Jimmy Cauty's ADP tour of a "Riot in a container" is paying a visit to the Beanfield next weekend and then on to Stonehenge for the Solstice.
https://www.facebook.com/events/226541157721326/

I thought I'd go and try and find the location both of the battle and exactly where the container is going to be sited. It turns out the Beanfield was cut in half by the building of the A303 dual carriageway and the small lane the convoy was forced down is now a dead end. But in the process I found a wonderful image of exactly where the container is going on google streetview. It looks like some squaddies in a tank have stopped for a full english in the middle of some J.G.Ballard-ian dystopian landscape that just needs a couple of hundred police in fluorescent jackets to be part of the show.



Streetview, container location https://goo.gl/maps/6vY3HWoSd1U2
Aerial, Beanfield https://goo.gl/maps/2hQdJYX95ss

It's 31 years since the Battle of the Beanfield
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/12/ukcrime.tonythompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beanfield

It gets better. Just round the corner is a red brick motel and a swish boutique hotel with golf course. Not quite pink, but still,

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot SPOT
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
‘Til it's gone

Brexit Leave campaign
meets Right wing think tanks
meets Right wing tabloids and broadsheets
meets Climate change denial
meets Big Oil
meets GMO/Big Agriculture

And all tied together by lobbyists and lobbyist organisations out of a single address in Westminster
http://www.desmog.uk/2016/06/13/mapped-cosy-relationship-climate-euro-sceptic-bubble-55-tufton-street-brexit-less-climate-action

It's not about Boris's hair or Farage's latest craziness.
It's not about Turkey joining the EU or some mythical tide of immigrants stealing our jobs and our benefits.
It's not about EU bureaucracy
It's not about saving or killing the NHS

It's about a high-stakes, power grab by all the usual suspects.

Don't give it to them.

Vote remain.

ps. The link between climate change denial and GMO promotion is wierd. You'd think if you denied science in one place you'd mistrust it in others. But of course it's never about the science. It's about regulatory capture by big business.


And not so surprising that the Leave campaign doesn't want to talk about the environment.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/13/eu-referendum-environment-filthy-beaches

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One more time, with feeling. Farr festival is a boutique electronic dance festival on July 14-15-16. Near Baldock on the A1, 30 miles N of London.

For just a little longer, the ticket link below is for weekend camping tickets at a heavy discount.

https://tickets.farrfestival.co.uk/rep/jbond-farr-2016
http://www.farrfestival.co.uk/

From tomorrow (May 24) for one week. Tickets @ £75 and 3 for £150. Get in there.
https://tickets.farrfestival.co.uk/rep/jbond-farr-2016

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Let's talk about global population for a moment. There's a technotopian view that "Given current trends, it is very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century and then start to decline.". This is an idea that Stewart Brand promotes as does Kevin Kelly as evidenced by their bets on the Long Bets website among others. Typically this goes along with comments like "The growth rate of the human population has already peaked. Today’s population growth rate is one percent per year, down from its high point of 2.1 percent in the 1970s."

Now, the best source of data about global population is probably the UN. Their papers are pretty dry but there's a good summary of their data here. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ And also in the UN's executive summary here. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf What seems to have happened is that the growth in population was close to an exponential curve up to about 1950. But then it transitioned to a linear growth so that from about 1965 to 2015 the growth in absolute numbers has been pretty constant at 1b every 12-14 years, 80m every year. Now in a linear growth phase, of course the RATE in terms of the percentage of the total is going down. Simple maths. A constant addition is a smaller and smaller proportion of the growing total. However the linear rate is constant. If the growth in population is following a resource constrained logistics curve we would expect an S shape. So that after the linear region we would expect the growth to slow and the total to then plateau out. However looking at the UN forecasts, even the most optimistic has the peak at around 10b in 2080. The median predictions don't top out this century and hit 11.2 billion by 2100. The UN has recently revised (2015) their forecast of 10 billion persons in the year 2056 (six years earlier than previously estimated). If anything the recent historical data and near term (30-40 years) forecasts are for slightly higher than linear growth. This is the data that Hans Rosling uses as the basis of his presentations to the BBC and Davos, although he manages to a positive spin on it. We should be more sceptical.

All of this forces me to say "citation needed" when referring back to statements like "very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century" or "Human population of the world will peak at or below 8 billion in the 2040s and then drop dramatically.". It looks too much like hand waving. So where's the justification for a different outcome from the forecasts of the most well respected source? When should we expect a slow down in the linear growth, because it's still happening.

This seems critical to me because people who seek to find technological answers to our problems tend to argue that Malthus and Erlich were wrong and continued economic growth is possible indefinitely. Continued growth in global population makes this harder and harder to support. It may not be the relatively quick Malthusian disaster produced by exponential growth, but linear growth is ultimately just as bad, it just takes a bit longer before you hit the limits.

Projections and futurists usually take a predictable approach. Take what's happening right now, project the graphs out to 15 years with no real changes in approach. Then push the models to 30 and then to 60 years with some changes that make a certain amount of sense. Now go back to 1970 when Erlich and crew were predicting Malthusian apocalypse. They'd had 40 years or so of accelerating exponential growth in global population and it was currently peaking at 2% pa compound. If that had continued we'd be on 9b now (2016), 12b in 2030 and 18b in 2050. Understandably they couldn't see how the Earth could possibly support that. But given the current situation they were seeing around them at the time, it was reasonable to wonder what would happen.

As it turned out they were writing just as the first demographic transition happened from exponential growth to linear growth. Instead of 2% pa, the system switched to 80m pa. It's now kept that linear growth up for 50 years. So if you were projecting right now, it would be reasonable to expect that linear growth to continue for at least another 15 years, maybe to 30 years out. And you'd be stretching the point to justify it for 60 years. It is possible that we're on the threshold of the next transition from linear growth to zero growth or even falling growth. But right now in 2016 it's hard to see.

So what is underpinning these 3 regimes?

- Exponential growth: Agricultural revolution. Crop science. Industrialisation of agriculture. Cheap nitrogen fertiliser produced with cheap energy. Antibiotics.

- Linear growth: Urbanisation. Falling fertility rates among developed populations. Underdeveloped areas with exponential growth becoming a smaller proportion of the whole. What else?

- Zero and falling growth: Pollution and resource constraints. Food capacity constraints. Ageing menopausal populations. What else?

What have I missed as justifications? And why should the transition happen from linear growth to zero growth? What I don't feel I've got a handle on is why we've had constant linear growth for 50 years and why it should stop. Instead of arguing about the details of which futurist was right or how previous predictions turned out to be absurd, where's the analysis of what was happening then, now and in the 30 year future?

I don't really see how to avoid this. It suggests to me that it's a core, big and difficult problem that won't go away. And it's the one big problem that underpins all the other big problems. If we're not to have those catastrophic failures defined by "SFPD - Systems Fail, People Die", then we have to come up with solutions for supporting 11-12b people within the next 100 years. And we have to do it while in the middle of climate change and resource limitations (eg fossil fuels) becoming major factors. And of course it's worse than it appears because that rising population has increasing expectations of consumerism. Generating increasing amounts of pollution, both as CO2 and as more traditional forms. And using up our resources at an increasing rate.

Happy Vernal Equinox Day.

The equinox was actually at 04:30 UTC, with sunrise for the pagans at Stonehenge at 06:06 UTC. But I wasn't awake for either.

And next Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon (Wed 23rd, 12:01 UTC) after the Vernal Equinox. So thanks to the calculations for the date of the Jewish feast of Passover, that's Easter.

Trying to unpack the symbolism surrounding all this is beyond me. The blood of sacrificed spring lambs, eh. M'kay, err, say what?
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"Pavlov's Dogwhistle"

Or is that redundant?
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We are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist. 

I, for one, welcome our corporate overlords. 

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The Committee to Abolish Outer Space should meet up with the last remnants of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts[1]. Surprisingly, it looks like they have a lot in common.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/manifesto-of-the-committee-to-abolish-outer-space/

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/smash-the-hotels-squat-the-moon

[1] I need both an AAA and a C.A.O.S T-shirt.
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When I'm in charge of motorcycle and motorcycle component design:-

- alarms won't drain the battery if you don't use the bike for 3 weeks and forget to put it on the trickle charger. Seriously guys, an alarm should run for pretty much forever on it's internal battery. Just taking a small charge when the engine's running.

- Honda and Suzuki will find a regulator supplier that can supply a regulator that actually works and doesn't lead to a small pile of mostly broken batteries that don't really hold a charge any more. How long has this been going on? Nearly as long as camchain adjusters that don't.

- And batteries will actually last more than 5 years and survive more than 4 winters.

- The sidelight switch won't be an infinitesimal click beyond the steering lock but will actually require a separate button press on a lockout. Gah! How hard is this?

- So it's virtually impossible to walk away from the bike in daylight with the steering lock and sidelights on, only to return to a bike 4 hours later that won't start the engine. Yeah, I know. Always check. Except every once in a while, you don't.

- And even if you could bump start it (CVT transmission and clutch, no kickstart, hey-ho) the EFI needs a certain minimum charge to boot the computer. This modern life, eh? Bring back carbs, air-cooling, kick starts, dynamos, and minimal electronics that will run with the battery replaced by a capacitor.

- And the battery terminals will be reasonably accessible with jump leads. Not buried behind a screwed down cover and surrounded by plastic so you can't get the crocodile clips to stay put.
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I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream in which I was listening to Weather Report do a Dub version of one of their songs. It had been de-constructed and re-worked so much you could barely hear the remnants of the original. But just as I woke up it resolved into Cucumber Slumber and it was called something like Turnip Nap. Or possibly Consuetude as some kind of pun riff on Swedes. And with a nod to Zappa's reworking of "Black Napkins" into "Serviettes Noir".

So I go looking for a Cucumber Slumber Dub and I don't think anyone's ever done it, and somebody should. Although there are one or two jazz tribute bands that do something approaching it. It's really annoying that you can't record the music you hear in your dreams!
The original https://youtu.be/_eUMQSfPtZU
Barbary Coast - Cucumber Slumber Medley https://youtu.be/RzQL6MOLA_4
Black Napkins https://youtu.be/cNkl1avYXRM
Le Serviette Noir live in Paris https://youtu.be/KIhiq-66A8Q
Titties and Beer tour. Yep, I was there.

Now, Simon Reynolds does a yearly thing where he encourages his blog followers to find music with examples of exceptional playing of one instrument. This year it was Bass. Most of it is from post-disco or post-punk so you get lots of references to The Stranglers or Bootsy and I was thinking that Cucumber Slumber is an example of amazing bass playing that might have been missed. Which led to Simon's post here that covers a huge amount of ground around Bass from Psychedelia. Mid-60s to Mid-80s.
http://blissout.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/bass-bits-4-psychedelia.html

As an aside, The Stranglers turned up on Dangerous Minds[1] in a short post about George Melly. 
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_stranglers_appear_in_a_bbc_documentary_about_surrealism_1978
You owe it to yourself to listen at least once to Their collaboration "Old Codger". Rather uncomfortable listening, post Saville.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO_6qmBHLbo 

Back to Reynolds. Right in the middle of his post about Psychedelic Bass is a live version of Jaco Pastorius doing a tribute to Noel Redding and Jimi Hendrix with a jazz-ed up version of Third Stone From The Sun. 
At which point I realised that I saw him do this at Hammersmith Odeon during the same tour. He was booed by an audience that was mostly there to see Birdland which had just become an international hit. They thought they were there to see some Lounge Jazz and what they got was a Sonic Attack from an abandoned Bass guitar feeding back through the floor of the stage and some wild eyed maniac space-hippy in harem pants bowing to them from the footlights.
https://youtu.be/gtHbxsdExlE

[1]Dangerous Minds is a wonderful blog. Where else could you find a mix of the 200 cover versions of "These Boots" mixed in with a discussion of Paul Klee's influences.
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/listen_to_over_200_different_versions_of_nancy_sinatras_these_boots_are_mad

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Pokemism : A tendency to collect and try out cognitive biases to see how they feel. Can you collect them all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

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Quality travel excursions for Oxbridge alumni, led by a world class academic. eg 19 days through China and the 'stans following parts of the silk road. For only £3910 all in.
https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/travel/crossing-the-ancient-silk-road-0 

A pipe-dream for the bucket list?

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I wonder how much easier travelling by bicycle makes border crossings compared with  motorcycle or car. And if the same applies to low power electric bicycles. So for instance, do you still need an escort in western tibetan China or the Waziristan and tribal parts of Pakistan?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2016/feb/16/crossing-asia-on-my-bike-i-met-countless-others-out-to-see-the-world-on-a-bicycle 

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Yesterday's nature excitement was seeing a pair of Goldcrests in Hertford's Pinetum. They were feeding on midges and insects on a pile of Douglas Fir branches I was clearing. That came from the top of an old but weird shaped tree that had broken off in the high winds of a few days ago.

The Pinetum is looking good and the display of snow drops is looking perfect. They have an open day this Sunday with guided walks and cream teas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldcrest
http://www.clintonbakerpinetum.org.uk/

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None of those "Shine-on; Let’s do an SF anthology about positive futures!" people have ever approached Peter Watts, for some reason. I wonder why. Here's his typically scary take on Zika and other emerging infectious diseases (EID).
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6461

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Reading James Bridle's SciFi short about a post mass-data world[1]. Recommended by Bruce Sterling[2]. Leading to re-visiting Bridle's blog and a piece about 5-eyes surveillance[3]. And his short film of a CGI walk-through of UK immigrant detention centres[4]. And another piece about the Space Blanket as a A Flag For No Nations (or perhaps a Flag Of No Nation)[5]. All while listening to Fatima Al Qadiri - Brute, a soundtrack for 21st century protest[6]. 

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-end-of-big-data
[2] http://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2016/01/the-end-of-big-data-a-science-fiction-story-by-james-bridle/
[3] http://booktwo.org/notebook/hyper-stacks-post-enlightenment/
[4] http://booktwo.org/notebook/seamless-transitions/
[5] http://booktwo.org/notebook/a-flag-for-no-nations/
[6] http://www.factmag.com/2016/01/20/fatima-al-qadiri-new-album-brute-battery/
http://thequietus.com/articles/19578-listen-new-fatima-al-qadiri [7]
[7] Coincidentally, the image for Brute is a TellyTubby wearing riot police gear. And while it's obviously the purple TinkyWinky famously outed by Jerry Falwell for being a closet gay, It's got Po's circular aerial and not TinkyWinky's triangle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies#Tinky_Winky_controversy. Except that actually it's Joe Kline's Po-Po [8]
[8]https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/josh-kline-freedom/

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The only possible response is "Oh dear". And that's what they want you to say.

https://youtu.be/wcy8uLjRHPM

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I'd like to propose an extension to Betteridge's Law. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines 

"Any headline that contains 'could' can be answered by the words, Probably not."

eg "This $500 bamboo bicycle could be a key to reliable, affordable, and sustainable transportation". Hmmm!?! Probably not.
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Why is David Cameron's "Greenest Government Ever" turning away from investment in renewable infrastructure? Especially after Paris last year. We were doing quite well there for a while.

Did they make too many promises to their fossil fuel friends in the fracking industry? 

http://qz.com/591143/a-pioneer-in-renewable-energy-is-inexplicably-abandoning-the-cause/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news-14-5/david-camerons-vow-to-lead-greenest-government-ever-lies-in-tatters-as-tories-axe-green-deal-home-10411260.html

There's something strange going on here.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/levy-control-framework-unanswered-questions

There's a broad mix of opposition politicians, energy companies and green groups asking the same questions.

Last July, the UK government started to roll back support for renewable energy, citing forecasts of cost overruns and the need to keep down household bills.

New projections showed the Levy Control Framework (LCF) cap for low-carbon support would be breached, the government said. Yet it has never published the details of its updated calculations, despite the multi-billion pound implications for the direction of UK energy investment.




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Beware neo-optimists (and pessimists) using "TED-Stats" to sell you a story. It starts with complicated but pretty graphics that combine 4 different things via multiple confusing axis scales mixed in with colour and different sized spots. Then notice that the graphics are only available as part of a youtube video of a powerpoint presentation with no citations or links to the underlying data. Dig deeper and you'll find the following common statistical strategies.   

1) Excessive accuracy. For instance total global population to an accuracy of 1000 in 7,000,000,000. Or total CO2 production against global GDP when this is hugely dependent on figures from China and India. One example is the de-coupling carbonisation story that requires a pause in CO2 production during a continued rise in GDP. Except that both figures just got restated for the last 10 years by 10 times the small change you're looking for. And with China the figures are coming out of a hierarchy with a huge incentive to lie about them. And as Eris knows, truth in communication is very hard in strongly hierarchical systems where self-serving lies are the norm.

2) Mistaking percentages for absolute figures. Total global population has been following linear growth for 4 decades with each successive billion taking about 12-13 years to add. If anything the time to add a billion is shortening from 15 to 12 years. But if you measure the growth as a percentage of the total, of course the percentage growth is dropping. You can sell this story as "Population growth has been dropping for 4 decades". Then extrapolate this drop in percentage out as a straight line and you can argue that it will drop to zero and so population will peak. Except that the linear growth is still happening and we're still adding a billion every 12 years. Even the most reliable source of figures, the UN, can simultaneously predict a drop in population growth due to fertility rates and also adjust the date we get to 9b closer by 6 years. So which is it; is growth slowing down or is it speeding up?

There's a similar kind of statistical lying in the story about CO2 production flat-lining. So the total yearly emissions in GtC/y didn't increase so the year on year rate changed by 0% or went down by 0.1%. Great. Except that yearly emissions were already at a record high and will be pretty much the same next year.

3) Focussing on detail and sub-sections instead of the holistic big picture. The classic example here is to argue that because the USA and developed world reduced their onshore fossil fuel use or pollution or CO2 output then things are getting better. If everybody could do this, then we'd solve the climate change problem. But this ignores the global picture that the developed world reduced it's emissions by outsourcing all its manufacturing to the developing world. And we outsourced all our pollution as well. Not only that but the shipping involved is a major polluter as well.

Now add all this together and attempt to argue that things are getting better because the numbers of people in extreme poverty are reducing rapidly due to capitalist globalisation. See, the percentage of people in extreme poverty is coming down year on year! If we keep this up we can wipe out extreme poverty by 2030. Add in a lot of hand-waving arguments about average incomes, education, fertility rates, urbanisation to justify that. But, wait. At the same time as the percentage was dropping we were adding 1b every 12 years. How come there were 1000m in extreme poverty in 1820 and still 1000m in 2010? And it's essentially the same people in subsistence farming in the poorest countries that are classified as in extreme poverty. Didn't we achieve anything in the last 200 years of progress? Clearly mankind has achieved an astonishing amount in the last 200 years and if nothing else we've added 5.5b people who are NOT IN EXTREME POVERTY. That's a cause for optimism as long as you don't think too hard about the implications of continuing to add more non-poor people to the mix indefinitely. But what we haven't done is to reduce the absolute number who are in poverty. Except maybe we have. Look closely and it's possible that the absolute numbers have been dropping a little this century. But be extremely wary of the accuracy of that reporting.

It makes you wonder. Does anyone know WTF is going on and can describe it accurately without bias and an agenda?

Bonus links
Poverty
http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/world-poverty/
http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?0,4
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/10/25114899/global-count-extreme-poor-2012-data-issues-methodology-initial-results
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/150512-ssp-pop.html
Population
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#pastfuture
Neo-Optimism 
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-Sterling-Jon-Lebkowsky-Sta-page05.html#post105
http://www.economist.com/node/5135423
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/02/happiness-conspiracy-against-optimism-and-cult-positive-thinking

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