JUMP - some kind of future

Yes, it's time to reveal the story of Juliette Häberli and Matt Nicholson. Matt was first featured in my novel Coin, where he helped invent the cyber currency which introduced him to Amanda Miller from SI6. Matt eventually moved to Geneva, to work for Brant/Biotree and that's where he met Juliette. 

They were working together on Artificial Intelligence projects intended to augment Human Intelligence. HCCH - Human to Computer to Computer to Human in the jargon.

Some parts worked but others failed spectacularly, although rival labs were most interested in the project and sent people to recover it in An Unstable System.

Fast forward to Norway and there's an entirely different proposition in play, although Matt's friends in the lab are intent on keeping it under wraps.

Part of the RightMind collection. 

Fixing a QNAP when the App Center disappears

It has been a curious week for disk drives. Chatting to friends, they suggested it was almost as economical to keep things in the cloud now, as to to have them stored on local file servers.

I explained that I'd donated a few ex-file RAID5 server disks to the local museum recently. Not as exhibits, but so that hey could set up their own file server with cloud access.

This  is on a Synology system and I can access it over the internet for routine tasks such as maintenance. 

Then there's my own QNAP server, which I really only set up as an experiment. Weirdly, it lost most of its control panel recently, in an automatic systems update and I had to change all of the DNS server from 8.8.8.8. to 1.1.1.1 and back again to rescue it.

 It's working fine now, but has almost too many options for the device that sits in the cupboard underneath the TV.

Then there's my Drobos. Data Robotics. So simple to use, and yet the company has been acquired and the product line almost stopped.

I reckon they were so fault-free that people would just buy the number they needed and then be content. 

Except in my case, I recently moved one. And groan, a disk in it stopped working. At least the drives fail at different times. 

in a flat spin from the money tree

We can see the No 11 flat refurbishment being packaged into a couple of neat transactions. 

First, the £58k which was donated by tory donor Lord Brownlow but later squirmingky paid back by Boris once others had spotted the sleaze potential. Add to that the £30k allowance that he could take, and Bada-Bing £88k. 

Of course, that is just to replace Theresa May's furnishings, and there is still the other £200k for general refurbishments as well. If Bozza forgot about the £58k donation, it begs the question bout what else he has overlooked. 

Still, £88k is a bigger budget than Angela Scanlon usually gets on the TV makeover programme 'Your Home Made Perfect', but I guess Carrie must have such demanding standards. 

The Electoral Commission have said it would mounting a formal investigation by Lord Geidt, but smoke and fire and bolts and horses phrases spring to mind. He's going to advise on any further registration of interests that might be needed. Oh, that's all right then.

I'd have thought a quick peek into the property would be one way to tell if there had been suspicious spending, but come to think of it, that new Russian-built £2.6m recording studio inside Number 10 looks reassuringly tawdry. 

And we have Michael Gove's journo wife Sarah Vine implying that a John Lewis furnished flat is now living in a skip. Well, Bozza and fiancée Carrie Symonds are reported to have felt the decor they inherited from Theresa May was “a John Lewis nightmare” - and Gove is still trying to take over from The Bozz.

I don't really care about the flat and its content, except that it is another microcosm of the elitist chumocratic operation of our system.

Look behind you. The callous pantomime continues.

So sad to see the dangerous clown on his new stage. The backdrop, which we all assumed had been made that blue colour so that it could be used for chroma-keying, clearly isn't suitable. And the way the serial blusterer has to sit right on the edge of the raised stage where someone could push him off can't have escaped the eyes of one or two cabinet members.

I can remember when I was part of a local Community Committee and we needed a new stage and some lights, I think we did a better job than this and for less than a couple of thousand quid. But we were a charity and maybe didn't have to pay VAT. If the new room and stage is a metaphor of how things are getting done around here then it is not a particularly comfortable one.

I can't help thinking about a whole string of other situations now, every time I see this pinnacle of our government:

• £200k Flat refurb
• Mystery £58k payment to Downing Street Trust
• 'Let it Rip'
• 'Pile em high'
• £2.6m Briefing room 
• Jennifer Arcuri free access
• Pole dance flat payment
• Hands under the table
• Chumocracys all round
• Fast lane unaccountable procurements
• Use of long grass for enquiries
• Long-term old personal phone use

When Michelle Obama and Samatha Cameron sat in the "Cameron" £30,000 refurbishment of Number 11, it didn't look too bad, but I maybe blustering Boris has wreaked havoc since those days?

And he knows we'll never know what is really going on.

invisible democracy

We've got the elections in a few days. London has that fancy booklet for the Mayoral decision, but most places are bereft of information. My ward is a case in point. We have four candidates. Three of them don't show a face at all on the whocanivotefor.co.uk page. The other one shows a Conservative man who looks convincingly startled that a dark wig has just been dropped onto his head. 

If we drill further, then the only candidate with comprehensive coverage is the Conservative, from whom we also received a leaflet and a shabbily reproduced letter. At least there is a different picture on the leaflet, and probably it was taken in the last decade.

The Labour candidate also has some blurb, and it reads as if he is from around here. The other two don't seem to have anything. No blurb, no links. 

It makes voting in a democracy quite difficult when the information isn't available. I guess we can conclude that:

a) They don't think they will win so why put up the information?

b) They don't have sufficient money to mount a case?

c) They don't have sufficient organisation to mount their case?

My conclusion is that most people will simply vote tribally, and probably be slightly influenced by whose Parliamentary representative is the best at getting thrown out of pubs or concealing sleaze.

Invasive methods and integrity vacuums

So Labour are trotting out the old accusation towards the the government of “fighting each other like rats in a sack”. I don't think it is as good as the Conservative's Dominic Grieve's own one of (roughly) the PM being like a vacuum of integrity. Far more racey.

Meanwhile Boris has apparently chopped new kindling to create a smokescreen around his dodgy doings. Dominic Cummings (for it is he) said the prime minister had behaved in a way he considered “mad and totally unethical”, and warned that he would happily give evidence under oath to an inquiry.

The pantomime leadership continues. Boris tries to hoover up his text messages to Mr Dyson, many of which apparently are from Boris's alternate phone. Normally this would be called a burner, but Boris has kept the same number for more that ten years. His hotties line, perhaps? 

And Boris is doing a Trump and calling out 'the chatty rat' who provided the leaks, except it seems (allegedly) to be one of Carrie (his girlfriend's) chums. If it is Henry Newman, then Boris could be accused of clowning around with the investigation too, although Nr 10 has bothered to issue a statement that Boris has never interfered in a government leak enquiry.

Of course, the lockdown leak was at the centre of what must be an entirely embarrassing situation for BoJo, apparently causing him to authorise the cabinet secretary to use more invasive methods than are usually applied to leak inquiries because of the seriousness of the leak. 

But I remember that Boris doesn't get embarrassed about anything, and seems to weasel his way out of any tight spot, Name of South West Mayor Candidate? Loan for fixing up the No 10 flat? £350 million a week to NHS? Cover-ups, sleaze and corruption. The way ahead.

Electricity

I've been out driving along motorways again. 

First of all, they are 'lightly loaded' with traffic. Secondly, there seem to be many more electric cars around. I noticed this mainly by the number of Tesla cars zooming along the outside lane. In prior years it would have been Audis, or before that Vauxhalls. Each with one company representative in them.

I decided to take a quick peek and can see that Tesla drivers do get some advantages.

All Tesla cars have zero emissions and may be eligible for financial incentives that encourage clean energy use in the UK.

Benefits for All Tesla Drivers:

• Exempt from London Congestion Charge
• Access to clean air zones, including the London Ultra Low Emission Zone
• Up to £28,000 interest-free loan (Scotland only)
• Vehicle Excise Duty

Benefits of Tesla for Business:

• 1% Benefit in Kind (BiK) (compared with the normal 20%-37% BiK)
• 100% First Year Allowance deduction
• No car fuel benefit charge
• Reduced National Insurance contributions
• Eligible for salary sacrifice schemes (like bicycles and gym membership)

I was reminded of driving around in Norway a few years ago, when the Teslas were being trialled there and had massive benefits to their users. It looks as if a company car scheme is yielding similar benefits in the UK now.

cat mathematics

Time to meet Juliette Häberli. 

I've been working on my next novel, which is a really odd one. I decided to plug Coin into my evolving universe of stories and used the last novel - An Unstable System to feature Matt Nicholson (from Coin) along with some the Triangle folk (Bigsy, Clare, Jake, Christina) in a story about inventions. 

I sent them to Geneva, but then, right at the end of the story, some of them left for Bodo, Norway, which also features in Pulse and some of the Edge stories. 

Now the only thing is, Pulse is set in the future (maybe 100 years away) and Edge and Edge, Blue/Red are even further (some 300 years later).

It would be impossible for characters from the near-now of An Unstable System to bridge to these later times. 

Did I say Impossible? Or merely Improbable. 

I'll need some Big Science to help me with this conundrum. Drum roll for solutions to Poincaré's conjecture, provided by Grigori Perelman using Richard S. Hamilton's Ricci flow solving the problem converged in three dimensions.

Imagine a ring doughnut with a bangle trapped on it. Throw in some quark-gluon plasma leakage.

"We are back to cat mathematics," said Juliette, "We are now dealing with problems outside of human comprehension, in the same way that most arithmetic is outside of a cat's comprehension."

What's it about? - An Unstable System

This novel is about Matt Nicholson, who was the inventor of the cyber mine in Coin. This time, he gets invited to Geneva to work on a new Artificial Intelligence system called RightMind. 

There he meets Simon Gray, who links him back to his friends Amanda and Grace in SI6 and GHCQ.

The Geneva lab is being run by Brant Industries, and it is surmised they want to use the AI for militaristic purposes. Amanda calls on The Triangle gang comprising Jake, Bigsy, Clare and Christina, who dig deep into what is happening at Brant. 

A couple of totalitarian states have an interest in proceedings and there's also Duncan Melship, a dodgy British politician, lurking in the background. Coin was written as a stand-alone novel, but by the time An Unstable System and Jump have played out, there should be a linkage from Coin right the way through to Edge. 

 And here's a useful diagram of Poincaré's conjecture – a feature of torus mathematic's homeomorphism and showing what happens if you wear a magnetic induction hat too close to a Hadron Collider.

Of course, Matt, in the novel was a genius teetering on the Edge of madness, so none of this should come as a surprise. And Steven Hawking liked the bagel/universe theory.

unstable

To my surprise, the published printed copy of my latest novel has arrived. It's not due until 21 May 2021. It seems to be up on Amazon already, too and can be expensively pre-ordered from Apple. 

Here's the Universal Book Link  

Strange that my preceding novel, "Corrupt" isn't even published yet.

An Unstable System

 

 

There's a few things I didn't ever tell the others about the invention of the cyber-mining device. 

 

The most obvious one is the way that I was boosting my thought processes. Those that know me will understand. Writers and other artists sometimes use substances to boost their creativity. 

 

Native American Indians said that peyote took them to heaven, but white missionaries would say, with equal assurance, that it offered them only a glimpse of hell.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre tried mescaline, and according to his companion Simone de Beauvoir, had a very bad trip: ‘The objects he looked at changed their appearance in the most horrifying manner: umbrellas had become vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces acquired monstrous characteristics…’ 

 

By the 1950s, Aldous Huxley was writing Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell under the influence of mescaline, the synthesised version of peyote. Then he moved to LSD, which became available to adventurous writers, intellectuals and therapists. 

 

William Burroughs and the Beat writers of the 1950s and 60s reconfigured the psychedelic landscape by moving hallucinogens out of the drawing room and into the streets, pursuing their organic roots in the third world. 

 

Burroughs wrote portions of Naked Lunch under the influence of yage, or ayahuasca, the DMT-containing hallucinogenic brew concocted in South America: ‘New races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realised pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains... The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market’. 

 

Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, took peyote in Mexico and yage in South America. His poem Junky describes Burroughs’s peyote experiences, and portions of Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl were also written under the influence of peyote. 

 

And we shouldn't forget Earnest Hemingway, who first coined the phrase 'Write Drunk, Edit Sober.'

 

My approach whilst trying out new ideas had some similarities, although I used electronic instead of chemical stimulation. I'd seen several brain booster devices on eBay and in Wired magazine and decided 'How difficult can it be?' to make one.

 

The technical term is transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves hooking up electrodes to the skull and then turning on a small electric current, typically powered by a 9-volt battery.

 

There's a small community citing this as its inspiration. Some studies that have found tentative promise for tDCS to enhance memory, alertness, and the ability to learn new tasks, and to decrease symptoms of anxiety and depression. Anecdotally, users report that tDCS also helps them ease into a flow state (i.e., being “in the zone”), where they can get many tasks done without distraction. Others will do this by listening to Mozart.

 

Of course, I'd read the literature. The jury was divided. Some said it would boost thinking, others said it would create limits. There were further warnings about the voltages. It wasn't like overclocking a cpu. The desired maximum voltage seemed to be 9 volts or the equivalent output of a single PP3 battery. That's oblong battery you find in the old-fashioned smoke detectors. Then it would be at around 1 or 2-milli-Amperes and to run it for about 10 minutes.

 

I priced up some components and ordered them from a couple of electronic specialists. The electro-pads were hardest to get, and suppliers wanted to prove they were medically certified, which added cost.  I improvised instead with some Medium Wave ribbon antenna and a few Band-Aids. The entire system, including power transistors and some veroboard, cost me less than £20. 

 

I'll be honest. At the time I didn't want the others in the flat to see me wired up, so I hid everything around the back of a chest of drawers, which was conveniently in the middle of the floor in my room. And I had the whirring clicking machinery of the cyber coin miner on the other cupboard which made a great distraction. 

 

Now I could fulfil my dream to play Tom Waits and attempt to jack my brainpower at the same time. Maybe listening to "What's he building in there?"

WandaVision

 

I've just been catching up with WandaVision, which is a show about superheroes trapped inside decades worth of sitcoms. 

We get a very 50s-style laughter track 4:3 format mono episode to start, reminiscent of old Dick van Dyke/I love Lucy shows, and then by Ep2 we've moved into Bewitched territory and in Ep3 into the world of Hey Hey we're the Monkees style color, with the end of the episode already drifting out to a 16:9 format.

I'm not really a fan of the superhero genre of shows with everyone flying around and bashing things with big mallets, but I quite like this show with its teasing hints of a parallel universe. 

I've only seen three episodes and it reminds me of a riff with Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma whilst strange events occur in the World As Portrayed. Or maybe in British terms the idea from Life on Mars or its follow-up show?

I get the feeling that we are watching something from inside someone's projection, but I could be wrong and haven't read ahead to find out. Because I'm not familiar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there could well be other characters already lurking in the cast about to pop on their superhero suits. 

I also enjoyed the series Jessica Jones, which was another sliver of MCU, but similarly played for real instead of with whizz-bangs all the time. Admittedly WandaVision has a few more Bewitched style moments, but I assume some of that is playing to the genre of the individual shows. 

Anyway, sufficiently intriguing for me to watch the next six episodes with interest.

Update: It eventually broke the 4th wall, slightly too soon for my preference,  and then we were able to see outside into a fantasmagorical Real World, with superhero hardware sprinkled throughout it. 

I suppose it needed a superhero vs villain punchup at some point to be able to use all the special effects. I wonder if it could have been more enjoyable if they used the secret powers covertly. Still, an interesting show.