Map Envelope

A wee bout of beeb hate

Linuxcentre

We here at theSlog are very fond of the BBC, but frankly, they seem to be putting every foot wrong these days. The latest being BBC Online coming down squarely on the 'closed' side of the open source debate. Basically their stance is, 'we like to make use of open source software but we won't give any back, and more than that, we will block anyone else from doing it for us' - and hence the excellent GET iPlayer is no more. For now at least.

Between dangling the dagger over 6music, the Asian Network, BBC Online, and now the means by which we can access most of it, I can't see how they will soon be able to claim to be a public service provider and not a commercial media network like any other. Well, at least it leaves things open for, I don't know, more open TV networks perhaps?

a cheesed off Roy.

beeple - the work of mike winkelmann

beeple - the work of mike winkelmann

via Make, some charming wee videos, firstly this one, then that one and finally the other.

Point to C on Solid Steel

May I thoroughly and wholeheartedly recommend this most recent Point to C mix for Solid Steel? Ta:

Ninja Tune - Solid Steel Radio Show 5/3/2010 Part 3 4 - Point to C & Neotropic - SoundCloud

Roymo

Typeface

Roymo

Robin Friend, photographer

Mr. Murphy links in his most recent post to photographer Robin Friend, with some beautifully haunting pictures such as this:



Apparently Murphy has reviewed his work in Hotshoe magazine but I can't find the article on't web on the first search, so must keep an eye out. Its so much more expensive, the whole magazine world, when you can't stand in Borders shamelessly dog-earing the periodicals. I guess that's why there are no more Borders (the shops, not the boundaries)..

Roy

Grampian Mountains

The newest link on theSlog blog (from whence these posts come, for those of you viewing this on facebook) is Grampian Mountains, the blog of Glasgow based graphic designer and disc jockey Point to C, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently. Very tasty photos and compositions alike.. checky:
http://grampianmountains.blogspot.com/

Roy

Southside Studios opening this weekend

Merlin James / Andrew Taylor / Tom Varley

Preview - Saturday 27 February 2010 - 7pm

Southside Gallery, 17 Westmoreland Street, Govanhill, Glasgow, G42 8LL

www.southsidestudios.org

The Show will run from 2nd March till 16th March 2010.

by appointment only, please call 077927 39788

Fun Occult - Recoat opening on Friday

Sent to you by Roy via Google Reader:

Fun Occult

via recoat by Recoat Gallery on 19/02/10

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• Subscribe to recoat using Google Reader
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The Do Lectures

"The Do lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about."

Inspector Tapehead in album completion shocker.

Reuters:

Glasgow, UK

Hello everybody

Just writing to say that we have well and truly and utterly finished our debut album 'Duress Code'. We have given the tracks we had up [on the myspace] before a rather thorough remixing and also worked away at the fresher stuff, before getting the whole lot (ten tracks altogether) mastered by Jon Astley. We are now putting it about with some hope of getting it released in early summer. Those who have picked up an album sampler from us at a gig, containing early mixes of the first three songs we recorded, may recall us printing an original release date of 'Summer 2008'. Let us assure you all that we will never be this optimistic again.

Anyway, to mark the occasion we are putting up three tracks from the finished article. We hope that you enjoy them and we will keep you posted on any developments regarding the release.

Over and out,

Insp. Tapehead.

Gie us a shot on yer wee friendly indie label mate!
www.inspectortapehead.com

How I Met My Wife

Linked by g, words by Jack Winter.

Brilliant piece of writing on that subject of words that don't have an antipode as prompted by a tomasky blog.

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate...

Stirling Engine

Words by Gareth, patent by Roger Stirling.

I was introduced to the Stirling Engine last autumn and was amazed that I'd never heard of one before. What have the slogistas heard? I'd like to think there's scope for microgeneration from waste heat in many homes. How about the self sufficient fridge, computer, kettle, air conditioner? Where's the main limitation? Batteries? kwh produced per engine size? Thoughts anyone?

By the way, the image is from: stirlingengine.com where you can procure said engines...

Inspector Tapehead Vid #4 and NEWS

I'm catching up with a few things here: Forgot to post Mr. Common's latest Tapehead video, from our sojourn to Stoke Newington (LDN) / Borough (LDN) / Withington (MAN):


That brings the total number of tapehead vids to 4, all viewable on Inspector Tapehead's channel here.

and NEWS:
Chris rang not but an hour ago, fresh out of a day's mastering of the album, Duress Code. Things are sounding very tasty indeed, let me tell you. I don't think the others will let me publicly announce a possible ETA for the album given that we're 18 months past the first estimate already. But soon.

East West Quintet

Just listening to some East West Quintet, courtesy of Mr. Johnson. Not sure if he's linked already, but if not, well worth checking out.

A pleasant melding of sax/piano/drums with something of a rock flavour, and all the jazzy noodling one would hope for. Kinda reminds me equally of Employee of the Month and the more visceral moments of EST.

Roy

Fergus ont' web

Meant to post this a while back - Fergus has updates his website with some pics from Allotment back in November - or was it October? Good times, and a great looking website.

http://fergus-dunnet.weebly.com/

Climate Information is Beautiful/Terrifying

George sent me a great link:

David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer for the Guardian and Wired amongst others, has been putting together some very good graphics on the subject of climate change of late. They are over on his blog, Information is Beautiful. The corker is this post depicting typical arguments and counter arguments between skeptics and the science - would be very interested to hear people's / Gaz's views.

Not the Gaz ain't a person, but you know what I mean..

Roy, and thanks to George!

A Euler massage

UPDATE - it turns out that the diagram I previously posted is a Euler diagram, rather than a Venn diagram. Apologies for my ignorance. Here's another handy one to make up for it:


from hand of Roy:

Wyn [of Reith days, from whence NYK first sprang] sent me this extremely useful diagram, having fallen foul of my pedantry:



It's amazing how a good diagram can ease one's understanding. I thought I was pretty up to speed on the whole issue of British borders, but this brought added clarity to the whole thing - it'll will make good recommended reading the next time I have to explain to any newbies how I can be British and English, whilst also coming from Scotland.

It doesn't however help explain why I sometimes have to edit that description depending on the company I'm in. Or how I'm at once one half Scottish, one half Indian and one whole English, yet am just one Briton! I need my own Euler diagram.

Climate Tricks

By Gareth. i.e. verbose entry warning...

I watched a debate the other night between amongst others George Monbiot on one side and Lord Nigel Lawson on the other (Maggie's chancellor of the exchequer) and something Lawson kept bringing up that was not properly refuted by Monbiot bugged me. It was this: "Global warming has stopped in the last decade". Monbiot's refutation was that 8 out of 10 of the hottest years on record have been since 2001. Which is absolutely correct, but argued Lawson, using an analogy, if population growth stopped in 2000 the last few years would still have the highest recorded number of people on the planet (ie growth stagnated). So, with that in mind I thought I'd get hold of any evidence Lawson had to prove his point then look at the data which exists in the public realm to try and back that up. With a little help from a timely Guardian article I found that Lawson is Chairman of the board of trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and that their website hosts the image I've added below showing an apparent cooling or end of global warming on the header of each page (sorry it's small go to the website to see it more clearly). So here it is, Lawson's evidence for the end of global warming.


Next step, try and reproduce it using any of the global datasets that exist. I.e. the ones from the UK Met Office (HadCRUT), NASA (GISS) and the National Climatic Data Center in the US (NOAA).

I've attached another two images. The first is the entire record of temperature on land and ocean for the last 100+ years (depending on dataset, e.g HadCRUT goes back to 1850) for all three datasets. This is no small piece of work, it comes from multiple measurements and many stations around the globe and has nicely been hosted for us all to look at at the above websites (who said we couldn't get access to this stuff?!).


The first thing to point out is that any monkey could tell you that the overall trend here is 'up' ie warmer and that if you took any one ten-year section you could probably find a decrease in temperature and conclude that global warming had stopped when the overall trend is still, our monkey tells us, UP. In other words we have natural variability in the climate. But let us ignore that for it is not convenient in my search for something to back up the claim that global warming has stopped in the last ten years. How best to do this? Well, the best way I can think to do this is pick the hottest year on record (that has the biggest positive anomaly from the baseline), from the one data set that works best for us to be our starting point, then see the decline from here on in. To do this we have to ignore the NOAA and GISS datasets as they have 2005 as the hottest year and it's quite tricky to claim global warming has ended when the hottest year on record is within your frame of reference. No, much better would be to pick the the HadCRUT data (red line on above figure) as this has 1998 as the hottest year, and well, it's British so it must be better. Now, what else can we do? Well, 2009 so far is looking pretty warm on the grand scheme (see that awkward upwards tick at the end of the red line above), and you know it's only December, so we don't have a full years record yet so let's drop that point and just use 1998 to 2008 and have a look at the beautiful decline like on Lawson's website header.


Wait, what's that? Even when I do that (last image) I STILL get an upwards trend on all three datasets. Bugger. Oh well, maybe I'll just re-draw my own image with fictitious points to match my argument (you'll note that as the Guardian article above points out this image has 2003 and 2005 level pegging for temp on their image, they aren't, and 2006 and 2007 warmer than 2004, again they're not) and put that on the top of my website, much better.

UPDATE: I just noticed, after having written this, that real climate beat me to it a few months back. Still it's good to do these things for yourself every now and then huh?!

Reel to Reel

IMG_5185
Originally uploaded by Spherical Roy

Some photos from Forth St, specifically a lovely reel-to-reel tape machine Gal has there, uploaded to Flickr..
Roy