R http://www.xlr8r.com/tags/best-2014

Now we need: "Best music released in 2014 after the 2014 lists had gone to press." We also badly need "Most over-rated of 2014".

And purely in the interests of cultural research and shared cultural values, here's the mashups of Pop 2014
Danthology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOHYCZLmbyc
DJ Earworm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjYWwZYLYEs
It's seems pretty clear that 2014 is "The Year of the Butt". And that pop music is more aggressively amped-up than ever.

ps. Follow the links. The ones above are often entry points for many more 2014 lists on the same website.
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Snout. [as Wall] Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; And, being done, thus Wall away doth go.
A Midsummer Night's Dream : W Shakspear.

James Bridle of New Aesthetic and Drone Drawing fame goes on a walk. He follows the edges of the London Congestion Zone, documenting some of the CCTV cameras he sees. The edge of the congestion zone is the 3rd wall around the city. The first being the Roman City Wall, the second is the anti-IRA Ring of Steel. It's the first wall that is largely virtual consisting principally of ANPR  cameras.
http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/nor/2014/11/07/all-cameras-are-police-cameras/

In Park Lane, he was accosted by a pair of security guards who performed a citizen's arrest and held him until the Police turned up. "When they arrived, the police officers explained that carrying a camera in the vicinity of Central London was grounds for suspicion."

This reminded me of a London Met and Transport Police campaign. 
http://content.met.police.uk/Campaign/counterterrorism2009

A key part of that was a poster campaign http://voidstar.com/images/cctv.jpg "A bomb won't go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras.", "Don't rely on others. If you suspect it, report it". This scary bit of Orwellian double speak prompted an Internet meme generator long since gone. The phrase "don't rely on others" prompted me to mash the image up with some Hawkwind lyrics from Sonic Attack. "Think only of yourselves"   http://voidstar.com/images/sonic_attack.jpg The message is clear though. Only look at CCTV cameras out of the corner of your eye because if you pay too much attention to them, you'll be suspected of harbouring thoughts of terrorism.

But then there's London Transport's posters. here This all begins to get scarily post modern. Is this some hipster designer taking the piss out of their brief and sneaking it past some middle management sign off? Or is it doubleplus-good propaganda that works better at inserting the idea into our brain because we laugh at it.

James Bridle can be found here.
http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/
http://booktwo.org/
 The Nor » All Cameras Are Police Cameras »
This essay is the first of a series of reports from The Nor, an investigation into paranoia, electromagnetism, and infrastructure. Map-500. On the morning of Thursday, 30th October 2014, I set out to walk the perimeter of the London Congestion Charge Zone, a journey of some twelve miles around ...

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Bruce Sterling: Data globalization sure has had a corrosive effect on international law and order.  Even "democratic rule of law" governments are capable of any aberration nowadays: assassination, torture, sabotage, abduction, invasion, guerrilla war, surveilling whole populations, jailing journalists, chasing dissidents into exile, over-arming the police, you can name it.
http://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/104828876008
 BruceS — .. »
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21635044-malicious-computer-code-making-spooks-job-easier-ever-spy-who-hacked-me
"IT IS 30 years since William Gibson, an American-Canadian author, wrote...

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At last, a replacement for Audiomap/TuneGlue. EMI killed that probably by accident, about a year ago. Try this instead as a tool for exploring n-dimensional music-artist space.
http://musicroamer.com/ It's the same kind of idea. Put in one artist, it will build a rubber band spider diagram of related artists. Double click on one to expand it.
 Musicroamer - Discover New Music »
Discover new music. Find related artists. Get top tracks, album listings and listen to free music

[from: Google+ Posts]




"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Albert A. Bartlett[1]. This is especially true of exponential growth with short doubling periods. Particularly troublesome are functions that double in under 5-10 years because they wrong foot us. We think the near future is going to be like the recent past just a bit more so, when the growth rate means it's actually going to be radically different.

Then there's the revolutions and technologies that ought to be possible and contributing to some exponential growth function but are actually permanently 30 years out. Like Nuclear Fusion power, AI, Moon bases, batteries that are high capacity, low volume and cheap.

And there's 30 year futures with a date. 2030 still feels like the far future because back in 2000 it was. Except that now we're half way there and it's only 15 years away. So when politicians talk about targets for 2030 (especially about climate change), you'd better ask what they're going to do right now to get there, because it's not that far away any more. It's not just some far future that can safely be ignored for a few years. Take, for instance the recent PR about China-USA agreements on reducing CO2 emissions; That date of 2030 is prominent. If China and the USA have any chance at all of hitting even those relatively modest goals, they had better start going after them aggressively today, not in 5 years time.

So combine short doubling period exponential growth, with a belief in technical fixes that are actually permanently 30 years away, with a belief that 2030 is so far future as to not be worth bothering about right now. Does that look like sleep walking over a cliff with your eyes shut?

[1] Here's another good one from the same guy. "We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity." - Albert A. Bartlett
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In the next UK election (and/or by-election) will you vote Blue Tory, Red Tory, Yellow Tory, Purple Tory or Orange Tory[1] run by a white male from a privileged background that is pro-Trident[2] and has a vested interest in business as usual.

Or will you vote for a party led by a woman, trying to make a difference, that is anti-Trident and anti-war; like the Greens[3], SNP or Plaid Cymru.

But then why settle for a party that is only slightly raving when you can vote for a party that is fully two stops past Barking on the district line[4] and vote Raving Loony!

[1] What colour are the Ulster Unionists?
[2] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/11/the-trident-test/
[3] Petition to get the Greens into the TV party debates.
https://www.change.org/p/bbc-itv-channel-4-sky-include-the-green-party-in-the-tv-leaders-debates-ahead-of-the-2015-general-election
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becontree_tube_station
 Craig Murray » Blog Archive » The Trident Test  »
The Rochester By-Election further destroys the intellectual case for the BBC's decision that only male party leaders who support Trident can debate on TV before the UK general election. The Greens got five times as many votes as the Lib Dems in Rochester, and are ahead of them in several recent ...

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And so it begins. The Quietus top 100 albums of 2014. To which the only possible comment is: "You lot are so obviously pretentious"!
http://thequietus.com/articles/16739-albums-of-the-year-2014
 The Quietus | Features | Quietus Albums Of The Year 2014 (In Association With Norman Records) »
Here is the Quietus' main albums of the year list for 2014, in association with our pals at Norman Records for all your record buying needs

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The interesting thing here is not so much the beliefs and arguments about near term extinction, the anthropocene and the systemic collapse of civilisation but the sociology around reactions to it's possibility.

I'm sure it's not complete, but the New Political Map is a fairly exhaustive description of those reactions. It divides mainly into Collapseniks vs Salvationists with some fence sitters.  It's not hard to recognise quite a few of those groups in current media discussions of things like Climate Change.

Of course, as usual this mainly refers to people in WEIRD[1] countries and ignores the other 6 Billion people on Spaceship Earth. What and how do they think?

http://shift-magazine.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/new-political-map-2014-image-for-Dave-Pollard-article.png

http://shift-magazine.org/magazine/see-no-evil-the-morality-of-collapse/

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Systemic_bias
WEIRD ("western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic")

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You might want to stay away from Waitrose Organic food because it's potentially infected with homeopathic remedies.

Farmers are encouraged to use natural remedies and homeopathy to treat sick animals.

I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad. They were doing so well until those two words "and homeopathy".

http://www.waitrose.com/content/waitrose/en/home/inspiration/about_waitrose/the_waitrose_way/waitrose_organic.html.html

This isn't just communism. It's Waitrose, Luxury, Fully-Automated Communism.

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If OPEC just declared war on the US fracking industry by forcing oil prices lower, you have to wonder where that leaves the UK Tory party and their friends at Cuadrilla. The companies heavily invested in fracking are largely funded by junk bond debt. How long can they last out unprofitability? What happens when they fail?

There's some nasty ramifications (and some upside) of a sustained low oil price until OPEC has regained control again and oil prices are allowed to rise.

Peak oil doesn't mean a gentle rise in price as predicted by classic supply-demand economics. It means increasing volatility and chaotic price movements. It will be dominated by the major players jockeying for position and control.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/27/1347948/-The-Fracking-Boom-Just-Went-Bust
 The Fracking Boom Just Went Bust »
Opec chose not to decrease oil production today. Oil (WTI) closed as 69.05 / bbl.

To quote a Russian oligarch reported via Bloomberg :
“In 2016, when OPEC completes this objective of cleaning ...

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The lights are going out in Syria. Literally.
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-olduvai-cliff-are-lights-going-out.html
 The Olduvai cliff: are the lights going out already? »
Image from Li and Li, "international journal of remote sensing." h/t Colonel Cassad". The image shows the nighttime light pattern in Syria three years ago (a) and today (b). Those among us who are diehard catastrophists surel...

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Saccades and LED lights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

Saccades are the name for the way human eye movements work in jerks. The brain blanks the visual system while the eyes move and fills in the gaps with a remembered version of the scene. The quickest way to verify this is to look in a mirror and switch your gaze from eye to eye. Despite the lack of blinking, you can't see your eyes move. This has all kinds of side effects, not least the suggestion that it is responsible for at least some SMIDSY accidents. It's also an entry point into the discovery that a lot of what you think is objective reality out there is actually a constructed reality in here.

Here's the thing though. A lot of LED lights are driven from either mains frequency or a created alternating voltage in the bulb and go completely dark between cycles so they flash at about 50 or 100 Hz (UK. 60-120 in the US). Normally you never see the trails of flashes as your eyes move. But it is possible to deliberately slide your eyes across the scene slowly instead of using the Saccade mechanism and see the after images as the lights flash on and off. With the early evenings I'm finding this increasingly irritating on walks round the town as more and more lights are replaced by LEDs. There's these damn after images flickering in the corner of your vision.
 Saccade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »
A saccade (/sɨˈkɑːd/ sə-KAHD) is a fast movement of an eye, head or other part of the body or of a device. It can also be a fast shift in frequency of an emitted signal or other quick change. Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction.

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If Harry Potter is so clever, why isn't he dealing with climate change, pollution and the energy crisis? And peace in the Middle East.

http://io9.com/seriously-why-isnt-hogwarts-using-all-that-magic-to-ex-1655211405 
 Seriously, Why Isn't Hogwarts Using All That Magic To Explore Space? »
We've all asked it at some point or another: if the wizards of the Harry Potter universe can conjure up such amazing miracles, why don't they use it to solve the energy crisis or explore the wonders of the universe? Boulet's latest webcomic dreams up all magical possibilities for the wizarding world.

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On this day, it's especially important to follow the directions on boxes of matches. "Keep Dry and Away From Children". However if you are taking your little darlings to bonfire night, you should also heed the advice from Scarfolk Council. "Always Light Children At Arms Length"

http://scarfolk.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/arms-length-safety-poster-bonfire-night.html
 "Arms Length" Safety Poster (Bonfire Night Part 1) »
When Scarfolk Council issued the poster below in 1972, it was met with complaints from parents, teachers and arsonists. While the poster does offer the safety guideline of an 'arms length', it does not specify how long that a...

[from: Google+ Posts]




Some fallout from the IPCC report on climate change

There's a bit of received wisdom I've been seeing stated as fact as people comment on the IPCC report. "You can have growth in global GDP without growth in the consumption of energy and resources". It's a nice fantasy and has an element of truthiness about it, because obviously increased efficiency and productivity means producing more for less. Except that rises in GDP have ALWAYS resulted in increasing consumption of energy and resources. So where's the counter example? And there's an underlying assumption that continued 3% compound growth is desirable and necessary. Is that true?

There's some interesting lines of macro-economic research here. In each case it needs to provide not just answers, ideas and proofs by example but routes to get there. And solutions need to be appropriate for global macro-economics, not just a tiny self sufficient community in the middle of Wales.

1) Can you have improving quality of life with zero or negative GDP growth?

2) Can you have increasing GDP without corresponding increases in energy and resource consumption?

3) Can we reduce our dependence on borrowing from the future via debt to fund growth in GDP?

4) Can we control the pollution side effects of growth in GDP?

It's not enough to do like Paul Krugman and just use homilies and parables about making shipping more efficient by sailing slower or such like. If it's even true, that's a local solution when answers need to be global models.

All the Limits to Growth models show hockey-stick style exponential growth leading to a brief peak followed by a catastrophic correction. More technical fixes and productivity improvements seem to lead to making the same graph more extreme; faster growth, a higher peak, a more dramatic correction. So I think this leads to the most important question.

What can we do now to create a soft landing as we transition from a growth state to a sustainable state? And that's both personally and as a global society.

If that's not hard enough. Then bear in mind what might be required to force global society to follow the optimum path when most of the actors are ill-informed and are treating the game as an iterated prisoner's dilemma where their own personal short-term gain is all that matters. And there's a lot of them spread all over the world.
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