Percussion and Art Galleries

Imaginary Soundtrack - Swing Out Sister - It's Better to Travel

(Yes I know, I know, but if Oasis can cite Burt Bacharach then SOS doing it is good enough for me)

Anyway what links the start of "The Guns of Navarone" and "After Hours" by SOS?

A fractured header there. Maybe it reflects my state of mind. I listened to the address JFK made at Rice University in 1962 just for something to do. Quite inspring despite the cold-war rhetoric and the coded warnings and still miles better than any speech a politician of today is likely to make.

Mkagnao

I was wrong - it is Cumulus Castelis, though it sounds a lot like Corpulus Castelis, well, it does in my head. I can't find this type of cloud anywhere but on "The Big Sky" which does tend to bear out my theory of excuse that it is a made up formation. AND my theory about prime number has gone down the tubes as all my colleagues except one though of EVEN numbers for goodness sake. Not a mathematician amongst them though. The answer to the person who cropped up twice in my searches was ... David Tudor. No! I hadn't heard of him either but I bet Jah Wobble has.

"We choose to Blog and do the other things not because they are hard but because they are easy."

Thank you to The Scumfrog

Soundtrack - "RadioAxiom" - Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell

I suspect I read this somewhere. I have noticed that if you ask someone to think of a number between 1 and 100, the answer is usually either a Prime number or the digits of it are Prime. I propose that the magnitude of the range up to which this holds true is dependent on how much maths education the questionee has had. I like to think that if we ask Stephen Hawking this question, he will automatically answer with a Prime that is greater than the highest one known. Ask him again and he will give you the next one. Easy! Forget all these distributed computing projects. Now if we could only find a simlilar method for SETI.

On the subject of SETI, is it not possible that every day we see or hear avidence of transmissions from Aliens trying to contact us. Surely some of the snow on the TV or the static on the radio could be the interference from these tranmissions. Then again, it could be that the Aliens have found some other form of communication. Maybe they use gravity waves or something related to the "Dark Energy" that was put forward as the explanation for the Expansion of the Universe. Modulation of Neutrinos? Maybe not. How do you interact with something which absolutely, positively does NOT want to react? If they were people neutrinos would always be found in the Kitchen at Parties but even then they would not talk to each other. Actually, they probably wouldn't go to parties because they couldn't pick up the invitations. At this moment billions of the little devils have passed through this article (in all its locations - the screen here, the wires between me and Blog Central and BC's disk drives) and are now trying to damage me, but my lack of density has got the better of them.

The Monday morning football discussions have started and while they don't quite have the impact that the Clone Wars did (will have), they do stop all other thoughts and conversations dead until at least 10 o'clock. I only wish I would get as much attention if I broke my foot.

"Why are all those people looking down?

I went to college in Bristol and we visited it last year. It has changed a little bit since I lived there; there is a lot of stuff going on around the central dock area where I used to work during my placement year. All around this area, there is a long poem (prose?) called "Walkie Talkie" which is stretched, mostly at ground level, around the buildings and window frames and even through the shallow fountain pools which lie about all over the pedestrian area. It is a rather wonderful mess of seeming nonsense but it leaves you with a real sense of the whole city. I downloaded the entire text and put it into a banner program, though this is rather jerky and difficult to read. I also put all of the Oblique StrategyCards into a program so that you get a random one each time it runs. I see now that I do actually get some things finished. I even wrote a Mandelbrot Generation program with zoom facility.

Anyway, while we are in the after echo of a mention of Professor Eno, my web meanderings over the Oblique Strategy cards led me to this - "My life in the Bush of Ghosts". Go listen and know how two men can influence so many others. I thought a minute ago, when I mentioned the after echo, of how Brian Eno likes the ambience you get after a sound proper has finished. There is a man, Matt Rogalsky, who released a CD of "Silence" and I heard that someone else planned to release a collection of the Rememberance Day two minutes silences. Then there is good old 4''33' (I am amazed that you can actually buy it.) We don't notice silence until it appears suddenly. Do you ever have a moment when you are engaged on some task while music is playing? You don't actually hear the music until the track finishes and then you remember the sound. Ambience is a very important thing. Total silence is probably quite disturbing but ambience is comforting.



As a quiz, which name crops up on two of the linked sites above?

Ambient sounds in an Empty IT area.

I am in an empty office at the moment. Well, almost empty. In the distance I can here the squawk of a phone on speaker, just within earshot; there is rain on the window pane and various hums and rattles from the bits of the Office which move about after we have gone home. On top of all these external sounds, I can hear my own tinitus which at the moment is giving me a very, very faint rattle like a paper clip in a tumble dryer. Occasionally a phone will ring or the wind will make the vertical blinds rumble. Probably not finally, there is the sound of the keys of the laptop.

"Just a Great Big Book you know"




This book is a coffee table. It is so big, it has a handle. It has at least 10 photos of each year from 1899 to 1999 and therefore not only defines the 20th century visually, it ends the argument about which years starts a Century or a Decade. Think about it and you will see. It will be like one of those moments when you are about 14 when everything becomes clearer. My favourite picture is of an armed Russian Nurse tending a fallen comrade in a Trench sometime in World War II. I am trying to find it on the web but all I have found is this.



And Finally a Blog of Note - Here

Progress for Progress' sake

Why would anyone be nostalgic for a war?. I suppose if you were on a remote island like in "Whiskey Galore" or "Back Room Boy" it might be alright but why do people want to go back to nightly bombings and wet air-raid shelters? It is just a longing for a perceived cameraderie and a time which is "better than now". We have a better standard of living here than at any time in living memory so it must be a dislike of change. Change is a good thing if it makes things better. Unfortunately, lots of changes in the world today are for the sake of doing something rather than to actually make things better. (See "Papanek") It is so easy to make things better but so much easier to carry out all the tacky,low-level stuff which drives us all mad. I may be being paranoid but I think many complex things which come about because of change are smply to cover things up - the instigator's lack of in-depth knowledge (Doctor Invincibilis is hovering on the horizon again), the fact that something un-ethical or downright illegal is going on or that you have just done something because you must be seen to do something. Don't do it. Make your life simple. Eat a Peach. Go on. I dare you. Thomas Stearns would.

Red Kites and Floor Polish

(Devenions gris)

Like with Proust and his old Madeleine biscuit, I was taken back to a time long ago by an aroma. It wasn't so palatable as a biscuit. It was the floor polish which I smelled somewhere which I cannot now remember which is funny as the smell itself brought back many details about a place I used to visit with my parents in the 70s. My Mother had a firend who was also a Doctor and lived in a bungalow in the middle of Wales, exactly where I am not sure. On the way there we used to see Kites wheeling over the Valleys. I am sure they were Kites and not buzzards as my Father is a Birder and of course knows all about these things. Anyway, the bungalow was set in such a way as to afford a sweeping view of many miles of Welsh countryside and had wonderful gardens, with a pond and little stony nooks which must have hidden many lizards though I don't remember looking for any. We used to play in the Caravan which they had parked on the drive and on the (I think) Grand Piano, though I think I just used to play on the black notes and just went up and down; it must have been excrutiating for the adults though they never complained as far as I can recall. Anyway, the polish they used must have been the same as that I smelled the other day because all this came flooding back. They had a small attic room in the roof which was full of old toys and I mean very old. There was an original Rocking Horse which seemed to have been well loved though I think I was too big to go it. They also had a wonderful wind-up music box with a huge pin-studded drum which revolved and plucked the various note pins. It seemed like a perfect radio four type house where you could set one of the more gentle Afternoon Plays (or maybe "After Henry" - The greatest Friday night sitcom ever.) A further note, They had a grown-up daughter who had a very bad accident out in Asia somewhere - obvious to me now - while she was on a hippy trip. Anyway, she and her husband lived in a remote farmhouse in Wales for a time, then lived close to my parents and then emigrated to Canada. I remember walking up to see them at the Farm. There was a big white enamel sink in the garden outside and it was full of tiny tadpoles.

I wrote "tadoples" there which I think is a much better word though of course it is not the 'right' one. My wife tells me the story of how George Bernard Shaw was on some sort of committee to decide on whether the pro·nun·ci·a·tion of "margarine" should be "MarJareen" or "MarGareen". He said that the British public had been calling it "MarJ" for years. His committee sounds like the one on which Winston Smith ended his days at the end of "nineteen-eighty-four - something to do with apostrophes in Newspeak. You can be too pedantic about grammar and pronunciation and you can probably tell from this that spelling is a problem for me, especially when typing. I think keyboards show up mistakes more because of course you are processing what you are thinking of putting on paper at a much faster rate. Thank goodness for Word-Processing I say.

I have ten minutes 'til the end of lunch time which means I could be two thirds famous. This reminds me that we went to the Tate Gallery at the weekend and saw the Warhol Marilyns and Elvises (Of course the plural of "Elvis" is "Elvi" - see the flying Elvi). "Marilyn and Elvis" sounds like it would be a great book.

A list of great "Couples books"

Oscar and Lucinda
Mapp and Lucia
Marilyn and Elvis

An epic tale of how two nearly famous Americans lived in anonymity in various diners across the US. Without explicity telling us how they were "nearly famous", this book defines how we become who we are in this planet of six billion people

"A BIG book for the new Millenium with lots of knitting in it" - Knitting Monthly.

Didn't Steve Martin say something like that about "Postcards from the Edge"?

I am TWO THIRDS FAMOUS.

Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland

My wife says that the automatic novel extract which I mocked up in "What it is like to be in Milan right now" sounds like Adrian Mole's epic novel of the title given above. I am just thankful that she has not started calling me "Jake Westmoreland". Personally I can't see the likeness but then again Adrian Mole could not see how effete his own efforts were.

We saw Amelie at the weekend. "All that is right about France and all that is right about Cinema". ( I may not have this quote exactly right but the meaning is 100% correct). I thought it was a bit like Diva but it is a long time since I saw that; (I was amazed to learn that it was made in 1981). I was worried that "Amelie" was going to be a bit like "One from the heart" but it was a lot less "Cartoonish" than I thought. The idea of creating a book of discarded Passport booth photographs was brilliant. I am trying to think of a suitable alternative which I could carry out myself. I make scrapbooks from any pitcures I find suitable in various magazines. You can trace my changing life through the publications from which those pictures are taken. It starts with "The Face", progresses through "ID" and "Q" and now is mostly "Q" and "Fortean Times". (This does not mean that I agree that most of the things in "The Fortean Times" are real. I am struck continuously how little the editors actually endorse as real.) I would scan a few pages in and show them here but I am not sure about the copyright situation.

Correction - It was a really dim cinema

Rudy Rucker was actually trying to define how large a single number would be to define someone's entire life at a sample rate of 500 times per second. This is appreciably larger than the numbers I put down. This in turn would allow us to define how many different lives a human being could experience. Ho hum. More later.

Pre-Raphaelites are everywhere

I was going to write about the above but in the split second between typing the title and writing this, I have decided that I don't want to. Do you ever get an enthusiasm for something which vanishes instantly the moment you try to action it? I was reading another of Rudy Rucker's books last night and he was trying to determine what magnitude number would be required to determine all the Brain states of a Human being over their life time. His answer boiled down very logically to the following :-

Brain state is determined by all the Synapses in the brain. These are either on or off so you need a binary switch for each of them.

Synapses in the Brain - 3,000,000,000

Sample rate : 500 times a second.
Lifetime : 80 Years
: 80 * 365 Days
: 80 * 365 * 24 Hours
: 80 * 365 * 24 * 3600 Seconds (Can't be bothered with the minutes)
Therefore Samples : 80 * 365 * 24 * 3600 * 500

Total required bits to store a lifetime's Brain states
= 3,000,000,000 * 80 * 365 * 24 * 3600 * 500
= 3,784,320,000,000,000,000,000
= 37.84320 DuoDeciPlex (Rudy Rucker's term)
= 3.784320 Sextillion

Lets put that into Bytes (8 bit ones of course)

1 MegaByte = 1,000,000 Bytes * 8 bits = 8,000,000 bits
1 GigaByte = 1,000,000,000 Bytes * 8 bits = 8,000,000,000 bits
.....
1 ZettaByte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Bytes * 8 bits = 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits

We are talking just under half a Zettabyte. Do we have that available yet.

Call me if any of this maths is wrong as I have done it all of the top of my head. I read it in a dim cinema before the start of K-PAX last night so he may have been on about something different. My brain-state was kind of fuzzy.

All things fall into the big space. Read the book Mind Tools if you like but it is not on UK Amazon.

What it is like to be in Milan right now.

Foucault's Pendulum is set in Milan so last night I was reading about street protests in a city which at the moment must be in a weird state. Anyway, the book has such a sense of impending revelation, that I could not help feeling that it was going to work in the plane crash at some point. Along with the virtual reality world, what if we had a virtual reality novel which wrote itself as world events occur. There is a web facility which trawls all online news stories and writes a sort of composite article. You would only have to change the writing style slightly to get a continuous novel - like the book in the "The Neverending Story" which is still being written when you reach the last page. We could filter the Zeitgeist down to a daily chapter of what would be a truly epic book. However, after my rant yesterday about the lack of Social History, it would have to take account of the smaller details of modern life.

Chapter 13952 - Thursday 18th April 2002 CE

It was a serious mistake, to start the day in the middle of an Ocean where nobody except a few sailors and islanders could appreciate how wonderful days actually were. This day was quite special in that it was special to someone in the world. It was the day someone was born, the day someone fell in love and the day when someone died. It was of course apt that today started - like all the others - in the middle of this particular ocean as one of the people who died, had sailed this ocean more than once to prove things which he thought were inalienable truths and that others thought were idealistic rubbish. He was old and he was a hero so that he had died was sad but it did not matter because he done so much. This day was happy because he had lived and not sad because he had died. Many other people died on this day and that was sad because they were young and they had not done a lot of things other than be miserable and be hungry, but some of them were heroes as well. In about the middle of the world or where the middle of the day would be if you wanted to measure things like that, there was an accident and it was frightening because it reminded a lot of people of other people who had been killed. There were also a lot of people for whom such things were meaningless because they are hungry and because they have no medicine. The day was like all the others and still it was special. It was everyone's only chance at this day.

We never knew what that great shadow was.

Thor Heyerdahl has died. The Kon Tiki Expedition was the first adult book I ever read. My Grandmother bought it for me I think. I still have it in the main bookcase. Funnily enough it was mentioned on the first program of the BBC series "Reading the Century" ( Which has no link by the way) only two weeks ago. Its a book where, although there is a great sense of adventure and danger, you never ever feel anxious for the people in it. They always seemed to be totally in control and to know what is right though I detected a certain undercurrent in some of the relationships between the crew. Anyway, they were all heroes in the true "Boys' Own" sense. The book of drawings of the expedition by Erik Hesselberg called "Kon-tiki and I" is also very good, though you can only get it second hand - I think there are quite a few copies around.

(From The Kon-Tiki Museum site)

It was a bit of a craze when I was nine because we had a competion at school to make the best model of the Kon-Tiki. My Dad cut wood from the hills and together we made quite a good version and although I thought mine was the best, I refused to enter it because I had had help. Anyway, years after this model had been thrown away when the wood went slimy, I decided to make my own version out of Balsa. It was lashed together just like the real thing though I had to use some glue, I was very proud of it even if I never completely "fitted it out" with a sail etc. My Dad visited one day and I was very happy when he said that it was a "proper version". It got broken when we moved house but now I have access to workshop space, I may have another go at it along with all the other projects.

Thor Heyerdahl was a great Internationalist. He burnt the Tigris in protest after it was prevented from entering the Red Sea by local conflicts. A man of whom we can say that he achieved a lot of things. Be sad and happy. His is a better life to remember than recent more prominent departures for other lives.

The History of Concrete

My Dad has been trying to get a concrete bandstand near his house listed. ( see "Malvern Gazette"). My Dad knows about a lot of things - a lot more than me. You may think that this sounds a bit over the top for a very un-insping and dilapidated piece of 1930's engineering. I know my Dad and I know that I would not know what I do today without his attention to such details. Without our history we are nothing - a building without foundations - simply a mess of people floundering about trying to do what makes them happiest. I have such a sense of frustration if I do not know where something comes from. I have mentioned before about having to trace back through trains of thought to find the start to explain why I am thinking about some obscure thing. The small details of our history make us what we are. I learned a lot in Primary school about how people really lived in history but at secondary school, it all became the acts of parliament (The Great reform Act of 1832 - Yuck!) and wars etc. We do not do enough social history - read this :- "A Social History of England" and watch this when it is on : - "One Foot In The Past. Celebrate your History. Anyway, back to the concrete - A beat up old Grandstand is just as important as a ruined castle. I don't think that even in a hundred years time, we will have sight of what life is really like today. The rest of the World already think that the UK is defined by Margaret Thatcher. In Bali in 1993, that was how people greeted me - holding a thumb in the air and beaming "Maggie Thatcher - The Iron Lady" - that was if they didn't mention John Barnes. I am not making any judgement on her politics - I would just not like to see us defined by one such obviously narrow personality.

What happened in 1532?

I wish I knew. Someone here said that the year 1532 seems to ring a bell with them but while there WAS plenty going on at the time, none of it seems to be Earth Shattering for European or US History. It was the end of the Incan Empire which is pretty Earth Shattering if you are an Inca (and may be again if all those South American ideas about the end of this World cycle in the next few years). Thomas Cranmer was married in this year but again not a big thing. Anne Boleyn was 4 years away from being executed so Henry VIII was in the middle of his attempt to marry every elegible European woman. If you have any idea, then email me at RDeWeyden@Hotmail.com.

There are so many things to do in the World. Not only do I have trouble deciding what to write here but I begin to get shaky at the thought of having to decide what to do in the future. Soon, man will have the whole world boxed off in some Virtual reality simulation - a sort of limited version of Newton's Majestic Clockwork where every part of the Earth down to a certain scale will be defined in some data bank somewhere and we will be able to visit any part via the Web. The day will come when you will not be able to tell whether you are in the simulation or in the real world. This is turning into "The Matrix" so I will leave off here. I will just mention "Vurt" which might not mean much so here is a link to something useful :- "AllTheWeb".

Let us have a little elegance today. I like to think my programs are elegant. It is easy to tell if code is elegant - you feel it. It is right. The code I am amending right now is definitely NOT elegant. Have you ever seen :-

For Z = 1 to X ^ 2

? and this for an accounts program. This bit is simply reading in a configuration file. Anyway I will "Fix it up and Ship it out". Sometimes I think I work at M*A*S*H.

Our Office Magnetic Poetry kit shows this at the moment :-

NigelLike

Delirious Spring Eternity
shakes bitter winter.
Still, sweet gardens
shine like Summer dreams.
A thousand moons
wax in languid water
with frantic, flooding beauty
and beneath rain,
when iron visions cry
some blue symphony,
as the forest falls,
a death-like moment.

He wasn't really a Beekeeper was he?

Soundtrack - "Teardrop" - Massive Attack

The BBC are reported to be producing a film about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Provisionally titled "The Beekeeper's Daughter". Gwyneth Paltrow and Russell Crowe are slated as the leads though with it being a BBC film, they will be working "for love, not money". Gwyneth Paltrow - hmmm - Yes - and Russell Crowe is obviously passionate about poetry after the BBC (Ironically) dropped his poem after his best actor's speech though the poem wasn't exactly up there with the ex-laureate's output. The Plath and Hughes families have refused permission for any of the protagonists' poetry to be quoted which could be good or bad though I have a film reel playing in my head of their first meeting with no sound other than Sylvia reading out "Pursuit". Anyway Joy Division - Sylvia Plath - it's all the same thing in the end. A better casting is a matter for heated discussion on the Sylvia Plath forums though Meg Ryan is now too old to play Sylvia. A better Ted Hughes is pictured below.



"Either this 1970's style breakfast bar goes or I do."

What NOT to write

As you have probably seen from lots of Blogs, the big problem is deciding what to write. Witness the "umming" and "erring" that appears at the start of many Blogs. I suspect the problem is not that there is nothing to write about but that there is too much and the problem is deciding which part of your experience to detail. Today's soundtrack is "Passion - Sources" - the companion album to the soundtrack to "The Last Temptation of Christ" (A Terrible title by the way). If you have never heard anything by "Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan" then you have missed something wonderful. I have had my finger poised on the Shift key for at least a minute trying to decide what to write and all I can give you is this equivalent of an um or an err.

There is a rowing eight with 7 men steering and 1 man rowing. (Thank you Martin for the analogy). Why is it that only the man rowing can see that this is ludicrous? I suppose it is because the 7 men steering get paid a lot more than the man rowing and as the men steering define the structure of the crew, they also define the structure of their pay scale and choose not to see the absurdity. Apply this to Government and what do you get? I will let you work that out for yourself.

I heard the bells of the nearest Church for the first time this Sunday. There is something quite special about a full peal but writing about them leaves me with a little guilt as it seems so "tank-top and Flask of tea". You might get funny looks just hanging about outside Church Towers listening to the bells. Bell ringing is a little like a Steve Reich progression though my wife would probably not agree as a lot of Steve Reich's music irritates her intensely and I think she quite likes Church Bells. Anyway with a good set of Midi Bell sounds and a bit of VB, I think I could imitate quite a good peal (after the Neural Net and the Fractals etc of course).

The soundtrack has reached "Magdalene's House" which is rather appropriate as I the Rogier Van de Weyden picture is still on the wall in front of me. I did not realise that the picture is unusual because Mary Magdalen is usualy depicted in a red dress rather than the luxurious green one in "The Magdalen Reading". I may have mentioned that this picture is often compared to the Van Eyck picture normally called "The Arnolfini Marriage" (though there is now some doubt about this) simply because the Green dresses in both pictures are so similar.

A bit bitty today probably because I was thinking about thinking about what to write ( and I do mean "thinking about thinking about" - meta thinking if you like). Time to post.

Self-Reference number 2

I had to change a couple of things on yesterday's Blog. They were only tiny changes and you will never guesss what they were. However, it reminded me of the re-writing of history as in nineteen-eighty-four. I could carry out a wholesale replacement of all the Blogs I have written so far. I could notice fundemental mistakes (as far as you can make mistakes in what is mostly comment and opinion) and replace them with the correct version and if you had never read the original, you would never know the repalcement had happened at all. Orwell did not use computers in his vision so the problem of logs and audit trails did not arise though I suppose the "Government" would have created computers without such things.

Less than Nine Billion names of God - or maybe a few more

Sound track for today - Sequentiea:Gregorian Chant/K.Ruhland

An interesting co-incidence at the weekend - though for all you Jungians out there, that is all it is.

I am trying to wade through Foucault's Pendulum again and within a few pages of the start, the main character has to access his colleague's computer (Called 'ABU' or at least running a program of that name). He surmises that the password must be one of the anagrams of the Italian version of "YHWH" ("YAWEH") and he sets out to produce a list of all the anagrams. The book even has a program listing in BASIC which will produce all anagrams of a four letter word ("YHWH" I presume). Anyway the Italian version of "YHWH" has 700 odd anagrams. The password is NOT one of these and I will not tell you what it is just in case you are mad enough to try and read this very arch book. However, the discussion of the problem did include the possibility of all the possible names of "YHWH" and the supposition that detailing all of them would result in the end of the Universe. It actually went on to say that the logical end of this was that you would need to produce all possible Anagrams of the entire text of the "Torah". To produce this in any meaningful way using the best of current technology would take far longer than the Universe has existed or will exist. However, as technology improves, we will eventually create a program and a machine which could carry out such a task within a meaningful timescale. Our forward movement will hasten our own end.

Of course, all this is rubbish, but our own advancement does damage our environment and will hasten our end or at least bring forward the moment when we have to leave this planet/Solar system. The real point of this entry is to highlight the repetition of various theories between cultures. Of course, both the writers of "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "Foucault's Pendulum" are White, Western and, I think, Christian, at least by Birth so has the idea simply arisen spontaneously in both? It reminds me of something I spotted at the "Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and World Archaeology" at Oxford.




This houses a huge collection of artefacts from every culture - it is the archetypal museum - no buttons - no sound - just stuff and lots of it. The collection is organised by function - not the culture of origin and therefore you will see a collection of Bow Lathes one of which is Ancient Egyptian and one that is Romany 20th Century (Jacob Bronowski mentions having seen one of the latter being used in the 1940s in "The Ascent of Man" - a book which deserves an entire entry if not an entire web-site). We re-invent things independently - Newton and Leibnitz invented calculus at the same time; nature continually re-invents things through evolution. Things which are "right" deserve repeating.

I am sure that a Neural net designed to learn some property shows this repetition infinitely - is it not some iterative re-invention of the "Correct" response, a sort of integration of learning? Could we not then extend this to evolution and say that "the survival of the fittest" is not just a random chance every so often, but a continuous process of working towards some ideal state. That makes me think of the idea of "Nirvana". Maybe Evolution is destined to result in some ideal organism. Of course some would argue that we are it but can you really say that about us? I suspect the reality is that the current "Top Organism" is just that at the time it exists rather than for the whole of history. Why are humans top? Why is any one religion the "right" one? Why is any one nation "Top Nation"? Nirvana will always retreat unless you do not want to get to it. You must catch it unawares out of the corner of your eye.

I have asked many more questions than I have answered today. Come back another time for a page of answers though not necessarily to these questions or indeed any questions that have yet been asked.

Famous until after Lunch

Well I have 15 minutes to fill but I don't think it will be my "Warhol moment". I don't think I actually want one anyway. I saw "24 Hour Party People" Yesterday. Like a cross between "The Doors" and any one of the Carry ons. I was the only person in the Cinema so it probably won't be on for much longer but it should do well on video. It was too fragmentary to comment on really so I think maybe I will turn to the "Dead Can Dance" retrospective instead. As usual for a 4AD band, the packaging is beautiful - a pure white box and a simple cardboard booklet stuffed with photos (The sort of photos you would discard from the pile but put together they have a suitable cohesiveness). I have to thank one of my Flatmates from long, long ago for my interest in this band. My most "off-line" records up to hearing DCD for the first time, were "Zazu" by Rosie Vela and "World Service" by Man Jumping. Duncan got me into "The Cocteau Twins" via "Victorialand" which I thought at the time was a lost soundtrack to my teenage years and is the spark for a few poems and even the ideas for a bit of a book (though everyone says that don't they?) This led to "Throwing Muses" , and a general fixation with "4AD" . "Rakim" by DCD is sublime. Listen to it.

Zooey has done his job well

I have finished reading "Franny and Zooey". I can say that this a case of sympathy rather than empathy. One of the reviews of this book, said that the reviewer knew of no-one who had read it twice (Though they did admit that many people contacted him to say they had). You cannot help but admire the complex construction of the world of the Glass family but at no time do they make you love them. You may want to be them in the same way you want to win the lottery but it would only be to provide you with an interesting and comfortable life, not a satisfying one.

A bad admission here. I have just started reading nineteen-eighty-four again. It was April 4th yesterday (This post is a day late), the day on which Winston Smith started his Diary (as far as he knew any actual dates). nineteen-eight-four is a schizophrenic book. Just as you don't know what is supposed to be the real view of Big Brother, you don't really know who Orwell was trying to get at. Of course there are the obvious targets (who are even more obvious in "Animal Farm") but it seems that people of any political or social leanings can use nineteen-eighty-four as a satire on their own enemies. This always suprised me as the two factual Orwell books which I have read - "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" - are both written in a very straightforward style which at some times borders on the naive. Nineteen-eighty-four on the other hand, has a power in the writing which takes it beyond the descriptive. You are pointed at the essay on Newspeak very early on in the book and after reading it I began to wonder why Orwell didn't use much Newspeak after that, though with reflection the reason for that is very obvious. All the way through, I think I can see echoes of our own society in the abstract behaviour of Big Brother, but that is probably because I am a Prole and not a party member. Educate people along a specific path rather than teaching them how to learn - a sort of meta-education. In the buzz word of today, no-one is taught to "think outside the box". Thinking about thinking.

I read somewhere yesterday about an automatic advertising Jingle composer which takes melodies from the charts, chops them up just enough to avoid any copyright problems and reassembles them into Jingles which are proven by being composites of the tunes in the Top 40. Novel Writing machines anyone?

What we want to know retreats.

or The link between Cosmology, Quantum Theory and Neuroscience

I was thinking about this last night. In cosmology we try to understand to the limits of our science and then something changes and we have a whole new range of possibilities to examine. Witness the possibility of the creation of our universe from the interaction of extra dimensional entities (remember the 'Branes?). Just when we thought that the big bang was the first knowable thing, beyond which we could not speculate, along comes this new idea which opens up so many possibilities. In "Conversations with Starglider", the probe answers questions about the existence of God with the old Doctor Invinciblis routine ie if God created the Universe then who created God? ie Don't multiply entities beyond what is necessary. However it appears to me that the extra dimensional collisions which produce our universe have done just that and created a whole multitude of possible creations and Creators. Maybe this does not multiply the entities but instead just moves them along a little so we are not sure where the boundaries actually are. The boundaries of what we see are forever retreating from what we actually know.

I have this thought about neuroscience as well. We are looking for a link between the mechanics and chemistry of the operation of the brain and the existence of conscience or even 'soul'. We could look at the brain like we used to look at the Universe, as some giant piece of clockwork. If we know the position and behaviour of every particle, then we can run some sort of mega program which will predict how the whole universe and consequently all of us will behave in the future. Quantum theory blows this possibility away. The same possibility seems to have occurred to the creators of artificial intelligence; that the existence of our own intellect within a simple (well simplish) collection of organic matter, is proof that a properly designed and constructed artificial brain will eventually be able to think and learn and emote like ours. However, I suspect that at the heart of the investigations into brain structure and chemistry there is some neurological equivalent of Quantum theory which means we cannot know the link which creates real consciousness. I suppose at some point, consciousness must have developed but at what level of evolution? Anyway that is not really part of this line of thought. To take it further, at the sub-atomic level, we get the same retreating of reality from what we can either see or describe. I suppose it is possible that one day we will find the very point at which all of these fault lines actually come together. We will describe totally the creation of the Universe and any entities which are responsible for its creation and the reasons for their existence. We will see the fundemental link between brain structure and consciousness and we will be able to describe the existence and behaviour of all particles and forces. Maybe. This is almost turning into some giant "Unified Reality Theory". Maybe this is the real "Nine Billion Names of God". Do we think and observe our way out of existence or does it lead to a fundemental truth? And do we share that truth with anyone?