Friday, February 29, 2008


Caution - Wet Floor - Trailing Cables



My favourite photograph ever. This is in the Phaidon Century book.

(From the The La Trobe Journal)

Wish I was listening to Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp

Actually Listening to Beyond Even by Robert Fripp and Brian En0

I promise to stop ranting about the tax system today. In fact I promise not to rant about anything today. I will instead recommend How To Bring Up Your Parents by Emma Kennedy who is probably lying in the periphery of your memory rather than in the "OHMYGODTHAT'SHERFROMTHETELLY" bit. This book, while laugh-out-loud-funny-won't-you-look-silly-on-the-train, is slightly strange for a reason I can't quite define. The anecdotes seem so odd that they must be genuine, rather than being edited versions. HMG and WDT are very likeable despite being maddening and the dog (Poppy My Most Excellent Beagle) is just adorable. If I wanted to be negative I would say that it is a might too long but then again I often feel that books of this sort are slightly too short.

Should every book have an ideal length that is defined as a product of various parameters not all of which can be defined mathematically? Which reminds me of the Horizon programme about how to make better decisions. Now I have not watched this yet (it is on Toppy My Most Excellent PVR) but it seems to be based entirely on those naff pseudo-mathematical equations that seem to crop up on the news every so often which I am sure are entirely the result of the dean of some university suggesting to the mathematics department that they come up with some stupid equation to get the department on the news, hopefully resulting in some interest in the press which helps to prove that not all mathematicians have the social skills of a thermo-nuclear device and smell ever-so-slightly of peat. How can you parameterise attractiveness? Or Happiness? You can of course decide on a fuzzy range but surely the resultant equations cannot have any guarantee of accuracy. I am thinking French Philosophy here (though not Jacques Derrida of course - we like Jack).

All the great French philosophers of the 20th Century seem to be dead. Are we just left with the rubbish ones now? is there an equation that will help me decide whether I should steer clear of modern French philosophers?

Thursday, February 28, 2008


Measuring cynicism from zero



(From Wikipedia)

I was trying to remember what the opposite of cynical is and despite having the internet and stuff, I cannot find an exact antonym for it. It must be the loss of neurones. Naive does not seem quite right but it does fit with what I am trying to work out. In best Newspeak tradition I have decide to start measuring cynicism from zero. However Newspeak would always use a positive root, so as to avoid the use of negativism is language s0 double-plus uncynical is not really allowed.

I just asked someone about this and they asked why I was asking - this is my IM reply.

I was thinking about the Tax system yesterday and wondering why on earth the Child Tax Credit is done as a completely separate payment rather than a reduction in Tax code when I realised that it is because for a lot of people it is actually a benefit and they are not actually getting taxed so of course it couldn't be a tax reduction - it is an actual payment - but that made me wonder why we don't just formalise negative tax - so that our circumstances just decide whether we are a net contributor or a net beneficiary of the tax system - You wouldn't then have TAX and BENEFITS just a positive or negative contribution to the country. Then I thought I was being the opposite of cynical which I suppose is like Naive maybe double-plus Naive - if I was cynical I would be double-plus un-naive as in Orwell's newspeak.

As you can see it is an extension of yesterdays thoughts but following on from my musings on the opposite of cynical, I was wondering if I wasn't just too [opposite of cynical] which thinking about it is naive or double-plus-naive if you want the superlative. Anyway - measure everything from zero - not TAX or Benefit - just contribution. I am sure that many scholars of the state already think about it in these terms anyway - it's just that I would like to formalise that view.

It reminds me yet again of the problem that Richard Feynman had when he was at school, with a man who lost a hat over the side of a boat while rowing up a river. If he rowed for so long after losing the hat then, if he rowed at such a speed and the river flowed at such a speed, how long would it take him to get back to the hat once he turned round. The answer is of course as long as he rowed up the river after losing the hat. The speed of the river is completely irrelevant. I am back to black boxes in my head.



Wednesday, February 27, 2008


Why Am I Never Awake For Earthquakes?


(From Totally Absurd Inventions)

Actually it's not really a question of being awake but just missing them. There was one in Bristol in 1984 and I must have been in mid-air stepping across the threshold when it happened and then there was one in Manchester recently early in the morning when I was actually awake and I still missed it. This one didn't even wake me up though Martin was still up at 1 this morning wondering why the couch (his word) was shaking. Oh well, I suppose I should not wish for a bigger one just so I can say I felt it. I did feel one in about 1986 when my five-wheeled office chair moved several centimetres across the office. Either that or one of the account managers punched me for being the posh boy.

What follows is not complaint - it is a reasoned and beautifully structured argument regarding the complexities of modern life. The introduction is verbatim from the notebook.

"So many people with a breath-taking ignorance of the complexity of their own minds and the world around them, Is the complexity of the human mind just too much for our own good? Is this belief in complexity my biggest failing? The bottom line is that the net outcome of a complex system OR a simple one is the same in most cases. The complexity adds 'cost' however. Determine the black box inputs and outputs and the define the simplest way of translating the inputs to the outputs. Micro-management is bad. I was taught all this as part of my Systems Analysis degree and yet the mistakes are propagated over and over again. ( I was too young to get the most out of that course - I should go on it now.)"

I seem to have rediscovered the thing about the black box - it was always in my head but for a lot of the time, I did not see "input - black box - output" because I was too involved with the whole thing. It takes discipline to ignore what you know exists inside the black boxes and to focus on the simplest way of translating one thing into another. Business these days seems to be buried under a complex level of administration, the outcome of which should be the same. So many times, micro-management is excused because it supposed to reduce costs. To my simple mind, it very often does the opposite - it is a cost in itself.

For example, the tax system seems to be increasing in complexity all the time when the bottom line is a requirement for a certain amount of money. I suppose it would be impractical to do everything using one tax - far too much of a blunt instrument. However it would surely make sense to reduce tax to say 5 key components - Say Income Tax, Corporation Tax, Capital Gains tax, VAT and one other of your choice (How about a Tax on business complexity?). Obviously there would have to be various levels within those but I would say we should not introduce any more than 5 levels of tax within each main level - so that there are never more than 25 different components to the whole system. Any situation that could not be agreed upon my the Taxer and the Taxee would have to go to arbitration but the decisions would have to lie within the 25 components.

Tax is after all money and no tax component ever actually goes higher in complexity than addition-subtraction-multiplication and division - I do hope I am right in that - if any taxman is doing differentiation and integration to work out someone's tax then things are far worse than I thought. Actually any use of to-the-power-of would be a problem for me. Surely there is scope enough to fine tune the amount of tax take. The actual level of taxation is another matter - I am not going to get into a BBC Have Your Say type Argument about why we are being robbed blind and why do we actually need a "gumint" at all. I refer you to my previous argument regarding not complaining about things. It wasn't really a complaint was it?

The BBC HYS site is a wonderful diversion - for every reasoned argument and interesting comment there are at least ten simple statements of fact which add nothing to what is laughingly called a debate. The Earthquake replies are fantastic. They will prime the pump with a devastatingly inane opening question - "Did you feel the UK Quake" to which the obvious reply is "no" and many people can actually be bothered to send in that as their only comment. Would it not be more useful to just have one of their vote thingies to at least give some useful data about the actual affects of the quake -

Enter Postcode - .......

Enter severity -

1. Teacups tinkled
2. Bed Moved
3. Mirror fell on Cat
4. Saw Jeremy Paxman wheel across the floor on Newsnight
5. Whole house collapsed - my life is ruined - I still can't find the cat and I can smell gas

Sorry - that is facetious isn't it?

Tuesday, February 26, 2008


Wollstonecraftwerk



Love's Philosophy

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?


I seem to remember either Steve Bell or Martin Rowson having done an "after Fournier" version of the picture up there but I can't find it. If it does indeed exist then it is somewhere on those lists. Good Luck. Is this Bathos or Facetiousness? I cannot tell. Anyway, all this Percy Bysshe is of course to do with Lewis last night. It used to take lot to get me to watch 2 hour detective shows, especially on ITV now that the adverts are frequent and irregular - often interrupting the crucial final quarter that used to be commercial free in the old days of The Professionals. However, now having a PVR with rinky-dinky binary skip we can almost totally ignore such interruptions - we only usually get to see the sponsors logos (today I have an irrational urge to buy everything that Sainsbury's have) - and concentrate on the 90 minutes of actual programme. Have I told you that I feel like a thief? There was a lot of Shelley in it - both Percy Bysshe and Mary and though I've never really bothered with Shelley and "the rest of the boys in the band" the poem above does seem both simple in execution and true in emotion - I was going to say "intent" but if you watched the programme you will know why that is just not allowed - Shelley, Keats, Byron etc , did not have "intentions" in their poetry - they just liked writing it and that is the way poetry should be. Having said that I suppose that Blake and, to a lesser extent, Wordsworth were actually trying to change the world a little bit but I am not nearly enough of a scholar to be able to comment further than the fact that "The Band" were too pisshhed and sshhtoned to be able to actually mean anything beyond the moment. But of course Everything I Know I Learned from TV. Maybe I do want to change the world through poetry but I have seen enough delusion amongst internet poets to know that I cannot. Actually I am not sure I needed to see any delusion to be aware of that.

So now of course a small appreciation of the literary junkies is on the cards though I suspect I really should try and avoid any large intake. What with Marvell last week and Shelley this week - they are really spoiling us.


Monday, February 25, 2008


But This Is One Big Complaint In Itself.

Lately I have been wondering about many things, the collapse of bee colonies, the failure of modern times to live up to promise of 1950s science-fiction and above all the complete waste of neurones that results in the mass of complaint about everything in the country these days; you would think that we were living in some dusty, ex-Soviet republic with a Head Of State who has banned all culture from the X-Factor up. You may accuse me of hypocrisy after some of my rants about various insignificant problems I might have had but I have recently been sharply conscious of my own level of complaint and being honest, most of my own issues are problems with my own lack of motivation to get up and practice things. I am therefore making a serious attempt to not complain about little things because my life is a hell of a lot better than quite a large majority of the world's population. Cliché maybe but cliché is often truth. I am also going to try and avoid stereotype or getting excited about things than when they are broken down to empirical data turn out to be truisms. There is plenty of science and nature in the world that has enough gee-whizz factor to overcome any super-natural speculation and yet it seems that a touch of coincidence is enough to have everyone speculating about "a greater force in the universe". Reduce all of this down and it is clear that not only is the universe a big place, but also two people talking are one person thinking cubed - Each individual comment may seem like nothing at all when taken in the wider context of all people. Of course this does not mean that a dialogue is worthless - the whole chaotic mess depends on conversations - it's just that participants should be prepared to accept that it needs a consensus for things to be moved forward. All this is of course a truism and I am now so bored that I am going to stop - the world is too big for the internet. It is the Internet that has wound me up.

Pictures at 11.

Friday, February 22, 2008


On Being Bookless ( as if ....)



Listening to I can Hear The Heart Beating by Yo La Tengo

I finished reading Love Lessons yesterday and while the content and detail left me in no doubt that it was written about the time it describes, it just seemed too constructed to be a genuine diary - more like a re-imagining along with a heavy edit - though if that was heavily edited I wonder about how scandalous the real-stuff would have been at the time. On top of that, the structure made me think that the end of the book had been decided to give the whole thing a novelistic feel. The whole thing seems to have Joan Wyndham in the role of literary courtesan (meaning not a courtesan who can write but a writer who can tease their readers - if you excuse the image - but you knew that didn't you?) . - Hacker point - where does the bloody punctuation go?

I am now in the weird state of not knowing what to read next. I am usually reading several books at once and there is always something to be getting on with but I seem to have popped-the-stack and left myself with dippable detritus rather than any meaty prose to be started and finished (or of course jettisoned). I never stay in this state for very long but the process of deciding the next book is often very satisfying even if the choice is not. And in fact in the few minutes it has taken to write this, I have realised that I mentioned something from the preface to something I should be getting on with and it has now been firmly pushed onto the stack for completion.

This article fills me with horror. I'd not thought about it until a mate at college said that he'd rather go blind than deaf and I instantly had to agree with him. I have lost bits of my hearing over the years th0ugh strangely it seems to be mid-range unlike the normal age-related high-frequency loss that has lost my dad the ability to hear birdsong which was always important to him. To actually lose the hearing in one ear and to use the third dimension as the writer puts it would seem like hell. Total loss would at least leave you gradually forgetting what pleasure was out there but to keep being reminded of what you had lost would be more than I think I could handle. I suppose I only have the high-frequency loss to look forward to along with the already-noticeable deterioration in my eyesight - well at least the inability to focus on anything less than the length of a small paperback away from my nose. I used to be able to focus on the end of my little finger with my hand outstretched and my thumb touching my nose. I am under orders to get glasses like The Doctor wears should it come to that. Having said all this, apart from reading small text in very dim light I'm not sure I have any problem.

Thursday, February 21, 2008


A Polaroid A Day - Until They Run Out Of Film



Listening to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

That is all. Oh well maybe not all. My notebook has something about the subconscious analysis of social situations to return the correct response - one which does not make people think you are odd. I have wondered whether the social discomfort that Apsergers produces is simply down to some people not being bothered to learn the complex analysis of social situations which is required to steer through day-to-day encounters. I have always felt that I have had to learn the correct responses and that I did this long after most of my peers but I do recognise that I am able to fire the correct response back these days without ever having to think about it. So I would not consider myself to be afflicted. All interaction and thought is complex when compared with the simple equations of physics - even a simple neural network will probably descend into chaotic behaviour while a stone falling will accelerate until it reaches terminal velocity which can be calculated with a few pushes of buttons. It amazes me that more people don't give up on trying to decipher various social situations - sometimes it is so tedious to just play tennis with some idea for the sake of social cohesion. Of course, if you have the right social circle, then the same game can be richly rewarding, taking up hours in what seems like minutes. [Sentence removed due to excessive pomposity]. But maybe this is just because I know a few fellow geeks. I must get one of those things to stop me getting ink all over my top pocket.

How about March being a daily-blog-entry month? I haven't done that for ages. maybe I should extend it and make it a picture-a-day as well. I was thinking of random things at strange angles - processed maybe. We shall see.

Verbatim from the notebook (after watching Control) :-

I know the reason (well some of it) for liking Black and White. It is more real - closer to our perception of what the rest of the world is really like. Maybe the concept of black and white has changed our perceptions of the world. I can still remember when the Nottingham studio of Midlands Today went from B&W to colour.
In the preface to The Golden Notebook the author asks how can a finished novel be true when what they experience in the real world is so rough and formless. How can this be applied positively?

I am sure that the bit about the novel should really have a bit of expansion to have it make sense but I was away from a desk at the time and it was actually painful to write. After that section there is v.poor drawing of a toy oil-drum made of yellow plastic and stencilled with the words :-


Not Sure why.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008


I'll Explain It All Then

Listening to I Often Dream Of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock

Black and White Frenzy this week - watched The Day The Earth Stood Still with my daughter and she was hooked despite it being not quite as full of CGI as she was imagining. She is most pleased with herself that she found out before me that it has been remade and is due to be released in May. It seems a bit sad to criticise Keanu Reeves (Klaatu in the new version) simply because he is not Michael Rennie. Like .. Barada Nikto Dude!Anyway we shall see. Looking forward to it. We watched Control the same night and bleak it was but then again I knew that - didn't you? The cast as band was uncanny - like being there or watching all those iconic shots of them - Hooky fiddling with his amp etc - suddenly start moving. Excellent Movie!

Whistled through In Stitches by Dr. Nick Edwards (another great book from The Friday Project - you should also read Reynolds' book as well - they are both online for free I think if you really want to do them out of the royalties). Everywhere we are defined by "targets" these days - arbitrary gifts to jobsworths, giving them both a reason for living and a get-out clause for any questioning that they might come up against. The four-hour target for A&E patients seems to be the beginning and then end of some politicians understanding of what goes on after a major trauma. If a medic is dragged away from the bleeding edge in order to explain why some patient went over the four-hour limit then that is wrong. Situations are complex as Dr. Edwards often observes in his book - and horror - some managers do actually know what they are doing and why they are doing it - but if your salary/bonus depends on a four hour target then somewhere along the line someone has died because of it. I'm not going to explain the complexities of my assertion but I know it is true and any decent five minutes of contemplation would clarify the truth of it to anyone. Read the book and understand more. I like to think I produce something that is useful in some way and though what I produce is nowhere near as important as diagnosing - on a hunch - the fact that someone has a brain tumour just because they say that playing the piano feels weird (Dr. Edwards' finest hour perhaps) I sometimes think that my line of work is just as limited by targets and documentation that no one ever reads as any public-sector operation.

I want to write another poem but I seem to be fresh out of verse. I am at last keeping a consistent and detailed notebook though most of it is absolute rubbish. I am contemplating scanning it as a rough guide to what goes on here but apart from the poetry, most of the scrawl is not related to this writing. It might be visually interesting I suppose - I love detailed notes even if they mean nothing. I would really like to be able to draw properly like my dad but I just can't - I was described as "a fair draughtsman" in the art section of my report card which was probably down to my obsession with technical drawings of bionic arms. I gave up TD before O Level and I was quite glad because even the best work for O-level looked v. poor to me - smudgy and inexact. Remember - Gurls hav difrent standards of behaviour in Klass.


Tuesday, February 19, 2008


Shop Fronts

London's brilliant
if you take away complaint and moan,
extract that which turns all poetry to prose,
the metre killers
of playing tennis without the net.
How sad it seems to make it all financial,
about nothing more than how I want to live
and sod the rest,
all how to turn all to painful jokes
and knee-jerk cliché you cannot analyse
or even understand.

Here is a weekday high street,
sun glancing on the pavement,
on the day I can first be sure.
my eyes are failing,
as the small print on my sandwich
races me to the edge of space,
red-shifted to a standstill.

I am railing against the cool tonight,
in streets of platitudes and drink.
Here I meet people known to me,
those on the list for here and there,
and my brain swallows them.

Friday, February 15, 2008


Excuse Me! What The Hell Is A "Jazz Fridge"?



Actually I may have misheard this on BBC3 last night. Reithian Ideals indeed. Maybe I will give up on moral relativism after all.

I have been trying to find a definitive picture of Joan Wyndham as she was around the time of Love Lessons but apart from the cover of one of her other books, the only picture is this one from her obit in the (deep breath) Daily Mail. I am not certain that this actually is the Joan Wyndham of Love Lessons and that in actual fact it might be the actress Joan Wyndham who despite being born in 1911 and according to all sources I can find is still alive at 97. Compare with this picture which is of the actress and this one which is the diarist though much older. Anyway, all this has been prompted by reading Love Lessons which I heard reviewed on A Good Read a couple of years ago and have been meaning to read ever since. The diary covers the early years of WW2 while Joan Wyndham was living at home with her mother though actually part of the bohemian life of artists and intellectuals in the area at that time. It is quite strange to see all these delicate flowers going to pieces under the threat of war and the blitz hasn't even started getting going yet. Wyndham herself doesn't seem to be as prone to this sort of collapse as much as the effete artists that surround her, being more concerned with maintaining her virtue in the face of near-assaults by various men. The book also reminds me slightly of the london exploits of Laurie Lee in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning though that was a few years prior to Love lessons.

Also reading In Stitches which although instantly addictive and funny has straight away changed my view of Casualty departments. Funny in places but sadly pleading for sanity in the NHS in others. Very good and very important. Strangely we watched Casualty for the first time in ages last weekend on the strength of a whole episode about the F2 Ruth Winters who was a strangely compelling character despite the swotty stand-offishness. It is nice to see that TV drama seems to have started swinging back to ambiguous characters and unresolved plots. Daughter wants to be a Doctor like her Grandmother and I do not seem to be able to put her off so maybe I should stop trying. There is a long time to go before she has to decide, and of course there are plenty of academic hurdles before then. So I will just have to wait about this hurty knee until she gets there.

Thursday, February 07, 2008


Tabula Rasa

A night of sat-nav
brought you here,
defined by GPS,
you sleep an hour in the car,
and fall into the sand and wind,
to hear the clank of metal,
loose and tumbling around itself.

And now a timer photograph
to prove the location,
of enigmatic smiles,
a tired woman failing on the beach,
to find a meaning.

My head, full of binary and API,
dreams of building you,
from silicon up,
from mitochondria,
to chemistry of mind,
a clockwork, female universe,
predicted in its code and data,
quantumless, desireless,
made to smile with switches,
and maybe me.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008


Not Even A Nurse

Listening to In Rainbows by Radiohead

Luddite that I am, this is on shiny disk along with :-

You Are by Steve Reich
The Reminder by Feist
I Often Dream Of Trains by Robyn Hitchcock.

Can you guess what I watched on Friday night?

And books as well - On Chesil Beach and Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham.

I have to say that the Later performance was the first music I had ever heard by Robyn Hitchcock, though he has been on the "must try" list for ages. I risked the album with just that one song and am sold, entirely. I have Hacker Nature in relation Robyn Hitchcock. Some sort of magic folk-soaked city comes to mind - like Billy Bragg grew up in Lark Rise rather than Essex though I think the RH is a London boy himself.

On Chesil Beach is, as is usual with McEwan, drawing me into what appears to be a complete world. Reviews have taken issue with the reality of certain events but sometimes that does not matter. We shall see. And for all those who wanted to bash the newly-weds heads together - get a grip - interaction with novels is restricted to Doctor Who. Phew!

Tuesday, February 05, 2008


Hacker Nature and Snow Tense

Listening to Heavy Nuggets.

I should really try and listen to more from The Wire; I have a nightmare that I will go through one issue without having heard of anyone in it. Sometimes I am convinced that ALL the artists in it have been made up to snare the unwary - maybe one issue a year is like this - no I am sure I have always at least heard OF if not heard, a few of them. Anyway, regardless of the music, it has a rather attractive though continually-changing design which is of course the real reason for buying any magazine - well isn't it? When they print covers like this, then the Hacker Nature takes over and I am blind.



I really do wish I could draw but artistry shows up my biggest failing which is impatience with anything except the heuristics of minute calls to the API. I know I can do most things to a reasonable level - I just want to do it all NOW. May contain Irony. Watch this space. I suppose this is why I am better at poetry than prose. A poem can be finished when you decide - a story needs a structure and that determines a certain minimum amount of content. May contain obviosity. Thank you Mel. Remember the Copenhagen Mapping.

Monday, February 04, 2008


"You Write Like A Girl"

For three to four hands - a piece like no other - dragged out of us like a broken tooth. Here we are opening our heads to you and you see nothing more than a slight fuzz of distortion and compression. This technology has stolen all the love from you now, taken away the hiss and buzz and made your songs nothing more than tinny diversions in your hands. We used to ignore that hiss; we turned off the Dolby so we could hear the top end and now it's all gone back to haze and mistake. No matter what the geeks in their white castles do to their sound modules, this piano might defy any analysis, leave us unable to tell you why it is different from the real thing but there is no question of how easy it is to tell the difference - half a second and I will tell you this - digital and depressing, not like the icy sound of the felt on wire, or the metallic harmonics of gut on strings. The world has exploded into this now, showering us with the shards and fragments of the meaning of music; no more feeling to a sound, just the humanist leavings of no God and no risk squeezed into your personal 2 Gigabytes, randomly throwing up something you bought but have never heard before and probably never will again. We saw Evelyn up there on the stage and we heard everything that she did not but also we felt in our bodies everything that she did in hers. We reeled at the processed screams of a mad woman, telling us of all the deaths she had known and so telling us of all the ones that we had known. All this processing, was real, unsliced, pushed like waves through air and electronics from mouths and beaters to our ears via warm and tuby electronics, fuzzy, hissy, breaking up like a waterfall in winds. And the radio! The bandwidth restricted, taking out the love again, pushing it into narrow gaps to race the sun to us at night - Moscow versus London - Soviets against the music and we felt and cried, still brought to stop with a few hertz of crackle in the winter air. Think of that when your phone shouts "Death" at you.