2016
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May 31st; Tuesday. A wonderfully sneaky hack right down at the chip level. A funny effect where prime last digits seem to predict last digits in subsequent primes. US law enforcement in San Francisco: hidden microphones in public places.
Oh yes, and my article about the East Bloc view of Brexit goes online.
May 30th; Monday. Some clever folk talking about how far maths is part of human culture: Penrose; Weinberg; yet only Wolfram, & again, seems to tackle it seriously. Here he says goodbye to a colleague who worked both on 2D puzzles and shift-register sequences, which Wolfram compares to cellular automata.

May 29th; Sunday. Long, quite informative piece on strikes and labour unrest in France. Perhaps tactless to mention this?
May 28th; Saturday. US missile systems still use floppy discs. Strangely reassuring.

May 27th; Friday. New claims that mobile phones do cause cancer after all.
May 26th; Thursday. Akos & I discuss US military robots ("You have 20 seconds to comply.") Meanwhile, the Tory leader's former strategist says that if Cameron were not prime minister, he would favour leaving the EU. + Curious story that EU-wide tax numbers are planned.

May 25th; Wednesday. Rahul spurs me with this inspiring snatch of Kipling.
- See you the ferny ride that steals
  Into the oak-woods far?
O, that was whence they hewed the keels
  That rolled to Trafalgar.
And mark you where the ivy clings
  To Bayham's mouldering walls?
O there we cast the stout railings
  That stand around St. Paul's. ---
May 24th; Tuesday. Northern Ireland man traces guns used in several killings. Inquest into 1970s killings hears how young apprentice cried for his mother before being shot in the head by Republicans.

May 23rd; Monday. Nice old story: someone tries to hack speed cameras with number plate in SQL.
May 22nd; Sunday. Chomsky on Newton.

May 21st; Saturday. 2003 child-murder frame-up claims. Forgiveably shouty.
May 20th; Friday. Show Lorinc my goose sketch. Abroad, schoolboy finds lost city.

May 19th; Thursday. Catalans dicing with AIDS? Bit News-of-the-Worldy.
May 18th; Wednesday. Trees have soul: another Schauberger?

May 17th; Tuesday. Last week's Petrograd radio mix quite good: #378.
May 16th; Whit Monday.

May 15th; Whit Sunday, or Pentecost.
May 14th; Saturday. Sugar icings in Urals: stronger, more gloss than puny cake of Western weakness!

May 13th; Friday. Lorinc challenges me to draw a goose. Closer up than this friend's photo, though.
May 12th; Thursday afternoon, Alex & I chat about Ethereum, Chromium, & Russian car-crash videos. After dark Akos breaks the back off my chair 2 by accident after laughing at my chisel work on chairs 3 & 4 not being so good. He's right, really.

May 11th; Wednesday. Weather continues to be wet, dry, warm & cold in unpredictable succession. The trees love it though. Street trees are suddenly big & bulky with thick pale-green leaf. A claim that Britain's economy is doing well.
May 10th; Tuesday. Drop over to Deborah & David's flat for lunch. + Britain's traditional blue letter boxes.

May 9th; Monday. Cruel but fair pastiche of Alain de Botton writing about love.
May 8th; Sunday. Canadian adolescents discover their parents are Russian spies. Deep undercover. While cross-dressing retired British spy helps woman "hide with hippies in the woods".

May 7th; Saturday. Peter encourages me to look at HTML5 with a fresh screen.
May 6th; Friday. Bernardo Kastrup podcast interview: his attack on philosophical materialism + transcript with dodgy spelling. Meanwhile, has your password & account been compromised? Check here.

May 5th; Thursday. Small hours this morning finished a book borrowed from Robin: 'New Art from London' by Chris Townsend. A bit dispiriting as a read, this 2006 book aims to describe what a later wave of artists based there were doing 15 years after artists around Damien Hirst & the Chapman Brothers were making waves in the early 1990s. The socialist viewpoint is so reflexive and taken for granted that every 3rd or 4th page carries a glib reference to "neoliberalism", "the priorities of entrepreneurs", or "global capital", assumed to be the obvious reference for any artistic activity today. After approvingly quoting Habermas on page 180, attacking how "the materialistic West" encounters other cultures, Townsend writes "The catastrophes that afflict the West now (9/11; the Madrid train bombings; suicide bombers in London and whatever else may follow), as well as those massacres that happen daily in Iraq, are largely a sign of the way that this version of modernity works, seeking to subsume other cultures in its materialism, rather than extending a hospitality towards them, a hospitality that, rationally, could acknowledge differences." This quote's clunky style ("a sign of the way that this version of modernity works"), simultaneously evasive and pompous, shows hardened habits of mind. The possibility terrorism might be largely driven by civilisations or forces outside the West never crosses his mind, because any cause outside western 'capitalism' would undermine Marxism's pretensions to explain everything. The idea that the West has in fact been hospitable to other cultures, precisely acknowledging differences, and the idea that this, the West's tolerance for differences and relaxed reluctance to assimilate incomers, might be the real enabler of terrorism - these two thoughts are likewise unthinkable for him. Viewed through his distorting lens, anything would seem drab, but I suspect that Townsend's mental filter is actually quite suited to the leaden irony of the artworks in this book. George Shaw's vaguely glum-yet-elegaic paintings (from photos) of the West Midlands and some of Ori Gersht's photographs of skies are the only works with any visual merit. The art & artists he gives most praise and attention to (the unsatisfying installations of Anne Hardy and Shahin Afrassiabi; the anti-corporate filmed performances of Carey Young; some multi-media work of Ryan Gander; Jo Broughton's deliberately bleak, banal photos of Canvey Island; Helen Barff's felt-covered components; Caroline McCarthy's miniature landscapes of supermarket packaging; the cartoonish debris of David Burrows; Nigel Cooke's paintings of "marginal" spaces; James Ireland's fake miniature landscapes; the rocky chunks of Tania Kovats) almost all seem "richly informed by" (that's to say, shallowly deluded by) dislike of Britain and business. I don't think this is Townsend misrepresenting their work - he's probably describing their aesthetic ideology quite fairly. Even art of the kind the NY-based American-photographer duo The Hilton Brothers do (example) could in his eyes veer dangerously close to the frivolous or decorative, I assume. To earn the approval of Mr Townsend, London-based artists must strive to be dourly unenjoyable, austerely theoretical, & politically didactic. Should take their pleasures sadly, in fact.
Part of the trick with this kind of writing about hyper-ironic retro-beyond-unmodernist post-whatever art is to use indirect phrases which suggest all sorts of clever stuff going on beneath the surface. Tensions are embodied, boundary situations are worked through, "language just isn't that innocent", performances of the self are "recapitulated". Words like 'sedulous', 'haptic', 'inhere' drop in occasionally to add casual authority to the prose. A typical sentence reads "Looking at her cramped, provisional studio space, one can't help seeing the work as an oblique commentary on 'modernity', fashion, and art's role as a catalyst in that process." One just can't help it. Considering the number of remarks Townsend makes about artists gentrifying unfashionable bits of London to the benefit of property developers, a brief mention of Sharon Zukin's detailed 1989 book-length study of just "that process" ('Loft Living') might have raised the bar a little.
Writing about Ryan Gander's project to present a fictional indie music band with mocked-up photos, packaging etc, Townsend adds in brackets "The history of bohemia is in part one where each generation apes the anti-bourgeois posturing of its forebears. In a mass cultural age where bohemia has no spatial or temporal identity, but has itself developed into a brand, it has become a tradition continued in the largely spurious opposition manifested by bourgeois children playing music to annoy their parents." That knowing little explanation, so sure of itself, unwittingly sums up the art & criticism presented in this book.
May 4th; Wednesday. Lovely day out to Vienna with Paul, Deborah, & David. Refreshing! Gorgeous visuals in the Mozart museum.

May 3rd; Tuesday. More from the Dilbert creator who's been predicting for over a year now that The Honey Monster will succeed.
May 2nd; Monday. For anyone who rates biometrics, see how the FBI makes fake biometric science up out of whole cloth. Entire fake subjects in fact.

May 1st; Sunday. A couple of new (to me) approaches to uniting the pesky quantum things. 1) You can entangle particles over time. 2) Space & time might be made of quantum entanglement.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com