zwift around London

I've decided to revamp the bike turbo as part of the cycling regime. I'd often mused about ways to set up a route around London which could play out on the screen, maybe using Google Maps. Tacx supports it, but the software is somewhat unreliable and crashes so that it is usually a disappointment.

Instead, I've tried Zwift, which already has a predefined London course built into it. It's not entirely the London we'd recognise, but it is a pretty good approximation. There are chunks of it where you'd look at a single frame and know where it is supposed to be, but the geography of the links can surprise with unexpected turns and twists editing out parts of the terrain. Here's the entirely recognisable Embankment (Grosvenor Road including Cycle Superhighway 8), heading towards Chelsea Bridge, with the Battersea Power station (complete with flying pig) on the other side of the Thames.

That's not forgetting the curious area around Waterloo, where you cycle into an arch around where 'The Steps' are and enter a labyrinth of tunnel systems and stairs. It's like cycling along tube platforms and then suddenly arriving in Surrey at the foot of Box Hill.

There's also time-of-day detail and weather to contend with, varying from stippled sunny days to hailstorms of rain bouncing from the pavements (like the picture at the top of the post). Here's the entrance to The Mall, in bright sunshine.

Being Zwift, the roads are busy with other cyclists too. Flags indicate where in the world they are all from, and at any time there will be around 1,000 others cycling the same roads. As for the street scenes themselves, they've closed the roads and put up Prudential Tour 100 stye barriers around the course. There's ample street furniture, with TfL bus stops, red phone boxes, Belisha beacons galore as well as new Routemaster type buses parked conveniently the other side of the barriers. There's even an old-school 15 Routemaster for the fans. I'd be picky about the shortage of pubs and that some of the shopping areas have been rendered as buildings, but that's detail.

There's plenty of camera angles available too, here's me (small dot in the centre) coming through Admiralty Arch, with the scene of Trafalgar Square in the background. You can see a Zwift runner too, and another cyclist 1 second ahead of me. And if I can get some speed on, there's several others ahead in the next 16 seconds.

I'm running Zwift on a Mac with ANT+ to TACX Bushido, and, I'll be honest, I did wonder at the point of the Zwift 'companion' application, which runs on an iPhone, but it does provide additional twitchy power meters, mapping, camera control and snapshots as well as being able to send greeting to other Zwifters. The readout against my name shows I'm using a phone, am currently cycling an interval (Orange Unicorn), have covered 14.4 miles and am putting out 2.2w/kg. The wattage is calculated by Zwift unless one has a particularly fancy turbo unit. I can also see that The Mall has a gentle slope downward (0.1%) and that even flat London has created 248 feet of elevation since I started. I've been cycling for 42:55 minutes and still have around 47:02 minutes to go to get through the intervals.

The interval training is quite clever too. The light beam arches pop up at the end of an interval and adjust to the speed of travel. Too slow and one can see them moving away into the distance, based upon how long to the end of the section. Here I am just 2 seconds from an interval end, and co-incidentally having just hit my personal goal of 62 miles per week.


Along the bottom of the screen, the extent of my exertions can be seen. I'm staying out of the red zone for this tourist circuit, as can be seen in the next screenshot approaching Buckingham Palace.

J Hernandez (who was 0.4 seconds behind) is now just disappearing off the bottom of the screen and into the 30+ second behind distance. And yes, there's 1390 more on the circuit at the moment. Indeed at certain points I'll encounter a peloton, although I'm never sure whether to join in on not. Things can get quite confusing in the middle of the pack, hence my choice of yellow chevron shirt, to attempt to stand out, purely for identification.

Unlike Zwift's Richmond, Virginia, or to a lesser extent New York Central Park, the streets are also busy with people too. There's people outside pubs (of course) and people waiting around at bus stops and at the gates to anywhere that tourists would go.If it rains, the umbrellas come out. In London the cycles include pedicabs and I even spotted a tandem. Animations include flocks of birds (pigeons? starlings?) landing on the pavement and then scattering. It's something I only notice if I pause awhile mid-circuit.

As for the circuits, there are several pre-defined ones, with options to vary the routes. The area covers Tower Bridge to Knightsbridge and sweeps in many of the well-known tourist spots (Trafalgar Square, Harrods, Buck House, Parliament, Embankment). It is possible to free-circuit around the area, or to select an interval training programme which goes around the same area, but with some purpose. There's also various events and challenges in groups or solo that do the same kind of thing.

The mileages are pretty accurate too, with a quick check between my Garmin and the Zwift readouts showing around a mile discrepancy over 20 miles of distance. Given the different way that Zwift treats hills (pedal fast and still only go at 3mph etc) then I'm thinking they've done a pretty good job. Now that Zwift is an ecosystem in its own right, there's also plenty of Strava way-points along the route, with time trials, and Personal Records galore.

I've alluded to the other circuits already; fancy the desert? Or maybe a palm tree island with a volcano to cycle around? Yep.

why I threw away the tawdry blue leaflet

I've received a blue-skirted election communique through the front door "Printed at no cost to the taxpayer." To stay inside the law, I wonder if the constituency paid? Anyhow, it urges me to vote conservative because they didn't want these elections. Huh? A pity they didn't have a plan then, isn't it?

It goes on to say that Theresa May is working tirelessly to pass a workable deal which takes back control of our money, laws and borders.

I don't think so.

Mrs May has been the reason Parliament and her own Government had to block the deal. It's one thing for our PM to go through a dissociative depersonalisation disorder, but quite another to drag us all in to it. Mrs May's mirror-world of terminology trundles on. Take the idea to carry the rebranded Customs Union (yes, the Customs Arrangement) into the Withdrawal Bill. Mrs May thinks this is an example of 'take back control'. Jamais-vu.

No. It gives control to the EU, without any recourse from the UK. The regulations applied by the EU will cascade to the UK and we will be obligated to follow them.

It's a lie.

Another lie, on top of the ones that were spread around the time of the Referendum.

Shame on you, Mrs May.

It would be better to stay in, to have a voice and a vote.

There's also a cynical irony in the paper. Page 2, Mrs May is quoted "parties shouldn't play politics with our future or act for personal gain." On the facing Page, Mrs May (who is supposed to be negotiating our future with Mr Corbyn) uses a fear tactic to tell latent conservatives that not voting for the conservatives will give Corbyn a boost and take him a step closer to Downing Street.

Deceitful and hypocritical.

Then on the back page, it's all about why the elections are happening, with the implication that only 2% of Labour support Brexit and 89% of Conservatives. Really?

It's a classic 'May-centric' view of the world. 'Look what they are doing to thwart my plans'

I told my nearest Tory MP I didn't want Brexit.

No reply.

He's not listening.

#revoke #remain #rebuild

piano roll DogSpeak operated politicians

Listening to the idiocy of a straight-faced Matt Hancock and others positioning Brexit for a customs union with the EU is saddening. It has reduced Brexit to a cynical central office speech writer's self playing piano of radio sound bites capped off with 'deliver Brexit and then move on'.

Matt, you are replaying DogSpeak.

That Mrs May used to say 'take back control' and other Dominic Cummings-inspired earworms runs against the idea of a customs union. The whole point is that a Customs Union requires all its members to operate external tariffs which are identical. This means that each country of the EU must implement the common tariff even where that is contrary to its own economic and national interests. To not do so creates a weak chink in the armour of consistency and lets in the goods or services that can then flow around freely, unimpeded because the other members don't bother to check them.
So what does this mean, Matt Hancock and friends? Simply that the UK must be controlled by the EU whilst it remains in a Customs Union. It won't have a voice or a vote. Tell Mrs May that far from 'taking back control' it is 'giving control away' to a group of 27 counties who can legislate and then pass the orders to the UK on tariffs and regulations.

Bonkers.

I wonder who is writing the speeches now and what on earth they are telling the speakers? "Matt, say this, it'll increase your leadership chances"

politiquote dog speak

Like the Ladybird book of computers is used by politicians to explain technology, they have another secret weapon for talking to the electorate. I discovered it by accident when it fell out of a briefcase at the Westminster Arms pub, where I was quietly drinking a pint of Shepherd Neame.

We've all heard of dog-whistle politics, well this is a very upfront book. "How to speak Dog."

It explains everything.

The non-sequiturs and the reality bending.

The National Geographic has nailed it, and a few others have cottoned on. Simple messaging without scaryness. That's what the politicians apply to the electorate. "Tell them something resembling a fact. Add an AND and then tell them a conclusion that is a desirable outcome."

So the setting is right, we've just done that election thingy. A pretty shambolic turnout for the main parties. Conservatives minus 1,200 and Labour (instead of picking them up) are minus 80. Oops. So what would the politicians say?

I decided to try out dog speak, based upon the local elections. Theresa and Jeremy are in full swing saying the results implied that the electorate wanted (a) Brexit - just get on with it (b) a general election. Their supporters are saying that both the leaders are brave and have been dealing with a difficult situation. A quotation followed by piffle. I decide to adapt a small javascript to emulate the behavior. Here's Theresa - with a javascripted random outcome:

Eagle eyed may remember that I used to have a random phrase generator on this blog. It was the infamous Jquote and I'm lazy enough to leverage this to build the new javascript. Here's Jeremy:

It passes a dog speak test (blah blah blah, bone) although it would be fun to parameterise the degree of loopiness of the conclusion. I guess the random number seed could do that? Anyway. Here's the source code of the javascript, ready for someone to adapt to make the pretty picture outcomes. I'll call it politiquote.js

//Local Election outcome speech generator
//apologies to javascript programmers everywhere
//politicoquote.js

var Quotation=new Array()

Quotation[0] = “The people have spoken ";
Quotation[1] = “This is a meaningful signal to Parliament";
Quotation[2] = “Sanity is a golden apple with no shoelaces";
Quotation[3] = “Honesty blurts where deception sneezes";
Quotation[4] = “Trust in the vote is seldom mis-placed";
Quotation[5] = “The results were as we had expected";
Quotation[6] = “The results were better than we expected";
Quotation[7] = “Wishes are like goldfish with propellers";
Quotation[8] = “The statistical direction points toward a victory”;

var Piffle=new Array()

Piffle[1] = “The people are right again";
Piffle[2] = “the people say get on with it";
Piffle[3] = “the people want a general election";
Piffle[4] = “it is not our fault as politicians, oh, no.";
Piffle[5] = “so long as we get power your hopes will be quashed";
Piffle[6] = “just give us the power to get on with it";
Piffle[7] = “we are no better than the slime eaters of polycringe";
Piffle[8] = “we will say anything to make it sound all right";

// ======================================
var Q = Quotation.length;
var whichQuotation=Math.round(Math.random()*(Q-1));
var whichPiffle=Math.random()*(Q-1));

function showQuotation(){document.write(Quotation[whichQuotation]);
+ “ and ”
+ showQuotation()(document.write(Piffle[whichPiffle])}
// end

that sinking feeling

It looks as if the leak sprung by Parliament the other week wasn't just literal. Now we've got the HooHa over Huawei, implicating Gavin Williamson. It's being denied, of course, although as Mrs May confirmed it with lightning speed, then it must be true. Its all about trust, isn't it?

It is curious that this enquiry didn't go on for months like almost every one prior to it? One of her ministers has censured the behaviour too. Who? None other than Jeremy Hunt. The man who was involved in some unfortunate leakage implications surrounding a proposed News Corporation takeover of BSkyB a few years ago. I expect knife wielding Michael Gove was craving to add his wife's self-righteous voice too if he hasn't done so already.

The HuaWei security model highlights that there's a new factor in the 5G model. It's the Thing itself. The IoT (Internet of Things) must be able to manage random devices, which require trust credentials. That's quite a conundrum, with the trusted item being anything from a traffic light, central heating timer or a little something I cooked up on a raspberry Pi earlier.

It's a bit like determining the trustworthiness of politicians. As an example we'll find in the (LoP) Lineup of Politicians to become replacement PM we've got well-paid author of a Telegraph column (Boris), the husband of a Daily Mail journalist (Gove) and a man alleged to have had improper contact with News Corporation (Hunt).

I'm not sure why Mrs May chose today to flounce pounce. Right on the day of the local elections. Pass the snorkel.

Visitor alert: this is not a recent picture of the Houses of Parliament. They are shored up with scaffolding right now

travails with my bike

I've only recently taken to cycling again, after a prolonged gap. There's that creaky feeling when starting again, during which I wonder how I'd ever managed any longer distances. Then they come along, almost without noticing. This time the meaning of recovery days is slightly more pronounced, with an unexpected slowing in the act of standing up, as various muscles protest at the effort.

I'm reaching a sensible 'Training Stress Score' which illustrates the accumulation of the various efforts, with the shaded blue part of the graph representing fitness, the pink line indicating fatigue and the yellow line indicating form or freshness. Fortunately, the effects of fatigue only seem to last a few hours, so I'll be back on the bike later today.

meta multi verse

The Sopranos bumped off the audience:'You probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?' said Bobby Baccala foretelling the clever fourth wall disruption.

Now we've experienced Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag talk to camera, starting with playful quips but spiralling into neurosis.

But I was really surprised when it happened in another series (OA 2). Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's multiverse completely flips on itself and then back onto the viewer. Metaverse?

It's the second time that Marling has caught me out. It happened in another earth too. I can remember the weatherboarding on the house being different. Like a fight club burning film moment. Before the great reveal.

the wide, wide time of East End in Colour 1980s

I've been marvelling at the East End in Colour, by Tim Brown, published by the Hoxton Mini Press. It's their second book on this theme. Tim was a tube train driver and took the series of photographs in the early 1980s, chiefly around the routes of the Docklands Light Railway, which was being built to serve the deserts of the Isle of Dogs, before the yuppies arrived.

It's a startling book, because I know most of the area depicted and it's fascinating to see it during the massive makeover that became Docklands. What I find interesting is how normal everything seemed at the time, yet nowadays how it becomes a look back to another time.

Among the seemingly mundane is a picture of Leytonstone High Street, showing Leytonstone Motors. We all used to go to that exact shop for spare parts for the eminently repairable Ford cars we all drove around at the time. Always difficult to park, then through the doorway into a narrow and dark space where man in a brown coverall would look at the part before reaching around to find something appropriate.

Similarly a snap of Monument, just around the corner from the office where I worked in a hideaway on a secret project.

I can retrace the steps to the sandwich bar inside the tube station where we grabbed a bite of lunch. What sets the book up is that the series of pictures are all of an era that has some signs of today in it but plenty more of a bygone era. At the time it all seemed so normal, yet now it would be difficult to recreate accurately.

It starkly illustrates the chaos of major redevelopment, with the hints of vanquished pubs and the randomly parked Cortinas, Granadas and Vauxhalls along little known side streets of Shadwell and down to the wharves of the docks.

Wide time, without a smartphone in sight.

highly evolved leveraged lawn mowers

Now we see new parties being formed to try to break the two party system but not taking account of the role of leverage in the system.

Behind the MPs stand their party membership, directly influencing the selection of representatives. A cosy little club really, Just 124,000 Conservative members influence the selection of 313 Tory MPs.

The MPs, in turn, are in thrall to these people, who sit in their beery Conservative Clubs around the country and pontificate dogmatically about the state of the Nation.

Membership highly funded with money from business shadowy sources giving the wherewithall to manipulate the agenda.

Labour's 540k members drive 246 MPs to Westminster. There's a tapering effect from the rest, through SNP, LIB Dem, Green, Plaid Cymru and with zero members, UKIP.

And now, I've just received the polling paper for the election of a councillor, admittedly not to Parliament, but I'm wondering how I can make a decision based upon what has been beamed to me.

A half-hearted news sheet with a picture of the politico mowing lawn (everyman), then with a group of care-workers(caring) and finally, standing by a local landmark (knows the area).

The second lot have something rather similar, but with a different mower and a big poster on the back designed to be placed in the window.

The third and fourth representatives couldn't afford to send anything out, so I suppose I'll have to guess or research their mowers and web-sites.

But back once again to the renegade masters. "Highly evolved," springs to mind. Here's CTF Partners (aka C|F, aka Lynton Crosby)

The wizard of Oz slithers into focus again. Sir Lynton Crosby has been the wicked witch behind much of the manipulation of the vote in the UK.

He strategised to help David Cameron get elected, Boris twice for the Mayor of London and more quietly for Boris when he was planning Brexit.

CTF Partners played the dog whistle racism dark arts so quietly that we could easily forget the £23,000 loan to Boris for office space that CTF Partners provided. They've provided fees to other MPs too, and pop up 186 times in a recent search of parliament's web pages.

CTF, via Mainstream Networks, have helped the 'members' tell their MPs what to do in the Brexit votes via about £1million of Facebook campaigning. "Press button to send a letter to your MP". Of course, now the other groups are starting to do the same. A race of the javascript robots. Elizabeth Denham at DCMS has her work cut out to investigate this lot.
Conservative office paid £4million to CTF to assist May's electioneering. But Lynton is coin operated. It'll be Theresa May's shoes sticking out from the house when it crashes down this time.

Last October Jacob's Mobb hired the Australian to run interference across Theresa May.

This will push Boris to the front of the queue to be leader in the so-called BAmber alliance. The Moggsters have already started their Project Boris with a few pizza parties (sorry Mikey, you're not invited) and now they can target the 124,000 Conservative members to get their way.

As well as numbers, this has to be a chess game. Boris has been told that it's no good being the leader if the whole Brexit shebang goes sideways - what would the members say?

That's where the Lynton double bluff ("Is it the Russians?") comes through. Harvesting remainers and targeting destabilising messaging both through the local and Euro elections becomes the name of the game. Hold on to your hats.

tacky adverts in the moment of next and how to get rid of them

That character shown shares my angst at the increasing number and type of annoying and useless adverts that appear when web-browsing. It's not the historic pop-up and embedded ones, which are relatively easy to suppress, it's the ones at the end of a piece and in the side margins of the page. Now I know why the print press called it gutters and why taboola and outbrain are increasingly involved.

These adverts have titles like "How to recognise if you have loose windows", or "Ten top shampoo tips" or "Would you even recognise this film star now?" - which are supposedly designed to make you click through. Some take you directly to the 'sell', others take the unsuspecting to a series of photos which have associated advertisements. Every click counts in this game and following the fascination of "do you recognise this car part?" or "20 uses for vinegar" clicks around the related advertisement count. More clicks / interest in the pictures = more money for someone.

I took a look at the technology behind this. It has all kinds of diagrams of the architecture, but it appears to be a case of putting some clothes on the emporer. It is never more telling then the advertorial provided by one of the purveyors which took until about slide five to explain how the billing to advertising clients worked. My chart is from the helpful NAI (Network Advertising Initiative), which shows that adverts are aggregated and then sprayed out via a publisher to an unsuspecting consumer. There is supposed to be a special filter for context, geography, propensity to buy, but I suspect, based on my own experiences, that this is all cookie-derived hokum.

It relies upon the principle that the adverts are 'native ads' in terms of the original web site. In other words, that the publisher of the web-site has given permission for them to be added to the site - although I'm not sure whether they wold give the same permission to add a dive bar to the side of their corporate property. Once the native application dealing software is there, it can tip out all kinds of adverts personalised towards the reader and different for everyone who stumbles upon the page.

But why doesn't the virus checking software, or the advertising suppression software remove this stuff? I notice that these advert-dealing frameworks are designated as PUPs (potentially unwanted programs) and that they cannot be automatically suppressed because 'someone'(?) might want them.

It's a part of the business model of one of the advertising blockers to let this kind of thing through - a kind of protection service one might say.

My examples show adverts derived from an Israeli company called Outbrain and the proposition is now to sell their technology to reputable sites. I notice too, that Smartfeed is an Outbrain company.

There's another company called Taboola (co-incidentally with its R&D in Israel) that does the same thing. And further ones that download themselves to a client computer and then install into the browser.

One way is to block the adverts is at source, by editing the /etc/hosts file and filtering the domain addresses of the offenders. Another is to 'set shields high', in the adblocker software of choice. That's my preference.

It's that final non-obtrusive ads option that does the trick. Unchecked it'll remove the PUPs from the browse - no more unwanted adverts.

So who is doing this? It's coming from the deep and dark world of security software scooping up the cookies. We all know that cookies are there to track us. That they have an innocuous sounding name that is a bit like breadcrumbs. As well as Google and Facebook, there's the curious world of Adroll. Notice there's taboola, outbrain and rubicon listed on this slightly misleading scrolling list of people with whom they interact.

Check out the marketing spin - Adam Singolda of Taboola: “Today, Taboola is used by thousands of companies to empower over a billion people worldwide to discover what’s interesting and new at the moment they’re ready to experience new things, In doing so, we partner with companies to attract, and strengthen, their customer relationships.” - spectacular doublethink for guerrilla advertising topped only with: “The idea behind Taboola was to create a software that would help consumers discover things that they may like and never knew existed, wherever they may be – to go after that ‘moment of next’ where people are predisposed to discover something new and interesting that is relevant for them.” - or - to send a huge number of adverts at everyone in the hope that something sticks.

I found an example of this buried in a font directory on my computer. Smacks of virus, doesn't it? Then there's adblade, content.ad, ayboll, yahoo gemini, rev content, adnow, as a few other examples.
As well as monetisation of websites, content and access to consumers, there's also the shady world of profiling and the interest displayed not just by advertisers, but also by state actors.

Oh well, as they say, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Unaltered Carbon - nano thin

As well as this week's Altered Carbon discussion, I suddenly found myself at a physicist meeting about Unaltered Carbon.

It was a briefing about graphene actually. I could recollect that graphene was created by scraping graphite down to one molecule of thickness. I seemed to remember that it could be made into a matrix and that whilst alone it was transparent, it could be rolled into something black. I remember sculptor Anish Kapoor got into a scuffle over an ultra-black graphene derived paint vs a pinkiest pink paint.

Anyway, it turns out that there's a whole lot more to graphene.

Like commonly available silica sand is used to make the chips in everything, graphene is derived from the fourth most common element - carbon. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms, tightly bound in a hexagonal honeycomb lattice via an atomic bond. My artist's impression makes it look quite neat, but when I checked out an electron microscope view, it's actually messier than this.

Carbon is an interesting substance. Being allotropic means it can take different forms as a solid, like diamonds, graphite and coal.

In carbon's graphene form it is the thinnest compound known to man at one atom thick. But that's not all: It's also the lightest material known (with 1 square meter weighing around 0.77 milligrams), the strongest compound discovered (between 100-300 times stronger than steel), the best conductor of heat at room temperature and also the best conductor of electricity.

What have we been doing all this time?

Nowadays people are looking at applications of graphene in high-frequency electronics, bio, chemical and magnetic sensors, ultra-wide bandwidth photodetectors and energy storage and generation.

Unfortunately, we can't just take a pencil lead and shave it to get graphene. We need a chemical vapour deposition rig using ethylene or benzene onto various metals, such as Platinum, Nickel or Titanium Carbide to make the layers of graphene.

With the right high temperatures a graphene layer forms on the underlying substrate. It can be one molecule thick (G-2D) or sometimes multiple graphene layers on top of one another (G-3D).

There's also a 'showered' manufacturing method which can create nanotubes of graphene, like the ones used in the Vantablack paint that Anish Kapoor craves.

More significantly, these nanotubes can be used to fabricate screen displays that flex or have a very large size. We've all heard of OLED, wait for OLET - organic light-emitting transistors. Wafer thin flexible screens both portable and for the wall. Coming soon to a phone near you.

Graphene in batteries creates another jump. High density lightweight storage with very rapid charging. Automobile manufacture maybe? solve the battery range problem now with graphene anodes.

Or something to improve flex and weight in tyres? Vittoria's latest bike tyres are already on to Graphene V2.

The implications of this last example show that prices are dropping as the scale of production finally ramps up.

I took a quick look around and noticed that Tesla is talking about graphene for car batteries, Samsung for their next generation of phones. Apollo already make a graphene charger for iPhones, with a 0 to full charge in 20 minutes. Apple and others are hesitant in case there's any teething problems in their actual devices - causing a massive recall.

Although Apple, as always, have a few patents lying around. The one I notice first from Apple is to use graphene in headphones and speakers.

I have to say that a 15 minute empty to full recharge sounds a lot more interesting. Maybe a 10 minute induction battery recharge on the motorway wouldn't be so bad either.