9 July 2010

My Farewell

Hello!

I don't blog here anymore, I got hip and got a tumblr.

http://tobiasrevell.tumblr.com

thanks.

2 May 2010

HTML5 is coming! This may well be totally meaning less to most but it's effects are going to be incredible. Companies are already flocking to put their names in the hat for it's eventual release in 2020. It's going to be huge. For a while now there have been no significant desktop-native software packages released, merely updates of the original and some (such as Photoshop and Google Office) are already web-native. HTML5 will also mean the gradual end of third party web programs like flash, all activity on your computer will be based out of the browser that's gradually becoming your window on the world. So when's all this going to happen? By 2020. Practically just around the corner!

And we're going to Mars! Yes Barrackbama said NASA are going to be popping in on the little green men for tea. Scientists are working on way to isolate bacteria in Alaska that can break down rock and turn it into soil and the 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars makes it a haven for plant life. And the combination of photosynthesis and some mild geoengineering means we'll soon have an atmosphere up and running to block out all the UV rays that bombard the red planet. So, when does this exciting time in humanities history begin? First stages may possibly be in planning by 2050!

And nanocomputers are on the way! At the moment the best one's managed to do is start a sodoku and not even touch it's coffee but soon they'll be performing instant calculation by the superpositioning nature of photons. A new age of computing that'll see the heralding of practical optics and exceptional storage power at a fraction of the energy cost. How long before this science fiction hits PC World Dagenham? By 2070!

All a long way off, the future, isn't it? So what about more immediately? What's literally just around the corner that will revolutionise our lives? Nothing. Spend less money, use less energy, be nicer to people, don't eat crap food and you might make it far enough to see the invention of the 20-way extension plug.

23 April 2010

My Patron Saint

From a young age, the thing that we were taught to remember St. George for is slaying a dragon, saving a chick and generally being a good role model. As you grow older, you realise that in the apparent absence of dragons from reality that actually the entire story must be a crock of shit and really no way to live. Chivalry dies in those moments. So you send off for your fake ID, buy some condoms (maybe) and start planning ways to get in and out of the house undetected. We decide as a child, that honour has no place in this world built on lies and instead realise that devious, bitter, vengeful and jealous selfishness is the only way to get the girl, the adoration of the town and the golden horde the big scaly fucker is camped on.

St. George became a metaphor for Englishness - and back then - Christianity, despite the fact he probably never came here and he never so much as slayed a dragon as was slayed by a dragon. He was a Roman soldier who apparently stood up for Christians and ended up murdered for it. In reality, dragons are big and scary, they're made of departments, ministries, constituencies, precedents, judiciaries, laws, statutes, rights, restrictions, taxes, paperwork and guns. So religions responded by taking the same form, they sprouted leathery wings and jagged claws, took to the skies and ruled from up high.

Neither the Dragon nor St. George are heroes. St. George is the Dragon and vice versa. The horrific, fat, greedy, gravity-defying beasties circle the sky above you breathing fire down your neck day in, day out. So what about the girl? We're all out of honour, freedom and chivalry but she needs saving. Well, it's amazing what fake ID and condoms can get you.

19 February 2010

My New Band

Finally pulled my finger out and did the good thing. Listen, learn, love and so on right here:

The Feral Five-Hundred

23 January 2010

My Mystery

Not really a haunted house. But check out Mystery Google. You can search for anything but get the results of the last person to use Google. Pretty clever stuff if you're after the inter-grail of true random anonymity in your online activity.

Might be a bit better than the 'random' button on Wikipedia. Although the article on Rezazadeh Stadium was particularly gripping.

22 January 2010

My Hypercube

In E8 you got Dalston, Mare Street, London Fields and even bits of Shoreditch. It's the kind of place where the girls wear denim short-shorts even when it rains (pairing with a kitsch raincoat of course.) It's the kind of place where cultures are supposed to smash together to birth sparkling creativity. Yes, truly one of the coolest postcodes in Britain. There's just one thing slightly cooler than this haven of the hip. Yup, that thing above is also E8. It's a 248-dimensional hypercube.

Allow me to stretch your mind. A hypercube, essentially represents the algebraic basis of a cube in different dimensions. A hypercube in 1 dimension (n1) has 2 vertices linked to 1 other, basically a line. A 2 dimension hypercube (n2) has 4 vertices connected to 2 others; a square. And a 3 dimension hypercube has 8 vertices linked to 3 others; a cube. All the connections must be at opposites and right angles to all the other connections. Here's a diagram of the first few:

Innit' pretty and perfect? You can keep going with the same basic formula. Using the 2 to the power of the number of dimensions to figure out the number of vertices (2, 4, 8, 16 etc.). Easy. Only it starts to fall apart after a while, things go wrong and the forms don't work, the right angles can't be held etc. etc. All very erm... "mathy". Anyway, at 248 dimensions it all briefly clicks back into place for some reason. This is called the Exceptional Simple Lie E8 Group. There's too much to go into here. Most of it I don't want to go into since I'm not sure and I don't want to put my foot in it with some militant mathematicians.

But, my point enters here. (You probably could have skipped the bit above but they are nice diagrams I suppose, well done you.) A theoretical physicist, also known as an extreme sports fanatic and firm believer in the 'balance' of life turned it into a Theory Of Everything.

(Gasp here.)

Extreme sports aside, Antony Garrett Lisi is taken quite seriously in theoretical physics so when he published An Exceptionally Simple Theory Of Everything in 2007 a lot of people sat up and paid attention. He showed that it might be possible to unite gravity and string theory (the wet dream of all theoretical physicists) using the E8 group.

Not sure how, still don't get it. As far as I can tell, you take the 248-dimensional super structure, imagine it as a wobbly 2-dimensional sheet and at every point (of which there are infinite) place a sphere. The interactions of these spheres define the universe. I think.

Sounds nuts and it probably is. The point is, that in the light of a theory that might possibly unite the behaviour of the entire observable universe in a flawless mathematical form, Shoreditch pretty much sucks.

21 January 2010

My Diagnosis

The brilliant thing about the whole 'related articles' thing is that for a paper like the Telegraph, which bridges that gap between the insane hysteria of the Mail and the conservative sobriety of the Times, an article titled 'Copper Pipes could Cause Disease and Alzheimer's', a title just one exclamation mark away from the dashboard of a transit van, links to these little gems of medical genius: A pint of milk stops heart disease, two drinks a day STOP Alzheimer's and divorcees and widows are more likely to get Alzheimer's. The irony is that a divorcee may well turn to the drink in which case she nulls her increased risks anyway. My favourite though; Statins cut risk of dying more than a tenth.

That's right folks, roll on up. For a 10% chance at eternal life take these crazy drugs. Occasionally though a newspaper does provide something useful. The Guardian recently put this up. A link to various government figures from 2007. Everything from your local BNP buddies to how much your school sucks. As if you didn't figure it out at the time. To a kid, every school sucks.

There used to be a blog called the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project. It tracked the various pieces of medical genius pumped out by that particular rag. Sadly, it hasn't been updated for two years.

What I'm proposing (and I'll need help) is this; start a set of blogs: Things That Will Kill You and Things That Will Grant You Immortality. Every day or so a group of us put up on one or both blogs the various things in the days media that would claim to cut short or extend our mortality with a brief explanation of how exactly this is supposed to be achieved.

It's just an idea. Perhaps a brilliant one. Could turn it into a book. Anyway, not sure how to end, here's a list from McSweeney's:

THE OTHER BATHROOM NUMBERS.

BY DAVID WECHSLER

- - - -

3. Shower

4. Shave

5. Talk to mirror

6. Vomit

7. Moisturize

8. Brush teeth

9. Masturbate

10. Clean (a. tub; b. toilet; c. sink; d. floor)

11. First aid

12. Both 1 and 2

13. Take drugs (a. legal; b. illegal)

14. Just want to be alone

Radical.

19 January 2010

My Doctor WHO?

This week, heavy demands were put on the World Health Organisation by the world. Well, 14 of the most developed countries. They want to know exactly why the WHO told them that the world would end unless One Gazillion US Euro-Dollars Sterling was spent stocking up on Tamiflu that wasn't really used. And I suppose they're right to ask. We're in the middle of the worst recession for almost 100 years, but swine flu is now officially on the way out in Europe and bird flu never put in an appearance at all despite saying it was 'attending' on Facebook.

So, whose idea was it to buy all this Tamiflu? It is of course, better to be safe than sorry and despite the obvious and much-highlighted flaws of using anti-virals once a virus has already begun to spread (akin to digging a moat to keep the Nazi's out, in 2008), Tamiflu is good at keeping the chattering masses focused on the failures of the financial world. This still doesn't answer how the WHO so massively overshot the mark on this one. An internationally responsible and accountable body falsely predicting the end of the world twice and each time encouraging people to spend all their money on Tamiflu does raise the type of questions that would have Naomi Klein squealing 'Sir! Sir! Sir! Oh me! me! I know! I know!' with her fingertips touching the ceiling in the Political Commentators school of Sceptics.

The thing is, that all this happened in the same week that seven hundred previously secret documents were released by the EU parliament. These documents detail email conversations in which the tobacco lobby was seen to be putting pressure on the various committees of the EU to focus on the economic aspects of policy rather than the social. Needless to say, links were made. Post 9/11 the US has a policy of; "Just because it happened in Europe doesn't mean it CAN'T happen here.'"

So once again, just like in the nineties, the role of 'Big Pharma' in the political world is being questioned. We probably don't realise here, but in the US the stranglehold that pharmaceutical companies have over the population is staggering. If someone on Fox News was to make a passing comment about say... Scurvy, you could guarantee that the next advert break would be for 'Orangozaic!; now with Pro-Scurvical-Ionidotopatoids to Protect You AND Your Family!' Twenty minutes later just about 6 billion units will have sold.

It's a terrifying thing to think that consumerism is based on fear. The fear of flu made world leaders happy to buy enough overpriced Strepsils for an entire planet, Tamiflu were happy to provide, 'the media' (a phrase almost as unpalatable to me as 'the youth of today') were happy to keep the fear pumped around and we were happy to lap it up, bitch and moan about it round the water-cooler and do absolutely fuck all.

But, as one informed reader of the Telegraph wrote: "Swine flu is now a political disease and, as with all things political, one has to be seen to be doing something." Even if that something is just panicking like an impotent, pathetic little worm and waiting for someone to blame. Well now we can all blame the World Health Organisation, an organisation set up to put international well-being, health and happiness before politics, finance and personal resentment. Way to crush every attempt at positive global cooperation.

Anyway, with global warming, economic doom, the failure of dollar imperialism, pandemics and resource shortages, and oh yeah '2012!' (yeah, that's back in the popular press) it's only a matter of time before the whole WHO gives up and just screams hysterically into a massive speaker system that everyone HAS to spend their money on re-enforced concrete, spears, Bibles and those crazy money-spinning cigarettes.

My Plagarism

I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time that went into that. The irony is that I stole it from a blog called copycunts. A blog with just about enough irate scorn to make up for the irate bitterness and stifled rage you feel when you see shameless plagiarism, so much so that the ridiculously profane language on the blog doesn't actually annoy you since all your spite is directed at idea thieves.

Awesome.

30 April 2011