a fistful of kuai

The weird thing about the USA teetering on the edge of its implacable sovereign debt status is that the US dollar actually appears to be getting stronger.

There's no secret that America prints around $86bn per month of quantitative easing (a.k.a. new money) reaching around $2.8 trillion so far. I think the USA annual economy turns over $16-$17 trillion per annum, so its already printed about 16% of that as new money.

Intriguingly, the site that informs the rest of the world about this sort of thing is closed because of the US Government shutdown.

Oh, and so is the site it suggests referencing at the end of the message...

It raises an interesting point about global financial stability, because usually the traders move to the dollar in times of uncertainty. As this uncertainty is about the dollar, it seems an unusual thing to do. Except everyone knows that the uncertainty will cause the US presses to keep on printing money.

Of course, most of the moves that these highly rewarded traders make are part of computer algorithms and the 'flee to dollar' is probably built in, creating the paradox. Not that there's any real alternative. It would take decades to devise an alternate Monopoly currency to be used in times of strife.

From time to time a humorous three dollar bill is reproduced in America, usually as part of a satirical message. I even have a couple from the Lewinsky era, which I picked up in Washington. But it's currently the $16 bill that is receiving attention.

That's the one that George Osborne and Boris Johnson have gone fishing for, over in Beijing.

Yes, the renminbi currency of Chinese yuan is the one to watch. Bottom right the notes even have the denomination marked in something that looks intergalactic.

So it'll be yuan, mao* and fen, whilst we watch the rise of the new ABP Chinese business district around the Royal Albert Dock, right next to City Airport. Maybe a new station for the Monopoly board, that Custom House Crossrail station due by 2015 is beginning to look a little understated.

* Okay, or jiao

Enjoying Grayson Perry's Reith Lecture

A few months ago I had an off kilter argument about the artist Grayson Perry. Not about his work, but about the location of some of it. I'd just seen it exhibited in London, but the other person running a gallery shop swore it was somewhere in Sunderland.

I think we were both right and it had been moved. Today I was listening to the Reith Lecture by the very same artist, during which he talked about whether the uniqueness of a piece was one of its defining characteristics. It made me briefly wonder if there was more than one copy of some of his, but I decided there wasn't.

His was a playful speech, (click here) covering points about arbiters of artistic taste, whether we (the public) are supposed to 'like' stuff in galleries, and the value of a good 'museum quality' piece to an artist's market price.

I've stumbled into liking Grayson Perry's approach. He's both serious and irreverent at the same time. He clearly knows his subject and whilst not to everyone's taste (what can be?) he will include messages and social commentary in the work.

I bought one of his earlier sets of drawings (Cycle of Violence) as a gift, but on closer inspection *cough* decided that it might not quite suit the taste of the intended recipient.

Plenty of points in his Reith speech resonated.

One was about the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. I think I've seen it a couple of times. Once before the extra layers of security protection and again more recently. Perry made the point it can't possibly live up to expectations, especially when there is so much theatre with the crush of people viewing it. More an ambient installation than a picture.

In my experience, there was another da Vinci around the corner, just as striking, more able to elicit the 'wow', yet hardly observed by the mob that headed directly to La Gioconda.

A different point from Perry was about the scale of paintings. Would size of the canvas directly influence the price?

It brought me to thinking of smaller pictures, like the topical one of the Goldfinch, which I saw somewhere in Belgium and is now the subject in the title of a new novel by Donna Tartt.

It's surprising how a small picture can also be part of a big idea. In this case the goldfinch as symbolism related to crucifixion. Da Vinci placed the occasional goldfinch in his own work (as above), but Fabritius, whose picture gets stolen in the novel, netted the idea down to its essence. And in a picture smaller than an LP cover.

wet

Time to find properly waterproof clothes again.

The London commuter umbrella still works but some of the recent rain has been horizontal. Apparently, if cycling, the statistics for London are to only get caught by the rain 8 times in the winter months.

It seems too early to need to plan transit routes that are subterranean, rather than through the streets, but the early indicators are there.

Mixtape in Newcastle

Okay, shameless publicity for daughter Melanie and co-conspirator Lee Mattinson.

Enjoy ten minutes of fabulous Ingrid Hagemann's radio show from BBC Newcastle, describing Mixtape at the Dog and Parrot and Singles Club at Live Theatre. And a short slide show spin around Newcastle and Gateshead.

Win Golden Cassettes and Five English Pounds at the events!

a case of red

The man from UPS dropped off some electrical components in a couple of packets the other day. It was my updated phone and various related bits and pieces. The switchover was fine and it's all up and running. Using the 'Waterloo train line test', it's holding the phone and data signal a lot better than the prior phone.

There's one area of particular irritation.

It's the case, which is described "to follow every hole, button and curve of the phone". Yes, "even the holes on the bottom are cut to exact specifications with a high speed drill normally used for cutting circuit boards."

The thing is, with this red artwork on the phone, it won't charge in the charging dock.

It's too big.

The precision case fits snugly, so getting it back off the phone is a small test of strength. The only leverage point on the back is the small aperture for the camera. I'm not happy about using the '5 element lens' as the pressure point to remove the case.

As another experiment I tried using an old dock with one of the little old style to new style pin adapters. That doesn't work either. The 'new' pins are not long enough. So the phone won't work in its case on any music playback device from the older style (or presumably the new style).

The front of the new dock is also poorly designed given the new fingerprint scanner. There's a small overlap so that the button is fiddly to use.

I'm expecting the car cradle dock to arrive any day. I'm already predicting that it won't work with the case either.

I get the impression that the case/dock/connector designers have been kept apart on this particular piece of industrial design.

Almost Wordless Wednesday

Yes, I know, it needs tidying.

Trainerroad experiment with cadence

I decided to have a go at a specific cycling test profile using that Trainerroad custom workout creator.

Most of the regular ones I use have a block shape for the ups and downs, but I thought I'd do something tapered, so that I could use it to practice increasing my pedalling speed.

To my delight it works. The basic shape is firstly a short warm up - I used this after I'd already been for a spin outdoors. Then a 15 minute segment progressively increasing the required power output by 'simply' pedalling faster.

I selected an gear at the start. Number 4 on the index. I then pedalled just above the target power line. It stayed easy for the first few minutes until I reached my own threshold limit (that's the white line across the graph). I'd designed the power graph to keep going. My idea was to simply spin my way through to the top without changing gear. It worked and did noticeably drive my pedalling faster than normal. My first go with this has already created a new best average cadence.

Then a few minutes under and over my threshold power and a repeat. The second slope was a shorter steeper interval which was also okay.

Then the final shortest slope where I failed to sustain the power. I'm bouncing along at my threshold level.

I'll try it again and am already wondering how to build something like this into another type of plan.

October seaside sun

A chance to make the most of the sunshine, down at the seaside.

A pub lunch, people watching and a stroll, even as the shadows get longer.

virtual cycling with a turbo trainer workout creator

I've set up the recently adapted silver bike as the basis for turbo training during the winter months. The Doubletap indexed gears with the little number windows work a treat and give an extra feedback useful for turbo sessions. The leather saddle has lost its over-slipperyness since I re-Proofided it.

I've already clocked a few hundred road miles on it since I swapped the gear system over, and I've left a heavy duty TACX skewer in the back wheel to make it easy to pop on and off the turbo.

One day I'll draw the schematic of the turbo set-up, which uses a TACX wireless Bushido trainer, which is ANT+ enabled, a Garmin Edge 810 to read the speed, cadence, heart rate and power and a TACX Head Unit to set gradients and generally vary the effort required. It really is a wireless setup, with the Bushido generating its own power from the pedalling.

I've also got a PC as part of the set up, which can read the ANT+ signals and commune to the house wi-fi. This is handy because I can then use the immense TACX TTS4 software. This can use video, google or virtual routes and varies the load to the Bushido brake automatically as the route is traversed. The little video illustrates some of the features and also why it can take the tedium out of turbo training.

As well as TACX TTS4, an altogether simpler environment, ideally suited to parallel watching a movie is Trainerroad.

Trainerroad can be used on a PC/Mac full screen to run a series of intervals, or the playback of the intervals can be run horizontally across the bottom of the screen. It works fine with the Bushido and the Garmin and can even send a virtual power calculation back from the PC to the Garmin.

On the PC screen there's a space for a full screen graph of the training workout or to make a space to watch a video. I've been re-watching Weeds and Green Wing.

One day I'll provide some comments about some of the training videos that work with Trainerroad, but today I thought I'd mention my latest quick experiment, which is to create my own interval training scripts.

There's an option in Trainerroad to create custom workouts, and they use Functional Threshold Power rather than an absolute value when the workouts are being created.

If that all sounds like mumbo-jumbo, it's to do with the point up to which one can exercise aerobically. At the threshold power, glycogen starts to gets converted to support the effort and one's exercise goes anerobic with lactic acid accumulating in the blood (and accompanying huffing and puffing sounds). The little video shows how to create the custom workouts.

The trick with the exercise programmes is to do base training in the sweet spot around Functional Threshold Power. Just under and it's good for endurance, just over and it's building power.

There's a load more numbers too, like the Intensity Factor of an Exercise and the Training Stress Score (the load that the exercise creates on the individual). I wouldn't dream of creating my own plans if I hadn't already used the system for a while. The basic system includes training plans for Base Workouts and beyond to Intermediate levels. I guess any sane person would start by using some of those. I know last Winter I went through the entire Base and Intermediate plan set (50+ different routines).

The point of all of this is to make any time spent in hamster wheel mode productive rather than just pedalling. The programmed routes from Trainerroad and TACX help to do this.

For me, a big advantage of Trainerroad is its reliability. I'm running it on a Windows PC in the garage and it always starts, identifies all the gadgets, creates the plans and saves everything back to the Cloud at the end of the session. It doesn't mind whether you run it with music from iTunes, DVDs, Netflix or integrated training videos from the likes of Sufferfest and RideFit.

In the winter months I'm sure I'll appreciate that reliability.

In other news I've refitted mudguards and lights to the orange bike ready for seasonal duties.

ravens and writing desks?

It said 138.9p on the pump before I pressed the trigger. After the guy in the shop had pressed the start button, the price changed to 154.9p a litre. Hardly an example of energy and fuel price freeze in action.

We've just had a slew of political party speeches hinting at pre 2015 election positioning. Behind the scenes, the UK, like America, continues to print money to offset the bank piracy of the last few years. It's quietly eroding pension schemes and similar long term money, ultimately affecting citizens who can't see any of it happening.

I normally try to stay as positive as possible, but it's hard to think of a good storyline for the current situation. Our Chancellor of Exchequer George Gideon Osborne may have been travelling around wearing as many photogenic working hats and hi-viz jackets as possible, but it can't really wallpaper over Bullingdon Club membership, curious house expenses or that he is his heir apparent to Baronet Ballintaylor and Ballylemon.

Not quite the common touch his photographer is trying to promote.

Worryingly, across all of the conferences, I find my comparisons drawn once again from Alice's adventures. A mix of the Mad Hatter's tea party and the caucus race.

FeLiNa - blood, meth and tears?

I noticed that there's been a few recaps of TV series finales spread around t'Interweb over the last few days. One that is frequently quoted is that Sopranos ending.

I think there were two endings. The Hollywood ending a couple of episodes further back at the cliff-edge - I won't describe except to say it is Tony being King of the Canyon.

Then the writers for the last couple of shows came along to do the proper Sopranos ending. People (even the BBC) describe the 'fade to black' ending, but it was a 'cut to black'.

The popular view was that Tony Soprano was clipped by the guy in the "Members Only" Jacket. It's been described at length. But it also depends on the 'Point Of View'.

My alternative theory could be that it's the audience that gets the bullet. Cut to black with no audio. Hmm, pretty terminal.

Interestingly, Breaking Bad did something similar at the end of S5E13 To'hajiilee; Gunfire and a cut to black. Three episodes to go.

Different reasons, but it is making me wonder about false endings again?

small probabilities

I've already spotted Christmas Mince Pies in Tescos and Strictly is back on the television.

Our gang have one of those Strictly Sweepstakes running again, this time with an even more complicated scoring system than last time. The rolled garden hedgehog allocated me a contestant called Julian, so at some stage I'll need find out who I am supporting.

My picture shows some hedgehogs, who bear an uncanny resemblance to Werner Heisenberg whilst being tested against a brick wall. They should bounce off, of course, although in quantum mechanics there is a small probability that a hedgehog will appear on the far side of the wall. About the same probability as me winning the sweepstake.

And see what I've done? Managed to mention Heisenberg just before the last episode of Breaking Bad.