look out for the helicopters

I was easy to spot that the budget was happening today, if you were anywhere near to Parliament.

I was just over the river on the South Bank and it was easy to hear and then see the helicopters hovering over the Palace of Westminster, no doubt to film the Chancellor en-route from Downing Street. Look carefully and you'll see two in the photo above.

mimi disrupts my hearing

I thought I'd try that Mimi music system, after reading about it on the FAQ blog a couple of days ago.

It starts with a hearing test, which I flunked completely the first time. I followed the instructions and plugged in a pair of Sennheiser headphones. The iPhone App even showed a little picture of Sennheiser headphones before I started the test.

Then it pumped out a couple of test tones at 500 Hz. Left ear or right? I couldn't hear anything. I waited and eventually after about a minute I pressed the 'heard it' button anyway. No, it said, you pressed too early.

I restarted the test. This time I waited a couple of minutes. Apparently no tone but it still let me go to the next signal. Same pattern. My hearing must be really bad as I haven't heard any of the tones. Another long wait.

I abandon the test until later.

Second attempt, I swap out my fancy Sennheisers. I've always liked Sennheiser headphones since the time I first tried HD414s and couldn't believe how amazing the sound could be from such a plasticy-looking headset. My original HD414s died long ago, when one of the membranes cracked, but I've stuck with Sennheisers pretty much since that time.

However, for this test I'm using the Apple EarPods. The type that come with the iPhone.

Re-run the test and this time it worked. Mimi were quite serious about the software only working with certain types of earpiece. This time I could hear the various tones in each ear, although in the gaps I could also hear a distant Radio 4 broadcast from a clock-radio.

And so I was presented with my findings. My left ear showed worse hearing than my right. Something I already knew. The frequency range wasn't too bad, although by my age one should expect some drop-off in higher frequencies.

At a practical level, one can make charts that show the types of impact hearing loss has across the spectrum, and it's something that the Mimi technology aims to rectify, currently for music playback.

It would be interesting for Mimi to produce a customised chart similar to the one I illustrate above, with left and right ear showing the approximate positioning and sensitivity of a person's hearing. I expect it will follow.

In the short term, Mimi provide a kind of hidden equalisation and compression algorithm to drive music listening from the iPhone. I tried it, using their selected track from my iPhone, which was "Don't Know Why" by Norah Jones. The effect of Mimi was quite noticeably different, more immersed in the sound, and with some of the detailing increased. I noticed that the vocals also showed boosted treble and that it created a harshness which wasn't in my original experience of the song. There was a switch to reduce the level of the effect and I found that better vocal rolloff produced a more natural sound.

However, when I played it a little longer I could also hear a kind of 'banding' effect across the whole track, something like a rolling lower frequency pulse that wasn't part of the music. No, it wasn't my heartbeat or anything like that, it made me think that the software was having a slight challenge to keep up with the processing. Either that or there was eventually going to be a 'Pay' button pop-up to make me splash some cash.

The phone I used for the test was an iPhone 5s, and I'm wondering if the processing is actually quite computing intense, maybe with active processing on multiple bands of equalisation and compression. I haven't really tried it long enough to cross check this via the battery use or heat from the phone, but I noticed that the FAQ review mentioned battery life as a challenge, and I think that was with an iPhone 6.

It is well-known that hearing sensitivity drops as one gets older.

Back in analogue days, a couple of tone controls would make the necessary adjustments. Bass and Treble. The circuit would reduce the whole signal by about 20db and then put back some of the frequencies.

The Mimi ideas certainly improve the space inside the listening experience - assuming the processing can properly keep up.

I'm pretty certain the real trajectory of this technology is towards hearing support. Like the old tone circuits, analogue hearing aids also boost and then tweak the frequencies in a fairly basic way. The more expensive ones add filter ranges, more akin to what Mimi appears to be doing.

I'd previously wondered whether an iPhone could be used as an aid to hearing, and this seems to be along that direction, presumably with the phone as a low energy (Bluetooth Smart?) controller and a new type of dedicated processing in ear-mounted hardware. Piezo electric sensor, programmable amplifier, analogue to digital converter, reconfigurable decimation filter, waveform creator? Something like that - similar block schematics to something Line 6 would make to simulate guitar sounds but much, much smaller.

Interestingly, there's a whole ton of legislation related to actual hearing aids, which are classed as medical devices and which means that folk like the Mimi developers are having to tread somewhat carefully. Let's hope their footsteps are heard by the right people.

existential solipsism and the art of motorway driving

I suppose the impending announcement of driverless truck trials will become an easy source of pickings for cartoonists, especially if it gets announced on Wednesday as part of the budget gimmicks.

The design is to provide platoons of trucks spaced close together in a convoy, as if on rails, all operating on the same autonomous wireless system software.

Call me old-fashioned, but the effect of it seems to me something like a railway train?

It's supposed to be based on the AHS (automated highway system) and there's already a Europe-wide system called SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) which has been trialled by the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Scania. Being called SARTRE, I suppose it will have an existential attitude, perhaps characterised by a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.

I'm also a frequent user of the M25, and I can't help notice there that there's always a few motorists who consider themselves so important that they can cut across 3 or 4 lanes of traffic to exit through a tiny gap at the last second like in that Channel 4 ident.

These planned road trains appear to operate with a maximum 6 metre gap between vehicles, so a block of say 4 or 5 articulated lorries could make the 'important motorist manoeuvre' a thing of the past.

My car already has some of the technology that these new road trains will incorporate: lane control, overtaking warnings, automatic speed management, traffic jam auto edge forward, radar and that thing that tells me when I should stop for a coffee.

Mine has a twister control that allows the distance from the variable speed vehicle ahead to be adjusted. I always keep it on maximum gap. I suppose that for the 'important motorists' it will become a technology arms race to get the latest gizmos and to run with 'minimum gap' selected.

That assumes, of course, that it all works. One of our cars has the rather simpler Stop/Start capability which cuts the engine at traffic lights to reduce emissions.

And guess what? It only works for part of the year. When the temperature drops it switches off, presumably because of the number of energy using systems running in the car.

early easter egg or am I over reacting?

The latest from our ultra-politically driven chancellor is that there will need to be a further dollop of money found to cover his apparently newly discovered spending gap of a further £18bn. Probably another example of attempting to cut ones way to greatness?

Osborne reveals this all at the last minute as if it is some surprise, when anyone with sufficient interest and a pocket calculator could have spotted this gap (or the more likely £27bn gap) months ago. What he does in his role and with all his experts to support him is something of a mystery.

None of it really makes a lot of difference in a situation where the upcoming budget will be probably driven by easter eggs of opportunism, maybe some new sell-offs and even repurchases as well as the need to preserve a position for that part of the government that George and Dave represent.

So with easter approaching, I'll use the metaphor of an egg cracking. This is another one of George's projects and might be one really ready for a U-turn. First, take a peek at the Areva constructed Flamenville EPR, used to build EdF's over budget and late reactor.

Areva let their carbon-weakened steel reactor shell be installed and covered in metres of thick concrete in the hope that no-one would notice. They have, though, and Areva has tanked (excuse the fission pun), and some may expect to see it merged with EdF, no doubt to contain the problem.

George may also be paying attention to this, because last year he announced the spend for Hinckley Point's reactor to be built on the same model as the French one - indeed by the same people, with additional input from the Chinese.

Before the undoubted overrun, the amount involved is, yes, £18bn.

Different money and different NPV, of course. Although, like all of George's gaps we should assume they will just keep growing.

ultra violet bike chains precede the nano-tech

Around three weeks ago I had one of those 'only hurts when I laugh' moments with the bicycle.

It was one of those almost stationary falls, and more embarrassing than anything, although at the time I had to do that quick zone by zone assessment to see which bits of me hurt.

The verdict was along the lines of 'keep taking the tablets' rather than anything involving bandages and sympathy and I'm more or less back to fully functional again.

I'm also doing okay against my annual target (around 32% complete) and we are now entering the bicycle update season again, where I start looking at gear cassettes and new chains.
Just for fun, in the short term I may just get some of that new chain lubricant that glows in ultra violet light.

I've wondered for a while why they don't make a different coloured glop to put on chains to see the coverage, and now they are starting to do it. And soon there'll be a nano-technology version as well.

power turn

Cornish pasties, tax credits, pensions and now possibly power stations? Areas where we've seen the man in the hard hat in a spin.

I mention the power station because of that photo-opportunity deal that George did before the Chinese visit last year. The one where he agreed to let the French and Chinese try build a nuclear power station at Hinckley Point.

I say "try to build" because the design seems to be an unproven money burner.

Not that it is dangerous, just that they can't complete other similar models which are all in massive overrun. Part state-owned EdF has taken a bit of a nose-dive over the last year.

Check the plans and notice that Thomas Piquemal, the EdF CFO who signed off the idea has just resigned allegedly because of the threat that the project poses to EdF's balance sheet.

Remember those signs? I'm not alone in thinking it was a terrible deal for the UK, topped off with an indexed linked £92.50 per megawatt hour for 35 years - roughly three times the current wholesale cost of power.

Bonkers, but it gave George a flag to wave when Xi Jinping was in town, because China agreed to invest 40% next to the 60% from EdF.

Now, with that EdF resignation, and a subsequent French auditor's report, it gives our Chancellor a small opportunity stop going in a straight line. With his upcoming budget, his views on UK overspending/size of the UK economy and so on, this possible change of direction may be one unbalanced force too far?

a few trading anomalies suggest strange forces at work

It is almost impossible to think of that movie 'The Sting' without mentally hearing Scott Joplin's rag-time music that was its theme tune.

The plot was about the delayed results of a horse race relayed from coast to coast relying on the delays inherent in the wire system to cheat the results. The scam was referred to as 'the wire' and was already obsolete when it was used in the time of the movie because the technology had been overtaken.

That was in the days when messages were delivered slowly in morse code. Since then, things have speeded up and we now get into the realm of very fast switching.

I've been dabbling with the stock markets, purely in the interests of investigation, and noticed a few odd facts.

I know my own trading system uses delayed information, even when it is set to show real time figures, but there's enough information to notice a few phenomena which somehow remind me of that movie.

First, the closing price and the next opening price of the same exchange are different. Those closing bells are rather symbolic because of the amount of out-of-hours trading. A jump of a few points on FTSE or NASDAQ may not seem a lot, but it is surprisingly common and means that someone has been making money from the side-lines.

Then, the amount of trades that don't seem to be made on the main exchanges at all.

Mere punters like me would use the main exchanges, but the serious players go off into another world known as 'dark pools' where they can exchange their shares at separately agreed rates, which could be different from those displayed in the main market.

In the USA, nowadays about half of the total trades are outside of the main exchanges. That's changed upwards since 2003, when 80% of the trades were inside the main systems.

And on top of that, there's the people operating like in that movie, who know the differences between the individual dark pools and the main market. In effect they are playing with the time delay before all the numbers resynchronise.

They are the so-called High Speed Traders.

I won't call them investors because they are simply in it for the turn on the money and may only keep particular shares for a matter of seconds.

Which brings me to the point about speed. If morse code was slow, then nowadays it is possible to transact in milliseconds, heading towards nanoseconds. All of a sudden the length of a millisecond becomes highly relevant.

I once attended a session where someone explained a nanosecond. He borrowed from Grace Hopper's presentation of the same thing. The amount of distance covered by electricity or light in a nanosecond is around 30cm (11.9 inches)

A whole second at light speed is, well, around 300,000 kilometres. Let's halve it for resistance etc. That's still the kind of speed/distance that suggests an awful lot of computer circuitry can be used in just a tiny delay.

So this is how it works.

Spot a trade, run in front of it to market, buy some, watch the price rise from the following orders, then sell and scrape off the profit, returning the price to its true value.

HST traders nowadays front run trades in those milliseconds of delay. It's not illegal, although some might find it questionable, save for the exotics that mean most folk won't really know about it.

No wonder the high speeders all want to put their computers close to the market exchanges.

Short distance = more milliseconds of advantage. Kind of like that movie, only legal.

#MFOR, not #Money For Old Rope in this case., more #Money from optic reduction.

Expensive to implement, but then money for doing very little.

how to convert a cooked pizza back to its raw ingredients

The so-called debate about the UK and the EU is getting even more bizarre now that players like the Bank of England are being jumped on when they say anything.

If Mark Carney had remained quiet or not announced any kind of contingency plans, it could have looked as if he was putting his head in the sand. He mentioned the planned liquidity contingency, which was already in a prior letter and announcement.

Inevitably, he got picked on by an oafish, floccinaucinihilipilificatious and time-wasting early 20th Century jester for showing bias - an accusation he was quick to cut down.

It all makes the idea of any serious content related to the debate even more difficult to imagine.

Then there's another story about City Hall being embargoed from non Boris friendly EU statements, and then not embargoed, and then the order not being rescinded.

Perhaps it is all too complicated now?

Carney has said that the UK is home to the largest international financial centre in the world. Either side could use this fact towards their case.

• In = We need to maintain the position and its links, or the players may move on.
• Out = We are big/powerful enough to look after ourselves and take control.

And so it goes on for just about every argument. The whole fabric of UK is intertwined with varied EU elements, like a DNA helix running through everything.

Unpicking the shift, slide, rise, tilt, roll, and twist of every nucleotide could be a job for a whole generation, much like the generational time it has taken to get to the current position where, still, even things like shoe sizes are different in UK from the continent.

And that's what make a vote difficult. In outsourcing, any deal is constructed with an exit strategy. Yet, despite all its bureaucracy, membership of the EU operates more like an inadvertent lock-in model.

Once things are done they enter the fabric of the way things get done around here. Like sprinkling strands of cheese onto a pizza. Once it is cooked, there's really no way to go back to the raw ingredients, although, there's that trick to turn leftover slices into a waffle.

Come to think of it, there's an awful lot of waffle around.

Hail, Caesar in Notting Hill

Off to see Hail, Caesar at the Electric on Sunday.

Well, the hail part certainly happened, and that was just on the way to the cinema. I'd already enjoyed the trailer for this Coen Brothers movie, but also wondered whether it would have the necessary twists and turns to make it something special.

For my view, it didn't.

It certainly had some fun with the movies, including a wide range of set pieces, some of which, in old-style musical tradition, didn't really advance the plot line. It somehow reminded me of a busy day in fixer Eddie Mannix's schedule, where the appointments had been filled in by someone else and he had to duck and weave to keep up. The stars were out in force, with Channing Tatum channeling sailor suited Gene Kelly, Scarlett Johansson being swimming star Esther Williams. Clooney was any number of Ben Hur and Spartacus stars and Tilda Swinton got to be both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

And so the list and movie references goes on - like this Alden Ehrenreich cowboy sequence.

It meant there were various themes running along, intercut with time on set and in the screening and editing suites. The movie was playful with references and there's certainly enough to make a whole series of great scenes for reviews and similar. As an overall narrative, point of view or plot line, I found it weak. There were hopeful moments, but they somehow sank away.

I'm glad I've seen it and I can see that it is affectionate of the movie making machine, but somehow it didn't have the real twists of a classic Coen movie.

in a spin

I've decided I need to be in the confused floating voter party at the moment for this upcoming EU referendum. I'm usually more clear-cut but for this one the whole thing is more like crystal ball gazing.

We get hokey, specious arguments in both directions, all amounting to a zero sum game. The bigger issues are being diluted with press coverage of haircuts and personal insults being thrown around.

I've set up a short list of some of the main arguments, but there are so many unknowns that it doesn't really make any sense.

I will admit that I started from a "stay in" position.

The EU has been good to me, allowing me to work all over the continent with minimum interference. My early career in Germany also helped me get a foot on the property ladder in the days when the UK was economically troubled.

But now, who knows?

It's bonkers that we send bus-loads of Euro-sceptics to represent us in Brussels and that they perversely filter what happens.

It would be interesting to hear directly from some of our other non-UKIP MEPs. There's about 46 non eurosceptic MEPs, but they are notably silent, despite being our primary representatives.

The 5.6 million expats are getting special attention in this campaign, too. Usually only 100,000 of them vote, but this time there's been a few heavy handed hints about how some of them might have to come back if the vote is to 'Leave'.

Then we get the German Stock Market enquiring about taking a majority stake holding in the London Stock Exchange. Now, today, there's France, saying they'll be quite happy to take over the financial services that require financial passport facilities to operate within the EU.

Our government may need to watch out or the valuable bits will disappear to the continent.

Meanwhile, time to do the hokey cokey and turn around, cos that's what its all about?

consulted then deleted

I see the Beeb is likely to be regulated via Ofcom in the future, taking over from the current BBC Trust arrangements.

The head of the BBC Trust, Rona Fairhead, called for external oversight pretty much since she took the role. Similarly, when John Whittingdale took over as culture secretary, he was cited as disliking the BBC in its current form. He's already set to back this new Clementi report recommendations.

The whole thing is a sword swipe across the legs of the current mechanisms. In the corporate politics everyone has been left to get on with their business until the day of execution.

That's also what is happening now with the BBC's recent public consultation, to which I was one of the respondents. The original 'Future of the BBC' document is still a fascinating read, even if it is about to get - er- deleted. My own response was submitted directly but the storyline now is that many of the responses were too 'left wing'. So much for public views. Whittingdale now appears to be hinting that he wants to launch his own replacement review.

These smack of straight moves from a Sun Tsu playbook. Move the battle to another field and replace any agenda threats. It's amazing how well the art still works.

A notable difference with the move to Ofcom is the relative shift from right brain to left brain.

If the BBC Trust future vision was one of creativity, then Ofcom is all over licences, frequency spectrum, telephone nuisance calls and broadband access.

Come to think of it, there's some mixed results with some of that, too. Although hardly a thought about the actual content across the communications mechanisms. So much for the 'new age of wonder'.

In the post phone-hacking scandal world of News Corporation and Sky, with the quiet shadows of Viacom, Liberty Global, Vodafone, Comcast and NBC taking peeks at ITV, we can start to see a further shake up of television as we know it.

Independent, creative and thoughtful programming? Or maybe exercise for the accountants? Shares and subscriptions, anyone?

my oscar plunk

It's a standing joke that whenever I plunk for anyone in one of those TV-vote competitions, they are knocked out at the very next vote (if they even last that long). I'm probably best kept away altogether from those kind of shows.

Nonetheless, I'll put in a small word for the movie Brooklyn at tonight's Oscars. I'd like to see it win Best Picture, but it is up against The Revenant (box-tick success) and (not my thing) Mad Max, so I doubt if it could win.

Brooklyn's lead is also in for best actress in a leading role, Saoirse Ronan (surely must have a chance here?) and Writing (Adapted Screenplay), which was Nick Hornby.

It is a lovely film, in which Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) leaves Ireland to immigrate to (predominantly Irish) Brooklyn, where she has a better chance of finding work. Crushed by homesickness, she meets Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen, channelling some young Sinatra) with whom she falls in love.

It is a simple story but magically told and beautifully filmed. I remember and have rewatched Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, the utterly different and somewhat uneven story where she is a young warrior on a mission.

Brooklyn feels somehow both like a movie from another time and simultaneously very up-to-date in its treatment of the material. I hope it wins something.

I've put up an 'About' clip instead of the official movie trailer.
Join the 9000 views of this instead of the 2.5m views of the trailer, which I think gives away too much of the storyline.