So the Labour Party Leadership election is over and the media coverage of it has been truly some of the worst journalism I’ve ever witnessed. The whole conversation has been terrible. If our news media were half way sensible they would not be talking about whether or not a particular train a particular man sat…
I went up to Birmingham for the Autumn Green Party Conference 2016, at the university there in Edgebaston. Not been to a political conference before, so have no idea how much it was like any other. Arriving a little after noon with not a clue what the hell we were doing, the registration desk directed…
Read more Green Party Autumn Conference 2016
It was surely one of the hottest days of the year today, and the performers in that theater were all wearing winter clothes and jumping around and dancing under stage-bright spot-lights. Whereas I’d spent the day at my desk in my pants. I did some pretty good work, but then I wasn’t dressed in winter…
This is a 60 minute talk (plus 30 minutes Q&A) about TTIP given by David Malone, the Green Party Leadership candidate I’m most likely to vote for at the moment. I think these next two or three years now, as our country negotiates a bunch of bi-lateral trade agreements to replace the cushy relatively-democratic deal…
All the parties are having leadership elections over the next few months. The Tories are picking between what appear to be a shower of literal monsters. Half the Labour MPs are trying to ensure their most popular candidate doesn’t stand for some reason. Much has been written about that, but the Greens just have an…
Read more Too long and overly opinionated guide to the Green Party Leadership Elections 2016
Imagine that you’re a Labour MP and you think Corbyn is what the media have been spinning him as: a hopeless unelectable incompetent throwback from a past age who will surely doom us all. You think, for some bizarre reason, that Corbyn is to blame for the Brexit insanity rather than it being Cameron’s fault.…
Thing is, the Stabby MPs (that should be the name for the new political party they are going to inevitably have to form now) are certainly right that our media’s reaction to Corbyn and to any hint of any diversity in politics at all is a joke, and you probably can’t actually win elections that…
It’s not about the budget What passes for democratic debate in this country is apparently mostly squabbling over how many millions some made-up tea-bag predictions say you’ll make or lose personally if you’re in or out. Gah. Economic projections aren’t really important either way compared to the political, constitutional issues. Sovereignty. Democracy. The very future…
I’ve mentioned The Dao before. Called it a kind of digital distributed democratic dragons den, and noted that 10% of all Etherum, a hundred million dollars, was now controlled by a software contract. And an exploit was found in that software contract, practically as soon as transactions were allowed, and money started draining from it…
An Etherum distributed-app has arguably become the biggest crowd-sourced project ever, pulling in a hundred million dollars worth of crypto-currency Ethereum. It’s called the DAO. It’s basically a digital investment fund that’ll be controlled by digital voting of the share-holders and (if the voting goes as the folks who wrote it seem to want at…
The first ever episode of DevLog made with the AutoStripper. Video-Editing credit must go to my robot, the Auto-Stripper. Not all of it, unfortunately. But most of it. More of it next time. More still the time after that I hope. If you want an infinite stream of video-editing jobs done, give them to a…
Should anarchists want to ban money? Money is certainly a way that some human beings exert power over other human beings. If you’re an “anarchist” then you want to remove ways that some human beings have power over other human beings. No? Thus: Eliminate money. But this is basically just us trying to determine what…
I’ve been reading Scott Adams’ blog since so long ago I don’t remember when I first added his RSS feed to my reader. Before most people knew what an RSS reader was. Though, do they even now? I have a poor grasp on what others understand or remember, or indeed what I remember myself. Ages…
So, basically-spoiler-free star-wars-7 review you say? Perfectly decent film, solid four stars. Nothing to complain about that you can’t level equally at the first three. Interesting and engaging story, pretty to look at, plenty of space-ships and explosions. Even tentacle monsters. More dying-people than I’d have expected. Especially for a kids movie. Most horrifyingly at…
“I have a new English cider in”, says the man in the of licence, and offers me a test bottle for 50% off. I always try a cider once I guess. Examine the label now I’m home, it’s in fact an American ‘hard’ cider. And it is hard. Hard to drink on on account of…
Just a reminder. The queen we have today is our queen because her dad’s dad’s dad’s mum’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s mum’s mum’s dad’s mum’s dad’s mum’s dad’s mum’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s dad’s mum’s dad’s dad had one of his army shoot the previous thief in the eye with an…
Spent the last half hour of tonight writing a couple of responses to Reddit’s Writing-Prompts While many of your brethren secretly maintain various positions of power around the world, you’re not hiding the fact that you’re a Reptilian (Thus proving your species is real.) as you run for office. They call me “Bob”. It’s not…
Well, our Parliament has set a date for the petition-demanded request to make cannabis use and sale legal and presumably taxed. I guess there is no better time to write to your MP and demand it than between now and October 12th when they’ll actually discuss it. All they’re debating is “The house has considered…
Whitbread are going to increase prices in order to afford paying a living wage. According to their site “at it’s heart, Whitbread is all about people”. Their profit last year was 400 million pounds. They have 45000 staff they reckon. National living wage is 7.86 and current minimum wage is 6.50 for a difference of…
Another version of this damned song. Now it has laser sounds, and the whole idea of a guitar-solo is ditched in favour of some synth stuff. Suspect this is about as far as it can go before actual studio-versions rather than scratch-versions of all the different parts are done. Which is probably good, coz the…
Andi came over on Tuesday and helped a lot with this song I’ve been writing while the band is on holiday. His advice was more like “Fuck that rhythm guitar, put these metal power-chords in and put the tempo up thirty percent” So that was both the kinda thing I’d been thinking of, and done…
I was at a party a few days ago and we were pondering on my future. I spoke as I thought: “Well, some of the future me’s [*] will have to face that problem, so those future-me’s will have a solution to find….” Before I could describe my thoughts on what those future-me’s might do…
Music production is impossible. I’ve spent another five hours on this. Is is any better? I can’t even tell. You know that thing where the more you listen to a song the more you like it? Or the more you hate it? How can you even tell if a song is any good when you’ve…
Here’s a screen-cast of me watching the vPre on my website pace about in front of the film I made of a virtual me in which the background features the first virtual me I ever made. Just NAME someone more egotistical than that, I dare you! Well, okay, if you want more, Summon the vPre!…
Mark Steel’s rant after Labour turned him down is funny and true. When I first saw Blair’s quote: The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes ‘disunity’.…
I read Max Tegmark’s book “The Mathematical Universe” in which he describes his career in science in a autobiographical way while exploring cosmology and the wider story of how we came to believe the universe is how it is. In depth microwave-background radiation analysis, the mapping of it matching the models pretty well, validating cosmological…
Finished reading the final book in Greg Egan’s “Orthogonal” trilogy this week. There are spoilers here. If you actually intend to read it you might not wanna read the rest of this. Egan is awesome, often jaw-droppingly so. Usually taking current physics understanding to it’s conclusions, setting his stories in the actual world as the…
Scott Arronson here talks to the AI in today’s news. Turing Test failed in one question. Obviously http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1858
The news is claiming a robot passed the turing test, even though it only fooled a third of the people it was tested against. This is not “passing”, this is surely “Failing”?
http://www.startrekcontinues.com/star-trek-continues-episode-2-lolani/ Watched the non-profit fan-made “Star Trek Continues” episode two this morning. It was bloody awesome. Just like having proper Original Series back for an hour. Ethical quandaries, green sexy slave girls, moral ambiguity, mayrtarism, Bawling uncivilized space monsters. That’s what Classic Trek is all about, right? Anyway, you should watch it, and weep that…
1) Newspaper reports celebrity “under fire”, when it’s the newspapers doing the firing2) Newspaper reports Dawkins as saying kids shouldn’t be read fairy-tales, when in fact he just said he’d like some research done on whether that helps or not, his suspicion is that it’s harmless.3) Russel Brand notices the first lie, and calls it…
So I finished reading the Roger Penrose book “Emperors New Mind” this week. I expected to disagree with it far far more than I actually did. The majority of what he says in it is true and sensible and interesting and in general where he taught me new things he taught me *why* those things…
Bubbles, not Bombs people Bubbles, not bombs. People ask me, “Pre, what should we do about Syria?” Well, I think that depends on who you mean by “we“. I don’t think the UK, or the US, or NATO have any actual moral authority or right to intervene. So if the “We” that is considering military…
They’re spying on you right now you know Listening to me saying this to you. Hello NSA! Hello GCHQ! Can you tell Cameron he’s a twat for me please? Thanks. The news lately has been reminding me of Celine’s first law. Celine is a fictional character in The Illuminatus Trilogy, and his first law states…
This was my final fesitival for this year I had a very good time And now it’s back indoors Did you go to Beautiful Days this year? Let me know in the chat box below! We had a lovely time at Beautiful Days this year. Good friends, good tunes, mostly good weather, lovely surroundings, great…
Ah, Glasto. Is there a better festival in the whole world? I suspect there isn’t. Small ones are nice, and have many advantages But there’s really nothing like the magic here This one was my 12th. And they never stop being good. It was even mostly sunny!. I’ve now spent more than 60 days camped…
Pre spends all this money on his bloody film And what do I get, to run my very BRAIN? A tiny fraction of 20 quid a month, Plus whatever I can scavenge from client machines like yours Thanks for all your processing power! I’m making this film, as many of you know. An animated cartoon…
A single puppet individual who fronted for a political movement designed by the rich to oppress the poor and to privatise and steal a country’s wealth has died a natural death at a ripe old age. The movement, of course, continues with the NHS under more threat than ever, the nation’s wealth continuing to be…
via singularityweblog.com Cory Doctorow at the end of this long interview about science-fiction, the future, geek rapture and his newest book: “If there’s one thing I want the world to understand, it’s that for so long as we maintain that copyright regulates everything that copies, then all copyright policy becomes de-facto internet policy, because the…
Read more Does copyright regulate the entertainment industry, or *everything*?
I’m making an animated tentacle monster film. In a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, tentacle monsters roam the earth devouring the last remnants of human kind but Sally is just worried she can’t find any new shoes. I need two voice actors to voice five characters: Sally, her robot, a tentacle monster and his mistress, plus a…
Read more Looking for voice actors for a couple of hours work.
My girlfriend was looking for a new computer, and some friends had noticed this little Samsung N150 netbook on sale in Sainsbury’s of all places for less than two hundred quid. Sure, it’d need a bigger RAM card fitted but that’s cheap enough. Sounded like a right little bargain to me so I recommended she…
The web is so abuzz with the news that facebook tracks which websites you visit even if you log out that even some of my facebook-loving friends are a bit worried. So here’s how I stop them doing so personally: By using firebox and Add Block Plus. First, Install Adblock Plus. It’ll make you restart…
I got on one of the new Metropolitan Line trains this morning. At first I was sad coz my favourite seat isn’t there on the new trains. I like the one right at the front/back of the old-style Met line trains. Where you can box yourself in with the fire extinguisher and have minimal contact…
On this, X-Day eve, it may be important to reflect that today is the last day this poor earth will have to suffer though. By tomorrow at 7am, the saucers will be here and the world will be naught but dust and pain. We note with sadness that the European Church Of The Subgenius, in…
Add RSS feeds to Project and Profile pages so that users can subscribe to the RSS feeds to know when new parts are released etc. See It Here
In which John watches TV and thinks about the nature of mind and consciousness. See It Here
In which John ponders the nature of work and capitalism See It Here
In which John meets the penguin. See It Here
As I eat my lunch today, I find the News talking of Alternative Vote. I’m reminded that on the 10-o-clock live last night, which was excellent as usual, Steven Norris was trying to explain that because AV isn’t the best voting system imaginable, we should all vote “No” at the referendum when it comes. He…
I’m trying to think about Logo Design right now, coz I’m gonna start trying to make my new project tomorrow. I know I won’t do a good enough job, and that eventually, I’ll have to get someone else to do it. Someone who can do a good job. It’s not important enough at this embryonic…
Read more The subtle influence of auto-logo algorithms on society