erhebung

Are We Watching?

SkyTruth is a website devoted to providing news on the BP oil spill (or leak, or disaster). I found it via The Browser, I think, and it is one of the first feeds I check when I open Google Reader. In an inter­esting turn of events, during their analysis of satel­lite imagery of the BP spill, SkyTruth has dis­covered another leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The story has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago the site requested help from the public: it wanted to see the “new” spill up close. In response, a pho­to­grapher, J. Henry Flair, got in a plane and flew over the area of the sus­pected leak, sending the pho­to­graphs he took to SkyTruth, who prompty pub­lished them, with further analysis. It’s good journ­alism, and journ­alism that is using tech­no­logy well: crowd-​sourcing online, data-​mining from public satel­lite records, and working with the clear and unam­biguous aim of informing the public.

In their latest post SkyTruth ask: is anybody watching what’s going on out there? It’s a good question. Is anyone actually mon­it­oring, daily, the status of oil wells in our oceans? We have the satel­lites, but beyond sites like SkyTruth, are we actually using them? Are we doing the best we can with the tech­no­logy we have at our disposal? Isn’t this some­thing gov­ern­ments, or the oil com­panies them them­selves, should be doing publicly, transparently?

Hitchens Interviewed

I get the distinct feeling Decca Aitken­head doesn’t like Chris­topher Hitchens. Her inter­view with the writer is a won­derful read, though, and all down, amus­ingly, to Hitchens: Aitkenhead’s frequent attacks and blunt ques­tions might have seemed smart and pithy at the time, but they come over, on paper, as somewhat petty, not to mention com­pletely loaded with what seems to be a very personal agenda (i.e., bitch-​slap Hitchens in public). But def­in­itely worth a read.

An Intensification of Existence

I’ve fallen into an odd love with Kenneth Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion, a series of doc­u­ment­aries Clarke, a his­torian, produced for the BBC in the late sixties. (Inter­est­ingly, it was one of the first major series to be filmed in colour, and it benefits hugely from the innov­a­tion.) After a day of teaching, I find it incred­ibly relaxing to be given an enthu­si­astic and broad-​ranging tour of some or other aspect of Western culture and history (there was a desire to also cover Eastern and pre-​Christian civil­isa­tions, but time con­straints made this impossible). And whether you agree or disagree with Clarke’s opinions (there is much that feels “wrong”, to me, and some of the state­ments that are made seem a little dusty, a little musty; but the show was made 40 years ago, so it’s not really all that sur­prising), it is hard to find fault with his language, his words always well chosen, his sen­tences always elegant, his delivery always crisp and clear and engaging. I’m quite taken by this passage from the second episode of the series:

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio­active. Well, I don’t put this forward as a sci­entific pro­pos­i­tion, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthink­able under ordinary evol­u­tionary con­di­tions. One such time was about the year 3,000 BC, when quite suddenly civil­isa­tion appeared, not only in Egypt and Meso­pot­amia, but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece — philo­sophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years — but also in India: a spir­itual enlight­en­ment that has perhaps never been equalled. And aother was around about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world — India, China, Byz­an­tium; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life — action, philo­sophy, organ­isa­tion, tech­no­logy — there was an extraordinary out­pouring of energy, an intens­i­fic­a­tion of existence.

The whole series can be found on YouTube, which is excel­lent. And here is the video that cor­res­ponds with the passage I quited above.:

Mind Heist

Who is Mike Zarin? What about Zack Hemsey? I’m not sure, but they both appear to have been involved in creating music for Chris­topher Nolan’s Incep­tion. Zarin’s con­nec­tion to the film is con­firmed (I think) by this site. Beyond that, I can’t find much inform­a­tion. More inform­a­tion on Hemsey’s con­nec­tion can be found here and here.

The “official” composer for Incep­tion is Hans Zimmer, but the “official” website keeps crashing in this browser, so I can’t hear much of Zimmer’s score (parts of it are over there, if you can get it to load). If it’s anything like the music featured in the third trailer for the film, music by Hemsey, it’s likely to be epic (the trailer itself is spec­tac­ular, and not just because of the excel­lent score — check it out).

Zack Hemsey’s put up a bandcamp page for the music featured in that trailer (it’s called ‘Mind Heist’), and if you like what you hear, you can buy it. You can embed it, too, which is handy:

A still from Incep­tion. (Source)

Random Random

After a night watching old editions of Question Time on YouTube, I come home to a download of the original Night of the Living Dead; and while watching that, I find this random, random download:

For more than 30 years the Short­wave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intel­li­gence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are trans­mitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Short­wave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way com­mu­nic­a­tion. Spies located anywhere in the world can be com­mu­nic­ated to by their masters via small, locally avail­able, and unmod­i­fied Short­wave receivers. The encryp­tion system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreak­able. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recip­i­ents once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid sched­ules, and transmit in many dif­ferent lan­guages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and inton­a­tion; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that trans­mits a female child’s voice!

One might think that these espi­onage activ­ities should have wound down con­sid­er­ably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by infer­ence, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Tan­tal­ising oddness. Wiki­pedia has more inform­a­tion, here. One “mys­ter­ious, powerful short­wave numbers station” was nick­named “The Lin­colnshire Poacher”, appar­ently. And more inform­a­tion on the influ­ence of The Conet Project, here; and an article from The Wash­ington Post; and another article on the subject from Salon.

Less Unless

I had a look at The Hype Machine a couple of months back, I think (there was a Jolicloud app for it?), but didn’t get into it, for whatever reason. This morning I went back via a link on Last.fm (tracks played on The Hype Machine can now be auto­mat­ic­ally scrobbled into your Last.fm account) and became utterly hooked. Every channel (cur­rently you can choose from: “latest”, “popular”, “twitter”, “radio show”, “spy”, and “zeit­gesit”) is cap­tiv­ating in some way, my favourite probably being “spy”, as it just feels alive: tracks that are “loved” by users stream down the screen, mys­tic­ally refreshed by the magic(k) of the tubes.

The dis­covery of the day has to be ‘Less Unless’, a track by CIVIL CIVIC: tre­mendous music, begging to be played again and again, louder and louder. I’m hoping there is much more from this group. You can hear the track on The Hype Machine, here. And this is the video:

Late Nights

I’ve always been a night person, my brain working better in the second half of the day than in the first. Right now, as I write this, it is night, past midnight, and it feels like a good hour. And I’ve always been drawn to taking pho­to­graphs at night: the light and shadows, the sounds, the atmo­sphere. Below are two pho­to­graphs I took on my way home from the office a few days ago. They do a fairly good job of cap­turing how it felt that night.

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Strange Days

What a strange election. On the one hand, the numbers seem to make a good case for repla­cing our current mess of an elect­oral system with some­thing more pro­por­tional: the Liberal Demo­crats would have con­sid­er­ably more seats if every vote cast for them was counted; and the Green Party would have not one, but maybe six or seven seats. On the other hand, some of the results send shivers, cause chills: 536,223 votes, for example, cast for can­did­ates belonging to the British National Party, a share of the national vote (28,062,489 ballots have been counted thus far, according to the BBC) that would get them around 12 seats in par­lia­ment. Why, I wonder, would so many people (half a million!) vote for a party with such a dirty heritage. This, it seems, is the world today.

A coali­tion gov­ern­ment could be inter­esting: the Liberal Demo­crats working with the Con­ser­vative party? This, appar­ently, is what his­torian Simon Schama thinks will happen. It might lead to more balanced policies, reasoned policies, genuine improve­ments to the country; or, con­versely, it might lead to deadlock. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. My gut feeling is that the UK is going to be in for a rough couple of years, polit­ic­ally speaking.

Without Us

Last night I came upon The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman about what the world might be like if humanity suddenly ceased to exist (I think at the time I was showing a col­league the Wiki­pedia article about Puszcza Białow­ieska, a primeval forest on the border between Belarus and Poland). Weisman’s book looks fas­cin­ating, and hearing about it made me think of A Sci­entific Romance, a novel by Ronald Wright about a time trav­eller who journeys to a decayed and unpop­u­lated London of the future. Here is an extract:

The Dartford bridge holds awful proof of age: the concrete leprous, pitted, whittled by wind, warty with cysts of rusting steel. Pelicans line the rods and girders like sailors on the rigging of a shattered wind­jammer. Cables have snapped and frayed, the roadway seems to hang by magic, and the magic’s wearing thin. Whole sections have gone from the raised approaches, leaving piers in the water like rows of pre­his­toric megaliths.

We made it our business to know what the cen­turies could do to corbel vaults and marble arches, to the grainite slabs of pharaohs’ tombs, to Roman concrete and Akkadian zig­gurats. We knew the work of seepage on mud-​brick, of termites on ironwood lintels, of acid rain on marble cary­atids. But how much time would it take to make a modern struc­ture look like this?

Time and heat. Your rat is gnawing. What happened here?

Warming, obvi­ously, as many foresaw. But for the reasons they foresaw? Or some­thing else, some­thing for which we can’t be blamed: an asteroid smaking the planet in the chops; or the world relapsing like a malaria patient into its old sweats and chills?

I remember Skef saying — as an aside in his pre­his­tory lectures — that the ice would rumble south again one day grind the spires of Cam­bridge into sand. But not to worry; we’d had a good long run since the glaciers stalled — a hundred cen­turies in which to tame our food, and tame ourselves, and invent civil­iz­a­tion in half a dozen fertile spots from China to Peru — and he saw no reason why the fair weather shouldn’t last. […]

You can read parts of the novel on Google Books, here.

Thinking about things like this brought to mind various other things: The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (and also his Collapse, nat­ur­ally), and The Road to Corlay, the first book in Richard Cowper’s White Bird of Kinship series. The rising and falling of civil­isa­tion has my brain abuzz.

More Tangshan

I’ve not been taking many pho­to­graphs lately as the feeling hasn’t been there. But I do still carry a camera with me (a small, 500 RMB digital compact by Fuji), and some­times I see some­thing I want to record: some­thing in the light, usually, or an arrange­ment of objects, or some­thing my eye simply finds pretty. At other times I can hear some­thing in a song that leads to a pho­to­graph; occa­sion­ally some­thing I see in a film will cause me to take a pho­to­graph; and some­times just the sound of trains on the wind at night can cause me to dig out the camera. The stimuli are various.

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Horrible Indeed

It seems that Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows have col­lab­or­ated again. In past years the team has created some such gems as Alan Moore’s The Court­yard and Alan Moore’s Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths, and Neo­nomicon, the latest comic, looks very prom­ising indeed. You can see some sample pages here. And you can see some other work by Jacen Burrows on his website, here (the list of writers with whom Burrows has worked, Alan Moore aside, includes, impress­ively, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Brian Michael Bendis).

A cover for Neo­nomicon. (Source)

Swims

Pleas­antly drunk, and won­dering why I’m not pleas­antly drunk more often. Typing is a little trickier, but the overall gain seems to outweigh the trouble. Ah. Okay. Enough rambling. But in summary: hot-​pot plus beer plus people who like video games and human rights plus a little singing and a lot of dice games equals: a pleasant evening. Sadly, right now I don’t really want to sleep; but my head swims: yes, swims.