Gameboy and SMS



And Duke or Dave or so-and-so is cut out, made for love he thinks for saving Daisy, to keep her safe from bombs and bombs. In the rainbow there are a billion colours and in those hues I saw Zellaby and his daughter separated from the world and all those fags and crop-tops. Just them and happy in their quiet, frowning company.

“Come on Stupid” – forget the stupid others and all their stupid tech – the old world is destroyed by all this. I heard one more say :-

“A shower unit without electric circuits” while all around, the DNA of everything faded into the sad animals left unhappy and ignored for ten pounds and ten punts and ten Euros. There are bored parents with their ersatz text affairs, all that long-distance negligence and gloss to make them forget the kids.

At the door tonight, a squeal of daily recognition, like that man who lost all his memory and can just remember his wife. The last two years have gone by; progressing the last, modern decade into what has just gone. All those years I lived through and the world seems older. 1980 always seemed so much more modern than 1970 but 1979 was after punk, all narrow legs and sleeves and sharper hair cuts. The black years, when only short, meaningful songs mattered and anything flowery was out and irrelevant. They wanted you to think they wanted to die when they just wanted to be loved like all their predecessors ten-years before. So passive in this jungle, I think I might just go to sleep and wake hours later dripping and curled up stiffly in the rain.

Now in the studio, there comes a sound of nothing, an ambience so deep that the presenters sleep on through it, knowing nothing of the dead air and rapid switch-off. This room makes me happy, just imagining it, the wall of tapes and microphones, the mellifluous voice of the presenter swallowed by those strangely shaped walls, brought to heel and made into light. Somewhere beyond this room, a million people listen to this music and are happy, far away from the mess of what they have to face, back in the days of baroque and earlier music. The strings in their unfamiliar keys, over the drones of weirder instruments make something that despite the gap of years and lack of common language, speaks meaning to everybody. The no-worry decades of before sweep back, undoing all those petty deaths, and we have a world where only now are doctors beginning to realize that no one is dying. When would someone first notice? Who would it be? The busy doctors might see a lull in their full lives and but it would be the morticians, sat around in empty rooms who would be first amazed. Every malicious bullet would miss or just not be fired at all; all those with anger and weapons just not bothered any more and the would-be dead would pile up living until we had hell, a mess of people crowding out the world and squeezed and in pain but without the release of death.

Dreams end, nightmares end. The village sleeps as before, the radio just sweeping over it, mostly absorbed by soft ground and mountains but occasionally sparked into voice and music by the odd antenna, active and listening in these hills. It mixes with all the other things out there; the propaganda from parts of the world so unfamiliar and violent that it would be hell to us just as out world would be hell to those it is aimed at. Here are musics we have never heard, built of languages that we just cannot guess made to touch emotions in brains wired up differently, and like in some book I read, radio sweeps over every grave, every cemetery and the lost pilgrim sunk for ever in some bog they thought an easy short cut. The missing found again by broadcast and bounced back like radar to tell their loved ones of a spark of hope that they will one day be found.

This is an illusion of intelligence, this program that aims to tell me when I am wrong. This mess of words is just too much for it, a wall of meaning that it can never get or understand. The emotion in the sentence has need of embellishment but no electronics can touch it

Oh BeeHive!



Listening to From Gardens Where We Feel Secure by Virginia Astley

I first bought this album on vinyl just after it had come out, purely because I liked the cover. It still floats around in the garage with its other 12” comrades, still with its cellophane wrapper. I got some funny looks when I mentioned having it to my fellow students who, though they had heard of it, had visions of fey and weedy hello-clouds-hello-sky types. Maybe I was fey and weedy but the strangeness of this album belies its flowery cover. The backwards samples and general weird use of environmental sounds as the percussion make it a fitting soundtrack for the hangover from The Midwich Cuckoos. The sound of oars in rowlocks is especially good and the alarm clock and owl on the last track are so evocative. Virginia Astley’s other, more vocal work has recently become a bit flat compared to the stuff from the early eighties. The album Hope In A Darkened Heart was a very slick collection with a re-recording of the second track from Gardens, all produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto which, because of the icy feel, lost some of the Englishness. I seem to remember a link with William Blake – one of her albums is called Had I the Heavens - but I think there was something else to it. So much more on Wikipedia.

I thought I had mentioned my current reading in yesterday’s entry but I was wrong. It is The Hive by an author who dared to write a book about bees despite being called Bee Wilson. This book is more about humans and their relationship to Bess rather than about the ways of bees themselves. It splits into various sections on Sex, Politics etc and ends with a chapter about Beekeepers which immediately gave the me idea that this was like the appearance of God in the lives of Human beings. Are domestic bees in any way aware that they are kept by an entity outside their own biology? Of course they are not. The book goes into detail of how the details of bees lives have been understood over the years – it was only recently that humans accepted that the hive was headed by a female rather than a ‘King Bee’ – and how hives have been used to promote every type of society from Monarchy, through anarchy to communism and beyond. Humans have brains more able to understand things outside their own immediate experience so we cannot really compare man and bees but the idea of a controlling influence outside perceived existence is a useful element. I will return to Mr Dawkins on completion of this despite being aware of a certain unwelcome preachiness that has crept in the The Ancestor’s Tale.

I have a number of short sentences in my notebook. The last of them is ‘Andy Pandy Ambience’ which refers to the Watch With Mother video which The Small Boy chose as his preferred viewing at the weekend. It is strange how the TV executive decide that everything should be updated to cater for what they perceive as being the current fashion for children’s television and despite this, a less-than-two-year-old can be held rapt for 30 minutes by a scratchy, black-and-white show recorded before his father was born. What struck me, apart from the delicious glassy accent of the Narrator of Andy Pandy, were the various knockings and clunkings that could be heard in the many silences (they wouldn’t be allowed these days). It seemed that, the narration was recorded in spare moments while all about, the BBC sceneshifters got on with there normal work. It reminded me of the sound of those school benches being shifted inexpertly by groups of small children. Sometimes I could hear what might have been buses or the general hum and roar of urban activity. It reminds of the recent complaint of historians, that digital photography is removing a great source of background for the future as people delete all bad photographs. The same happens with sound. Technology has allowed us to create pristine sound tracks, where all that comes in is the relevant speech and any artificial ambience that the director and the foley artist decide is required to paint the picture. We should make simple field recordings just to keep what the sound of the current world is like. And with that, we are back at the start – the ambient sounds of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. Life is a circle.

Nectar and Ice Would be Nice But I’m Not Sure About The Robert De Niro Part



Listening to Another Day On Earth by Brian Eno

Procedural thing first.

Daughter got StarWars Ep. IV from the library and I noticed that the commander who informs Grand Moff Tarkin that there is a chance that the rebels will be able to damage the Death Star is the Foul-Mouthed Security guard – Len – From the smoking room. This reminded me that Siobhan Redmond was in Bulman with Don Henderson who played General Taggi in SW. I have been trying for a third link between the two shows but I have failed. Any info would be appreciated though not of course in any material way.

I finished The Midwich Cuckoos in a few days; it is one of those books that despite being about adversity and rather horrific things, has a dreamlike hook which makes you race through to the end AND still dread finishing it. I have felt the same sense of having missed the depths of the narrative in my first reading which I got when I re-read The Girl In A Swing. The hero (though not the narrator) – Zellaby – is an intellectual heavyweight though with a fine ability to distract himself from the matter in hand - except of course when it really counts. This you will find at the end. There is also the continuing sense of a rural idyll threatened by the existence of the children as well as by the children themselves. You will also see why I have separated these two ideas if you make it to the end. Zellaby’s monologues are deep and sometimes seem irrelevant until their completion. I struggled to link this book with The Day Of The Triffids which has a strong sense of narrative and things happening which is missing from the Midwich cuckoos. You may feel I am warning you off but you will never feel cheated even in the sudden end which leaves so much unanswered as to the future of the whole world. Incidentally, I think Zellaby would have made a great Blogger.

The idea of the children being the way they are, links in with my sometimes-held view that Autism may well be a next-step in the evolution of humans. Our world is becoming increasingly complex and involved in the emotionless machinery of technology. We may be on the way to fine-tuning the interfaces between the human world and the computer world. Will this ever allow the tacit stuff of emotional communications to be part of the transmissions between people? Already I see a great removal of the sense of conversations through instant messaging. The reduction of this side of communication removes the ability to understand it when it is present, very much like the inability of the poor inhabitants of the world of nineteen-eighty-four to think ‘bad’ thoughts because of Big Brother’s re-invention of language to remove anything that might be used to form negative thoughts. I know that sounds tortuous but if you want to know what I mean, read the essay on newspeak, which forms an appendix to nineteen-eighty-four. Autism, which I am sure has a genetic component, may well prove to be an advantage in the future world and will therefore survive. I know the kids in The Midwich Cuckoos are not truly autistic and there is a supernatural component to their personalities (one which Zellaby does a great job of rationalizing though), but the hint that they may well be a next-step in evolution is there.

Not sure how happy I am. There is nothing bad on the horizon for me personally but the world-going-mad component is there all the time now. I know the risks here are low and this in whichever side of my brain looks after the day-to-day and the mathematical is keeping me from following. It looks like my Son is going to be left-handed though my daughter is dexterous like both her parents. In my Adrian Mole mode, I would like to keep an eye on this but I probably won’t until the boy suddenly announces he is going to art college instead of plumbing academy like his dad. No! It wasn’t plumbing academy was it. Art College? I mean!

Much travel over the weekend. Trip to Zoo, trip on train to newly refurbished Liverpool Museum, and various walks out and about. There are many photos though none with me at the moment. The museum trip also allowed a diversion to see the Little Artists though we were surprised to discover that the entire lego thing was just one exhibit in a case depicting one art gallery with all the modern art and artists present. Our enthusiasm for searching out the various listed pieces seemed to inspire the real gallery attendants to look for them as well. There are some photos, which when auto-contrasted look quite good. I would like to know if all the tiny accoutrements exist as real bits of lego. As they had a miniature version of Dali’s lobster telephone, which made me, wonder where they got the lobster.

Let's Do The Show Right Here!





Well as you can see, Web Space has been found and pictures uploaded and guess where they are? Things have a habit of appearing quite easy in the end. I spent hours on a problem yesterday which involved a number of technologies. The solution in the end was two characters of code and a day's wait. Wonderful!

Is there a mood equivalent of what one of my flat mates called ‘a no weather day’? I am in it so there must be. He used to say that a cloudy day with no rain or wind was just that. Today with no ups or downs is my mood version of the same thing. It is not a no-weather day to go with it – maybe both is the equivalent of being number one in both singles and album charts.

I am afraid I have temporarily jettisoned The Ancestor’s Tale to complete one of the books I took with me to Malvern. My daughter got me the Dead Famous Life of Roald Dahl and that prompted me to whistle through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which she had with her. I then went on to start The Midwich Cuckoos again. John Wyndham has a knack of making what everyone thinks is supposed to be Science Fiction and making it into a tale of everyday life. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Anyway, you think this is a book about village life in England in the late fifties. However, look at the picture on the cover of the Penguin Classic edition and the real sense of what is going on is behind that baby’s eye. My wife has not read it and has expressed interest. This is unusual.

Water and Shadows

Listening to Pavarotti (Honest)

It is so dark this morning. Yesterday there was a bright sunrise through the narrow gap between the horizon and the clouds over Winter Hill but today there is only a smudgy, grey sky with squally rain. A morning when being outside only goes to reinforce the idea that you should be still in bed, listening to the rain on the window and wondering how long it will be before you just have to get up. I have noticed a strange polarization of the sadness of the morning and the upbeat feeling in the evenings. I am wondering if it is because I have been alternating the decaff coffee from the kitchen with strong stuff from the machine. The question is whether it is the ”full-fat” that makes me sad or the decaff.

We went to Snowshill Manor at the weekend, a place so full of stuff that it would take days to see it all. In reality, it was so busy that we had to go with the flow of visitors though it never seemed rushed. The collection is that of Charles Paget Wade who filled the house so full of his found objects that he ended up living in the small priest’s house in the grounds. As opposed to a lot of National Trust places, the feel was very much of a living house, as if the spirits of the original owners of all the objects remained with them, happy to bring pleasure to the quietly reverent visitors. My daughter was spooked by a few of the rooms, notably the darkened ones with a number of sets of Samurai armour. It was possible to believe that at midnight, the warriors would return and walk silently through the rest of the house, quietly brandishing their swords and wondering how they had got there. The music room was quite special as well, full of many instruments all vaguely recognizable but all slightly off what you might expect. I have always liked the drone of a hurdy-gurdy and would have given anything to have been let loose with one. My daughter gave a short concert after I pointed out that Mike Oldfield played one of the Elizabethan wind instruments of In Dulci Jubilo. Small boy was also happy, being able to indulge his obsession with clocks. They said there were over forty in the house but I think it was closer to 100.

Despite having the many rooms of the main house, Charles Paget Wade lived in a few austere rooms in the Priest House next door, tin bath stone steps, very little comfort at all. And still full of objects, though in this house, they seemed to be more practical things rather than the generally artistic contents of the big house. Photos at Eleven if I can find some web space.

Do Not Draw While Driving

The Tate Gallery trip is being resurrected after seeing the show on TV last night. It will have to be combined with this show at The Walker Art Gallery. Great Art - Lego - What more could a middle-aged kid want from a cultural expedition? Daughter and Son may like it too.

I’ve Lost Hetty Wainthrop’s Hobbit

I hope you are the same but I go through life with many one-for-one associations between things cluttering up my head. I think about going to school in winter and see myself in the gloom of early morning, dressed in my dark-blue gabardine raincoat (and always a cap despite probably not ever wearing one) walking along pavements to an undefined school in an undefined city. I think about holidays and there is my dad in his fifties over-the-head windcheater like the 53 Everest expedition wore on the lower slopes, map and binoculars around his neck with me and my brother dragging along behind him. I am thinking that a negative aspect of this is that it is a form of stereotyping. From a cursory reading of the Wikipedia entry on Freud this is an element of the ego, which has memory and various filters to rein in the baser instincts of the id, which has no sense of history. Pompous exhibition of recently learned knowledge is over.

I’ll Swear At You And Then It Won’t Be So Passive

Listening to Celtic Wedding – The Chieftains

The BBC programme Coast has been fantastic. I thought that 13 episodes of it might have been a little too much but there is enough variety and stunning scenery to keep anyone happy. Would have liked a bit more on the Hebrides and it seems they might have missed Shetland out altogether. The CGI showing the huge underwater mountain off Jura where George Orwell nearly met a slightly earlier fate was intriguing. The cartoon mountain that creates a huge whirlpool just seems too big to be part of the British seascape. It is as high as Blackpool tower and, it appears only twice as wide at the base, therefore resembling a stalagmite. I wonder if they will dig out the programme filmed from a Hawk Jet flying round the entire British coast? I seem to remember it came in two versions – one in real-time and one speeded up to allow it to take only half-an-hour. I can find only fleeting references to this programme and maybe the kiddies in charge of the BBC won’t actually know about it. It would be nice to see it again.

Did you know that only 4% of all species are closer cousins to us than Starfish? The starfish is a strange animal and yet most animals are further way genetically than those cute, five-armed beasties. I also discovered about a particular member of one of the taxonomic groups described in the Ancestor’s Tale, which defied classification until someone declared that they had found Mollusc DNA and mollusc eggs inside it, making it a … er… mollusc. Until they discovered that it actually ate mollusks. Mollusc is a nice word and is apparently spelled with a ‘K’ in the US, which somehow makes it less exotic. I am over my odd feeling about having come from fish. I have always been a fan of invertebrates over vertebrates, maybe because they are indeed exotic compared to what I consider as close cousins. Give me a squid over a chimp any day. Having said that, Lorises and Lemurs are quite fun … and quite a lot of marsupials are interesting.

It must be all those insects.

Flaunting The Flautist

Listening to The Sweet Sound Of Emma Kirkby – lovely.

I arrived at work before the start of some ‘early music’ on Radio 3 this morning. I like baroque a lot but I like the stuff that came before it more. The piece I missed was this :-

Buffardin, Pierre-Gabriel (c.1690-1768): Flute Concerto
Musica Antiqua Köln

I will probably never hear it now. Because of my new location, due to some undefined sense of restraint, I have been restricting my listening to Classical pieces (The Gary Numan was an aberration, which was repaid in the form of a power cut here) and I do not have enough to keep up a variation. My daughter has been listening to the Mozart Flute and Harp concerto at sleep time and I keep forgetting to bring it in. I have decided to look for some cheap Mozart boxed set; it’s good for programming to apparently.

Word keeps flagging up my contractions as if it is pretending to be Kryten before his transformation. Alright! – IT IS good for programming to. Happy? I may be turning the style police off soon. ( and notice that one sentence ended with a preposition, something up with shich Word will not put).

We have the Flute And Harp concerto after a flood of tears from my daughter when we left a Hi-Fi shop which was playing it. We had to go back and listen to the end to see what it was. We regularly get requests from the back seat to note down what a piece of music is. As she has learned that the stations now have play lists she just asks us to note the time and station.

A mess of brain dumps this morning. I have just remembered why we consider our current hometown as cosmopolitan. A headline in the local paper last week read “Rat Catcher Gets New Van” - which made us laugh anyway.

Back on your heads!

The Loss Of Limbs Came As A Shock.

Listening to Replicas by Gary Numan …

… the black-haired old rascal.

I am not sure what to write about at all. Everything seems to have escaped the box this morning. I can only look forward to finding a scrap of hope left at the bottom, underneath all the scrapings that Channel 4 and ITV have done to get the ideas for their latest shows.

It may not surprise you to learn that I am still in the middle of The Ancestor’s Tale. I have just noticed that the illustrations are often headed with just a fragment of a sentence from the main text in the style of a lot of old kids’ books. A Child’s History Of the World had this sort of caption. It's sort of related to the way Frasier had those obscure titles before each act (Conceit for bit of the programme divided up by commercial breaks – didn’t The Streets Of San Fransisco have ‘acts’?). They made no sense before hand and the meaning was only revealed after watching the section. Seem to have seen that idea before somewhere. Can’t think where though. Aha! More information on this subject has just popped into my brain. Glen Baxter used to draw cartoons with ludicrous captions very much as if they had been lifted from stories.

I want to use the Passive voice so please leave me alone.

I have been able to accept all the concestors in Richard Dawkins reverse tale so far. They all have four legs but we are now mired in the murk of primordial seas where the line of descent joins the fish and this has made me uncomfortable. I know we link back all the way to single-celled ancestors but the loss of limbs came as a shock. I was reading the book trying to imagine some internal and primal body image that links me back over the years to all those reptiles and fish. What did strike me while trying to imagine this was the ‘rightness’ of these creatures. Think of a shark swimming gently in the blue sea and it just seems correct – the only possible outcome of a long process of fitting the animal to its environment. I see so much which is ‘designed’ by us humans and often it just fails. Successful human design is often more of an acceptance of a long line of failures and lessons learned. Try and design something from scratch and it will often be full of faults. This may be some subconscious stealing from Papanek who was passionate about designing for the real world, for real people. There is so often a headlong rush to computerize something already working with the result that all the years of evolution which have brought a system to a peak of efficiency are ignored at the expense of a few gee-whizzes and a slick front-end. There is also the slotting-in of staff to run these systems with the result that so much just becomes a fix-it-up-and-ship-it-out process without allowing for anyone to think about how ludicrous things have become. It reminds me of the dangerous joke sketch from Monty Python where the translation of a fatal joke from English to German was carried out in small chunks to avoid exposing the translators to the full power of the whole joke. One man saw two words and spent two weeks in hospital. Maybe one day we will get the whole joke. Maybe that’s all it is.

Over 1 Americans Every Year

Listening to Music in 12 Parts – Part 1

Some undefined sense of sadness has been in my mind for days now. I sometimes feel that anything that takes me out of normal routine creates issues in my mind that are suppressed and come to the surface only when I have returned to some sort of routine. This then creates the sense of delight in misery. For ages I thought I might have had Aspergers (without the accompanying intelligence and ability with maths of course) because of what I am certain is a certain degree of Obsessive Compulsive behavior. In my teens I went through a phase of waking up and worrying about whether the taps were off in the bathroom and this accelerated until at its worst when I was living alone, I was up and down the stairs before I could sleep, checking sockets and gas taps. This mixes with the feelings I mentioned at the start where instead of worrying about something terrible happening because I DON’T check something, I welcome the chance for the pain of something terrible happening as a release from the depression. All this is irrational and never bubbles up into anything I would consider dangerous. The feelings are fleeting at their strongest during the day though at night they can be dark and overpowering. I read something recently about why we are not supposed to remember dreams. I have had the notion that dreams are just the tape rewinding from the previous day but now it seems like they are actually designed to be reviewed in downtime and then forgotten, a bit like checking every bit of paper before you throw it into the waste bin. It’s just a bit worrying to wake up in the middle of some of them where the images are so unrelated to what they refer to, that it is difficult to get away from this idea that they are just cathartic archiving. A blog will never be able to serve this purpose as it all gets remembered, though some of the random Fridays may be just brain dumps.

Is that the confessional over for today? I shouldn’t be worried as things seem to be falling out quite nicely at the moment. When I was a kid right up until I had left college, things never worried me in the long term. It was during the first gulf war when I started to extend my worrying beyond the next week. I was convinced that I was going to get called up, as I thought the country was going to need a stream of aggressive young men to pour into the Middle East. In fact some of my older colleagues pandered to this worry by suggesting it was possible. I am still not sure whether they were winding me up as I was just about beginning to realize that not everyone older than myself was cleverer (or had more common sense) than me. Maybe they really believed it. As one on my colleagues says about himself, I am a devout coward and would now take great pleasure in being sent to chop wood after declaring myself a conscientious objector (way to go Oliver). A relative of mine was a CO during WWII and I have to say very brave to be. While we can see forgiveness on the part of troops who served - sailors who go to the reunions of the enemies who sank their ships – even the meetings between the IRA man who planted the Brighton bomb and one of the victims – there were some terrible atrocities carried out by people we now like to call civilized. In the gap between this and the previous sentence, I have been caught by a terrible sense of not wanting to go along this line. There are too many bad things still happening (I have just set Word to flag up bad style as well as grammar so why has it not underlined that last sentence as cliché?)

Who cares? Not me!

Great Driving Moments #134

Listening to Ron’s Piece by Jean Michel Jarre

One thing I did get from How Long Is A Piece Of String? is that most numbers in meaningful situations – accounts, surveys etc – start with a 1. The reason for this is not entirely clear and I can’t even remember the possible given solution. I thought I would just explain the number up there.

Anyway, the drive here through spitting rain was quite atmospheric. The shock of the tripled distance to work has worn off and the various sights are filtering into my mind. There is a little lock-keeper’s cottage in a valley under the motorway which on some mornings has a misty shroud around it. There are many great little images of Britain on this journey. It is just a pity that so much of the drive is on the Motorway and the bits that aren’t are through industrial estates rather than clear and well-kept bits of rural Lancashire. I can drive home ‘cross-country’ but that takes longer and the pull of home is greater than the desire to see nice fields etc. The music for today’s journey was Piano Concerto in G by Ravel followed by Hary János - suite, Op 35a by Zoltan. Can you tell I just copied them from the Radio 3 playlist? ITW?

It sounds like I am going to be purchasing the M6 Sights Guide soon. As it is, my colleagues and I are beginning to discuss the journey to work more than we used to. Some years ago, someone joined the company from York and rather than move he commuted twice a week from that fair city to Liverpool and his discussion after the journey was road-orientated in the extreme. He was no tank-top but it did begin to get to us. Now we know why for we all do it. “Nasty queue at the M58/M6 junction this morning” – “See that fire on the verge just south of Charnock-Richard?” – “Watch out for the squashed hedgehog East of Skem”. We are all overtired.

Where does the time go? I was in here at 06:40 this morning with a view to a long blog entry and here I am with only officially half-an-hour before start time. I try to deal with the email first and one of these was a survey (required by the company) a survey which shall we say produced more comments regarding the survey in the any-other-information box than comments referring to what it was actually surveying. Try and work that out. I tried but it got away from me.

Slugger And Link Heaven

A long day today – lots of VBA and VB and many cross-references between various open applications. I have two screens on this Pc and small-boy that I am, it still amuses me to see the mouse pointer slide off one side of the main screen and then reappear on the other. For a few moments the other day I was convinced that the computer knew where the slave screen was in relation to the master one but it was just me forgetting things. I am making an effort to keep both the physical desk and the windows desktop tidy rather than revisit the mess of disorganization that characterized my previous workstation.

Listening to Music for 18 Musicians – Yes I have set up my giant Black iPod and am back on full stream random shuffle. .net Development, database import and great music! Heaven in a CPU and I get paid for it. Bliss.

I nearly bought the book about the The Voynich Manuscript which is the subject of this TV programme but I got How Long is a Piece of String? instead. I whistled through that and now feel unsatisfied. Should have gone for the weightier tome but I already have too many things on the go. The Ancestor’s Tale is veering between boring detail and exciting pronouncements and tantalizing references to things to come. Still not at jettison stage yet and at over half-way through I will probably finish it if I can keep focused. I really should read The Selfish Gene. The fact that I have not read it reminds me of a literary game in David Lodge’s book Changing Places where the characters (staff at a University in California) have to admit to the famous books which they have not read. I usually buy any David Lodge novel which comes out but as the last one, Author! Author!, is a departure in that it is a novelisation of some part of the life of Henry James, I am taking it cautiously this time. The previous book – Thinks… – was excellent, hitting the spot on cognitive science and having a tantalizing glimpse of Robyn Penrose from one of the earlier novels – Nice Work. An appearance by a character from a previous novel is obviously Lodge’s trademark. And just look at the new covers – Imagine all those in one place – like the covers of all the Realworld CDs.

Boring rant about another obsession – You may wish to come back tomorrow.

Six Pianos goes on apace – slow pace maybe but bits and pieces are done. I have worked out where middle c is on my list of midi notes and attached the relevant midi numbers to the stave used for definition. I still need to set up drag-and-drop for the sharp and flat symbols to be attached to the bars.

Wednesday 10th August 2005

I Thought It Was West Ham

Yet another No Brainer.

Re: The line :-

The president has suggested that a theory known as "intelligent design" should be taught in the classroom.

It proposes that life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and an unseen power must have had a hand.

Many times I think of some element of life in the world which seems too difficult to explain and every time I eventually see some glimmer of the mechanism through which evolution produces that element. The beauty of evolution is that it is simple rather than complex. It just takes a long time. This links in with my theory of blogging - that the majority of people in the world actually have no idea how big the blogosphere is and by extension no idea how big the world is. Extend this into time as well and you find that most people cannot think beyond the next five minutes. It is not surprising then, that the concept of a beautiful and simple mechanism which takes billions of years comes as a threat to some people. Douglas Adams as usual had this tied down with the idea of the planet Krickett covered in thick clouds living at peace with themselves and unable to see the rest of the Universe. As soon as a spaceship comes crashing through onto their world, the Kricketters have their eyes opened to the rest of the Universe where their immediate reaction is "That'll have to go." Destroy anything you do not understand - that's the game these days.

I have said many times, that none of the development work I do is the programmatic equivalent of anything more than the basic mathematical operators (with a few brackets). There is no differentiation, no integration or standard deviation. Occasionally it may slide over into square roots but the bottom line is that information is simple to handle and simple to search. I would say the same of evolution. You may need lots of basic operators, lots of brackets and even the odd Sigma in there to allow for the length of time and amount of iteration required but nothing deeply disturbing. The trouble is that basic maths is a problem these days.

I received an email with a quiz in this week. It was a challenge to make a given solution number from four other given numbers using only the four, basic maths operators (and any brackets required). You have to use all the four given numbers, once and once only but any of the operators any number of times. The four given numbers are 1,1,1,5 and the solution is 5. Evolution is that simple, just extended over time. How then do we need to make it complex by introducing the concept of a designer which in mathematical terms is probably about as complex as the proof of Fermat's? Maybe it's the desire for authority which does it. Everyone likes to have higher justification of their actions these days.

Very unstructured today but I have another analogy. There is the old argument that evolution is like the idea of the Monkey typing away and coming up with the text of Hamlet. The real idea of evolution (and I know this is very simplified) is the Monkey typing away and after each word say, having someone look to see if the writing put down so far "survives" as being meaningful. If you tie it down to being Hamlet then you just have to compare it with the original and it is many orders of magnitude down from the complete random typing of the whole script. I know that's not a good argument but suppose you decided that what was written just had to be meaningful, (either grammatically correct gibberish or a proper narrative), this would be a full test. The test of being 'correct' is analogous to the conditions in which evolved life has to survive. I know I have removed a lot of the variability but the idea shows how something which sounds statistically impossible becomes entirely plausible when tested incrementally against a solution even if that solution is not defined at the start. I have a blurry idea in my head that this could be akin to the way neural nets work but that may be a dud link. And the old Jumbo-Jet-out-of-a- hurricane argument is laughable. It shows a lack of thinking about the problem. Can’t be bothered any more. I should have taken notice of what one guy said at the end of the article about Bush’s idea about intelligent design –

There is no science to intelligent design, it's not even a scientifically answerable question.

Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Finally and without naming names for I do not wish to become involved in a debate, I was annoyed by some blogger’s schadenfraude ( had to look that up BTW) regarding the deaths of some prominent left-leaners. It struck me that recently there has been a debate over the ejection from this country of certain people who express glee at deaths. My simple mind cannot see the difference.

It's Like 1990 All Over Again

The fact that certain intelligence agencies have been looking at Mt Ararat to find Noah's Arks does not make me think that the biblical story is being taken seriously, rather that the organisations which we are encouraged to look up to are as gullable and daft as the rest of us. Oh - What's the bloody point?

At the bottom of the box you can never close. See it glinting in the light of failed atrocities, a final, distant beacon for the lost and despairing. Take this darkness any way you want to.

Vanished Like A Wrinkly Ninja

How I feel today. Why bother to analyse anything? This article tells you exactly what the point is - there is no point. What about one which tells us the solution? Not sure there is one.

Thirty years ago I would have been glued to the stuff about space (which is ace as Frank Sidebottom always says) but now I'm not bothered beyond a bit of giggling at how dashing Patrick Moore looked in the fifties and how rather distinguished in a portly and rather affected way he has become. I fleetingly thought that this was because I had grown up and that boys toys had become passé in the deWeyden household. Not sure now that this is true but it gives me a gentle ache over how the enthusiasm for things seems to be waning these days.

Monday 8th August 2005

Handling Snakes and Burning Bushes

[Argument Deleted because it was irrelevant and there is no point ever mentioning it again - I am sure I will though - wipe that spit off the screen now.]

Listening to (at last) La Roque 'n' Roll - Baltimore Consort

Not everything came off this weekend. The art gallery trip was scuppered by a long and unexpected lie-in by Number One Son (henceforth known as JFG), though barbecue and Cinema trip went ahead as planned.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as excellent though seeing Deep Roy as every Oompa Loompa was quite spooky. See it.

(I would imagine that Willie knew exactly where the bars would be going – so of course he had time to write all the songs. Maybe there is nothing outside the text and I have always worried too much).

You Polishing My Oscar? How Very Dare You!

More on this wonderful new building. There is simply-furnished seating area in what looks like the observation deck of a ship, just above the reception area of this building. Indeed, the walkways that surround the open reception area resemble the railings of some sort of liner. It is quite refreshing to be able to look out over this rural bit of South Lancashire after the years of brick walls and mid-eighties, Dallas-style glass frontages. Very civilized it is.

I made a point of noting down thoughts for comment yesterday and they turned out to be wishy-washy and pointless really. However, I thought of something which I was sure was going to be the starting point for a truly great entry and guess what! I’ve forgotten it. The concept is playing a tantalizing game of brinkmanship with my rapidly-failing memory but will not surface enough to allow me to define it further. At the moment I don’t even have enough of a handle on it to put down a few bullet points as memory-joggers.

My conversations with my colleague, Martin, who has just returned from two weeks in Tuscany, ranged over many things yesterday and I seem to think that the ground-breaking-but-elusive thoughts referred to in the previous paragraph were sparked by one of these discussions. And I still cannot think what it was about. We talked about the suitability of your average judge to decide on the future of your average chav, how the papers are running dangerously close to being in contempt of court over recent events and whether Jeremy Clarkson can be described as a ‘Capitalist Folk Hero’. Not one of these things is what I am after but it was worth a try.

A busy weekend is ahead. Barbecue, cinema, art gallery, more on Six Pianos and plenty more I am sure. I got a text yesterday which said ‘Pram dies’ which had me thinking for several seconds at least, that I didn’t know anyone called Pram. It should of course have read ‘THE Pram died’ as it meant that a wheel had come off. Luckily I was able to fix it when I got home. I am not sure it will last the distance as at the moment it is serving more as a shopping trolley that happens to be able to carry Number One Son rather than a baby carriage that also has room for shopping. We’ll train him up to carry a couple of bags and then we’ll be sorted. Joke – before anyone writes in.

Wolf Tone

New desk – new life.

I haven’t quite finished on resolution yet. Here are some notes I put down.

There is no resolution in daily life, either working or private. Happy people are either those who live their lives in such a structured manner that they don’t have unresolved issues or those who do not care. I am neither. Maybe you could solve the problem by just filling those needs which keep you alive and then by sitting around for the rest of the time.

The Sameness of Rooms on Different Floors.

On every one of the six floors in the building I used to work on there was a gents. It always struck me, when I was forced to use one on the floor above or the floor below me that the rooms looked almost identical but there was always the sense that you were lower or higher than the familiar one. Do humans possess a sense of absolute height in the same way you can perfect pitch or absolute direction (which indicates north wherever you are)?

Today I have also been thinking about how some emails sound in your head using the voice of the originator and some of them use a sort of general encyclopedia voice. Think about it next time you read a long email.

And finally in the notes, how about getting all this rubbish out of the way so I can dance and sing.

I actually meant ‘write poetry’ instead of ‘dance and sing’ but it scanned better.

So what about the real meat of today’s entry? I don’t think I have written as much for a long time, though that made me think of quality over quantity. The world is a strange place at the moment. Or is it? It is this strange all the time? To be honest the things to which I am referring are simply statistical blips in the general strangeness of things over all time. This sounds like the Hierophant’s column in Fortean Times. I have only just looked up what a Hierophant actually is and it is not what I thought – i.e. a sort of backwards skeptic in the general double-agent type world of FT. A priest hey?

The title for today? Wolf Tone. I was reading about how the note F# is called the Wolf note because in medieval times it sounded so much at odds with the rest of music that it was banned for a time by various religious authorities. The book didn’t actually say Wolf Tone but word association brought it to my mind even if I did think it was the nickname of some blues musician (maybe it is though Google knows nothing about him/her). This is another of my double puns which I like to collect – Three Piece Suit/Suite, Golf Club, Wolf/Wolfe Tone and many more which I am sure you can find. I expect that these phrases double up because they are easy to say and sound good and so get two meanings – double the sonority from a single phrase. Which reminds me in a tortured way of the joke about the three legged pig which saved the farmer's family by breaking down the doors, raising the alarm and calling the fire-brigade. Why did it have three legs? Because you don’t eat a pig like that all at once. Groan!

Tumbolia

I was listening to the Today programme .. er … Today. Someone – probably the Markets’ guest for the financial news – was asked a question which had a definite answer – Yes or No – and as is common for interviewees since I started watching current affairs, his immediate reply was completely unconnected to the question asked. Eventually, he came out with a few sentences of complexity which probably did give an answer in a way, not that I was able or could be bothered to try and understand it. The question could have had a proper reply, simply stated and understandable to everybody.

This made me think about how this was like an un-resolved piece of music, ending with a key unconnected to that with which it started. There is a chapter in Godel, Escher, Bach which relates a tale of Achilles and the Tortoise (not Zeno’s by the way) where they switch from situation to situation via various levels. The first situation ends in a cliff-hanger which I think was them hanging out of a helicopter about to fall to the ground. Although they went deeper into the levels of the tale, each situation was resolved in a sort of push and pop. All except the first situation. There was no return to this first situation leaving a deep sense of unease about the failed resolution. There is a point and connection to the story of the interviewee above. It struck me that very often the person being asked a question thinks that their complex reply is the right answer. It may actually answer the question but via many levels each resolved correctly after the pop and push. If you keep with it, the final resolution can be satisfying, but only as long as you have kept up with the various levels of the argument. He trouble is, the general listener these days is not up to this maintenance of interest in replies to questions. They want a piece of music in a single key with a nice chord structure and a definite resolution. They have a right to expect it. This desire for complexity is often a way of keeping up appearances. ‘They are paying me for being an expert so I must sound like one’. However, this has a reverse in that so many times you see people on news programmes billed as experts or analysts in some particular discipline who simply talk common sense. They have given the public exactly what I said they desire above. The expert will tell them something they already know which either keeps the viewer/listener happy that someone is in control or that they themselves have more insight into the issue than the average person because they already knew what the expert has said.

Having argued all this, you may well be thinking about why these posts are never resolved. The problem here is that I am doing the literary equivalent of noodling about on the piano, playing rubbish to see if it sounds good, a bit like the continuous tapes running while the group James recorded one of their albums. When the disk was released, the tapes were edited to create random new pieces (this was of course the idea of Brian Eno). The result was a complete second album called Wah Wah which was excellent. This blog is like the edited tapes.

I had another thought along the lines of resolution which was triggered by the mention of Ben Elton returning to Stand-up in the article I pointed you to yesterday. One of his BBC show routines started being about transport and specifically mentioned the M25 and how there was a proposal to build an extra lane. He then diverged via various things as is standard and eventually started talking about the overflowing bin-bags in the kitchens of student flats. This rang true with me and I was nodding sagely between the chuckles when he talked about the extra bag down by the side of the bin to take the overflow. This extra bag always ends up full as well which is why putting an extra lane on the M25 is no solution at all. Resolution – nice satisfying chord.

Show Me The Nectar

Do you remember films where some group in a control tower somewhere maintain a vigil on some dramatic event occurring elsewhere by way of monitors? These monitors seem to have eyes and ears everywhere and can show you what exactly is happening as a spaceship dives into the sun from the point of view of someone hanging on just behind the tail of the ship in question. It used to bug me even when I was little. How did they get that view? What camera was hanging about within the story to allow people within the story to see what we, the audience could see as part of the third person narrative?

Well it looks like we soon may be able to have that sort of omnipresence. We have heard about the pilotless drones which buzz around over various hostile regions, ready to strike down enemies and send back images to base but it appears that this sort of surveillance is going to become widespread in a way that can only cause terrible feelings of Big-Brotherness amongst the general population if of course they can be bothered to look up from watching everybody else. It seems that we are about to see things called Eternal Planes, lightweight constructions of plastic and super new materials which can reach anywhere in the world in 24 hours and then keep station for months at a fraction of the cost of a geo-stationery satellite. Of course being closer to the ground than one of Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful inventions will make them more able to pick up information with a level of detail akin to IMAX times 100.

I don’t want to think about the Civil Liberties of this situation. My point here is how this idea brings us closer to my idea of a complete model of the world defined inside some machine. With continuous surveillance like this, we wouldn’t need a model; we could see the world in real time from anywhere at any time maybe from the web with a click of the old proverbial. Think of that camera on top of the Club-House at St Andrews or the ones in Times Square that you can pan and tilt and zoom using a pad on a web-page. Think of having that over the whole world.

So on the one hand we will all retreat into virtual worlds created inside the computer, eventually having our consciousness permanently downloaded and be at one with the machines while on the other, the machines will spread their conduits and sensors into the real world and view what happens physically. All humans will end up as memory in some spaceship drifting in space, able to avoid the problems of the physical earth and to dodge oncoming asteroids while they remotely watch the real world and marvel at how crowded it has become inside the memosphere that is their home now.

Add to this the work on making tiny surveillance robots the size of flies and you have everything covered. Nothing we do will be private except thoughts and then one day they will have those captured as well. The use of this information is then the question. Can one group of people rule another? Can you block some thoughts and not others so the elite have their thoughts to themselves while knowing everyone else’s or does it just become a general sludge of irrelevancies that no one could be possibly interested in? This makes me wonder whether anything I may have thought at any point in my life would be enough to put me away by the moral and legal framework of this country today. Just by admitting such a thought are you incriminating yourself? As usual you are only getting questions. Nothing very bad in here I am afraid but then again my humanist thoughts would be enough to make some people of stronger religious persuasions choke on their wafers. At this point I normally get mad that some people can think that any of the thoughts which I consider reasonable to be ‘bad’ thoughts.

While waiting for Number One Son to fall into sleep deep enough to allow transportation to the cot last night, I was reading Susan Blackmore’s book – Meme Machine. Her first chapters go over bog-standard evolution but I soon found my thoughts diverging from the words going into my brain from the page. I was trying to decide on how to program a simple version of evolution into the computer. The book had just mentioned about us only having the one chance at evolution which for some reason made me think about the possibility that life on earth actually is some experiment and that there is a creator. Computers are complex things and with all the newer and faster giga and peta flops floating around out there, we could easily simulate a quite complex set of evolutionary factors. Richard Dawkins has already produced his own programmatic version. I don’t know enough or remember enough to say whether the irony of the arch denier of the existence of a creator creating (after a fashion) life himself is clear to him. At this point, I am sure you are chanting Occam’s razor at me but I have gone on before about how much of the world a creator would have to actually produce in order to convince the inhabitants he produced that it was indeed real. The human mind fills in lots of stuff for which it only has limited sensory input and could it be the case that the inhabitants of a created world would use that mechanism to create belief. Dreams seem to be the brain making sense of lack of sensory input. They are what the inhabitants of the world think about when the world they inhabit is no longer present.

Someone in this building has the word Paramnesia written on the white board in their office. This is a disorder of memory (you guessed) where dreams are confused with reality. The actual word to describe the Zen master who is not sure if he is a butterfly dreaming he is a Zen master or a Zen master dreaming he is a butterfly. I though that rather apt for today’s stuff. For a moment staying in the ordered and rational real world, I cannot think why he has this word on a white board otherwise full of proper work-related stuff. Maybe it is the man’s way of asserting that he is indeed a man and not a number.

All of this is rubbish of course. You know yourself that the desk in front of you is hard and would hurt should you choose to bash your head on it. But then again you could be programmed to feel that. I am sure that there has been computing power around for years now that could allow the creation of a program that could be convinced it was human. Maybe we should think in terms of fractal levels of cognizance. The lowest level would be a simple few lines of basic which when asked ‘Are you human?’ replies in the affirmative. Program deeper levels of detail into this until the machine begins to get to a point where it has to ask questions of itself. Take the example of getting hurt when bashing your head on the table. This could simply be a link that says Action – Bash head on table – result – Ache. Or it goes down to the level of the colour we see in the pain we actually get when we bash our heads. The trick is to keep the level of self-awareness of the entity being questioned below the actual reality it is asked to describe. Humans must have got to a stage where they think far beyond the experience of the world. Maybe I am describing the point at which consciousness arose. Two lines – reality – awareness of reality. When the awareness of reality goes above reality then we have become conscious. All this could be summed up as thinking about thinking. I await the emails from guffawing philosophers and machine cognizance researchers. You have me in this mess of my own thoughts about the world.

AKA47

(Sic throughout, including that title)

Interesting article about British Comedy in the Guardian today - WARNING - Pretentiousness alert - Bad Language and Nudity - well maybe not the last one. The last line of the piece is very good. And this in the same paper is fun but again as pompous as Colonel Blimp's first exhibition at Tate modern.

The drive here today was strange. Once I was off the motorway, everything seemed worthy of mentioning here - the strange statue made of metal pipes, the huge, new Barratts estate with its fake warehouse style, the half-timbered house under a tarpaulin. They still seem worthy of a mention but it is all so unstructured as Graham Norton might have said when he was good. (i.e. On Channel 4 rather than the BBC). The one that seems most interesting is the new estate. There are many two-storey house - semi and detached - but there are also blocks of confused warehouse style apartments with fake doors on the gable ends - one even completed by a derrick extending out into space just in case one of the new tenants wants to install a piano or more likely a juke-box. I bet there isn't even a hole in the bricks behind the door. Lower the price a bit and stop sticking all the junk on the outside. I know of course that £50 spent on a fake door which makes something look old probably adds a couple of hundred to the price but all this fake heritage is just depressing. I am sure there are better places on the web to get a rant about the authenticity of the world and I suppose that really we shouldn't be bothered about this - we all have houses that don't leak and keep out the wind and even in poverty we have enough food. What happens when everyone in the world lives happily with enough food and freedom? I know that's a long way off (we must not believe that it will never happen). Everyone will want Ronco Olive pitters to attach to their breakfast bars and the means of production will be fully occupied. Will they start putting fake mud-walls on the huts in the Kalahari in order to suggest the old days? I am horrified that I have thought of many examples of how this happens in cultures far removed from this one. I hadn't actually realised but it goes on all over the world already.

I Hope They Were Sultannas

There is a strong smell coming from the canteen just across the office from where I am sitting. It reminds me of the meaty smell of the Vesta Curries which my brother used to eat when he lived at his flat in Malvern. They make you mad with hunger and then full of guilt at having eaten something which you might suspect was more akin to the waste products of a chemical factory than to real food. They still make them I think; I made my wife buy me one some years ago and of course I was disappointed. Never went for the chop-suey though. What were those little squares made of? Some of them seemed like mini-oxo cubes and tasted like them as well but the meat was something else.

My brother’s flat was in one way like John and Yoko’s country estate, with loads of big white rooms. However, it was a mess, with bits of strange kit and records all over the floor and a strange smell which probably took the various aromas of every occupant since it was built and combined them into one big crusty-like stench of yukkiness (If you’re reading – sorry Bruv). Maybe it wasn’t that bad. He was a New Romantic at the time though maybe of the strangely-sensible trousers and tank-top variety. He had a small drum machine which only had four pads and could probably remember no more than about 4 bars. Despite that I would spend hours creating loops and then regretting that I had no way of layering any music over the top. As soon as I got any spare money it went into various bits of kit, starting with the old Casio keyboard and going up to various Yamaha and Alessis racks. Now I can do it all on the PC.

Talking of which, I managed to bring myself to revisit drag and drop and now I can define the bars of Six Pianos just by pulling notes onto a stave. I found the little pamphlet which is the score (£11 from Boosey and Hawkes) and have started programming the full thing. I know I could buy some software but that’s no fun (and costs money I don’t have).

Elements to do are :-

Define data structure for storage of bars

Define method of assembling bars into the full piece.

Define the method for fading in and out the various bars.

All this has helped me to re-awaken my shaky ability to read music albeit in the style of one-finger following the words – very slowly. I think I mentioned being surprised at being able to follow the score of In C in real time. Again, its proof that seemingly difficult things are really quite easy and the reason that more people don’t do them is because they are afraid they will look stupid. Still, having just re-read some of my old school magazines, it is clear that few of us at that particular educational establishment could write very well. We might like to think that our school days were something like The Rotters’ Club when in fact they were spent flirting inexpertly and giggling at “art materials” and that was just the girls – ho ho. Maybe that’s just the rural place I went to. Looking back, it wouldn’t have taken much to fire my enthusiasm in some more intellectual directions. Our physics teacher was good and the replacement for her we had during her maternity leave was a hoot. However, I am afraid to say that in other disciplines, we were not inspired often. English was not helped by having Where Angels Fear To Tread and Henry IV (part 1) as set texts. I only passed Eng. Lit. because we got A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the live exam. It is still my favourite play. Where were nineteen-eighty-four and Animal Farm and Lord Of The Flies – all of the books we think of as set texts? Maybe I should sue.