The New Music Express – top 500 I thought it would be fun to have links to the music and a wikipedia link as well – remind us these albums were about!
Indie Rock – explained
1. The Smiths – The Queen is Dead || Info
2. Beatles – Revolver || Info
3. David Bowe – Hunky Dory || Info
4. The Strokes – Is This It? || Info
5. The Velvet Underground and Nico || Info
6. Pulp – Different Class || Info
7. The Stone Roses || Info
8. The Pixies – Doolittle || Info
More Latter.
Laos is a small and mountainous country, 4% is arable, and during the Vietnam conflict the Ho Chi Minh Trail that boarders the two countries was constantly bombed, in fact, on some measures it is the most bombed country ever, for example, using per capita metrics, and a considerable amount of Unexploded Ordinance remains, on some estimates 8m bombs did not explode.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swf
https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swf
The country is beautiful, at Lunag Prabang the Mekong slips past as it winds its way from Tibet towards the ocean outlet of the Mekong delta in southern Vietnam, cutting steep sided valleys covered in denser green rain forest and with very step banks, which make getting to and from boats a bit tricky especially for use oldies! Boats of all kinds traversed the river, cargo, tourist and ferries – we made one trip of about 4 hours in narrow long boat, which seemed to have a difficulty with its motor until we pulled up along side a larger boat that served as a gas station on the river.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swfThe river cruise to the Buddhist cave was interesting, passing farm land and weaving around the rocky parts of the river. At the caves one is provided a panoramic view of a mountain range and we could see elephants in the water on the opposite bank. All along the river small villages can be seen and the bank of the river is often used for market gardens, sometimes with small terracing, it seems the flooding of the river is less a danger with the up stream dams. Laos is looking to the Hydro power industry as its major form of export income by selling power to its neighbors of Thailand, China and Vietnam, however, the ecology is impacted and the flow of the river is likely to lessen in time, thus impacting how the people who live along the river interact with it. We saw Monks walking along the bank, many fisherman in very small boats or sitting on the bank, women and children carry the daily supplies up the banks from small boats and sometimes cows and elephants drinking. The river is an integral part of local life.
A trip to a local Elephant nursery saw us spending an hour with a 57 year old female who seemed to enjoy eating, the rest of the tour group road off down to the river, and on return two elephants transported their tourist riders down to the river for a spot of bathing and washing, of both parties. Like most places across Asia the elephant is endangered and these nurseries are important, as are the ones for bears, we past one such Bear park as we visited one of the water falls in the area.
The Plain of Jars is one of the important flat and arable areas and it is in the East towards Vietnam, it is home to large stone jars that were chiseled into shape somewhere between 300BC to 300AD by unknown people’s, and it is thought as part of burial rights to hold the bones. It is a 6hour drive to Phonsavan but worth it, you can fly in and out, but then you miss the sights. The road is narrow and winds through steep mountains and past village after village, like in Sri Lanka the road is just an extension of the house and in most parts the road ran along a narrow hill top with the houses perched precariously with little of no backyard, hence all play and cooking and cleaning was done in the front between the front door and the road, which in all cases was no more than a few feet.
The jars themselves are large, about as tall as a normal person and varying in circumference. There are many sites and we visited two, there other main one was impassable due to rain. The plains are about 1000 m and hence the weather is cool and during our visit rainy as there was a Typhoon off the coast of Vietnam. The thing that strikes you about the stone jars is “how did they do that”, this was during the Iron Age, so it is thought that some form of iron tool was used, but it would have taken many hours and then required a lot of effort to move them into place.
The local markets and eating places are pleasant without hassle and the food and drink all reasonably priced, the hotel accommodation provides a good range to meet different budgets with Tuk Tuks and hire vehicles plentiful.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/picasaweb.googleusercontent.com/slideshow.swf
In late September I visited the UK on route to Cardiff to work for the International Baccalaureate, which I have done nearly ever year for the past 12. This time I decided to visit Blechley Park and for a bit of fun, look for some of the locations used in long running TV series Midsomer murders.
I booked into the Highwayman a country pub near Kidlington, it is a working persons pup, right by a canal and served a variety of real Ales – the ones that pour by pumping. They also served wonderful ‘Full English’ and India food.
On Saturday I went to Bletchley park, the home of the WWII code breakers and Alan Turing, and the National Museum of computing. Alan Turing is simply one of the most brilliant of mathematicians and conceptual thinker about the notion of computational thinking that lead to the development of not only Enigma code breaking machines but also the modern general computer and the stored program concept. In WWII he was one of the lead scientists who worked to crack the German codes created using a mechanical machine called the Enigma code.
His work went unheralded after the war and he eventually committed suicide when charged with homosexual behaviour in around 1950, illegal in Britain at the time. Not until the late 1950’s did his mother know what he did in the war and that he was a hero, his treatment remains a scandal despite Brown’s letter of apology. A movement is underway to grant a full pardon.
Turing’s writings are wonderful in their clarity of not only the technical mathematical content but for his use of every day language to outline the problems he foresaw that would need a technological solution – one being the idea of data storage being like a book with a direct page reference in preference to storing a series of 1’s and 0’s in a mercury filled tube using waves, this latter technology actually worked, but it was his insight of the need for very large storage beyond that of the immediate primary memory that is impressive. He worked with the American von Nuemann to design and discuss developments in computing during WWII, sub-sequentially the von Nuemann design was adopted and basically all computer still use his fundamental design. It uses the philosophy of doing as many instructions as possible using hardware, a complex instruction set. Turing had proposed an alternative to do only the very basic instructions in hardware and to provide the rest using software, this is what is known today as reduced instruction set architecture and is used commonly in mobile devices.
The role of women at Bletchly park was not known during the war and received scant attention after it. The main British code breaking machine, designed by Turing, was called the Bombe, which is a derivation of a Polish word bomba, meaning cytology or code breaking. The machine was used to determine the Enigma machines daily settings and was operated and managed entirely by WREN’s, many of their stories are now available and apparently the shifts were long, stressful as mistakes were costly, very hot, very smelly (oil as it was a machine with moving parts) and very loud. The fundamental inputs were a series of cables connecting single input points two at a time, these connections had to be made very quickly and without mistake: I can attest that this is difficult as you can visit the hut and try for yourself.
I also visited the National Computing Museum and was reacquainted with similar input devices I used as a student in the early 1970 – enter programs a line at a time, the symbols displaying in electrical displays which were small glass cylinders – one per character, about 10 at a time! There were also the old 300MB, 19 platter disk units which I used to sell for $50,000….bit of a trip down memory lane.
The rest of the trip saw me hunting for Midsomer Murder sites – I visited pubs, took pictures of villages, walked in the woods, made a short movie and saw the windmill, alas the camera obscura on the village green of the village of The Lee is fictional, image my disappointment!
Some pics at
I also made a quick visit to Kings College Cambridge – just to say I had been there!
and you can listen to the choir of Kings College here.
To act, or not to act, and if one acts what should one do, and if no action is desired on what basis is such a decision reached.
Science is a gradual process and not one that claims 100% knowledge at any point in time and more importantly not about likely consequences – political or otherwise. It is also a cautious disciplined approach, a skeptical approach, one where consensus can be upset at any time by a new discovery. Importantly, it is a process which is long term, statistical based decisions made in haste, on poor samples are eschewed, but it is true that Scientists champion causes to promote their tenure and get funding, and once the scientific discoveries enter the political domain the idea of a dispassionate assessment is lost.
When scientist looks at the carbon atom – to pick one of the so called green-house gases – it is found to absorb earths radiation coming back off the earth’s surface otherwise destined for space, hence trapping heat which leads to warming, but good aspects of light rays are not reflected back into the atmosphere rather these pass through to hit earth’s surface, some is absorbed hence increasing temperature. Remember that light from the Sun is not a single ray, it is made up a wide spectrum, in effect some are good and some are bad, the earth’s atmosphere filters the good and reflects the bad.
Interestingly when scientist look at water vapor H2O it is found that this leads to clouds which reflect sunlight, as do the oceans, but humidity absorbs radiation reflected from earth’s surface, and there is the heat transfer caused during evaporation.
If warming happens it is likely to increase humidity, which will lead to more clouds and more rain brought about in part by ice caps melting releasing stored water from ice – the amount of water is fixed, it is just stored in different ways –the overall heating will increase rainfall in some areas but not others. The result will be increased sea water levels, rain patterns will change. Water vapor is the cause of thunder storms as it changes form via evaporation and hence releases energy, which also warms. This is why it is thought there will be an increase in violent forms of weather.
The amount of carbon is fixed or balanced as well, it is just stored in different forms, the amount in the atmosphere is increasing, past the magic number of 350ppm , the historic maximum reached before (at least what can be worked out)– less than 1% of the total volume of the atmosphere – has now been exceeded. The atmosphere is made up of Nitrogen (78%) and Oxygen (20%) , so green house gases represent less than 2%.. The atmospheric layers play the vital role of reflecting dangerous rays of the spectrum in sunlight – the ozone layer being one form of reflective protection, which science showed was diminishing as gases in spray cans started to accumulate and began to disperse the ozone level to create holes, like the one over Southern Australia, interestingly this science was not disputed, action taken work wide and the trend mitigated.
There is a delicate balance in this over all climate system (and sub-systems of the water cycle and carbon storage) where small changes, when modeled, seem to have the potential for much larger disproportionate effects e.g. warming and changes to climate. But it is unclear the exact nature of what will happen with real mother earth, for instance the increase in clouds may help to temper warming by reflecting sunlight, in fact if there was some catastrophe e.g. a very big Krakatoa or anything that lead to vast increases in clouds that lasted for say two years covering the entire world, then we would have cooling, vegetation would die – including plankton in the oceans hence CO2 would be less absorbed to cycle to give O2 and so on to …….
We have got a complex feedback system here and it would seem foolish to me to ignore this complexity. In another blog article I talked a bit about exponential growth (and decay). The rate of growth of C02 seems to fit an exponential model (equation) which implies that as the steepness of the curve increases then small changes on the X-axis (time) will result in larger disproportionate changes on the Y-axis (levels of CO2 etc). Which implies that if these levels have the potential to alter the behavior of the earth’s climate then whatever impact there will be is likely to be much quicker than we expect – and by implication difficult to reverse or nullify.
Coal provides around 30% of world energy needs (oil and gas 66%)), of which China’s usage represents 50% and of the rest the largest user is the USA. The volume of coal use is increasing, driven mostly by China and India’s consumption patterns. The patterns of consumption (assuming accurate) show increases in China (50%) and India (20%) and decrease in USA(-5%), but that China is doing a considerable amount on the issue of decreasing emissions, whereas India is not.
Longer term the reliance of Australia on the resources sector will continue but at some point demand will slow. To me there is an ethical issue here. Assume for a minute that the climate science is reasonably accurate then Australia is, because of its exports, contributing far more to warming than just the 1% attributed as our contribution to total green-house gas emission. We have a small population so viewed on a per capita basis we are seen by the rest of the world as excessive contributors, but not in an overall sense. China and India are the single largest contributors and our exports are partly fueling that.
On the other hand China and India’s increased development is likely to have positive impacts and hence our exports are helping with this.
Complex issue and not one that is easy to answer. Australia has signed up to international agreements to reduce emissions by 5%, I think by 2020. The now government made much about the claim that the previous government’s carbon tax would raise and continue to do so, electricity prices by some $550 pa., these figures were not disputed expect when one considered a floating price for carbon, the net effect was likely to be then around $150 pa per household. The current government’s policy of direct intervention is one I have some agreement with as I am not a big fan of these trading schemes. And at around $4b over 4 years represents a cost of $43per person, or about $131 per household, using average occupancy of 3 persons, as opposed to $150 increase in yearly electricity prices using floating price of carbon i.e. roughly the same for ONE year, but vastly less expensive on a yearly basis. It is unclear if this type of expenditure is sufficient to meet our target. I am not aware that the current government disputes the need to meet our international agreement, which implies direct acceptance of climate change science, there is just a different approach, which on a basic analysis shows household cost increases would be the same..
Australia is reliant on coal for our electricity, over 50%, so coal use is not going anywhere other than upwards, unless LPG or other sources quickly begin to take some of the increased demand. Domestic demand for coal is pitted against the commercial reality of demand from overseas, if that price is more attractive, domestic electricity suppliers will need to meet or better the price, in so far as that is an increase in input costs then the consumer will pay, hence electricity prices will increase as our domestic demand increases irrespective of what is done with a price on carbon, directly or indirectly. Unless of course providers reduce other costs e.g. labour costs, lower hourly rates, less permanent more casual etc.
All very interesting and complex, is it best handled as a political process? What other process is there?
No story just some pictures of visit last May to seaside town of Vung Tau
Just a few photo’s from a week long visit to Japan in April, went to a conference and to also pay my respects in Hiroshima.
The conference was a bit lame, but I visited Hiroshima and Kyoto before staying Osaka for the conference.
The country side I saw from the trains – the trains are clockwork, fast and clear – was a patchwork of green and plowed fields. The cities were a little drab but with a number of cultural and historic buildings. In Hiroshima mostly everything has been rebuilt, the peace park is a moving place to visit.
Some pics below.
This problem was posed on FB by an old school friend.
For those with an over stimulated interest in mathematics, riddle me this ….. if I but $10 worth of petrol at $1 per litre I get 10 litres ….. if I buy $10 worth of petrol at $2 per litre I get 5 litres ….. if I buy $10 worth of petrol at $1.50 per litre (as $1.50 is half way between $1 and $2) I should get 7.5 litres ….. but I get 6.66 litres ….. why is it so!?
Mathematics gives us away of looking at the world and abstract problems, often by creating a model with an equation and some assumptions. The equations simply relates what is on the right hand side, normally a computation, to a single value on the left hand side. The LHS is made up of things we call variables, and arithmetic operations are performed to produce a single value.
The above problem looks like a paradox at first until it dawns on you that this is a class of problems described by the equation as y = c/x, where c is the amount of fuel in litres and x is the cost in dollars and y represents the amount per unit by cost. e.g. c=$10 and x=$2 then y = 5 litres per dollar.
The assumption made in the statement of the problem assumes a linear relationship, but the graph of y = 1/x with x>0 shows a curve with the behaviour that as x gets small then y gets big and as x gets big then y gets small, and changes in y happen quickly and not uniformly as x changes uniformly and x=1 gives y=1.
Many will know the frog in boiling water parable. The above is a demonstration of exponential growth for x>1 and unfortunately this does not have nice even spacing for the y values for evenly spaced x values and hence we can’t claim that $10 worth of petrol at $1.50 gives a result evenly divided between petrol costing $1 and $2.
We could make an Integer relationship and force the result e.g. A(x) = {(1, 10), (1.5, 7.5), (2, 5)} and so on, and if we plot these ordered pairs we would see they lie on an imaginary straight line.
Exponential relationships exist everywhere in nature – weather, smoke, economy etc. and commonly we often don’t understand that things may well be speeding up or indeed slowing down, it is probably fair to say our brains tend to shape what we see into something that fits what we know and this is mostly linear. It is why we need to be very careful with claims that appear linear when in fact they are better modeled as exponential.
You will find a very interesting discussion on how it is vital that we understand exponential growth – see Economics and Exponential Growth the point of this article is what has happened in the past may happen 50 times quicker in the future, and the 100 times, then 1000 times i.e. every accelerating or the opposite. Think population growth, carbon entering atmosphere, fish numbers etc.
And a word of caution on models and simulations of these using computers – models are abstractions of reality and exist under assumptions, which may or may not be accurate.
The stock market is an interesting system to consider – by system I mean something that has inputs and outputs, at a simple level we have money to purchase stock as the input and the twin outputs of dividends and capital growth or decay. Today the markets is monitored down to mico-seconds and buy and sell decisions are made as much by decision making software as are made by humans. Caught in the middle of all this it seems to me that it is impossible to draw trends, or those that are drawn are done so on a very much smaller time scale that say a day. Does the market behave in a linear (don’t think so) or exponential manner, probably the latter if you look at the long term chart, but at another level it could be completely random. The only reason we are interested in equations is because they allow use to try and predict things but getting linear and exponential mixed up leads to very poor predictions.
Lets turn to another idea, that of randomness and models. Ants have been studied as they come out of the nest and go to either of two food sources to the left or to the right meeting other ants that are coming back to the nest. It seems that ants to one of three things: go to the food source they have always gone to and never change, randomly choose as they emerge or are influenced to change their mind by a returning ant. I find that fascinating! Consider the most recent election and assume 70% of people vote as they always done, 20% make a random choice and 10% are influenced to change their mind at some point in the time they started thinking about voting and when they tick the box. You can easily model this with what is terms a simple stochastic process and you can run different models making different assumptions about the size of each group – clearly the larger the last group the more you maybe able to influence the result via advertising or some other intervention. The larger the random group the more difficult it becomes to predict, you only need one more vote than your opponent to win.
What I have done here is made a leave of faith that the Ant model is a good one to apply to voters, but when you reflect maybe I am not so mad for doing so – decision processes are open to study, here the voting process does seem to be able to be categorised. For instance we could add those that donkey vote, or those that will vote informal etc. Imagine also if a particular form of advertising was seen to act in an exponential manner i.e. each single day the shift of voters accelerated from one group to another due to FB advertising in a direct sense – this phenomena does in fact seem to exist i.e. phases such as campaign momentum and landside seem to suggest voters can move quickly in time.
My final ramble is about binary arithmetic, and again I find this amazing that something so simple is so, well wonderful. Computers represent stuff as on or off, two states, hence we can use a 1 or 0. How do computers subtract numbers – well by adding complements, this simplifies things in terms of circuits, reduces heat and speeds things up.
1 + complement = 0 this is the result we want. Adding 1 + 1 in binary gives 10 (thing adding 5+7 gives 12), I will not go into bases and place values.
Lets consider we have groups of three 1s and 0s to represent 0 to 8 i.e. (000), (001), (010), (011), (100), (101), (110) and (111) note there are eight groups hence (000) is 0 and (111) is 8.
(000), (001), (010), (011), (100), (101), (110) and (111)
Complement (111), (110), (101), (100), (011), (010), (001) and (000)
add 1 to each (000), (111), (110), (101), (110), (011), (010) and (001)
Now add each pair from the first row to the third row —what do you get, ignore any carry at the end? You get all zeros!
We have our result – value + complement gives ZERO—beautiful.
Couple of bits of music I wrote in Jordan – one instrumental and one with lyrics, but both with lovely pictures of a beautiful country, wonderful people all with a troubled past and present.
I Love Jordan
Palestinian Sorrow
Last Friday we ventured to Phenom Pen for the weekend, it was a 30 minute plane trip, we opted for this rather than the 8hour bus or 4hr boat.
Prior to landing the spread of the Mekong could be seen covering a vast area. We stayed in a hotel called the Frangapani and it was right next to the merging point of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap river, which drains out of the lake by the same name.
Our journey into the hotel was via Tuk Tuk and we got to see the traffic up close, nothing exceptional, but it did feel relaxed much like Siem Reap as compared to down town HCMC, which is just load, dirty and fast!
The hotel was lovely, friendly staff and great roof top restaurant, the bed was also nice – we slept well and were up early waiting for friends so we could go off to the Killing Fields. The taxi arrived an hour early and we left just before 10am detouring to avoid the congestion caused by a protest against the Government not ceding to the will of the people as expressed in free elections and leave office. In fact the tourist numbers were right down as the news of civil disobedience and the potential for over reaction from the police and army was keeping people away.
The Killing Fields is a somber and grisly place – the collection of skulls being hard to view, and when you realise that this was just one of many and that 3million died in about a three year period of Pol Pot rule, it is hard to understand. The prison that we visited early on route, an old school, is also a terrible reminder of the atrocities committed with the gallows still in plain sight.
At one point on route we past hordes of people on the road, both sides, and these turned out to be workers from the factories heading home for lunch, there are factories all over, newly build or in construction, often they have blue roofs and have a sinister aura, mostly there were no signs saying what the purpose of the factory was – low wages and exploitation were in the news!
Sunday saw Cathie and Helen off shopping ALL day except for a quick lunch time visit where they interrupted John and I at the Irish pub next to our hotel – we had viewed the museum.
Monday saw us off to see an Ankor Watt type ruin at Tonle Bati and a visit to the wild life rescue farm. The latter was most unexpectedly well developed with large spaces available to all animals, many of which were victims of poachers or urbanisation or farm clearance. The Sun Bear being the highlight.
As always the people were fantastic and it was a pleasure. Pictures at:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115822802180325365262/albums?banner=pwa
We live next to the Saigon River and I mean literally – it is about 10m away and there are panoramic views along about a kilometer of a gradual meander bend (see, Cathie I learned something when I taught Geography for you). Our vista points directly North and hence to the left is West and right East. We don’t see the early morning sun, but the afternoon sun sets behind a row of high rise apartments and produces many a wonderful sunset, shining for only a short time directly on the patio from about 2pm give or take the time of year till about 6pm or so.
The patio is shaded by two palms on either side but otherwise the view of the river is unimpeded. To the West the river bends away a little North before curling back again on its journey to Saigon, to the North-East the river bends past a busy container shipping area, it is this subsequent path of the river we have not seen yet, the other we often see as we catch the boat into town.
The river is wide maybe 200m, I guess I could get exact measurements but exactness is not necessarily always a good measure of the significance of something, so I will try and paint a picture for you. It is a stable river, no waves unless a large boat passes, and flows left and right with the tide, but never at a fast pace, it is clearly powerful but on first glance this is not apparent, it is only so when one hears the motors of the boats straining when running in the opposite direction of the prevailing current. It is not muddy but also not clear, there is quite a bit of sediment but it is home to jumping fish and various other marine creatures, much prized it seems as there are, at low tide, men gathered and diving into the muddy shore line collecting little shell fish, we think.
Rivers in Vietnam have shaped the country, especially in the South around the Mekong Delta. Our stretch of water carries the cargo boats, these move gracefully up and down all day and night, never stopping so it seems. There are large green boats with tall sides and shorter sided boats, and boats that appear almost sunk, these latter boats typically laden with sand, I am told destined for export to places like Singapore. Whilst graceful there is a traditional masculinity about the boats: strong, sturdy, reliable, what you see is what you get, there is no subtly. Many of the boats are homes as well, the washing often prominently displayed, and plant pots and TV aerials can be seen – there are women and children going about the daily tasks, the men can be seen washing the boat will bucks dipped into the river and hauled up – and themselves at times. The captains nearly all have the same pose, it is relaxed, with feet used to steer and resting back – you get the impression sometimes they maybe sleeping.
There is little noise from these boats but the smaller wooden fishing boats can make a putt-putt noise and at night or early evening this can be a little loud. These are small boats about 4 metres long, narrow and fishing boats in the main, but from time you see them burdened down with all manner of cargo. The crowd favorite are the pugnacious tug boats, these are squat, and resemble cartoon depictions of tug boats the type captain Pugwash captained. Their main task is to push against the current and move huge barges about, often empty but often full of sand.
As the boats have a maleness in the traditional sense the river itself is certainly – Mother Nature. There is a dependency on the river it is the giver, not wanting anything in return except some respect and to be treated with fondness. Traditionally this was the case, the rivers were revered and still are but environmental issues are present and growing urbanisation and industrialisation, and farming are starting to cause problems – erosion and pollution being the two main ones, and of course there is the ever present Up Stream damming in other countries.
In the morning the river often welcomes me with a carpet of green and in the so called winter months the green clumps of water hyacinth carry abundant bird life, mainly white storks. The carpet of green drifts with the current up and down and it is not clear where it goes to or where it comes from. Women in small boats drift with the tide collecting bottles and other rubbish that can be sold, this tends to keep the river clean or at least more so that you might expect.
It is a privilege to live so close and to see the goings on, it is truly a life with a river.
