Thursday Thirteen : Tate Modern extension (Part 1 - outside)

1. I popped along to the new Tate Modern extension for a preview of what is on offer.

2. The official opening is on 17 June, but with my special pass I was one of the a long line of people taking an early look inside.

3. The Tate Modern is in an old electricity generation building and there's areas call The Tanks, The Boiler Room and the newest part is called the Switch House. Spot the oil storage tanks location in the picture below.
4. The original Tate collection was started by Henry Tate, who was the inventor of the sugar cube.

5. Noticeably, the new brickwork of the extension reminds me of stacked sugar cubes.
   
   The architects may refer to the brickwork as 'knitwear' but I'm wondering whether, like Newcastle's Baltic, it will become attractive seasonal lodgings for a type of sea-bird? (kittiwake cam here)

6. I used to pass the building during its construction. It was a much whiter looking colour before the external brickwork was added to the concrete skeleton.
   
   Now it's like one of those posh coats with a contrasting lining.

7. It seems hard to believe that the Tate Modern only opened in 2000.
8. It now receives some 5 million visitors a year and is now well-established as a key London tourist venue.

9. I know I'm not talking about the artwork in this post. There's some great well-known (and controversial) pieces on display, but they warrant separate descriptions.

10. Despite the long queue of people waiting to enter the building, the interior was surprisingly uncrowded. I'm told there is around 60% more exhibit space now.

11. There's various links to the pre-existing part of the building, although I think they had special restrictions until the whole building is formally re-opened.

12. The Bankside area has been completely transformed over the last few years. New buildings, an urban park, pedestrian areas, a superb walk along the Thames. It should be on everyones' list of places to visit when in town.

fire at the circus maximus

Last few days of the campaign and, sure enough, more scare stories are popping. I suppose they'll save some for the weekend, although the effect so far is driving the various dials south.

Let's take a look - there's the value of GBP (down).

The stock market (down).

Shares in Britain's biggest industry - finance services (down).

We can see a consistent downward trend. Supposedly the markets are pricing in the uncertainties. Now we're hearing about emergency budgets and new taxation as well. I illustrate the post with Alphonse Mucha's Nero watching Rome burning.

Maybe Osborne is a modern version of Nero? Certainly Osborne and toast in the same sentence seems likely in the near future.

Of course, by talking about the economy here, I'm playing into the hands of the Remain camp, who are steadfastly avoiding talk about migration, which is the main plank of the Leave camp argument. Cameron is superb at giving his speeches to non-press questioners and swerving out of shot when he gets buttonholed. To balance it up, here's the ONS stats for migration.

Total UK migration is about 50:50 between EU and Rest of World.

The Rest of World has China top incoming, then India and then USA.

And there's a couple of countries that particularly skew the EU incoming (the so called EU2, comprising Bulgaria and Romania, who account for 27%).

There's more about all of this here, in the ONS May 2016 report.

And this morning, I could look up and see a couple of helicopters hovering over Parliament. I'm guessing it was linked to the two mini flotillas splashing around outside the Palace of Westminster, so that the two groups could shout through megaphones at one another.

I'm not making a point about In or Out here, it's more that our government is probably supposed to promote stability but seems to be doing everything possible to inject uncertainty.

For Osborne and Cameron, the very fact of a referendum make a brilliant political excuse for all manner of things that don't get done.

Weirdly, without an election to follow the Referendum, we're in a very strange situation.

If we Remain, we've the scare stories of Ozza and Cazza to deal with, but if we Leave we swing further right with Bozza, Nige and Mikka tugging the island further from the thamentopoein-carrying death moths of Europe.

Crazy in the coconut.

Wordless Wednesday

Walking to Capel Mounth

TfL prepares for emojification

TfL have just announced the change to the London Underground typeface font, so that they can include hashtags and @, moving from Edward Johnston's 100 year old typeface to a new and very similar digital typeface Johnston100 designed by Monotype.

Truth be told, there was an intermediate version back in the 1970s, when the old overlapping W was replaced as part of a move to typesetting.

Johnston didn't see the need to design certain characters like @ and #, although if he had, we'd probably have stylised ones, like his groovy £ (now de-flourished), quote marks and the care with the differential spacing of the filled loops on B, P and R, which all also help legibility. Then there's the caret topped i and j and the ornate and serifed lower case g.

Sure enough, they've tweaked the g and also removed the flourish from the £ symbol. Those dots on the i and j get morphed to 11, the full-stop is invited to become precariously balanced and the new @ symbol looks as if it comes from a different univers*.

Even the Apple mac keyboard had to kind-of cram the hashtag in, next to the GBP £ symbol as an alt-character on the number 3. Such multiple key pressing for a character isn't new, and even in the days of low speed digital communications, there were various notional shorthands to speed up the messaging.

So no great surprise that Apple have just said that iPhones can convert real words back into digital-world emojis, and that the new emojis can be displayed three times the size of the old ones. Squeee.

The TfL and the emoji moves are maybe further signs of the digital future and I suppose resultant emoji translations become internationally understandable?

In case you're not fully up to speed, for some revision, here's Zoe Mendelson's rendering of the Breaking Bad finale in emoji, below.

It would be fun to convert a few TfL station names to emojis, but that will have to wait.

* = bad typeface joke

two hands to hold

As a gun-free Brit, I notice that the US gun lobby have been quick to aggressively comment all over any sites suggesting U.S. gun laws are inadequate in the wake of the latest atrocity.

A few months ago someone made a map showing gun stores and Starbucks, illustrating there's about five times as many gun stores as Starbucks in the USA. This statistic has already been heavily contested, but there's still a gun store within an hour drive for most people, including many Walmarts and similar outlets which carry firearms.

One of the challenges to the frappuccino statistics was that some of the so-called gun-stores might be Federal Firearms Licensed (FFL) individuals operating from their kitchen tables and assisting cross state line arms sales. That's all right then.

I decided to look at Washington D.C., whose 68 square miles appears to only have one licensed gun-store.

When I extended the search to the rest of the neighbourhood (Maryland, Virginia etc.), I was soon up around 100 stores. I picked one at random, and took a look at some of the stock.

As well as BB guns and other items aimed at a younger market, there were also bigger guns available. In America it isn't legal to own a machine gun without a special licence, but an assault rifle is like a one-shot-at-a time variant. They seem to be pretty commonplace.

As I glanced through the stock list of this Virginia-based store, I noticed this one: A Sig Sauer MPX, which looks like something out of an old Bruce Willis movie.

I noticed that the Sig is available as both a semi-automatic, which is generally legal, and as a Class 3 fully automatic weapon, where holding the trigger will fire bullets continuously. Now this is, as the blurb describes, a full weapons system, so by the time all the bibs and bobs have been added its probably a $2000+ purchase.

Something less expensive maybe? That's when I noticed this smaller advertisement, for a youth rifle.

A 10/22 rifle with a 25 round magazine clip and a bucket containing 1400 rounds of ammo for $395! And it's a stainless steel collapsible rifle for ease of transport. "Teach your son to shoot special".

Somewhere in between? Walmart was the biggest seller of firearms in the US but it withdrew most of its high powered rifles late in 2015.

Amongst the high powered items, the AR-15 is still readily available and popular because of its adaptability. Here's a less expensive Colt Expanse M4 ($699) and a mainstream Colt AR15 ($999), from a further nearby store in Virginia.

I didn't check all the legal points, but I did notice in Florida these two guns don't require any form of licence (an $8 background check is all that is needed) and it is actually illegal in Florida to keep a list of firearm owners. The simple version is that if it requires two hands to hold then its available across the counter.

That lower gun is the one dubbed "America's gun" and has frequently featured in the 1001 US mass shootings since Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 right through to the weekend's Orlando nightclub tragedy.

At 164 days into 2016, excluding gang-related, the US has had 133 mass shootings, including 15 in Florida.

Canary Wharf time check

Sometimes you just have to. If you know what I mean.
#onlyplaceinworldwhereicandothis

#iphonepictureismoredifficultthanitlooks

On top of London #upattheO2

To the Dome, for a bit of a climb. We'd assembled from across various part of London, to climb over the Dome. I worked close to the Dome for a while and often used to see people setting out on the expedition, but this is a first for me.

At Base Camp, we were given clipboards and a massive form to fill in. Waivers, emergency numbers and even shoe sizes. All logical, of course, because we'd be given gilets, harnesses and boots for the climb.

A briefing, a few moments to climb into the harnesses, put all of our belongings into blue boxes for safe keeping and eventually emerge at the start of the actual climb.

A few more safety checks as we were clipped onto a runner line that went all the way to the summit. Our special gripper locking safety wheels needed to be at the right angle to pass through certain loops and then onto the climb itself.

The first few steps were curious, the walkway was boingy and we needed to manipulate the safety system without trapping our hands inside the mechanism. We soon found our rhythm and were climbing properly. The way up started steep but became progressively easier as we approached the top. Logical really with the flattish shape of the Dome.

Plenty of time for pictures and a wander around at the top. A cameraphone-only zone because we'd all been asked to leave any bigger items back at base camp.

After the range of triumphant pictures against all manner of scenic backdrop - Canary Wharf, the ex-Olympic Village, West India Dock, Victoria Dock, The Thames Barrier - it was time to clip on again and start the descent.

Amusingly, there were a few angled sections to the descent, which progressively looked more and more sheer. I'm told it was 30 degrees, but it felt like 60.

Back at ground, we did the group hugs and handshakes and then triumphantly handed back our gear.

Great fun. We'd been on top of London.

31.5m workers and an annual net contribution of £5.5bn (€7.1bn) is £175 per worker per year

Ever since Boris upgraded his French "get control" Renault truck to the bright red German Neoplan Starliner bus his big message is about £350 million per week which he'd give "to NHS". Plus figures about impacts on workers and pensioners. Some are calling his figure misleading or mis-representational.

That's part of the challenge with this situation. Because of the complexities, a vote almost needs to be a categorised (e.g.) 55%/45% split rather than a 100%/0% binary option.

Confusingly, the 'IN' bus is also red, courtesy of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party - Notice it's IN, not Remain. All the buses are being referred to as 'battle buses', which was the term given to the London double decker buses used in the First World War to transport British troops to the terrible front line fighting in Europe a century ago.

Then we get wing nut Ozza on telly a couple of days ago brandishing part of an Airbus. It was good form of distraction, like that well-expensed MEP who keeps showing us his slippery passport. Again we had numbers, but most of it designed as one-liner headlines contradicting whatever the other person says.

No wonder the electorate is hacked off with politicians.

My own attempt to cut through the numbers gave me some interesting points.

• The weekly spending on EU after adjustments, is around £136m per week. I know it still sounds a lot, but at governmental spending levels it really isn't
• The net contribution per member of UK population (64m), per year from UK to the EU is £86.38.
• The net spend per UK worker (31m) per year, from UK to EU is £175.34. More than a TV licence, but less than a Sky subscription.
• These figures and their gross equivalents are a drop in the ocean compared with the government's overall spending of somewhere between £759-772 billion per annum.

No wonder Osborne wants to run distraction, based upon these bigger numbers.

I decided to tabulate the biggest UK government spending items for 2015/2016.

• After state pensions and welfare, healthcare becomes the second biggest spending category with a current run rate of €3,774 (£2,948) million per week.
• The entire unadjusted EU budget of £11bn is 1.42% of the total run-rate, and after the adjustments is 0.72%. A lot of money, but small in the scheme of running a national budget.
• The amount of interest being paid on the national debt is six times as much as the EU spend.
• The concept of leverage of the EU funding has hardly been raised. That'd be the swing of gain or loss resultant from changing/removing the payment. The average annual exports to EU are about £220bn. Around a 3% downturn as a result of hiccups with trade agreements would neutralise the EU contribution.

So, who pays what?

Quite interesting (click through for a bigger version), but not as interesting as how it plays out after the adjustments have been made.

It is clearer with this about who are the net funding beneficiaries and those that are net givers. I could observe that the ends of this chart seem disproportionate. Maybe the EU understand this better, although when I looked at their budget at a glance publication it was over 2,200 pages long and started with a semi-permeable membrane of stuff about sugar taxes.

Bureaucratic overload.

I know, I've only picked on one of the topics and lightly dusted through it. It illustrates the complexity of this whole thing and the increasing likelihood that many people will vote instinctively on the day.

Me, I've already voted.

class war - a review

An entertaining read.

Dave Coote is having a slow meltdown. The framing of his life is being challenged.

A changing job he can’t reconcile, a prime relationship that’s drifting. Pressures from a teaching career that has slid sideways and is now being inspected.

Add grit from a slapdash Academisation and privatisation of teaching. Scoundrels in the halls of power.

Maybe Coote is like the similarly named water fowl that feigns stupidity, hiding its intelligence to amuse itself, even at the expense of status.

Despite bursts of enthusiasm for classroom teaching, the depressive Coote is losing his grip, in a series of self-damaging situations, across a discovered corruption and somewhat miraculous love interest.

Coote is no Patrick Standish skirt chaser, and there's no 'Moon and Sixpence' separation and quest by Coote, more a "Nicky Hutchinson meets intern Alice McDonald" from Our Friends in the North. Generally, we see Coote as the person that things get done to, rather than as an initiator.

I know folk who have drifted through similar mid-life situations and found myself comparing Coote with how real life scenes had played out. The boss who crashed his family life and job to live on a boat with his lover. Lasted a few months and was very messy.

A different situation when innocent business trip photographs showed an old flame. Hushed spousal tones before a split. The list goes on but empirically there’s more of the expensive crashes than the happy-ever-afters.

For Coote we also get some faintly autistic sequences. Coote's world overwhelms, he displays anxiety, a feeling of social disconnect and need for time alone. Add some methodical descriptions of computer use and his sound system giving us almost pencil-arranging rules determining ways to do certain things. It’s cleverly written because the possible ASD hovers as a spectral shadow rather than as a bad actor pretending to be drunk.

I enjoyed reading the story, as the character continued to take ever more destructive forks in his road. Kind of sex and drugs and rock.

Thursday Thirteen looks up

1. I've been up a few hills recently, and the picture above is a recent example.
2. The saying on the stone is "Take a moment to behold as still skies or storms unfold"
3. I suppose it can be read in the other order as well "As still skies or storms unfold, take a moment to behold"
4. It's on the Cock Bridge to Tomintoul route, just before the Lecht ski station.

5. As well as the stone, there's the four obelisks, from which to dally and enjoy the view.
6. I've sat inside each of the structures and looked out across the scenery.
7. And looked through the peep-holes in the stone to see distant objects.

8. Like Corgarff Castle.

9. I've visited that castle in sunshine and in snow.
10. Just back along the way is a wooden shack that sells lovely warming soup - it tastes good whatever the weather.
11. And around here it is important to look up as well as along at the scenery.
12. I think it was Enid Blyton books where the Famous Five used to hide in trees because adults don't look up.
13. Whether it's always true or not, it's useful to remember.