Axe Muderer Loose in The City

Impossible Guitar

And maybe try one of these a day for a week.

City Life Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

I Practice Drawing Glibly

Beware of diffusion and discount warehouses followed by sleepy dunes and winking, digital trance-inducing gases, brought in by imaginary miscreants. There was a punk barber-shop quartet and random critics of the current regime.

The Heuristic development of ideas - write down ideas in categories when they come to you rather than forcing yourself to spend too much time in one go working to list everything. It is like one of the sections of an old title-sequence for Tomorrow's World where the title appeared to construct itself out of a flow of molten metal. Obviously it was projected backwards and really the words were being destroyed by the flow. And of course with the beauty of new-fangled thingies and whatchamacallits, the very sequence can be reproduced for all youngsters and older non-brits.

Relativity


Listening to Awkward Annie by Kate Rusby

The young lady standing up on the right of this picture I am pretty sure is my mother. She looks very like my brother here which is what made me look twice. The picture is captioned "A Music Class at Dartington Hall Summer School in 1940" though not much music seems to be going on - more like "a coffee and fag break in a music class etc etc". I was going to say it would be a pretty boring symphony using just that tambour or whatever it is on the table but Evelyn Glennie has done a whole Concerto for Snare Drum so what do I know.

Proof!

Strangely I fell over the stirrup pump today!

I misheard something on TV as this yesterday and I thought it sounded like some cold-war thriller. The Oerlikon is of course a lot older than the cold war having its roots in WW1. I always thought it was Scandinavian but after a bit of trawling it is clear that I was thinking of the Bofors gun, the Oerlikon being Swiss and was manufactured under licence in Britain after the designs were smuggled out of Zurich around the time of the fall of France in WWII. Both the Oerlikon and the Bofors guns are autocannons meaning that they are self-loading cannons with a calibre more than standard small-arms but less than conventional artillery. I will now be trying to find a subject for a poem with the title of The Oerlikon Solution having already written one called The Bofors Gun some years ago. I'm not actually sure what an Oerlikon could be the solution for, save perhaps for being attacked by a propeller-driven aircraft which despite the stories we have been seeing recently about the amount of gun-crime in the inner cities is not likely to be the over-reaction to an accidental glance at someone's "bird" anytime soon. You never know though. "Leave it Douglas - he's not worth it." I suppose it would be nice to have one in the garden even if it was deactivated.

There was an anti-aircraft gun in the the car-park of Worcester swimming pool in the seventies and amazingly all the mechanics to move the carriage and the barrel were still working so after swimming you could sit on it and target any planes which flew over. I have always wondered whether the actual firing mechanism was still working and that the authorities were just relying on the lack of 20mm ammunition to avoid nasty accidents. Anyway, it vanished sometime in the early eighties - possibly after some small boy actually found some spare 20mm ammunition. This has reminded me that we actually found one piece of 20mm ammunition on a shelf at the back of the garage. I think it might have been empty but you never know. Not sure what happened to it. A mate of mine had the compass from a Lancaster bomber which I desperately wanted. All we had from the war was a stirrup pump which gave us hours of fun. And The Aphex Twin has a tank - it's just not fair!

Sonic Spoons

The Brain Training Made Me Do It!

Listening to - Trance Europe Express

You may think that this is just an ordinary spoon but you would be wrong. It is a sonic spoon and there is a chance that if I use it wrong it may blow your head clean off. Of course it can be used just to stuff your face with porridge or whatever other fibery goodness you choose for breakfast but can you take that chance - that it will simply be a small food lever or do you really want to see what it can really do? Well! Do Ya?

I wish I could draw better than I can though I have found that practice is actually making me better than I thought I could be. My faces and eyes are quite recognisable as such and because I always have a hand to hand as a model, my drawings of hands do at least have the requisite numbers of fingers and a position that I could feasibly get my hand into. I have been wondering about how interesting it would be to take one of those rough sketches which has used the heuristic approach of just going over the lines until the whole blurry outline looks right and to extract each "level" of the drawing from it. Each one would surely look as bad as any of my complete failures to capture something in pencil. My mother was an excellent artist using that technique, both with drawings and sculpture and my dad is brilliant both as a draftsman and an artist - I should scan some of his bird paintings in. I've been trying to get him to paint again for ages now but no matter how many watercolour sets I buy him as presents he won't do any more. Maybe if I get half as good as he is I could shame him into starting again. My daughter is of course a much better sketcher than me.

Standing There Like Cheese At Fourpence

It has been dark all day here – I get into work before it starts to get light and so I notice what time full daylight arrives. Today it stayed just pre-dawn for ages. And it rained. And I am obviously boring you with stuff about the weather. However, weather talk, according to Kate Fox, is a simple means of determining the willingness of someone to talk to you – a sort of pre-conversation control question like those innocuous things that get asked of people about to take a lie detector test – is your name Gary, do you drink liquids, are you human? Etc. I can’t remember it being mentioned in the book, but there is another palate-cleanser topic for office-bound bods which is traffic conditions. A colleague of mine used to commute from York to Liverpool twice a week and his Monday morning conversation would be a description of the traffic conditions including road numbers rather than places which meant nothing to me – I can just about work out where the M6, the M62 and the M1 are. My route to work was four miles at the time.

PMQs - Exciting Again!

Well having said that they’ve just started talking about Europe which is not quite as interesting. It is still rather exciting to be able to watch it live wherever you are though I am sure anyone younger than me just thinks it normal.

Well actually it was really boring so ignore me completely.

A book log :-

Attention All Shipping! by Charlie Connelly

This uses the metronomic rhythm of the Shipping Forecast as the basis for a tour around various parts of the UK and Europe and very interesting it is too. I have read many books with the same style (notably ones by Tony Hawks and Ben Fogle) and every so often there comes an overlap in the travelogue which seems to trigger a sense of satisfaction in me; I feel that I am covering gaps – like finally getting a copy of every one of the first 50 Giles annuals. The author does not go to all the landfalls of the various regions - Rockall is obviously not easy to get to unless you are a Navy - but the places he does visit are interesting (or boring but written about in a diverting way). Fun and free from your local library.

QI Annual 2008 by the usual suspects

Which means all of us got an annual this year – Postman Pat, Doctor Who, Wallace and Grommit and QI. Fun time had by all.

Einstein For Dummies by Carlos I Calle

This dummy is enjoying it though maybe not quite understanding all of it.

On Continuously Feeling That A Small Spider Is Crawling Across One’s Face

In the style of www.ennui.org - Current Music: Drumming - Evelyn Glennie

Not sure why but it is there all the time, necessitating a strange flick to rid me of the slight tickle. There is nothing there – just the feeling. Must be some minor lack of a vitamin necessary for healthy nerves. It seems to have gone now but like a stopped car alarm a void still remains. I should be feeling miserable what with it being towards the start of a week in January but things just tick along nicely at the moment.

Having a notebook with squared paper seems to suit me. I have managed to keep it full and up-to-date – I seem to like being constrained by lines which says a lot about my personality I suppose. However, some self-contradiction or at least a desire for some self-contradiction crops up in the pages of the book in that I mentioned about trying to be less ethical and more egocentric. This led me to trying to work out how egocentric I actually am but that measurement seems akin to asking someone whether they are a bad driver or lover and of course can’t actually be answered without observation by the ego itself. My brother would love this post as he loves to talk about the id and the ego and the problem is that I am not entirely sure except in very general terms what the id and the ego actually are.

I went to the Harold Pinter Website the other day, prompted by some article about his scrapbooks being bought for the country. It immediately struck me that the text on the front page was very dense - very un Pinteresque if that adjective can be used about the physical layout of text rather than the atmosphere created in ones of his plays - I cannot be bothered to have a real look for the definition as any of the main links from Google just have it as the Adjective for the noun Pinter without any further description. Anyway - back to H. Pinter’s Web pages - I suppose I would expect a bit more space … a few more ellipsis … visual pauses … room for the reader to … think … to get bored and find something else to click on. But no – it is lines and lines of tiny text and loads of little buttons - like someone trying to cram everything in to one page before they lose interest. Of course like the id and the ego I have not idea what a real Pinter play is really like - I have of course been sucked into the stereotype for the sake of a cheap laugh - you did laugh at this didn’t you?

Just on the offchance and prompted by talking of getting bored with things I have just entered www.ennui.com in my URL line and it actually goes to a blank page. I could go and find out if this is anything meaningful but it does seem self-referential. It does actually have html source behind it though obviously not much - head /head body /body is about it. www.ennui.org is a might more interesting and therefore defeats its own objective. Funny what you can stumble on. Many times I have been annoyed by the fetishist answers from Google when looking up some technical issue. But as we men are supposed to think about sex every three (five - seven - insert own prime number here) minutes I suppose it is just opportunist to redirect us from Citrix Metaframe to “girls who want it” every so often. I suppose we might be interested while in the middle of an open plan office with partitions no higher than a table tennis net (Balls of Fury anyone?). Oh I cannot be bothered to work out the punctuation for that one. ) Maybe it is not too much of a good idea to read the blog on www.ennui.com.)

My note book has the words “Ear Print” in it just below a formula for calculating the half-life of coffee (the same as the half-life of anything else by the way). I am not sure what it actually means which shows that I should be expanding the entries just so they actually mean something to me. I also have the phrase “For God’s man! This is a ternary operator” which I do remember. I hate ternary operators – they should all be re-written as proper code – like all those stupid c iterations and elseifs. Do it properly! As you can tell I have had some c++ to work on this week and bitwise shifts do not agree with me. It’s work code as well before you think I rushed home and opened up the PVR APIs.

And now I’m off to Rockall (noun - not verb).

Yo La Tengo (Album 8)

Listening to Spiritchaser by Dead Can Dance

Well I am as speechless as the researchers themselves over this article which describes how hearts grown in the laboratory can actually function without intervention. The fact that the heart started beating spontaneously when it had reached a certain stage of development is a bit like having a program which "grows" based on the bare skeleton of the spec. Maybe there is some scope for a development system which takes a spec and after having the programmatic equivalent of stem cells thrown at it starts running of its own accord. Of course some development will always be heuristic but I wonder if we could formalise the approach. I of course link this to the anti-evolutionary argument regarding the hurricane in the junk yard building a working aeroplane (usually a Jumbo-Jet for some reason). Systems design does already sometimes refer to black boxes which means that a piece of software created by the above method would not be open to scrutiny to check how efficient it actually is. Biological processes have until recently not been open to scrutiny and I wonder if the deep workings of the mind - the actual point where consciousness meets neurons - ever will succumb to analysis. Computers can of course out perform humans when the spec is rigid but for fuzzy logic our gooey brain stuff is always best.

Other worrying things going on this week :-

- Daughter seems to have all the women in her SIMS pregnant at once, though the comment that "At least this one is a human baby." made us wonder if we should be keeping more of an eye on her progress. Still I suppose it will assist in the forthcoming "talk" at school.

- My email inbox seemed to turn into deep water this morning, as if the messages were sinking and rising depending on how heavy they actually were. Must be the weather.

- Some c++ Cyclic Redundancy code I was asked to describe last week appeared in the sample code for the APIs that are used by our rinky-dinky new PVR. Yes I know it is sad to want to do MORE programming at home but at least it does not involve sitting at the end of a wet and windy railway platform with a notebook and anorak. Anyway, for a moment I thought that my recurring idea of breaking through the virtual shell of the real world and hitting the machine code underneath had actually come true. Let me know if any of you get there, I would be interested to run it in debug. Of course I cannot understand the maths for CRC but I could at least describe each line and actually get a working executable going.

- Aforementioned PVR has added to the previous feeling of unreality by allowing me to pause live TV which for you Sky plussers will be old hat but for an old luddite like me is a bit akin to witchcraft though not as much as for the Foggy Dew Men who got a bit spooked when I first dragged something off one screen onto another. I was warned that I should keep it quiet as I would probably have been in danger of being burnt at the stake. Tip - a binary search is great for skipping adverts - it goes 5 minutes forward instantly - then 2.5 minutes back - then 1.25 minutes forward and so on. Almost instant skipping of adverts I feel like a thief. There is what I suspect is an urban myth regarding the presence of the technology in PVRs etc to skip adverts automatically and that it has been removed at the advertisers request. I suppose the reason I downloaded the APIs was to see if I could find a way of automatically detecting the start and end of advert breaks but I think we might have to file this one under the 100 mpg carburetter.

The Wonderful World Of Marvin Minsky



This give me pause.

We had a place to talk that belonged just to us. At the end of the field above the houses, there was a beat-up old gate that led to a rutted path across the common to the remotest farms of the village. The path at the gate was deeply cut through much use, but today was dry enough for us to walk on. We stood on the second rung up with the line of the hills stretching across the horizon. It was always quiet here for we were far enough away from any roads to shrink the traffic noise to a gentle challenge to the almost-silent noises of the country around. This is what most of England sounds like I suppose but not to most Englanders; they live in a mess of city noise, cacophonies of muzak and the merged roar of millions of cars, a permanent tinnitus that does not even give us respite at night. These days I wake to the strange scrapes and clangs of wind blowing anything loose against anything solid. mixed with distant sirens, the clatter of helicopters and the mysterious detonations that come from docks and freight yards. I imagine the rain falling on everything like it did in the country but it all still makes all this noise, wasting energy and making our lives somehow less important. People used to mean something in the landscape but now they are just small things against the massive backdrops of architecture. We wake to electronics rather than the sun and go against all our programming, forcing ourselves to work for defined times rather than when is good for us.