The Sudbury Hum and Other Tales

Listening to Abronecronedrone 7 by Sheila Chandra



(not quite Abonecronedrone I know)

A friend of a friend tells me how the the friend was at a religious conference after hours with a number of the press secretaries. He said he knew it was going to be a long night when one of them pulled the cork from a second bottle of whisky and spat it into the fire.

Not sure why I start with this but it may be vaguely related to the rubbish that follows. I was getting a little daunted by the The 'Information Challenge' in A Devil's Chaplain - the chapters in this section - 'Light will be Thrown' - are longer than the previous section and more in-depth. The 'Information Challenge' relates to a question beloved of Creationists which is "give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome." Basically it is a complex way of wording the question of how complex organs such as the eye can evolve purely through natural selection. While the article does a nice job of explaining this (though I'm not sure I was entirely up to the final section), it does have a neat summing up of Information Theory, something which I really should know about.

And what else today? We read of a strange hum that is heard between 6pm and 5am and is keeping some of the residents of Sudbury awake. I think this is one for an already-fat file at The Fortean Times though there is also The Hum Conspiracy Page. I suspect that the assertion that the hum is due to gravity waves is not ultimately going to be the answer. I think that we can all identify a hum if we go outside in the evening and at night - this is obviously when the normal noises of the day fade out and we are left with a grand sum of all the sound left over, like the echoing sound attributed to the sea in shells held to the ear - a sort of small-scale version of the big-bang radiation , only in sound rather than electro-magnetic waves. I can remember the distant sound of the city when I was about four and playing in Wollaton Park in Nottingham. Of course we might be able to pin it on Gordon I suppose - everything else seems to lead back to him in the message boards at the moment. If you like Sudbury so much why don't you go and live there.
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