Blank cheque special purpose acquisition company

Now London is to become the global centre for SPAC.  I'd better buckle my swash ready for this buccaneering and casino lifestyle.

Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation 

The founder of a SPAC pools money from investors and may contribute to the SPAC to form a blank cheque company with the sole purpose of acquiring another company—or companies. 

The money raised through the IPO of a SPAC is put into a trust. The funds are held until the SPAC successfully identifies a viable merger or acquisition opportunity to pursue with the invested funds.

Investors may not have full knowledge of how their money will be spent, so they issue blank cheques to the SPAC. In turn, the SPAC must receive shareholder approval for all acquisitions and 80% of investor funds must be used in any single deal. If the SPAC fails to find a shareholder-approved deal within two years of creation, it is liquidated and the SPAC's founder loses the investment.

Blank Cheque Preferred Stock

Some companies may issue blank cheque preferred stock as a way to raise additional funds from investors without the need to first seek and obtain approval from shareholders. In order to create blank cheque preferred stocks, the company is required to amend its articles of incorporation to allow for the creation of a class of unissued preferred stock. 

In some cases, a public company may choose to issue blank cheque preferred stocks as a form of defence against a potentially hostile takeover bid. 

the plush march of the cuddly machines

I'm writing a novel about the inventor from Coin, who gets tangled up in another adventure, which involves Artificial Intelligence and HCCI (Human to Computer, to Computer to Human Interfacing). 

It deals with some of the issues to make the HCCI work, as well as the march of militarised robotics. 

 I was looking at the Chinese systems, like the one that looks like an old-school petrol pump, but can be used for facial capture/surveillance. I noticed that the Chinese have another system like a kid's motorised car, and they were deploying it in Wuhan after the virus subsided so that they could yell at people not wearing face masks. 

 I wondered about humanising the systems so that they are more readily accepted, but then I saw the above cuddly toy, available in Wal-Mart and Giant in the USA. 

It's a cuddly toy replica of the Marty robots that are being deployed as aisle monitors in an increasing number of US stores. They say that the devices are only good at monitoring spillages, but it wouldn't take much to add a few cameras and Bluetooth scanners. I'm not sure how I'd react to one of these peeking around the aisle or coming toward me.

Oh yes, and there's another type that looks suspiciously like Daleks. I'll find a picture later.

I think I'm on another world

 

I'm writing a novel about artificial intelligence at the moment. 

I decided to merge the Coin novel's characters with the Triangle folk. 

I had sneakily left a trapdoor to achieve this in Coin, by the use of Amanda Miller and Grace Fielding who happen to know both sets of characters, so all it needed was something sufficiently dark to bring them into the same storyline. 

I described the story to my sister the other evening, but she remarked, "Hmm - you're not exactly selling it." 

Maybe it was the bit about rats? 

Or could it be that I couldn't remember the title of the novel, which I do tend to change about five times during the writing process? 

I can remember that Coin was called Harrier, then Coin Operated and finally Coin. 

This one has gone through several similar changes and its current working title is "an unstable system." I'll have to post the current cover design here too.  

I'm just on my way to Madrid for the Expo, and Kjeld is going to use some industrial theatre to present the scientific findings. 

They've even chosen a walk-on track, and its 'Another Girl, Another Planet,' by the Only Ones.

 I found the Coal Porters' acoustic version and couldn't resist putting it at the top of the post - and maybe the original by The Only Ones below:

 

jabbed

Well organised, friendly, efficient and effortless. Thank you, NHS.

Quarantine

It seems strange that the discussion about Hotel quarantine is only just taking place. 

We were around London Heathrow almost a year ago. We'd booked into a hotel before a flight and a man in a tin hat came out of a booth when we arrived. He told us the hotel was closed and that we should go along the road to another one. I should have noticed that the windows to the hotel were boarded up.

In truth, I'd gone to the wrong Holiday Inn.

He handed me a piece of paper, which explained that the original hotel had been taken over by the NHS/Public Health England as was to be used as an isolation location for people suspected of carrying COVID-19 to the UK. 

I remember thinking at the time it was like something out of the X-Files.

Contextually, it was ahead of a lockdown or even general awareness of the COVID pandemic.

What happened to those early preparations?
 

Up to no good?

My latest novel is back from the printers earlier than I expected, so I now have Corrupt, by Ed Adams listed as a Kindle on Amazon and available also as a re-assuringly expensive paperback, although not available in that format until 6 April 2021.

This one is a political thriller about the corridors of power in Whitehall and some dreadful lobbyists, who try to make money via sleaze and corruption. I know it sounds a bit far fetched, they are even doing it by manipulating healthcare.

The baddie organisation in the novel is Brant, which is a subsidiary of Raven and they seem to be up to no good. Clare gets enlisted as an MP Researcher, to help Amanda Miller to investigate.

Snake in the Tunnel graphs

Interesting that the latest Public Health England/New York Times graph for the vaccinations shows the completion date of the total vaccinations for all adults between May 22 and June 18. 

Admittedly it is only the first of two jabs - with the second jab trailing at around 2,500 per day, but it is encouraging news. 

I'd previously reckoned on it taking 4 quarters to inoculate everyone, based upon about 11 million jabs in 3 months for annual flu vaccine, so this is considerablly faster.

New Novel: Ed Adams : Corrupt

It looks as if my next book (officially released on 6th April 2021) is already available as an eBook in pre-release on Amazon. It will make its way to good booksellers everywhere over the next few weeks and then also be available as a paperback. 

Hear, speak and see no evil. 

Can power, greed, and money create corruption? 

Could an honest politician ever win an election? 

How does a politician hold his value?  

Clare joins Parliament as a Researcher. 

See her, and her friends, uncover a ruthless plan

and realize a single politician can’t make a government. 

He needs accomplices.

 *****

“a conspiracy theory that is dangerous” 

“a reality that is way past speculation” 

“feels like I’m in it” 

“they lied to us” 

“Clare’s got the moves” 

“blows the lid off what goes on in the corridors” 

 I've used the same gang as in the original 'The Triangle', plus Christina Nott. In this story (kind of Archangel series number 5), Clare joins her sister Samantha in Parliament as a Researcher. 

The customary mayhem breaks loose. 

 My plan is to show a lineage from 'The Triangle', via Archangel, then Corrupt, to Pulse and then eventually onward to the Edge series. 

The one book that is hanging out on the edge of everything now is Coin, but I do have a plan to bring that into the series too. I'll have to start 'The madness is creeping over me.'

peaceful transfer of power?

Reminds me of that old movie during which Joni Mitchell sings The Circle Game. 

Yesterday a child came out to wander 

Caught a dragonfly inside a jar 

Fearful when the sky was full of thunder 

And tearful at the falling of a star 

And the seasons, they go round and round 

And the painted ponies go up and down 

We're captive on the carousel of time 

We can't return, we can only look 

Behind, from where we came 

And go round and round and round, in the circle game 

The Strawberry Statement - although it paints a very difference picture of the conflict from the current trauma.

Meanwhile 70-year-old B52s circle the middle-east on so-called presence patrols.

end of reel

The whole soundtrack has gone a bit Radiohead. The jutter of Trump's sprockets play out as the last reel unwinds. But what to do to keep their interest? Media love a noisy, off-kilter man, to keep their eyeball counts high. 

Looks like tonight, the sky is heavy 

Feels like the winds, are gonna change 

Beneath my feet, the Earth is ready I know it's time,

 for heavens rain It's gonna rain, yeah yeah 

No-one considered that he is deeply damaged. Histrionics for history.

And autocue playback of a line of defence.

Cause living water we desire 

To flood our hearts with holy fire 

Rain down 

All around the world we're singing 

Rain down 

He doesn't care. It's about power, money and recognition to this hustler and huckster.

Can you hear the Earth is singing 

Rain down 

My heart is dry but still i'm singing 

Rain down 

Rain it down on me

Listen to the flip-flap-flapping at the end of his reel. 

c'est la vie

A frosty start to the new year around these parts. Still, there's a hint of sunlight on the distant fields.

We are so far from the lorry parks of Kent that it will only be if grocery shortages start to come our way that I think we'd notice. 

I did spot the signage on the motorways over the Christmas period, helpfully denoting which Tier we were driving through (Mainly Tier 2, although that would have changed by now to mainly Tier 4). 

And like just before our trip to Iceland earlier in the pre-lockdown year, we were subjected to other sudden hotel closures and considerable re-routing to stay safe and legal.

Then, the actual transfer agreement came along without much fanfare. 

I guess everyone was bored and I can't work out what happened when, according to our thumbs-up premier, we seemed to get the deal of the century despite all of the earlier noisy misgivings. 

It almost seems too good to be true although I suppose the Free Trade Zone aspects were slipped through in a separate paper- 'Singapore on steroids' - free-market, pro-business economy, as Martin Sorrell positioned it to Downing Street. 

Well, it was clearly no failure of statecraft and an oven-ready deal in a million. 

We can already notice most politicians' speeches peppered with 'British discoveries' and 'British inventions' so it must all be true. 

Johnson's own family are running to the French hills, with his dad Stanley already applying for a French passport and Boris' sister Rachel indicating she'd like to follow if her father gets the French papers. 

On va s'aimer, on va danser 

Oui c'est la vie, la la la la la

Hancock's flights of misdirection #Covid #Covid-G #Covid-GR #COVID-GH #COVID-V #COVID-S #COVID-L #COVID-O

 

If I hadn't been writing my recent novel, I doubt whether I would have stumbled across this recent set of science. It is from Daniele Mercatelli and Federico M. Giorgi and was written up in Daily Science last August. 

They looked at a wide bunch of COVID cases and sequenced the genomes. And guess what? They found seven variants of COVID. There was the original Wuhan one and six others, including the three G clades with are referred to as G, GH and GR and create around 75% of the COVID infections in Europe. Check out the graphs below to see the distribution of the COVID variants. Now Matt Hancock has chosen today to release information about 'a new COVID Type' which he implies is ravaging the south east of England. He claims it has just been found by UK's world leading scientists. 

I can't help thinking he is telling fibs to get off detention. Why not tell everyone about the various types - back up his findings with some science? Because the variants have all been around since the first UK lockdown. Some of the variations are unable to create the spike proteins. The Wuhan variant isn't even the main one in play now. It all changed in February.

Analysis of 48,635 SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences. Think of it like a mag tape reader reading blocks of data, delimited with tape headers, block headers and then chains of actual data. Then squirt some oil and iron filings into the heads to create some distortions.

A load of fairly predictable transcription errors occur. Sometimes a block gets skipped or accidentally misread. Then in the world of Messenger RNA (like a mag tape) the genomic sequence can be messed up. 

Genomes have 4 neucleotides: U C A G. It only takes a few Cs to be converted to Ts (Terminators) or As to Gs and it all starts to look different. Fortunately there are only a few common mistranslates, as follows:

or, graphically, by region.

In particular, clade G, prevalent in Europe, carries a D614G mutation in the Spike protein, which is responsible for the initial interaction of the virus with the host human cell.  Other interesting variants are clade V (variant of the ORF3a coding protein NS3-G251), and clade S (variant ORF8-L84S)

The G clade has three variants G, GH, GR and that makes up 75% of the population of the virus. (See the Europe chart at top)

Within a 10% variation, there is a massive prevalence of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) over short insertion/deletion events (indels) worldwide and in every continent. 

Ignoring the crud, you get SNP and SNP_silent as by far the biggest variable affecting the chain and creating the majority of the common variations. So look, Matt, even within the current pandemic, your NHS is handling the seven variants, but with G as the strident one and ironically the Case Zero 'S' type almost at zero now. Mid Feb was when the two extra Gs split out GH and GR. GR is now the largest and G the second, In Europe, all the Gs account for around 75-80% of cases. Then L and V.

So I'm worried now that you are running spin. Announcing the 'new variant' on the same day as London Tier 3 to run some deflection? My questions are whether you know about this stuff and are doing it deliberately? - not good - or whether you don't know or understand this stuff and are doing it unwittingly? - not good also. There was something in the manifesto about taking back control. I'm not convinced.