Bicycle diaries

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while
after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly
before my father died, he said to me, 'You know-you never wrote a story with a villain in it.' I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5

David Byrne doesn't have a bad word to say about anybody either. Not really. Rudolph Hess and Imelda Marcos both get a sympathetic hearing. That's not to say he doesn't have a point to make, but it's all the stronger for being subtle.

As you might expect, this thing has something to do with cycling. I don't know how far I've cycled in my life, but it certainly amounts to thousands of miles. This book/audiobook is something of an incentive to me to get out there and ride.

But really the cycling is just a vehicle, if you'll excuse the pun. David Byrne had something to say about sustainability, about social justice, about Art, about History. And about music.

I've always been a reader, but lately I've developed a taste for audiobooks. I "read" while I'm driving, or while I'm surfing the internet. Occasionally, I will still read a chapter of a real book last thing at night to help me drop off to sleep, but that tends to keep my wife awake, so unless I've gone to bed before her this doesn't happen often.

The life of Pi, The Handmaid's Tale, Slaughterhouse 5. All these and more have been absorbed through my ears while I've been doing other things.

I found out about the Bicycle Diaries because I'm on David Byrne's mailing list. I actually downloaded it several months ago, but it just sat in a zipped up folder on my laptop for a while until I got round to listenng to it. There are 11 chapters including a short introduction, that cover 10 cities. Get rid of the introduction, and you have 702 megabytes of audio data - Just enough to fit on a CD.

Because it's an audiobook, and because he's an arty chap, it's more than just the spoken word. Ambient background noises add weight to the words. Darkly, as when the ominous drone of jet engines forms a backdrop to a bit about living through the Cuban missile crisis as a child. Or humerously, with disjointed and quirky music when discussing a particularly avant garde Berlin artist who's "actions" sparked outrage and eventual arrest.

I found the background stuff in the Buenos Aires chapter to be particularly interesting. There's a lot of actual music in this one, and it's turned me on to things that I'd never heard before.

Specifically, Juana Molina's music jumped out and bit me. I want to hear more.

Here's one of her songs.



For more information, or to get hold of either the book or the audiobook, visit David Byrne's site, HERE.

Streetview Fail!

Exposed! They tried, but they failed!

Take a look for yourself.



This is the approach to Kingsway, the more modern of the two Mersey Tunnels.

First thing to note is that Google's camera car uses the bit reserved for motorbikes, and goes through the toll plaza without paying.

Cheeky buggers.

Then it enters the eastbound tube towards Liverpool, and straight away, it's struggling with the lower light levels. The picture quality quickly deteriorates, and at some point, the camera car appears to jump from the eastbound to the westbound tunnel. Then, the viewer is unceremoniously dumped without warning on the mean streets of Seacombe, without so much as a by-your-leave.

I tried again from other directions, using both tunnels. In each case streetview either jumped to the surface, or just stopped, as if it had hit a dead end.

I have a couple of theories for this.

My first theory is to do with the low light levels. Perhaps some software or human interpreter detected the poor image quality and decided that it was too poor quality to use.

Another theory is that the fact that it goes well below what Google believes to be the level of the land has triggered some kind of error.

Thirdly, Google's card have a complicated camera thing on a pole. I think it's more than just a camera. I think it also contains either GPS, so that it can relate each image precisely to a location. It may even be some kind of uplink. Rather than risk losing data, it is streamed to some remote location via satellite or mobile broadband uplink. Car enters tunnel. Satellite link is broken (satnavs don't work in the tunnel either, although mobile phones do) and the system can no longer function.

Edit:

I thought I'd found an explanation. But if so wouldn't it be consistent? I mean, if a tunnel is long and deep enough, Street View won't be able to deal with it right?

The Dartford Tunnel is covered by street view, though, and although it's shorter than either of the two Mersey tunnels, it's still long and deep enough (and dark enough) to be stymied by any of my explanations.

So why not the Mersey Tunnels?

Liverpool

As the crow flies, I live perhaps a mile or two from a bustling, cosmopolitan and vibrant city with a huge range of cultural activities. Being unable to fly like a crow, if I want to go over to Liverpool, I have to get across the river Mersey, which means either driving through a choice of tunnels, or getting one of the frequent trains (every 5 minutes from Birkenhead, every 15 minutes from New Brighton) Or if I wanted to really push the boat out, I could get a ferry, although they're geared up for taking tourists on expensive jaunts up and down the river, rather than taking commuters and shoppers from one side to the other these days.

Yet I rarely get over the water, and when I do it tends to be either on the way to somewhere else, or to give my step daughter a lift to work. Or to give Bren a lift with her stuff for an exhibition or craft fair.

Today though, I actually got off my arse and went over with Bren. First of all we had to pick up some of Brens work from an arts centre in Toxteth, but having done so, we walked a mile or so into the city centre, and went for a meal at "Egg", which bills itself as the city's premier vegetarian and vegan restaurant. I had tandoori mushrooms, which came with mint raita, pasta, salad, and couscous or chopped nuts or a mixture of the two. The world on my plate!

On the way back we went to a Chinese supermarket and bought a few bits and bobs. It was an interesting experience, that supermarket. There were the occasional incongrously familiar things, like jars of nescafe amidst the unfamiliar packages. We bought some bags of star anise, for their fragrance more than anything. Bren gets frequent migraines, and artificial perfumes are a major trigger. So having a magic tree dangling from my rear view mirror is out of the question.

I also found some cans of drink called "Grass Jelly drink". Just had to give that a go, so when I got home I cracked one open. First surprise was that it was not in the slightest bit fizzy, despite being in a can. Second surprise was that it tasted of... well, grass. The kind that cows eat, rather than the stuff you put in bongs. So it shouldn't have been that surprising when a big glob of jelly landed in my mouth. I won't be buying any more, but we will have fun giving the other cans to our friends.

How fast is Google Street view?

What I mean by this is, when you allow the imagary to scroll, how long does it take to get from A to B? And if that A to B is a known distance, if I were to translate it into the real world, how fast would the camera car be travelling?

I get the feeling that this may be a way of callibrating how fast mt PC is, rather than how fast Street View is, but let's see what happens anyway...

Here's how it works.

1) Take a measured bit of road. (using the Google Earth line function thing is fine. I don't need to go out with a pedometer or ball of wool)

2) Travel along that bit of road in Street View, and time how long it takes to cover the measured section

3) Do a bit of simple arithmetic.

Well first of all, here's my road.

The Lever Causeway. Basically, a mile long tree lined straight. There have been some horrendous accidents there over the years.

From the beginning of the red rumble strip marking the beginning of a 30 mph zone on the right of the picture to where the centre line of the road on the south side interescts the causeway is exactly one quarter of a mile. This would take exactly 15 seconds to do at a speed of 60 miles per hour.

Here#s how the trip looks, on Street view:

as you can see, it takes one minute and eight seconds to cover that quarter of a mile.

So it would take 4 minutes and 32 seconds to do a mile. Let's call it 4 minutes 30.

9 minutes would cover 2 miles. So 90 minutes would cover 20 miles. 90 minutes is one and a half hours, so divide 20 by 3 and multiply by 2 to get the answer...

Google Street View, running through Google Earth, when viewed on my (dual core processor, dedicated graphics card) computer, runs at a speed of about 15 miles per hour.

Meet the new boss...

Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Algeria. Bahrain.

A wave of unrest has swept the middle East! Entrenched dictators have toppled! Power to the people!

It is of course to be applauded. That vicious shits like Mubharrak have been forced to relinquish the rei(g)ns must be a good thing. Even Qaddhafi looks like he might be on his way out, after using heavy battle weapons against his own people.

But why do I feel that an opportunity has been missed? That they could have used the space they'd created to do things differently. Instead, power is being transferred from one elite to another, while the apparatus of the state remains essentially unchanged.