Friday, January 31, 2003


Word Perhect

Click on the link above to go to what I think should replace all Word Processing packages. Bearing in mind that Word Perhect (yes it is spelled correctly) is a technological representation of a shabby way of writing documents, could you not use it to write perfect documents? The whole thing is quite extensive and very funny so spend a few minutes there.

I read that a German circus director has gone on the run with one of his elephants after allegations of cruelty. The German police have admitted that this is a big test as failure to find them would not say much about their powers of detection. Maybe he thinks he is Hannibal Brooks.

There is a lovely sunrise here this morning though its peak has passed. In the West, it has left a very fethcing pink tinge on the line of clouds which follows the lie of the Mersey and the Coast of Lancashire.

Thursday, January 30, 2003


Pigs might play football

I have just read the chapter called 'Unweaving the uncanny' in Unweaving the Rainbow which detailed exactly my argument regarding coincidences. It is easy to work out the odds of each of these co-incidences and though they are very high for the number of people around, it must happen to someone. In addition, there are opportunities for co-incidences occurring right throughout the day. Every thought in my head has some potential for co-incidence. I could think of someone and they phone me up. The odds against this might be high but over the year I think about many people and only rarely do the people I think about phone me up within a time of me thinking about them which I would consider co-incidence. Richard Dawkins has a term PETWHAC - Population of Events Which Would Have Appeared Co-incidental. (He uses lowercase - pwtwhac - because he considers capitals to be unattractive on the page). He states at the beginning of the chapter, an advert imagined by Robert Winston, which offers a method of ensuring the birth of a boy for £500 and offers the money back if it fails. As 50% of all children are boys anyway, half the money would be kept for doing nothing. Brilliant! An extreme example but it does hint at the gullibility of people regarding understanding of probability.



Pi for a minute

I finally managed to convert the .wav of the first minute of the Pi music into an mp3 and here it is :-

(Warning - it is about 0.8 MB as I did it at 128 kbs)

PianoPi2.mp3

Apologies for the bad cut off at the end; I didn't get to the fader in time.

I started on an interactive version of Six Pianos last night but I need to get a better timing mechanism as it sounds a bit hesitant at the moment like someone learning to play the piano. The first program I wrote which used the Midi control was simply a random playing of notes from all along the scale with no set key, just all the notes, black and white. I had the idea then of starting with the program playing this random set of notes at random intervals and gradually fading from this to a set key and time signature as if the machine was learning how to play melodiously and rhythmically. All this is of course a build up to the self-playing version of In C.

There are some pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath at the BBC news site. Compare this with the picture on the first page of the Sylvia Plath Forum. The actor playing Ted Hughes is Daniel Craig who I have not seen in anything but he looks the part. I do hope the cinema get the aspect-ratio correct. When we went to see Mrs Brown, it was projected wrong and I was the one who had to go and tell the projectionist as no-one else seemed to bother - or notice. So many people have wide-screen TVs these days and leave them on the widescreen setting for all programmes so everyone appears to be stretched out to the side. True Widescreen is only broadcast through digital transmissions and it annoys me that so many people either don't notice the obvious distortion or just can't be bothered. I know that television in genjeral is a distortion of reality but at least the cameramen make and effort to make the image appear pleasing to the eye. Since we got the Digital and can watch true widescreen, I have noticed how many broadcasts are actually far more aesthetically 'right' when seen as they were filmed. Drowning by Numbers from what I remember used great paintings as the basis for many of the shots and another Peter Greenaway film The Draughtsman's Contract relied so much on the widescreen format that it almost seems odd that TV was originally done almost square when our view of the world is extended left and right compared with the vertical field of view. Maybe 'square' TV has compacted our view of the world. It is almost as if the wide vistas of real life are too much for us to take and we have to squeeze everything down and then at the last moment unsqueeze it so something which normally takes up only a small part of our view becomes all that we can see, a distorted parody of reality - or is that just Eastenders?

Tuesday, January 28, 2003


Poetry will save us all - probably

They do not see the end results do they? They do not see the dead and the injured. They just see the weapons and that excites them. A bullet, once it has left the gun, has done its job as far as they are concerned. The fact that it hits something is meaningless because the desire to shoot something has been satiated as soon as the recoil hits the shoulder. Live with a bullet in your brain and you know about what it does to you. It will kill you now or later. They will throw high fives while the smoke still lingers on the deck of their ship. The name of the target will still flash red on their computers.

Poetry will save us all - one day.

Monday, January 27, 2003



Soundtrack - 604 - Ladytron

Kraftwerk play 12-bar blues and get away with it.

On hearing this my wife started singing the words to 'The Model' and strangely it works for every track on this album. Radio 6 played their new track the other night and this connected with the picture from the front of the album 604 which is in my scrapbook somewhere. I didn't like the idea that I had a picture from a record I didn't own and so I remedied it by buying the album. I am not sure that the version of the theme to Are you being served? was a good idea but then again the group are probably too young to remember that and the similarity is just coincidence. I can't really get over that they come from Liverpool. The sound is more like Poland 1983. But then again, Liverpool has had a history of spawning some very unexpected music, The Teardrop Explodes, OMD etc. However 604 is decidedly spiky in a way that no real 80's band ever was. The definition of the synthesisers was never that good.

PotterAid

Please read this article from the BBC before proceeding further.

Don't you feel sorry for them. I suggest that we in the West set up an aid process in order to send copies of the Harry Potter book to American Libraries. It makes me sad that the US has fallen on such hard times that it has to stop providing for its children. I never realised how bad it had actually got. There must be no money around at all.

Seriously though, how bad would it look for the US, if there was a campaign amongst the rest of the west to collect money to send books to American libraries. This is a country with its priorities all wrong. Of course so is the UK. There is money out there even in the depths of recession. It just goes to the wrong people. I don't mean full scale re-distribution of wealth; it is just that the salaries 'earned' by certain individuals bear no relation to the amount of work those people actually do.

So let us do it. I formally start the send-a-Harry-Potter-book-to-a-US-library campaign. It is not just physical poverty that causes misery. Don't forget, £8.49 will provide one whole copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which in the correct hands will give many hours of reading pleasure for up to 50 American kids. That is of course if they don't get burned first. Still as Freud said when the Nazis burned his book - "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books." (They might have burned him if he had stuck around I suppose). I can't understand why they burned copies of Snow White along with the Harry Potter books. Are dwarves evil or something? How about Lord of the Rings? From what I remember it was supposed to be a Christian Allegory in the same vein as the Narnia.


Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Write to me if you like. I don't really care.

Friday, January 24, 2003


Plain Hunt Minimus

I have been trying to get my head around Change Ringing but it it still a problem understanding how the changes operate. I programmed a set of eight bells the other day and simply moved each bell from the bottom of the sequence to the top but for eight bells that repeated after only a hundred or so rounds (I can't be bothered to work out the exact number so don't write to me - well do write to me. it would be a change from the usual junk mail). Bearing in mind that the number of combinations of eight bells is 8! - 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 = 40320, I have not got the right method. (I could not bring myself to miss out the x1 when I just used the calculator to work that out - it just seems incomplete). Even though it was not the correct method, it still sounded quite nice using the midi piano sound. I got the playing of Pi to a nice stage as well. I put a chord on each highlighted beat which matched with the random note. In addition, I have set it to use any file as the notation and to simply mod each ascii value with 10 to get the note required rather than using Pi all the time. If I use an Excel file as the basis, there is a twiddly bit at the start before about 500 repetitions of the same note. The anticipation of the first proper variation is quite exciting. If I do use Pi, then apart from the fact that I have only got 1 million places, I have, in concept written an infinite piece of music. Bear this in mind as well, because it is infinite, at some point the whole first million notes will be repeated again. And then the first billion, trillion etc. Every portion of the piece no matter how long will be repeated an infinite number of times at other points. This is a sort of self-similarity isn't it. No matter what part of Pi you look at, it will be repeated somewhere else and not only that, it will be repeated an infinite number of times. Makes my brain ache that. If you used letters instead, you could define any sentence/paragraph/book/'decline and fall of the Roman Empire' using the number of the position in Pi. Of course you would have to have a very long number to define it, the fact being that the number you would have to use would be so high that it would be many times the number of particles in the Universe. But still, the concept is there.

This reminds me of the idea of the Alien who comes to Earth and asks for all the accumulated wisdom of mankind so he can return to his home planet. He scans all this matter in a few seconds and produces a simple metal bar which he then takes with him, the idea being that the metal bar is made so accurately that the EXACT length of it defines a number which can be translated into all the information in the books he was given. Yeah right!

Thursday, January 23, 2003


From Discreet Music

Extract from the Liner Notes


In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn't the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.

Brian Eno - September 1975


Barcodes in starlight are all we need to define the poetics of the Universe. There is so much we do not and cannot understand and which is 'fair game' for poetry. It would not be unfair of us to use any and every aspect of science as the basis for some form of literary masterpiece. From the depths of cosmology, through the the formation of the stars and planets to the final beauty of the ultimate entity of this mess of atoms we call creation - the evolution of life, there is nothing that cannot enthuse with a sense of awe and wonder. Even in the repeating structures and events of our daily lives there is the beauty and mystery of chaos underpinning our very existence. So often we seem to miss this beauty and everything about science and number which describes all that is not science. Science and Art are polarised opposites and yet as well, they are complementary disciplines, each mirroring the other but neither standing on its own. Technology and Spirit. Complexity and Simplicity. We live with both elements and yet we set one against the other as if one was correct and one incorrect. Do not decry the scientist and do not dismiss the artist.


"It is science alone that can solve the problem of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening customs and traditions, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people. Who indeed can afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid. The future belongs to science and to those who make friends with science."

Jawaharlal Nehru - 1962 - inscribed on the wall of atrium in the atrium of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi, India.


As Richard Dawkins says, it is sad that among India's most recent triumphs of science has been ther development of nuclear weapons. That does not help hunger, poverty or anything else.

One final er .. debunking is the only word I can find for it. The article Armageddon Fiction Grips the US got me very bothered. Why are the authors of such fiction - very hard emphasis on fiction - certain that they are right and anyone who does not believe them is wrong. Nothing supernatural has occurred yet. This promotes not only Christianity over other religions but seems to promote a very narrow brand of Chrsitianity. Writing all this has made me realise how silly even bothering to write about this actually is. The end of the world when and if it comes will either be man-made or because the sun goes Nova.


Liberated like My Lai?



(From http://www.queensu.ca/surp/surp817/bib8.htm)

I am sure I was followed to work today by Ernest Hemingway but bearing in mind he would be over 100 years old AND that he blew his brains out in 1961, the man in the car behind me was looking very good. Also, I am not really sure that driving a Honda Civic around Liverpool would be Ernest Hemingway's idea of adventure and I didn't notice any Game Rifles or fishing rods in the car with him. I will keep my eye out for Michael Palin though. I should be looking out for people who are more likely to turn up like Richey Manic. Looking for Richey Edwards on the web also brings up the Aphex Twin because he is Richard James and Richey Manic is Richard James Edwards. The Aphex Twin search brought back this page of photos from the Glass Pages. Be warned! They take ages to load. There is one photo in there of a woman playing the violin using music from a Philip Glass score which is taped to the walls of a room. The piece is called 'Strung Out', naturally.

I dreamed of the B52s last night, still pouring their bombs into Vietnam and Cambodia. Kissinger stole my childhood. He made me think how wonderful air power was without reference to the end result. It was all illegal. Where was the resolution number-whatever on that? My feelings are so fragmented at the moment. I am having trouble making up my mind how I feel on any one thing. The world is just too complex to understand but I do understand that many, many things done in the name of freedom are really done in the name of self-interest. The 'managers' of the world at every level are incompetent and it is only because the people want a quiet life that they accept the results of this incompetence - for good men to indeed, do nothing -- and say nothing. Pruit Igoe, Pollution, Hunger are all part of the same problem. We don't need huge buildings to house all the people of the world - We don't need genetically modified food to feed all the people of the world - We don't need oil to provide energy for all the people of the world - and we certainly don't need politicians with brains the size of walnuts to tell us what Freedom is and who is right and who is wrong. We need good people. We deserve them and we do not get them. I am with Elvis Costello AND Douglas Adams.

Talk of Douglas Adams reminds me of the current book. It is Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins and I have to say he is unstinting in his defence of science though from what I have read his moral stance is as strong as ever. He introduces ideas frequently without the thread becoming fragmented. The link with Douglas Adams? Dawkins wrote his obituary in the Guardian and gave the Eulogy at his memorial service (in Church! Without being struck by lightning).

I don't think I should have listened to Koyaanisqatsi while writing that.

Remember My Lai. It is pronounced Me Lie which is apt.

Wednesday, January 22, 2003


Unit Delta Plus

There is something very satisfying about the ambience of the Radiophonic Workshop. I have to admit that I had not heard of either Delia Derbyshire or Daphne Oram (who has just died). The only names I do remember from that band of heroes are Paddy Kingsland (Hitch-Hiker's Guide) and Elizabeth Parker (everything else). All the earlier stuff from Delia and Daphne reminds me of the jingle and electronic based music of Raymond Scott. His album - Manhattan Research is probably the most beautifully packaged CD I own. There are two CDs with labels like reel-to-reel tape spools, each slipped into a plastic sleeve inside the front and back covers of a CD-sized 144 page book.



(From http://raymondscott.com/mripr.html)

I have started and deleted many sentences at this point over the last few minutes so my mind is in that chaotic state. I wonder if epilepsy is a consequence of classical chaos within the brain? I suppose it must be really. A small change in the exterior conditions results in a build up of patterns which overflow until the structure of the brain cannot cope with the extra messages. I have never come close to feeling like my brain was going to overflow but I have felt that it could not cope with some concepts I was thinking about. I mentioned this before. My mind can quite happily take on concepts which logically are totally ludicrous. In short, my mind is fuzzy rather than well defined. It stays within acceptable parameters for all possible thoughts from 'ticking-over things' like hunger and other basic needs to nonsense poetry to cosmological ideas (even if the detail eludes me). That is an amazing thing to be able to do when you think that even the most sophisticated computer cannot 'get' a joke or appreciate music other than on a purely mechanical level. Is our fuzziness just a by-product of our complexity? I seem to remember some people suggesting that Autistic behaviour was an evolutionary step towards removing emotion from our species. This fills me with horror but maybe that is because I am fuzzy anyway and any possible Homo-Sapiens-Sapiens-Sparta (for want of a species name) would not have the capability to be horrified by it. This reminds me of the bit in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide where Arthur finds out what the mice want to do with his brain in order to read 'The Question'.


"In other words,'' said Benji, steering his curious little vehicle right over to Arthur, "there's a good chance that the structure of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain --- so we want to buy it off you.''
"What, the question?'' said Arthur.
"Yes,'' said Ford and Trillian.
"For lots of money,'' said Zaphod.
"No, no,'' said Frankie, "it's the brain we want to buy.''
"What!''
"I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically,'' protested Ford.
"Oh yes,'' said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's got to be prepared.''
"Treated,'' said Benji.
"Diced.''
"Thank you,'' shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair and backing away from the table in horror.
"It could always be replaced,'' said Benji reasonably, "if you think it's important.''
"Yes, an electronic brain,'' said Frankie, "a simple one would suffice.''
"A simple one!'' wailed Arthur.
"Yeah,'' said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, "you'd just have to program it to say What? and I don't understand and Where's the tea? --- who'd know the difference?''
"What?'' cried Arthur, backing away still further.
"See what I mean?'' said Zaphod and howled with pain because of something that Trillian did at that moment.
"I'd notice the difference,'' said Arthur.
"No you wouldn't,'' said Frankie mouse, "you'd be programmed not to.''


See! I would be programmed not to. This is a sort of sub-clause of the Anthropomorphic Principle isn't it. We only see the Universe the way it actually is because if if was any other way we would not exist to be able to see it. What is 2+2 did not equal 4? Would the universe be the way it is? Can there be a Universe where 2+2 does not equal 4? The upshot of basic number theory is that numbers are independent of the Universe. Even if there was no time or space, 2+2 would still equal 4. Or maybe not. Oh! I am dragging random and un-related sentences out of "God and the New Physics" This is the point where my fuzzy brain becomes close to overflow but my error checking routines kick in and I bail out.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003


Spitting Out Oar-Blades

I just lost a huge and very uninteresting post about the weather when Blogger failed. I took the free time to read about Delia Derbyshire. She realised the Doctor Who Theme though it was actually written by Ron Grainer who apparently was 'tickled pink' on hearing Delia's recording. Anyway, read the page to find out more. As this is a post to complete what I tried to do yesterday, I have to go and do some work. More later.

Monday, January 20, 2003



Consumer Madness

From this article :-



"Every age group is excited about this product," said a Panasonic spokesman.

"A businessman might capture something wacky happening on the street and send it to his friends saying 'hey guys, looked what happened today'."



A very sad businessman; A very small businessman. Why does it have to be a businessman? This sounds like the company haven't got any real idea of what their product could be used for and have to manufacture a situation. A real businessman could find many uses for this product other than just photographing "something wacky". There are too many products and many of them have no real use other than to accessorise an increasingly gadget led public. A case of sod the use, let's make a nice shiny piece of plastic and decide what to do with it later. We need Santa Claus machines. The ideas in the article linked to back there are the big ones which we need to work on, not the rubbishy little ideas of technology. At the size of a Palm-top or medium sized digital camera, there is almost nothing we can't do and yet we still pour out pollution into the atmosphere, let great numbers of people starve or go without medicines which they deserve and generally behave as if we were living in the Stone-Age (actually worse than that because up until recently agriculture and the making of atrifacts, existed in harmony with the world (Hello Clouds! Hello Sky!) All thinking today seems to be for the current minute rather than the future. The men (and they are still usually men) in charge are not the visonaries required for a decent, sustainable future. If they say they are, they back down at the first groan from the money men and cover there duplicity with bluster and obfuscation (a self-referential word don't you think?). I think you may guess to whom I am refrerring. God over Djinn.

I improved on the playing of the digits of pi over the weekend. I got the alternate notes to occur panned left and right in the speakers and then accomapnied the first beat of each 10 with a chord where the main note was the root. I was going to make the notes pan completely so that the lowest was on the left and the highest on the right but I decided that this would be like listening to the piano from inside. My wife immediately thought of Bill Bailey's character, Manny in Black Books, plays the piano from inside in order to pretend that Bernard is playing so that he can impress a girl. Manny lay under the piano and played the strings with spoons. Totally ludicrous. Read the book reports by children on the Black Books Website. Oh and the false book covers are pretty good too.

Friday, January 17, 2003


Audit - Audit - Audit

Back again? So Soon? Oh! You meant me? Yes!

The west! I am resisting the impulse I get to captalise such words along with words like 'presidential'. I should take the final step and be like a lot of bloggers and not captalise anything including 'I' but my muscle memory gets the better of me. What about the west? I read the word in this article and it just struck me that we would capitalise it just because that is what we do. The West is something different to the west which is just in that direction. Australia is probably part of 'The West' and yet it is in the east rather than to the east because it is to the west of the United States. It is to the east of us as well of course which means that directions are meaningless everywhere except in a very limited local sense. Why all this rambling? It seems that we may have stumbled onto a Random Friday but that would be wrong.

Do you ever get the feeling that you are not party to something very big? Like everyone else knows something and that you are the only one that has not been told about it. I suppose that this is the beginning of paranoia. I expect a lot of people get it but that most of them simply ignore it as a silly whim. Sudden change of direction here. Oliver Sacks talks about the first time he tried cannabis; he describes holding his hand in front of his eyes and feeling that it was moving away from him and yet retaining its apparent size in his field of view so that eventually it became a cosmic sized hand dominating all around it. I am not advocating any intake of suspect substances to enhance the effect but try it. It seems quite easy to imagine that this has happened even if you know it is not true. Sacks' discussion was prompted by his description of a man in his fifties who had recently had cataracts removed allowing him to see things other than light and dark for the first time since he was a young child. One of the points was that people brought up all of their lives in forests where the distant horizon was never visible were unable to determine the distance of hills when brought out to a plains location. They would try and touch the distant objects. My visual world seems totally familiar to me and yet how can I imagine what anyone else experiences. I know that most people see pretty much what I do iin terms of clarity and cognitive ability and yet what would I make of something I will never experience in reality? What would I make of the Sun from only a few thousand miles away (me being suitably protected from bodily and visual damage)? My brain would have trouble interpreting such an image. What about the last moments as I was pulled apart entering a black hole? My vision and my brain's interpretation of it fits with may experience and pretty much everything I can experience. The extremes of the world are shaded from me. Is this why people blot out horrible experiences from their memory. Maybe they don't possess the cognizance within the brain to decode images of these events and therefore for them the events never happened visually. As by far the largest part of our sensory processing power goes on vision, then maybe the bad events don't register at all after their occurrence.

Friday Hero but they are all flawed.


Martin and I had to visit our other site yesterday, which is about 120 miles away and involves a boring journey along the M6 which for any visitors from overseas is what we like to think of as a linear car-park. My feeling is that the Government should outsource the motorways to NCP. Well, we did actually manage to get where we were going. Our colleague Peter was with us (asleep on the back seat on the way down) and commented that we were lost without the internet to answer our random musings on film and music. We spent a good five minutes dragging our memories for the name of the film where Clint Eastwood played a secret service agent on presidential protection duties. Eventually 'In The Line Of Fire' popped in to my head and we were happy. Internet enabled Palms are required urgently. Please give generously to save future annoyance.

I watched The Autism Puzzle on BBC four yesterday and it struck me that the diagnosis of 'within the autism spectrum' seems to be device for allowing any symptoms which cannot be described within terms of other conditions, to be put into one convenient bucket. Maybe I missed the point and they all have the same basic cause. Excuse the simplistic analysis but it is like all broken legs from green-stick fractures to multiple compund fractures are still broken legs. It also occurred to me from reading the Oliver Sacks book, that if some people can re-assign parts of their brain to handle functions which they have lost, is it not possible for an autistic person to become 'less autistic' by the same method. The symptoms of Asperger's syndrome which is usually defined as for want of a better phrase, being at the milder end of the autism spectrum, has symptoms whiich I recognise in myself from my early twenties. Of course for me this was probably just a normal social awkwardness but where does insensitivity to others feelings turn into real autism? So many people behave as if they have no concept that other people may be thinking in ways which they do not. I learnt to be more comfortable with people. On my first day at work proper (16 years ago) it became clear that the telephone was a major part of the day-to-day operation of the department and I was petrified of it. On the day on which I had to start answering the phone I was actually quite scared but over the years I have learned to put it out of my head and now I can happily do my half-day duty on our help-desk. I still do not like phoning people I do not know.

It is quite noticeable that my own mind has changed so much over twenty years. I sometimes worry than my own thoughts and concentrations are too trvial but I look around at the fixation with celebrity and Football and I think otherwise. Or is this fixation just a manufactured idea, set up my the TV companies and the Newspapers to define how they think we should think? Apologies for harking back to my old colleague's idea about the current education system being the Government's way of keeping people from thinking but I think that idea may be relevant here. It is also like the idea of the Belcerebon People. Vis :-


The Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished and, above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy.

As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to everyone within a five-mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become.


In other words, feed us junk to fill up our minds and we won't think about how ludicrous our existence is due to the obvious faults in the way the world is run. Thinking about real things is dangerous and only makes us worry about them. I don't believe for one minute that there really is a conspiracy; my line is that the reason for all these plainly stupid actions throughout the world is plain incompetence and I think human nature likes to make one try to behave in a 'cool' manner whenever possible. Be good and clever and be cool, be incompetent and be very uncool. All politicians are uncool (except Mo-Mowlam and she is not in power). Oh dear! This sounds like the anti-truant campaigns that are going on at the moment - It's cool to be in school. It is though. Just go or go back.

Soundtrack for today.

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure - Virginia Astley

Wednesday, January 15, 2003


More Spaces in my Head

I like to know where all the cavities are in my house though of course this is totally impossible. There are always spaces which you can never get to. I have a couple of Odhams Press books from the 1940s which details various aspects of the technology of the day and one of the chapters was on house building. It included an exploded diagram of a typical brick built house and it was interesting to see all the doublings of the various cavities. My idea for a house would have no cavities. The inside walls would be the inner surfaces of the outside walls, the floor would rest directly on the base of the foundations and the roof would simply be laid on the walls. If you look at this irrationally, it seems to be a conspiracy against simplicity. All basic human needs can be served very simply and yet still leave us feeling that we have a good standard of living. Opponents of this idea would say that increasing technology makes live easier for us. If that is the case why is it that in general, societies with high levels of technology are the ones with most discontent at their existence? The exponetial rise in the use of technology is not directly proportional to the benefits and indeed, it seems that in some ways, the affects of technology are negative - in inverse proportion to the rise in technology. Technology seems to be introduced not for the benefit of humankind but for the whims of individual humans. Powergen is very laudably streesing the need for the intoduction of green sources of energy while gradually phasing out the use of fossil fuels. However, the thrust of their argument seems to be that fossil fuels will one day run out while wind, wave and sun power will never run out. I like to think that with the will, the world could phase out all fossil fuel burning power stations within ten years and within twenty could rid the world of oil burning vehicles. The will is not present. Most Green projects seem to be on a scale that could only ever be for publicity purposes. Having said this, there does seem to be an increase in the visibility and scale of these projects but the momentum needs to be a lot higher if it is to be of use. The question regarding fossil fuels running out, to me is one of whether the exhaustion will occur before or after we have ruined the planet. The following figures are not from anything I have read but are simply gut feelings. I would say that the total energy created and dispersed in just 10% of the sea surface of this planet, that is sunlight, wind and wave, would be more than enough to supply the energy needs of the entire world. The world uses too much energy anway, so maybe we are talking less than 5% of the sea surface. It can be done and with the profits from the world for one year. The will is not there because the returns are not clear. Everything is reduced to financial terms these days. Remember the car company who supposedly did not fix a dangerous fault on a particular model of car because the financial cost of handling the litigation from bereaved families and other legal suits, was determined to be less than the cost of fixing the fault? Go here for details. I know that this sort of thing happens at all levels of business and indeed Government. They say it is just for internal accounting purposes but it seems illogical to me. It is as of the business people are saying that normal feelings of grief and loss do not apply at this rarified business level a bit like the classical laws of physics break down at sub-atomic levels. Madness. I call it Madness.

A moment for reflection. See these wonderful panoramic views of the Malvern Hills. Sadly, they are not live which would have been nice but I emailed my brother this morning so he could tell me what the view of the hills from his office window was like (It was either raining or about to). Time to go. Bye

Monday, January 13, 2003


New York, Ice-Cream, TV, Travel, Good Times

So what Mr Grimsdale?

Have you ever heard of Jamais Vu? I thought Oliver Sacks had just made it up to contrast with Deja Vu but thinking about it, the feeling of never having experienced something which rationally you know you have actually experienced many times must be as common as Deja Vu. Anyway Deja Vu is almost always not real. I think this is getting dangerously close to what I was arguing with my Brother about, so I will leave off.

I want to lie shipwrecked and comatosed. Maybe I don't really. Having talked about Deja-Vu and Jamais above, I suddenly feel very strange though obviously that maybe lack of sleep. I have to keep looking out of the window to prove to myself that I am in the same location I last remember. Ok so thats a bit over the top but I do have that odd papery feeling you get when you are tired. I am in Zelig mode. Having just read about a Surgeon with Turette's syndrome am now convnced that I have it, not because of any tics or uncontollable obscenity but because of the internal feelings of not being in control. All rubbish of course. Apparently there is a rise in the number of people visiting doctors with specific conditions when those conditions are described in TV soaps. If it is the case that TV soaps affect things like that why isn't everyone dumber than a bunch of rocks? Oh! Maybe they are or is that just the writers?

There is a simulacra on the way to work. Just at one corner on the right hand side of the road there is a plastic bag stuck in a tree in such a place that it combines with marks on the wall below it to form the image of a slightly hunched old lady. I get spooked by it every time I see it even when I remember it before I pass it. Sometimes I just drive by without seeing it. It is amazing how the human mind attempts to turn everything it sees into first a face and then if that is not possible, a human figure. I have just drawn a very simple doodle of a face and then tried to draw more lines over it until it no longer suggests a face. You need a lot of extra lines to turn a face into a non-face.


Rebuff and Rebuke

My brother responded to being mentioned in the last entry regarding his advocation of synchronicity. His email reply is :-


Why are you sorry for something that you cannot prove or disprove.Is not
a more mystical experience of life more fascinating than a
cold,hard,black and white experience to one's walk from birth to death.
Some questions have no answers and are best left that way unless you
KNOW (feel) the answer without the use of mans languages.Does a word
exist for everything. "it kind of feels like ******* but I can't quite
put it into words" To KNOW something goes beyond the understanding of
Man,or woman for that matter. To feel IT and be IT you must kill
yourself and give birth to another who is also YOU.

Let this be the lesson of the day.
When you stop trying to prove or disprove something and except it
without a mere thought towards it the it may lend itself to your
experiences.If this were to happen enjoy it for what it may be but do
not pull it about like some new creature that needs to be cut
up,photographed,written about to say what it is,where it comes from or
why it exists.


When he called me I did ask him what he was reading at the moment but it was something to do with investment. For the sake of completeness, my reply is as follows :-


You seem to be joining [my wife] in an Anti-Analysis bloc which I have to tell you both is not necessary. My Blogging is simply a train of thought and I suppose I should put some form of disclaimer that I myself don't actually agree with everything I write. Yes! I do like breaking things apart; taking the back off things as it were, but only to understand them where possible. I am quite happy to admit that there are things which we will never and indeed can never understand. As I said, I suspect that all fields of science will attempt to define everything and yet the real world will 'retreat' from our attempts at understanding. Believing this notwithstanding, it is still interestng and productive to try and understand them even if only be means of a random analysis in one's head. You and I both work in fields where a strictly materialistic analysis of
things is required in order to provide the best result. I am quite happy to join with you both in an appreciation of the beauty of the Universe and yes maybe I do try too often to provide myself with an explanation of things in purely scientific terms. This does not mean I am lacking in an awareness of the 'spritual' dimensions of this beauty. The current crumbling of the idea that there was nothing; no space OR time before the big bang has almost proved my point.



Anyway on to something related but probably against my argument. I watched Mind games on BBC 4 on Friday. This was the first episode. It was very much a radio show on the TV. The visual aspect was absolutely necessary though in order to show most of the various puzzles many of which I had seen before and therefore knew the answers not by virtue of my intelligence but because I remembered the answers. I can't actually believe that the panellists had not seen most of the 'tricks' before; maybe they had been told to behave as if they hadn't in order to make it more interesting. Anyway, to my point. One of the items involved taking successive pairs of digits from pi (3.141592654...) and using each pair to create a value from 00 to 99. Where the value of a pair was 1-26, the corresponding letter from the alphabet was substituted. The question was the name of Which British playwright would appear as consecutive letters in this string? The answer was of course any one as Pi is infinite, then any string you care to mention from the word 'an' to any book ever written, any book that will be written and indeed any book which could possibly be written will appear somewhere in pi. This of course was mildly interesting but what intrigued me was what if you used the values of Pi to create not letters but musical notes. So I dutifully went of and downloaded a million digits of pi from here and simply fed the value of each digit into a midi control at regular intervals. I defined each value as being from a genuine scale to avoid using all 12 notes and so I had one octave plus three notes from the next octave. The raw result sound reasonably Ok but I added some emphasis on the every first and third note to give the bars a length and then left it running. I am not sure it would ever be called expressive but at least it was unrepeating even if it did have a long term similarity at all points. I left it running for a while without actually listening to it and when I came back to it it seemed to have changed its mood slightly but that may be simply because my own mood had altered. Of course there are plenty of arbitrary decisions which I made about which scale to use and which octave. I could go further and define a far more complex interpretation of the values, for instance using the first value to define the length of a note or making a chord accompaniment but all this would detract from the purity of the interpretation. I suppose a true sound would use simple ratios and frequencies rather than arbitrary note decisions but are not the notes of the Western 12 note scale defined by maths anyway?

All of this has led me to a greater understanding of how the midi control for the PC works which means I am a step closer to being able to program the self-playing version of In C. I will define a set of instruments and faders with a simjple melody to prove that the mix will work and then define a way of getting each of the channels to pick up the next bit of the score. In addition to this I can program Bell Ringing etc. Now there would be a group to annoy by computerising something.

I didn't sleep a lot last night. I tried to read at about 1am with a view to making myself drop off but unfortunately the book I chose was so interesting the usual heavy eyes did not result. The book is An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks and is in the mode of an earlier book of his - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which strangely was turned into an opera by Michael Nyman. The first case was of an artist Jonathan I. who through an accident or stroke lost his colour vision totally and found the world after this a strange and dirty place. He was able eventually to use this devastating loss to create his own powerful new art. I never realised that Goethe wrote lots about the theory of colour. Anyway, lack of sleep means that I am losing my concentration and I should direct it all at work rather than this indulgence.

Friday, January 10, 2003


High Tech Looms

How about throwing it all in and going off and being the warden on an island somewhere? Bardsey would be nice and not too far away though not always as sunny as in this picture. My problem at the moment is too much worry. Having said that, over the last few days some form has calm has returned, almost like the heady days just after I started work here all those years ago. I never really worried about anything other than little local difficulties. The recent philosophical attitude of mine may be due to an increase in the amount of work I have to do but it could just be acceptance that I can't do anything about the things which I worry over and hence there is no point in worrying about them. Zen Hey!

I heard that live recordings of public Classical Music are now virtually impossible because of the almost continuous sound of mobile phones ringing in the auditoria. Is that sad. Nothing was said about the fact that the performance is actually spoiled for the majority of the audience who have switched off their phones. Someone will invent a machine to filter out these sounds. Actually, the processing power is probably already available. In fact I did read about a fantastic new device which can listen in on a hubbub (lovely word) of conversation and pick up each individual speaker and transcribe the speech. Sounds a little fantastic to me. There is a problem these days in that technology does so many fantastic things these days that is is almost impossible to determine the border between what is and is not possible with the technology. This border is not a smooth transition. Some fields advance far ahead of others and not usually because of any technical issue, but because the people working on the various fields are pushed by more down-to-earth reasons, usually of economy or military need. The average person, told that a spy Satellite can be contacted via the web and instructed to point a camera at them to check what they were reading and that it could do it even though they were in a house with the curtains drawn, would probably believe it. This is not to say it can't be done. If I stick my neck out here and say that it is currently impossible to do this, then I am opening myself up to being proved wrong possibly because it can already be done. I don't think it can but I am ready to be proved wrong. Within ten years I think it will be possible to do this and to have a computer which will simulate the entire world to a level where you can walk through a photo-realistic version of it and interact with 'intelligences' within it. I am sure that small portions of the world are already modelled like this. Yes! I know about 'The Matrix'. This has reminded me of a story in Fortean Times which said that some people believed that we were all intelligences in giant game. Some philosophers believe similar things regarding us being pure thoughts in the mind of God. It could be that only one of us exists as an entity with full intelligence in the mind of God. All other entities are purely sensory input to that one entity. In that case, which one of us is it? It is me of course unless God has put these words into your sensory perception and the one true entity is you. What happens if this idea is propagated through the mind of God in the manner of a meme? If the idea becomes popular with many people, then it can be propagated to the one true entity through its myriad sensory interactions. God does not have to think of a lot of things if there is only one True entity. Only the things which affect that one true entity need to be thought about in the mind of God. If the OTE is me, then I cannot be in all places in the world at once. I can go to weird places on a whim and having previously read about them and seen pictures of them, God only has to 'flesh out' these places to make them real and to fit with my ideas of what they should be like. Actually, He doesn't even have to get it 100% correct. How many times has a place not met with your expectations of it when you get there. It only has to fit a basic description, and even some plainly wrong things can be explained away as Deja Vu or other such weird mind tricks. The world is consistent as far as I can see. I never see things which make me think that someone is controlling me. There are the occasional odd things where something you have just thought about for the first time appears in print soon afterwards, but with the world so complex, and with so many interactions, this sort of co-incidence is bound to happen (Sorry Bro. There is no such thing as synchronicity). Does it not amaze you what you can actually think about? The Universe is complex and yet the mind, your mind, my mind, is created in a physical object which constitutes only a tiny part of the whole universe. We can create worlds as different from the real one as possible but they will be just as complex if not more complex because we can imagine whole things in simple concepts. I know what the Universe looks like, out as far as the furthest stars that exist 'now' (now as near as we can define it) and as far back as the earliest possible things which happened and before that. Even if there was nothing before the Big Bang ( and that is now not clear because of 'brane theory), I can still pretend in my head that there was. Can it not be true that we can be our own gods and have our own universes. Just because I sit here and can quite clearly feel certain that my mind is situated in my brain behind my eyes, does not mean that I am a physical person. I can write a computer program which simulates a tiny part of intelligence and for that program I can tell it that it is a person within the confines of what it knows about its world. Could we not just be the same only to a much higher degree? We get into recursion then. I could write a program which I make believe has written a program which it makes believe has written a program and so on.

I suspect that this comes across as self-indulgent sophistry though if you look I have not said that anything above is true. The problem is that physics suggest that at small scales, the Universe behaves in mysterious ways as staggeringly complex as anything I have said above. Could it not be true that we believe that our existence to be normal and un-mysterious as we do because it is familiar? The Universe is complex and set in the realms of equations but it is still fantasic and beautiful. I think this leads on to Unweaving the Rainbow doesn't it?

Think complexity and you will find complexity. Think Simplicity and you will find yourself.

Thursday, January 09, 2003


Casua Belli

It is not often I agree with Andrew Motion (especially after charging for his Millennium Poem) but the poem (linked to above) is a neat summing up of what a lot of people feel. "Quote but never learn". Indeed.

I still think Simon Armitage would have been a better Poet Laureate. I used to listen to him when he was on Mark Radcliffe's show in the evening (Between Out on Blue Six and the breakfast show.). That evening show was wonderful. They had film, art and poetry along with drop-dead-for sessions. They often had the poet who is currently doing the digital radio adverts who is a sort of Yorkshire (I hope I am right - where is my Red Rose by the way?) version of Roger McGough but I cannot remember his name which is sad. I am even contemplating ringing up the DAB authority to ask.

I have found him. He is Ian McMillan who amongst other things is Humberside Police's Beat Poet. You wouldn't think that Humberside police actually need a beat poet would you. His website has opened up a plethora - yes plethora is the only word to describe it - of websites for poets so a bit of perusal is called for. I may even go along to radio crosby's poetry evening in the next few weeks. I am currently listening to the poem by Chloe Poems from the Radio Crosby website. I think they encourage people to stand up and read their own poems so I will sit quietly in a corner.


Holly Dolly Clone

Just for all the Londoners who have never seen it, The Guardian presents A user's guide to snow.

I have my headphones on here, and I have just heard a low rumble over the top of the music (Stereolab - Mars Audiac Quintet) which made me slightly anxious. We keep hearing the planes flying low over the building. Having the large window and being high up, we are more aware of the air traffic now. We spent a few minutes yesterday using trig to work out how far away the most distant vapour trail was. If the plane was at 25,000 feet then we estimate about 100 miles but then again we didn't take account of the curvature of the Earth. Martin of course knew that we needn't TAN because we knew the opposite side (25,000 feet) and wanted to know the adjacent side. TAN is opposite over adjacent, just to complete the lesson. This is of course all just ballpark. I think we had better close the blinds today so that we don't waste time staring out of the window and being fascinated by the smoke from the chimmneys. Yes! We are that boring.

I am like Zellaby except that I don't want to think of a brick wall and that is all I can think of. Where are the cuckoos when you need them? I have to crumble that wall myself. It is the only way. Why does John Wyndham always have someone who's name begins with the letter 'z' in his novels. Well, I haven't read all of them but in The Midwich Cuckoos and Trouble with Lichen there are such characters. I can't really be bothered looking up the characters from the other books just to check. There is no such character listed in the cast for either of the two film versions of Day of the Triffids so mayeb it is just a coincidence. The BBC TV Version of Day of the Triffids was far superior to the film. The sound of the clackers which preceeded the use of the Triffids' whip-like sting was chilling and often imitated at school by banging knuckles together. It still hurts if you do it. I started using it as an insult and what do you know a single knuckle clask became a gesture of abuse on 'Friends'. The 1962 film is awful unless you are 10. For the definitive John Wyndham film see Village of the Damned from 1960 (Avoid the John Carpenter remake) It is the best example of a film where nothing happens and still you are rivited. In my mind, films like this work better in British Villagers rather than US outposts, simply because so many films have used American towns that you expect something to happen. I seem to remember some Kids' show set in Avebury. Time to post.

Wednesday, January 08, 2003



Whiteout Heroes

There was a very well constructed programme on TV last night called Collision Course, which yesterday detailed the events of the Southall Rail crash. It started off concentrating on the lives of some of the people killed and injured in the crash and could so easily have been like one of the 'Airport' films where the personal lives of the various passengers are mixed up with a major air event. This steered a straight course which allowed the details of the few seconds of the crash to be told in an informative and compelling way without ever seeming to be voyeuristic. I try to avoid watching things like this but at the moment it actually seems that a train crash is a more familiar tragedy; there seem to be so many strange and dangerous things going on at the moment, that such an event seems almost normal. The real tragedy is that at the moment rail crashes are almost normal. The stats suggest that we can expect a rail crash of such proportions every two years. Still, rail (and indeed air) travel is far far safer (10-20 times safer) than travelling by car. The problem for most people is as stated by one of the injured passengers, that people fell more afraid, the more divorced they are from the control of their mode of transport. Many of us drive cars and we feel happy doing so because we feel completely at ease with the control of the vehicle. We are happy even if we are not driving, because we can drive. The further we get from being able to drive/pilot a vehicle, the more worried we are about it crashing. The bottom line is that, in general, we don't trust people other than ourselves. Anyway, all credit to the production team but more especially to the people prepared to talk about something which must be a real gash in their memories. I do hope that this man was watching and that he keeps his mits off things which he knows nothing about.

Wonderful suggestions have been made, that we may actually be seeing some snow over the next few days. It is always nice to wake up to but in the city it so quickly turns to slushy mess rather than just melting away over days like it does in more rural areas. I loved the snow when I lived on the common but I told you that yesterday. When it snowed there, you were actually in some danger. I walked all the way from our house to the top of the Herefordshire Beacon (See this map - the route is all the way from the house just above the 'n' in Castlemorton Common on the right to the peak of the Herefordshire Beacon on the left.) and when I got home (in -18C) I found the house empty and I was locked out. I think I was in danger of frostbite then. My nose was certainly on the point of crystallising. The Beacon is an old hill fort which has many concentric ramparts surrounding the two main peaks and these were filled with snow to a depth sufficient to cover me had I fallen in. I think I was probably a little reckless. I am still here though. Or in another quantum universe, I was sucked under the drifts. I have this theory that no-one ever really suffers. We all have our personal result of Sum Over History and all the bad stuff happens to other people, the further away you look from yourself, the more terrible the tragedies become. However, for the actual people who expereience those bad things, life is OK and it is us who seem to have the terrible lives. Probably not true but there is an element of reality, in that people generally like familiar things and so life changes, including those for the better, upset one's feeling of 'comfortableness'. Maybe that is just me and thinking about it it is quite pompous because there are many people in the world whose lives are really bad, no food or clean water or abuse so that their lives are just one long terrible experience. Maybe it only applies in our western culture. And the annoying thing is that more western people take their own lives. It seems that people for whom life is a chore, value it more than those of us who have no real problems. The human brain is a sea of irrationality. The more comfortable you are, the more you worry about things not being comfortable. Mental anguish. Who needs it? Follow the seven-fold way.

Tuesday, January 07, 2003


Writing as if humans mattered.

Everything is back to normal after what seemed like a very long break. Even my daughter is back at school. As usual I have made all the unvoiced, internal resolutions to start everything with a clearer mind and also as usual my mind staggers to a halt like a trolley rolling over syrup. Only poems ever seem to exit my mind with any velocity of note. Maybe I should write everything as a poem where I can flit from idea to idea without having to worry about the consistency of it all.

It is cold all over the country today and the forecasters are suggesting significant snowfalls for next week. My daughter will be happy as the only time she ever saw snow was on a visit to Malvern two years ago and although that was quite deep and nice to look at, it was powdery and wouldn't stick together at all so no snowmen or snowballs. We only seem to get snow here every eight or so years. The last snow we had here was about 1994 and I took loads of pictures to send to people who were writing to me from Bali as they never see snow. I explained this to the kids in the street and they said that they had never seen snow either. Maybe I should have said nothing the other week when I said that we didn't get really cold winters anymore. When I was at college, there were many days when the temperature stayed below freezing. I have probably mentioned this already but I used to walk to the phone box to call home listening to tapes of Gregorian chant which made the whole thing quite unreal. Further back, when I was still at school and we got days off because the weather was so bad, we would skate across the Icy ponds on our bikes. We felt reasonably safe as the ponds were really just foot deep depressions in the common land where we lived and the ice was nearly frozen through. We did scramble out on one permament pond with a view to testing the depth with a plumb line which was probably quite dangerous but you don't think of that at that age. My brother fell off his bike and got a lump the size of an egg on his head. Where do lumps that big come from? Must be something Lymphatic I suppose. There's a great title for something - The Morphology of Lumps.

I want a machine to speed up time or to enable me to jump to a specific point forwards. No need for any worry about time travel paradoxes as I would still exist in the gap between the start and end. I used to dream of having such a machine to allow me to skip to a time after some bad thing coming up like and exam or a driving test. I was far more bothered about the actual event than the results of that event. Now I just want to speed up the time until I get to go home. I don't feel inspired by anything here other than lunchtime. Still, my life is within my control to a certain extent so I suppose I just have to get on with things. I think my brain runs far ahead of what I can actually type as do most people's when they are blogging like this, without definite ends or structure. I have the ideas arrayed in my brain and they fall out onto the keyboard at a rate which I can't keep up with. The random fridays are only an extension of this idea. They are like word association without the direction given by the trigger words. In fact, my mind has just gone into this terrible loop where I can't think of anything other than the loop to write about. Hopefully, this very act of describing such a loop will allow me to look at it and find a way out which is logical rather than doing what I normally have to and ending the paragraph until I can find something else to carry on with. It hasn't worked. All I can think about is a loop in my head ... but what is that? ... The lane down the hill over the common from the house where we used to live. This was back way to Upton-upon-Severn which I could cycle along (ten miles) without seeing a car or even a person. It went through fields and alongside streams, passed farms (one very smelly poultry farm I remember) and big old manors but I rarely saw a person; I would have regarded them with suspiscion if I had and they would have felt the same about me; I was a scruffy oik then. I used to cycle that road at least once a week for years, whatever the weather. I had no purpose other than to visit what I considered a metropolis. There were no cities in the world as far as I knew. Malvern was the biggest place there could possibly be. Worcester, London and New York were all imaginary places that were made up to fool us into thinking that big was beautiful. Big is still not beautiful. I'm with Schumacher.

Friday, January 03, 2003


Para-Para-Celsus

Illness made it impossible for us to visit my parents in Malvern over the holiday which made me quite disappointed; no matter what happens in your life, going home always seems to put things into true perspective. My wife and daughter were also quite upset not to be going and indeed I think my daughter especially has suffered through not going. A trip to Malvern is always an uplift; even if you don't actually go anywhere, life there is laid back when compared with this speedy metropolis even now that we have moved out right to the edge of the city.

Today is a random Friday. It does not feel that random simply because it is my first day back at work and the time is dragging so much. Did you know that the word 'Drag' when applied to female impersonators comes from the fact that in the early theatre, womone were played by boys and the clothes they wore were often too big for them and dragged on the floor? I need to read A Midsummer Night's Dream again. I think I can still tell you the plot even if I cannot remember any of the text. I can still remember Hal's soliloquy from Henry four part one - 'I know you all and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness ...' And then his other leg fell from the ceiling and Spike said 'Here comes Part two'. Sounds like the punchline to a great joke and so it was. Only two months and this will be a year old and written on more days than not. That is more writing than I have ever done in one place before even on my thesis on Linked Cash machine networks and the Blue Cloud. None of them wanted to send me any information but I worked for one of them and got lots and lots despite the security. They will never admit it. Relativity is a cinch. Pythagoras never relaised that he would ebd up working out that did he. Harmonics and Triangles are the fundemental stuff of mathematics and yet they still crop up in almost everything. See if complex numbers last as long, or genetics or Germanium Diodes, Triodes and Nematodes. Nematodes and not actually worm-like creatures; they are small electronic components with the power to move themselves from one place to another within the circuit. Like writing code which writes code hey? I could stay asleep all day and my computer could write the code for me. This is the end.


The Network is Down

Long break there. Not as good as I had hoped it would be for many various reasons but being away from here is enough and I have had itchy typing fingers for days now. I could not sleep the night before last because of all the ideas I wanted to write down though these ideas were not for Blogging.

Reading log of Christmas presents :-

1. Dead Famous - Albert Einstein and His Inflatable Universe by Dr Mike Goldsmith.

I have a copy of Relativity for the Layman which I have read a couple of times and which I though gave a reasonable explantion of relativity. However, the dead famous book on Einstein manages to do the job better and still have time to detail Einstein's life as well. I knew what the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations actually resulted in but it was breathtaking to see them actually derived in what is essentially a children's book. The author does warn you before the difficult bits but nothing was that difficult. Maybe it was because the derivation of the equation for the contraction of length was actually so obvious that it was easy to understand. I was going to put a link to a page of derivations but they are so obscure compared with the elegant and simple way it is done in the book that I will not bother.

2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking

I have not started this yet but got it because it is half-price in the shops and even less at Amazon - not, I hope a sign of its lack of sales.

3. What the Tudors and Stuarts did for us by Adam Hart-Davis

Raced through this one. Unputdownable despite having seen the TV series only a few weeks ago. The endpapers are pictures of Adam Hart-Davis surrounded by scientific and tecnological accutriments of the time first in the style of a Tudor woodcut and then a Stuart engraving. The woodcut is expecially attractive and I have a copy on the partition here. An extract from this woodcut is in the masthead of this page.

4. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor

Half-way through this one in two days. I was a bit taken aback at first because of the frequent interruption of the standard Lake Wobegon style of story telling with the racy (deliberate understatement) if somewhat stylised extracts from High School Orgies but then I realised that it was simply the overlaying of real-life with the standard mind of a teenage boy, a very clever device. As goof as any other Lake Wobegon book. I left my original Lake Wobegon Days with one of the drivers in Bali as he asked me if I had any books I could let hime have. I am not sure what he would have made of it. I also left him The Third Policeman which must have caused an amount of beffudlement proportional to my own at least. Nice word beffudlement.

5. Trieste: And the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

Not started this one yet but I have to as Jan Morris is a cousin of mine. This is her last book (she insists) and from reading the cover it seems to be a bit like her great fictional travel book - Last Letters from Hav but then again maybe that was the idea of 'Hav' - all her books have a thread of similarity because they are filtered through the same mind. It has just struck me that writing a fictional travel book is like the feeling you would get if you lost a leg, lose your ability to visit real places and your mind makes them up, a great idea. I am talking rubbish anyway - novelists make up places all the time.

6. A History of Britain Part I by Simon Schama.

7. A History of Scotland

That is all the books. You don't want me to list the socks, gloves, shirts, ties etc do you?