now the science

I've always suspected Facebook is a law unto itself. Now we are hearing about all the latest allegations about Russian interference with elections/referendums and so on. It's good material for my novel writing but a suspicious way to conduct asymmetric sanctions.

In that context, I have also encountered the censorship from Facebook directly. Once, when I was putting up a post about Archangel, I used that go-to typeface 'Armalite Rifle' for a strapline. And guess what? It was rejected because I might have been trying to disguise something I was saying by using a camouflaged typeface! I solved the problem by making the image a bit more blurry and then the cunningly concealed bullet holes didn't show up.

Another time I was promoting 'The Triangle', which is the first novel I wrote and was recently relaunched with a few story changes, geographical updates and a character modification. On this one, I decided to use the strapline 'Dirty Money: here's how to clean it." For unfathomable reasons, it sloshed around in the Facebook system for ages.

It was just not allowed for release. Then I changed the strap to 'A novel about dirty money and how it gets cleaned.' or something similar and whoosh, it went straight through!

Thank goodness I'll have time to prepare for the launch of 'Now the Science', which isn't due out until mid-November.

Anyway, Why not join in the fun with this couple of FREE eBooks?



or maybe:

Lily Cole: Who cares wins

I just read that Lily Cole book about the world we live in. It raises the interesting question: How we can all have a tangible impact through action? 

I'm a great believer in positivism 'Fun going forward' and all that. As the blook's blurb says: 'Optimism is not naïve and it is not impossible. Many people perceive this to be a moment of despair. Global warming has reached terrifying heights of severity, human expansion has caused the extinction of countless species and neoliberalism has led to a destructive divide in wealth and a polarization of mainstream politics. '

...and breathe. 

Lily's simple words (simpler than the blurb writer imho) explain how we can do things differently and why we should. Lily Cole is well-educated and level-headed about the issues, which include positive thoughts on how we can all change the future. 

It is written conversationally too, like having an extended discussion with Lily - not a lecture, but a chat interspersed with frogs jumping out of hot water, a few sweary bits, and the premise that living is petrochemical. 

Cole has the advantage of access; she can sit in a cafe in San Francisco to meet the CEO of a biotech company, or assist in the creation of a new no-plastic glasses company. That's a kind of privilege, but it's one that Lily doesn't appear to squander, instead signing up for various thoughtful and righteous initiatives. 

 I enjoyed the read which left my thoughts buzzing. We are all ancestors of our future.

Thingiverse

I've previously blogged about the IoT - Internet of Things, and realise it has more or less embedded itself into the house now, with even the morning coffee and the garden lights being IFTTT controlled.

The outside lights are an interesting example where I can set them to switch on at 'sunset' and off at a particular time. Even unplugging them and then later replugging them doesn't affect the performance.

I suppose some folk would worry that the house will get hijacked by a Chinese or Russian web-crawler, but I suppose they have more interesting things to do with their hacking into politicians accounts and various governmental systems.

The vacuum cleaner has been given the house name of George (for Alexa purposes) and automatically fires up at an alarming 2am to sweep quietly around the house. Of course, it suffers from the first-generation Dalek problem in that it can't deal with stairs -although it is pretty good at getting back to a charging base concealed underneath a sofa.

Latterly I've also been playing around with webhooks to link web-side applications together. The keys for such services are quite lengthy and I notice that not all webhook services are compatible with one another.

Some of this is symptomatic of everyone having an interest in whether particular interfaces can be monetised, like cats' eyes on a road or those wire coathangers that laundry is returned upon.

It becomes a kind of jigsaw puzzle, to find the most efficient and effective ways to join pieces together, using as few components as possible.

It is still too complicated for the layman, but presumably it will become packaged and the services will then become 'just make it so'. Just like I discovered when I issued asked Alexa "turn off the garden lights" and to my slight astonishment, they turned off, and George the vacuum cleaner will send phone notifications if it really gets stuck. Fortunately, they are fairly infrequent.

masking reality

Sometimes the stories about a single politician come along thick and fast, like so many lorries jammed in a border park.

Govester gets slippy with LorryPark One.

Just before all the lockdown hoo-hah, I visited one of George Orwell's boozers, in Canonbury Lane. The Four Sisters, which was just along from where he lived for a while.

George famously wrote about Airstrip One, which was the name he gave to the UK after it had been adapted into Oceania.

The Govester has decided that Airstrip One sounds too energy-consuming, and wants to go for a greener-credentialled Lorry-Park One. Well, I say one, but I think he wants 40 of the things, with 12 larger ones to include the 120 acre Ashford site. I see what Gove meant about no new controls at the borders now; instead they are tucked away 20 or so miles inland.

The drivers can sit in government-provided comfort to read the simple new 200 page customs instructions

Is this what he means by 'taking back control'?

I know he fancies himself as a bit of a smooth talker and the lies drift effortlessly as he explains whatever wheeze Dommy and the masked Bozza have just dreamt up.

Ashford will be a masterpiece, explains the Lanc-ster, capable of holding 100,000 lorries. One could think of them as 100,000 lorries full of delayed goods, or 5.6 Million cubic metres of delayed goods. If you add together all the shelf space in the 479 Tesco superstores, it works out to around 1.3 Million square metres. Arguably a comparable size. (5M-7M cubic metres?)

Well, that's one of the lorry parks accounted for.

Nice going, slippy.

ARCs of Ed Adams - The Archangel Trilogy have arrived!

Some Advanced Reader Copies of The Archangel Trilogy have arrived after much debate about the cover.

Its other name is Magazine Clip and it goes on sale in October, although it is already up on Amazon.

The first part is Archangel, which is also available as a FREE download.

Free eBooks by Ed Adams

Here we are, a couple of the Ed Adams novels available for free eBook download.
Click on either cover to start the free Ebook download process and join my Readers' List.


Simply put, there's two series:

The Triangle Trilogy comprises:

• The Triangle: Money laundering within an international setting.
• The Square: A viral nerve agent being shipped by terrorists and WMDs
• The Circle: In the Arizona deserts, with the Navajo; about missiles stolen from storage.

They introduce characters Jake, Clare, Bigsy, Chuck Manners.

The Archangel Trilogy comprises:

• Archangel: Biographical adventures of Russian agent who threads her way through other Triangle novels.
• Raven: Big business gone bad and being a Freemason won't absolve you
• Raven's Card: Tarot inspired when Russian oligarchs attempt control

More from 'The Triangle' characters, but also with Christina Nott as the Archangel agent.

There's a plenty of London scenes because I've worked and lived in London for years and it seems like a natural place to write about.

I've also travelled extensively for work and so European cities, the Middle East, the USA and Russia feature as well holiday roams (so far) around Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico (ie The Square).

Not forgetting the corridors of SI6 and GCHQ.

Oh, and the fabulous Iceland, because that's where I was on holiday before the Great Lockdown.  Whoever would have thought that Christina Nott was Icelandic?

Don't be shy, click either cover (or both!)

crushed by the wheels of industry

It's reduced to symbols now. Optics to build or destroy power bases. Buffoons splodging through the photo ops, distracting from the real stories. Boris has latched on to Trumpian copycat redirection and direct use of social media. The man who knows too much about Boris is pulling all the strings and merely hinting about Russian influence, philandering and oh so much more. Slush and sleaze. It makes olden days monochrome wooden technocrats seem positively dull.

Meanwhile Boris copies prior politicians by spending his way out of a corner. All those years of austerity and then a single splurge to spend more from the public purse than a whole year of British output. Don't waste a good crisis, eh? ERG members are lining up to line their pockets.

Work all day or work all night, it's all the same
(Work the same)
Will we ever change
It's vocation or vacation
Some are workers, some are not
It is (time for a party)
Syncopation for the nation now

(Chorus)

Work, ha
Work, ha
Now

Ed Adams : Triangle ebook giveaway

Apple chipper A12Z

I see Apple is about to change chips again. They seem to be quite good at it, although there are a few application casualties along the wayside.

I transitioned from the PowerPC to Intel back in the day and the machines hardly missed a beat. I still have, in a plastic crate, a PowerPC 17 inch MacBook Pro (matt screen) which occasionally runs old legacy device updates (Guitar EPROMs and TV hand controllers mainly). It just works.

I did the compatibility check and realised the processor shifts generate the biggest Mac purchase cycles for Apple. Unlike PCs, Macs don't degrade to slow imbeciles full of registry errors after about 20 months.

When the last Mac Pro was released, they included a diagram of the chip architecture with it, which I thought was unusual for Apple, but I guess they were positioning for the A12Z ARM processor. As far as I can see, it is a variant of the iPhone X processor, which is, itself intriguing. Nowadays everyone is building SoC (Systems on a Chip) which cuts down the distances that electrons have to travel. A nanosecond is about 30 cm/1 foot.

The big difference between the A12X in an iPhone and the one to be used in an iMac seems to be the transistor count, which goes from 6.9 billion to 10 billion. Current Intel are at about 2.8billion in the i7 Kaby Lake processor. Apple also switched on all of the Graphics Processing Units, which were partly disabled on the phone - I guess it relates to battery life or diminishing returns? They are also using the same idea of two sets of processor cores, with Vortex running at 2.4GHz for the big work and Tempest for the high-efficiency tasks and this time they have put 4 of each core onto the chip, so it is a sort of jumbo-sized iPhone X processor in the new Mac.

It is also interesting to look at the new diagramming as an illustration of master-class marketing. Show the things you want to - don't give them anything to count which could backfire - so no mention of the multiple processors in the new diagram.

I followed my own instincts when I originally started using Apple years ago ('it just works' era) and stayed fairly close to their product sets for most tasks. The stuff in the box did most of the average domestic chores. I slid away over the years and now have substantial Adobe and some Microsoft product set in use. It is curious though, that the Millenial-influenced design drift is from the mobile world onto the big screen, with systems like Catalyst to enable porting of iPad/iPhone apps to the Mac.

I hope it won't be a reminder of what happened when Apple changed Final Cut by adding the word 'Pro' and removing about half of the features, including for a time the ability to support plug-ins.

The average reporter dialled into the Apple jamboree will be saying what they've been told to say about how the Arm chips will inherit abilities built into Apple's A-Series chips for iPhones and iPads. We just don't want that to become a mantra or a box-in. 'Make it a feature not a bug,' as the ancient IBM Marketing manual reads.

The hidden challenge will come with the likes of Photoshop, InDesign and other dual-platformed software(ie Mac/PC). Writing for the clean lines of Big-Sur Safari and the needs of someone editing bleed-lines on a preprint image might create a few challenges. I suppose the Siri command "Macintosh make it so," might be the ultimate answer. I guess we will be hearing more of Clang compilers and Rosetta emulation again, probably on these little 'at cost' boxes.

So now I'm looking at two hardware cycles again. First to be able to run anything at all on Big-Sur and then to be able to transition to ARM processors.

Maybe I should buy some buy Apple shares as a fundraiser? And when will California run out of landmarks to use as codenames?

Free eBook: Archangel by Ed Adams

Roberta

At the start of the latest book, Archangel: Raven's Card, I needed to plant the Tarot deck, so I decided I'd use the fortune teller Roberta from Raven, the previous book in the trilogy. Roberta had given Christina a flyer advertising her next show. An obvious place for the two of them to meet. Except it meant I'd have to devise Roberta's stage show...

[Archangel: Raven's Card = Pages 14-20]
Roberta

Christina was in the dark, underground vaults at Waterloo station waiting to see Roberta, the fortune teller.

Christina had originally visited Roberta in the Boxpark, where Roberta had a small gallery, and Roberta had given Christina some spirited advice, which had been useful when trying to understand the Raven situation.

Now Christina was standing in a crowded, bohemian bar, lit by fairy lights and waiting for Roberta's show to begin. They were all called through to a small black room, with rows of chairs arranged along the back wall. A black curtain marked the edges of a stage area.

With a flash of smoke, Roberta appeared as a pirate queen. Long, flowing brunette hair, a white bodice pulled tight with a leather corset and thigh-length leather boots. She carried a dangerous-looking sword which glinted in the spotlights.

"Of course you would," thought Christina.

Roberta winked when she spotted Christina in the audience of about forty people. She flashed the sword through the air and a pirate flag appeared. She held the sword aloft, and the flag rose above the point of the sword, then fluttering down where it cut into halves. Then, suddenly, the two halves became bats fluttering upward.

A woman behind Christina screamed.

"The next one to scream will see me use my pistol," she cried and as suddenly as the bats appeared, a flintlock pistol was now in Roberta's hand.

She holstered the weapon and slapped her thigh, in good pantomime style.

"Imagine two ships, she said, A tall galleon and a smaller frigate. The smaller frigate holds the pirates. The tall galleon has a larger crew but is slow.

At that moment a back-projection appeared. On the left was a galleon and on the right was a frigate.

"What type of audience do we have tonight? Are they King's supporters or Pirates? Think hard about this. Which ship do you want to win?"

…And so the storytelling continued, of pirates, wreckers all along the coasts of Cornwall and Devon and then some stories from the Spanish Main.

"… Who is for this King's ship? Point to the ship. And who is for the Pirates? Now you point. And you that have not pointed, you will feel the anger of the sea."

There were several shouts from around the audience, some of whom were being soaked with jets of water.

"Come here," said Roberta to one of the people who had screamed, "For you must face my pistol."

Roberta pulled the female audience member still wearing her raincoat forward.

"Stand still," she said and pointed the flintlock pistol.

There was a loud crack and glitter fell from the ceiling. A gasp from the audience as her victim's coat swept away, revealing a pirate costume.

"Now sit yourself down and behave," said Roberta, "But look at the ships. The King's ship survives. The pirate ship is burning. We cannot spare the souls of the pirates. It will become a ghost ship."

There was a scraping of chairs and three others of the audience stood. They each had bedraggled pirate costumes and grey skins.

"Look, for we have new ghosts tonight."

"And now, a song."

Roberta used a flourish to produce a black and silver ukulele. She played and sang Pirate Jenny - The Black Freighter.

…" And now, the chorus," she sang.

"And the ship, the black freighter
With the skull at the masthead
Sails into the bay"

And later "…another chorus…"

"And the ship, the black freighter
With fifty long cannons
Opens fire on the town"

She sang the verses of the song and then, "…this time the chorus…"

"And the ship, the black freighter
Runs a flag up her masthead
And cheer rings the air"

And, after a rousing ukelele solo, "… And we all go down together…" Roberta winked to Christina,

"And the ship, the black freighter
Sails away out to sea
And on it is me"

The pirates in the audience clapped and cheered and the rest of the audience followed.

"That's Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht for you," said Roberta.

"Tonight, I've been Pirate Jenny - the Pirate Queen - and thank you all!"

She carved her sword through the air. The pirate ships vanished and a full stage-width pirate flag appeared and fell to the floor.

More applause. Christina clapped enthusiastically. Roberta knew how to work it.

The audience filed out. Christina realised that these were short sets, in a 'Fringe-style' set up. A chance to get a taste of the performer rather than an extended show.

A tap on her shoulder. "You came along! - Christina? Isn't it? - I remember you - from the land of the ice and snow!"

Christina smiled, "Yes, a great show. How do you do those clever things with the sword?"

"I may have told you some trade secrets, but a magician never tells," answered Roberta, "Come on, a drink at the bar?"

"Sure," said Christina.

They found two seats at the bar and ordered two Sol beers, complete with lime.

"Did you find your ship of fools?" asked Roberta.

"Actually, I did," said Christina, "And I found out a lot of other things that I can link back to our conversation in the Boxpark."

"That's great," said Roberta, "I'm still there, you know, hanging on by good fortune!"

"Plus, this act, terrific," said Christina.

"Yes, and that's before you see our regular theatre show "Busy" or even see me serving in The Pure Ground - it's a coffee shop."

"Were those some of the actors?" asked Christina.

"Yes, and Celine from the coffee bar - they come along to support me. I can't properly pay them, but we all help one another out with our solo projects."

"Look - after the last time we met, I wished I'd given you something," said Roberta.

"What's that?" asked Christina, intrigued.

"Well, you had natural abilities - we talked about it then - I think I have something in my bag. Wait, a moment."

"This isn't another magic trick where I get squirted with water? " asked Christina.

Roberta fiddled with the catch of a small bag. It was like a miniature-sized suitcase.

"Don't look inside," she said, "You'll spoil the magic."

Christina looked away.

Then, Roberta produced with a flourish, "Ta-da!" she said.

Christina looked puzzled. "What is it?"

Stacked on the bar was something small. It looked like playing cards.

"It's Rider Waite, " she said, "Tarot. These are the real deal. Look…draw two cards."

Christina fingered through the deck, looking at the backs of the cards and pulled two.

"Place one by you and one by me."

She did as she was asked and placed them on the bar.

"Now turn them over."

By Roberta was the Magician, by her The High Priestess.

"I knew it. You have the power. You pulled two of the most powerful cards from the Major Arcana - for me, the Magician, for you, The High Priestess, signifying Intuition and Wisdom. Together for you these two represent Willpower, Creation, Mastery, Adaptation, and Divine Truth. They are the powers of an Archangel."

Roberta smiled, "Take them. Take this deck of cards, This Tarot belongs to you. It is telling me to give them up. It has found its owner."

Christina smiled. She kissed Roberta on both cheeks.

"Robert/Roberta. Thank you."