Canonicity is in Dispute

Listening to Limbo by Throwing Muses

At last some real rain!

Did you know that the first commercial fax service was set up in Paris in 1865? I seem to remember some urban myth about the very first fax message getting lost in the wires somewhere and suddenly reappearing decades later. In these days where computers inhabit every stage of the transmission lines it would probably be possible for this to happen but as the first faxes were set up across telegraph wires with no storage capability in between the only possible way for such a delay to occur would be for the signals to keep bouncing around the various lines without ever reaching a destination. Reminds me a bit of the Delay Line Memory used in early computers where the various bits representing a value were pulsed through a slow propagation medium such as Mercury before being sent back to the beginning again after being boosted a bit.

In turn I am reminded of an afternoon radio play about an academic who, after a mysterious tip-off, discovered what look like the original manuscripts for Shakespeare's plays addressed to him care of a remote railway station. He arranged for a small piece of the paper to be tested to prove its authenticity and had the rest sent on to him. However, it never arrived being sent, apparently mistakenly, to someone else. The implication was that somebody, possibly Shakespeare himself, had started the bundle of papers on its way all those years ago and rather like the idea of it being safer to send diamonds through the post than via security van, the manuscripts were kept safe and on the move.

Now in the spirit of James Burke a further connection is that a special Afternoon Play featuring Torchwood at CERN is due to be broadcast this summer - no details of date yet but should be worth a download. We can only hope that CERN does not start spitting out black holes and swallowing us all before it is transmitted. As if! Exciting though isn't it? And of course a collider is sending particles through a medium at high speed and measuring the results in a a manner rather similar to a Delay Line Memory which brings us back in a circle to where we started, rather like a collider itself. The world is full of these arbitrary links and coincidences which while intriguing to pattern-seeking humans are meaningless and not significant at all. For instance, the first page I read last night featured a description of the Pier at Weston-Super-Mare. Spooky or not? Definitley Not!