no2self.net

At the suggestion of my father-in-law, I’ve just been listening to Radio 3′s Late Junction. It’s fantastic. Some beautiful stuff. The most beautiful of which, from Monday’s show, was a piece called Poem électronique by Edgard Varèse. Unknown to me until now, it turns out he was the Father of electronic music. Poem électronique sounds like it could be Aphex Twin’s latest project, yet it was written in 1958.

“I long for instruments obedient to my thought and whim, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, which will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.” – June 1917

The interconnectedness of this morning’s browsing is a treat. I spent the weekend clearing out my cellar in preparation for it being waterproofed and becoming my study. When I opened my copy of The Poetics of Space on the tram, he talked of the phemonological impact of the cellar and the inhabitant as a diagram of all the houses previously lived in. On the Varèse site I visited there is a diagram he sketched of Poem électronique, which is now my desktop wallpaper. It replaced the album cover I had found a couple of weeks ago at franklarosa.com of a 1950′s LP of electronic music.

More stuff to give away. Sending a couple of books to biroco.com has spurred me on to further acts of altruism.

Buried beneath some Connect 4 pieces, inside a pen holder I made from clay when I was eleven, I found the key that opens doors at MI5.

I’ve been looking for it for months. Ever since I heard that Jessica could give it a good home. It’s over a year since we moved house, and I’m still unpacking boxes, still finding things that make me smile/frown. This one provides the links to memories that will keep me smiling all day.

Thanks must largely be paid to Tom. It was he who salvaged it from the empty shell of the old MI5 headquarters in London, during a foray into dereliction (PDF link) as part of his work at the Bartlett. Left behind in the empty shell that used to house the secrets of the Nations security, was a key to supplies that must have been crucial to the day to day life of any self respecting British intelligence officer; the tea cupboard. The description embossed on the copper plate key-ring, says that it belongs to ‘tea station 1901a’. Perhaps there were at least 1900 other tea stations. If you include the alphabetical variations A through Z, that makes a total of 49,426 tea stations. That’s a nice image – think of all the sugar cubes.

In a satisfying, circular fashion, this takes us back to biroco.com. Although I landed at Joel Biroco’s site via research into flash mobs, it was a story about keys and going places you’re not supposed to, that convinced me I’d finally found a web log worth bookmarking. Sadly (for us), he’s moved on to other projects now. Archives are still accessible though, here’s the link to the entry about keys.

Sat in the Quadrant Lounge on Lichfield Street, it seems I have discovered the world’s most uncomfortable arm chairs. I’m calling them arm chairs because I don’t, at this point, know how else to categorize them.

If you perch on the edge, acres of seat is wasted behind you. If you sit back there is nothing to lean on. Anybody under six foot wouldn’t be able to put there feet on the floor. I wrote this sentence while lying down – it’s no better.

That said, it’s actually a pretty good bar. It’s got a laid back atmosphere and some 70′s funk thing coming out of the hi-fi.

Quadrant lounge: meet, drink, lounge, eat, chill.

Just don’t sit down.

The argument about ID cards in the UK is unresolved, the idea of having to carry ID is unsettling, many (me included) believe it to be unnecessary. Here’s a link to a piece about the possible results of implementing such a scheme. It’s a discussion about an American system, but the prinicipal holds true for any location.

My argument may not be obvious, but it’s not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.

It doesn’t really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.

taken from www.schneier.com

Over at the bbc, this years Reith lectures are being released as MP3s. This a Big Thing, as it’s the first time they’ve moved away from the Real Audio/Media Player format.

It’s this sort of thinking that makes me happy to pay my license fee. Tom Coates over at plasticbag.org also has an article about it.