Thursday Thirteen (V22)

1. I thought it would be fun to mention a few places I have visited since I started this Blog. An obvious one for me is London - I was there when we won the Olympic bid.
2. The next day, I was in Paris, but I was there on the day of the terrorist attacks on London - we first heard about it via SMS Text messages.
3. A little earlier, I'd done a quick scoot around Europe, stopping in Milan, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. I notice I didn't mention it at all in my blogging, because I was still getting to grips with the technology.
4. I did mention my chill-out time in Scotland, though.
5. Then to Stamford, Connecticut as well as Baang in well-heeled Greenwich and South Norwalk by speedboat.
6. From Stamford I drove to Manhattan and then ditched the car in 46th Street. I was staying in the funky SoHo Grand and grabbed a cab driven by David Bradford - the author of Drive by Shootings
7. Next I was in Wales, for a brief sojourn.
8. And then off to Stockholm, where I arrived at about 22:00 - which was an ideal time to go off to hit the Operakellaren for a spot of clubbing.
9. Clearly influenced by all things Swedish, I'm then found in Warrington Ikea
10. And then another trip to Italy, this time to Rome
11. And a spin to Frankfurt and then Heidelberg.
12. Next up, of note was a short visit to Cannes, France, which was in the period I was writing my NaNoWriMo novel and was a superb source of inspiration as I got upgraded to the best suite in the hotel.
13. And I'll finish this brief skip through the first few months of my blog in the spa at Nirvana, laying in the flotation tank, listening to soft classical music.

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OTA Wordless Wednesday

Supper at Cipriani's, West Broadway, NY
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a little bit haunted

Out this evening for dinner.

Our setting was a big round table and enjoyable food. Ideal grounds for conversation, which included me trying to explain Dr Who to an Italian, two Swedes and a Belgian, none of whom had heard of the series or knew about cybermen, or what a dalek was.

And the venue has its own ghost in the form of a permanently resident blue lady.

bandwidth

Another mad scientist post today. I was reading about bandwidth of new computer chippery and started to muse that these numbers are approaching those of the human brain.

For example, it is estimated that the human brain has around an 8-10 Terabyte storage capacity. Thats $10k of disk hardware nowadays.

It is speculated that a normal human can process senses at around 11Mb per second, spread between sight 10Mb/sec (though the eye has around a 127 megapixel resolution), touch 1Mb/sec; hearing 100kb/sec (great value); smell 100kb/sec and taste at 1kb/sec.

Our brains are supposed to use associative processing (like a combination of massively parallel processing and fuzzy logic) which works well for pattern recognition (eg of faces) and this can be the equivalent of a conventional 10 billion instructions per second.

But for day to day tasks, the average brain's main CPU is quite slow at only 50-100 bits per second, with a theoretical maximum of around 1000 operations per second (based upon the number of "brain building block" synapses that can fire per second).

The energy consumption of a brain is around 25 watts, under a normal load, but probably half of this is used for non computational purposes.

And the brain has a process a tad like writing to DVD for long term memory, where the data is progressively compressed (in a sort of fractal way) keeping main patterns and concepts and then using association with other memory areas to allows things to be re-assembled. Those synapses are pretty clever because they are nonlinear, plastic, analog systems that encode information in space-time distributions. This somewhat beats binary.
Or we can look from the 4000 year old Vedic perspective predating Buddhism. They said the brain was only a memory unit and used Soma (a little like magic mushrooms) to clear the brain of logic and to improve awareness.

It is like the idea in meditation that the sensations in the brain become still and then perception becomes clearer.

So I shall put this mind back in its box again as I've used my 25 watts for this evening. Now for some liquid cooling.

Tag: brain, bandwidth, mad scientist

Big Noddy

There's a complicated news story in the US at the moment allegedly involving a grand jury, Iraq, the powerful deputy White House Chief of staff and strategy advisor to George Bush(Karl Rove), the CIA and hints towards evidence from the Vice President Dick Cheney.

The twists and turns of the story seem to revolve around whether there was a junket style trip to Africa to investigate possible nuclear sales before the Iraq war. The sequencing and trail is convoluted at every turn, yet many of the documents are a matter of public record.

So the other US secrecy news is about the National Security Agency now being able to operate inside the USA in the way it does to the rest of the world using its so named 'Big Noddy' technology, which intercepts some 650million transmissions a day.

The challenge seems to be that if a bunch of senior and well reported and documented US officials can have stories so complex to unravel, then what hope for the internal surveillance systems to find anything useful?

Maybe they will need Big Ears as well?

Mind the air gap.

Tag: NSA, CIA, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Big Noddy, noddy

yeee-haw!

The holyhoses lads were celebrating their 2,000th post a few days ago. Zowie! Their enjoyable sister pub is GuitarGAS, which I frequent as I blunder through learning the guitar.

As personifies a holyhoses debate, they talk about how the various girl guitarist models do/don't look as if they can play guitar. There is also a discernable country theme that drifts through some of their debate.

So here as a 2K celebratory post is Emily Robison in the middle of a bluegrass banjo solo, and for those with peculiarly detailed interests, its a rather funky Nechville Meteor.

..and OK, by popular request, here's Sophie Hawkins and a gratuitous girl guitar phone wallpaper advert - both clicky.

Views: : Sophie=19, GuitarGirl=42, Emily=29

Tag: music, guitar, dixie chicks, banjo

Hammers

Watched the unfortunate demise of West Ham with a few others of divided loyalties. Everything stopped for the last few minutes. Ninety seconds before the end of extra time it could have been West Ham. But after the penalties it was Liverpool.

Tag: soccer, West Ham, F A Cup

cow

Its a serious problem. Cows are disappearing. A rapidly growing collection of cow abduction evidence is being assembled to help triangulate the ways that possible alien forces are operating. Click the picture for more information and a chance to help.

Tag: cow, alien, abductions

getting my stuff done

I saw this via Amanda's at Rocketboom and decided I needed to watch it before I started to get my stuff done. It took a few minutes to down load it and whilst it down loaded I was thinking about how to get my stuff done. Then I thought it would be best to put it on the blog before I could start to get my stuff done.

So I had to upload it again to my movie folder before I could start to get my stuff done. Then I needed to set up this entry and link to it before I could start to get my stuff done. And I remembered I wanted to thank ingredientx before I could start to get my stuff done.

Tag: vlog, stuff, rocketboom

rashbre.tv - train on route 66

I filmed this on a steam train whilst taking a break from driving Route 66, on my way to California.

I was in Williams, Arizona, at the time.

You see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona. Don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino. Won't you get hip to this timely tip: when you make that California trip get your kicks on Route sixty-six.

Tag: music, guitar, vlog, Route 66, Arizona

Thursday Thirteen (V21)

1. Yesterday I noticed that some Thursday Thirteens had already started to appear before my day had flipped. I resisted the temptation to pre-load anything.
2. Actually, I was so tired last night that I don't think it would have made any sense in any case.
3. Like a week ago, I'd been on some late video link ups to Atlanta and Sweden. It sure beats travelling for some purposes, but on this occasion we had a slight delay on the line, which meant we kept interrupting one another.
4. So it was a Thai chicken ready-meal when I finally got home yesterday, before I departed to the land of nod.
5. I'm ashamed to admit that I looked in a neglected part of my inbox yesterday and found just over 4000 unread inmails. Now you are right to surmise they were 'Bulk Mail', but at least my force fields were set to 'High' so there wasn't really any 'bad hotmail' in there. You know what I'm talking about. Now clean and tidy again.
6. I have been trying to edit another piece of video for the Vlog, but it keeps going wrong with a file error. It's a shame, because I quite like the piece. My backup is a fellah playing banjo on a train by route 66. I expect I will post that instead.
7. I packed away my Final Cut Pro DVDs and some other bits and pieces and sent them to Apple in Ireland a couple of days ago. They say they will exchange them (for a fee) for the Universal format version, which means I should be able to edit with FCP on my Intel Mac. Frankly the iMovie on there is already quite useful for a lot of basic editing in any case.
8. I started a post about the daleks yesterday, before I remembered it was supposed to be Wordless Wednesday. I was going to do a text with holes blown in it by the daleks. They have a new catchphrase now - instead of 'EX-TER-MIN-ATE' they also say 'You will be deleted'. Scary.
9. I was with Tatiana yesterday looking out at the grey skies whilst we waited for a coffee to finish making that coffee shooshing noise. She said 'beautiful day' and meant it. I realised she was referring to the green leaves of spring. Its all about perspective.
10. However one looks at it, today is an excellent day around here.
11. Is still my favourite number.
12. TT is a kind of meme. I can remember when a lot of people didn't know what a meme was. I bet a lot of people still don't know what a mneme is, although its actually an older concept as a unit of social evolution.
13. I'm sitting writing this about 4 metres from some freshly brewed Java. The aroma is overpowering and I need some right now.

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OTA Wordless Wednesday

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