Andrew at Rest

So Andrew it is nearly over - back to the proper stuff - at least you knew you didn't have to die in poisoned harness. According to the Guardian, the new Poet Laureate is Carol Ann "Tin Tin" Duffy but maybe we should wait until tomorrow or whenever Gordon Brown can fit the announcement into his busy schedule of trying to look like he's in control. I confidently predict that, should Duffy actually become Poet Laureate, she will write not one poem as part of the job because she will be too busy knocking out belting, welsh-tinged soul ballads or claiming that she was once in Duran Duran. I note that Simon Armitage is still joint favourite with Duffy at William Hill. Like Swine Flu we will not know until we know.

In scanning the papers for stuff about the laureateship I just found this picture of Duffy with Valerie Eliot. The fact that TS Eliot's wife is still alive always takes me by surprise. But so do so many other peculiarities of time. I like time to be nice and simple and when the calculations regarding the overlap of various people's lives become messy, I am caught out. But after all time is just numbers in a sequence and (ignoring relativity) it always flows at the same rate so why I am so messed up about it?

Oxtail! Now!

The view through the long windows is very pleasant today - I can see various trees either in blossom or showing light-green leaves, waving gently in a middling wind like one of the pictures in The Ladybird Book of Trees. Think of this in the midst of the current panic. Any asteroids looking likely at the moment? At least the sun is shining.

I am certainly almost autistically-aware of the changing nature of the world. I am also very concerned that I do not know whether "autistically aware" in that sentence is an adjective or not because I just didn't do any parsing as school. I DID do times tables but still can't remember them all. There is of course no need these days but wouldn't it be nice to have an add-in for Word which would show up the part of speech that the cursor was hovering over in a tooltip? Maybe there is such a thing. Last week there was a conversation here about how a real, chunky-buttoned calculator was much more useful than the fiddly little buttons you have to use on the Windows calculator. I suggested that someone should invent a Bluetooth calculator which would squirt its result across to whatever component had focus on the nearest PC. Been done already. Seems like the parsing add-in has as well. Will I ever have an original idea. How about a set of financial products tailored specifically at penguins, a device for wrapping baked potatoes to keep them warm (sure that's been done - ed), toothbrushes for whales. The potential is enormous.

I'm with these people I am afraid.

A final juicy read for you !

Sestina - First Half

I didn't get where I am today by promising to write poems based on the most complex forms imaginable.

In chaos, dreaming of an epidemic,
passed across the seas and skies,
we wait for dawn and mechanism,
in daily rags and lists of panic,
how the world will end this cycle,
how we missed the signs of Armageddon.

Which madman listed Armageddon,
as the glimmering end of epidemics?
Which historian foresees this cycle
of rain and fire from the skies?
I request whole nations panic,
at the oiling of the mechanism.

We manufacture inefficient mechanism,
from the cooling fires of Armageddon,
with our heuristic joy at panic,
and our seeking out of epidemic.
How they mock our eyes to skies,
the single exit from the cycle.

The Scritti Politti Duty Roster

Saw this on a computer screen today and laughed out loud - nearly as much as I laughed at last night's episode of The Big Bang theory. Hopefully as much merriment tonight from new Have I Got News For You and Reggie Perrin.

I haven't really kept up with Erwin James since he left prison but today he reveals his true identity in this article. The background to his case is here. I make no judgements other than to say that in his case, prison worked. Unfortunately I suspect that no more than a few percent of people going into prison which such a history will come out with the same level of education and self-awareness. If we can put as much effort into education for people at risk of offending on this scale as Erwin James did after his conviction, then the country might be a better place. My internal cynic says that the proportion of offenders prepared to accept this path is about the same as the proportion of people in society in general prepared to rise above the Soma that is fed to us every day and question the fog of comfort that surrounds us. Here I have to admit that I am one for the path of least resistance, a sort of cultural laziness to mirror my own physical inactivity. I suppose I am the worst manifestation of the chattering classes though I like to think that my Enlightened Ignorance raises me slightly above the valley mist that is life today.

Update:

I've just read this article about using brain impulses to Twitter. Now obviously the immediately obvious use of this technology is for "locked-in" syndrome as the article says. However, all I can see is the world full of a multiple of the already-huge level of inane chatter that floats around us. I am thinking of the Belcerebron and their world full of chatter to avoid broadcasting all thoughts telepathically. With this attached to twitter, telepathy will be here. Fear it!

What Makes You Think That the Blame Culture is my Fault?

It being Bill Da Bard's Birthday I need to think of something appropriate. Well here is an article by Ian McMillan about how so many poets kick the bucket on this date. Obviously there is no attached data to prove this; it is all just anecdotal and you know how I feel about anecdotes. I suppose that if Seamus Heaney thinks Eminem is a poet then Johnny Thunders must be.

The most interesting bit of the article is the mention of the poetic form The Sestina which is so structured in terms of the words ending each line that I imagine it must be hard to get anything across in such a poem other than your technical prowess. Despite this I'm tempted to have a go but 39 lines is a lot of work isn't it? The order of the last words of each stanza can be analogised to kneading bread in that each outer word in a triplet is folded into the middle though I can't be bothered to understand it exactly - the list of numbers is enough for me to get the message. I just looked up Iambic pentameter because I have no real idea of what it means exactly but reading how the various subtleties of its use can be employed to slow down the pace I'm a bit bewildered. In reality poets just put down what they think sounds good and of course it always important to say it out loud. I think I used to know all this but like blossom in the spring showers it has all vanished and decayed, just seasoning on the compost heap.

I'm actually in the middle of a proper poem though it doesn't rhyme or anything sissy like that. Unfortunately I'm thinking of entering it into a local competition and it cannot have been available anywhere even if that is a quiet backwater of the interwebs visited only by email-scanning robots and the occasional person looking at that cartoon of Sylvia Plath. Just like the photo for the Iron Men competition, it will be available later.

Aren't You a Little Short for a Storm Trooper?

To The Philharmonic Hall to see a wonderful programme of Music From Outer Space presented by Elizabeth Sladen and her husband Brian Miller - one of the voices of The Daleks from way back. Also many Doctor Who and Star Wars characters as you can see above. Sci-Fi by it's nature is forward looking and a good proportion of the music that accompanies it is optimistic in the extreme. We both left with wide smiles and a happy step but carefully avoided getting too close to the scarecrow in the foyer. Star Wars themes, Thunderbirds marches, Red Dwarf Suites all great stuff - forget the reflective stuff that makes you cool - this is upbeat and just the ticket for a Saturday Evening in Spring. Just watch out for the fan-boys.

Fahr'n Fahr'n Fahr'n ...

Today we go back beyond the eighties. This time the album has never been lost - a copy of it has always been available as it is completely indispensable. Since I first put on the headphones to listen to the full 23 minutes version, I have been hooked, first by the technical prowess that is displayed on an album which was recorded years before any real developments in the gadgetry that so-called techno music uses today and then by the sheer emotion of the thing. I had missed the strange and comical appearance of the band on Tomorrows World in a segments which might have been dismissed as an April Fool. Instead I came to the band without any preconceptions and I was hooked, locked into them as the coolest, most tuneful and most mysterious band ever to walk the planet. Though of course we are not sure they actually do walk the planet - maybe they glide in strange self-built carriages and so have not had to walk since the day Florian first picked up a screwdriver. I don't believe anything about them cycling.

The album itself is a complex set of interlocking parts, spiced with the deep and satisfying sounds of racing engines, brought just to the point of resonance with the human body - you really feel this music - it gets you in the guts or the head or the heart. And though sometimes the sounds are almost exactly the same as those used by the wannabes of such bands as Depeche Mode, these are properly played melodies - a bar may be sequenced to be replayed over and over but here someone actually hits the keys with a swing that none of the synthesizer infants could ever quite manage. I once read somewhere in a review of drum machines, an enthusiastic paean to some device or other by the Fast Fashion guys in which they praised the tightness of the machine and how they had put it on an oscilloscope to prove it. Were they being ironic? No such boasts from the Kling Klang Kids - they had emotion and all of it went into the machines and came out again. The road system of Germany in one day - sampled through the ears of Ralf and Florian and transformed by whatever bits of electronics lay around the studio. The second section with the flute is as-sweet a melody as you could wish for - filmic and intimate at the same time. Then there is the driving section - simply the main beat overlaid with the deep sounds of engines - panning in the speakers, gradually building to a melodic drone which resolves into the next bridge to the slow down and what must be the only instrumental traffic jam ever recorded. It breaks up into a fractal drive towards a resolution with radio sounds and steel drums and the final fade broken up by a speeding engine in the trademark pan to end. Time to lock the car, walk inside and take tea.

By way of a treat, an early and strange radio track from Kraftwerk in 1971.

Never as Cool Again!

The Half-life of Mr Turing's (Dead) Dog

(Picture taken by youngest)

I just upgraded my MSN messenger and it no longer allows add-ins to be used which means that my auto-reply will not work on this version. I assume that this deprecation is either to avoid having to bother with it or because of some security issue. I'm not sure my experiment is worth uninstalling the new version for so Mr Turing's (Dad's) Dog's Dead. Long live .... Mr Turing's (uncertain) cat. Apparently Stephen Hawking says "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol." Won't stop me and I bet it won't stop Brian Cox either.

The notebook really does have some Half-Life calculations in it though they were actually to do with Caffeine rather than nuclear materials - so that's alright then isn't it? Phew - got away with that one.

The rest of the page has the following :-

A Cynical Response to Everything.

(In a shaky, old-man voice "It was much better in my day."

Most people's intelligence is despite rather than because of their education.

Mr. Turing's Dog is dead - forever.

Gatecrashing Second Life.

And that's your lot.

Great Lost Albums - Part 2

Another one rescued from the garage. I love funky sixties flute - something to do with an early live performance in a library somewhere. Pity we have nothing to play this on at the moment.

Demi-Homme et Demi Dalek.

Friday Night in the Tardis. Donna has passed out. K9 has lost a certain amount of stability and requires a good-hard recalibration. And what on Earth has happened to the space fairy on the right I just could not imagine in this universe or the next. At least The Doctor is on his feet, though only just. Davros is vertical purely because he's in that chair thing. At least it's the weekend coming up. Well for the Whoniversers anyway.

And now for some Beautiful Rubbish. Of course while it is beautiful in the singular when artistically lit, in plural it is sad.

I could not do this - it would drive me mad.

Keep on Keeping on keeping on ....

Weird planet today - not sure why - nothing is different outwardly but something is strange in the air. Of course this is something that the CBT should be able to nip in the bud. This exposition will also help disperse it. Like talking about a programming issue with someone solves it without any input from them at all, then trying to define what causes anxiety also seems to lessen it - it seems to be a sort of evolved CBT - the mind's own beta-blockers, as healthy as homeopathy and more effective than placebo. Though I'm not going to put down what worries me here, I think at the moment I would struggle to be able to define anything to go on the list. I am worrying that I am worrying. I do not sleep because I worry that I am not sleeping. The only trouble is that absence of worry can lead to space to think of things to worry about. CBT and exposition should be able to give that route to madness a miss and this is the result.

Stereo Trees

Go cross-eyed and bring them together - someone pointed out how the main branch in the foreground creates a loop over a smaller branch.

Rogue Biscuit Squadron

If only the biscuits had been posher, we wouldn't be in this mess. Which reminds me about the help ticket I once had to deal with that spoke of "rouge characters" in a file. 

And now for something completely different.

This Episode Goes Up To 11 .... Malcolms

David Tennant Day in this house it seems. There he is on breakfast news and then again doing a reasonable-if-shambolic stand-in for Jonathan Ross along with Catherine Tate and various other Whoniversers on Radio 2. And then the main feature which did not disappoint (shame on all you reviewers who seem to think it was not grown-up enough - that is the point saddos). It would have been enough just to have a flying double-decker let alone swarms of omnivorous metal stingrays and the bionic woman as well. And then there was Malcolm. We love Malcolm as much as Malcolm apparently loves The Doctor. I'd salute as well.

Patch, Balance, Stop, Mix

(From Flickr) (Brilliant by the way! Buy it!)

I have nothing! Not a jot, not an iota, not a scrap of an idea. There is the single, unfinished phrase "The Patent ..." which means nothing to me and I only wrote it this morning. What can I use to trigger something? A fridge fell over in the street outside at about 3:30 this morning but it didn't wake me up. That is all.

I did do some work on The Steve Reich Simulator V2.0 and was actually able to get .net calling the midi APIs after a few minutes googling which not only solved my problem but indicated that using the APIs to play midi was likely to involve me in a huge amount of work. This is of course rubbish as my wrapper functions have only two lines of code to work out the midi message to send. I also failed to initialise a sleep duration variable for the thread which I am now using to play the notes, meaning that it actually implemented Thread.Sleep(0) which of course just played the sample note continuously and quickly in the thread without letting anything else get a word in. It sounded dangerously scratchy up close and like the closedown beep from a distance. Couldn't do anything else but unplug the PC but all the code was saved and returned uncorrupted. I ran it again after initialising the sleep variable to a minimum value. The test shows that the thread plays the notes in exact tempo without any other processing interfering. The new interface looks good as well. As .net does not have control arrays I decided to define the note structures using a DataGridView (which is of course the reason for using a later version of .net). This means that I can do block settings of notes rather than ticking or unticking myriad check boxes. I suppose I should think about proper note creation but that would take me away from the idea of interactions and counterpoint. Coasting from now on I hope.

I know him! I know him!

Here is John Sentamu's Speech on 'Englishness' or if you want the short version, the summary from his own site. He quotes from two books I have read - Kate Fox's Watching the English and Paxo's The English: A Portrait of a People. I do apologise for the variation of the old joke about the devastating letter - we have to forgive Doctor Sentamu; it's apparently in the job description! Nice to see a bit of depth and intelligence in a speech these days. There is indeed a loss of great orators; no one to fire up the determination to do things - the reaction of people to speeches these days is polarised - no one is converted or even convinced to consider the other side of the argument. All response seems to be knee-jerk condemnation of everything that one does not agree with.

I wonder if the recent requirement for archiving details of emails for a period of time (really cannot be bothered to look up the details) will result in more people writing real letters? It would be a very good way of keeping things out from under the noses of our dear leaders wouldn't it? Of course this could be remedied by requiring Royal Mail to take a copy of every letter but that would be far too difficult wouldn't it? My point here is that the Government have decided to keep records of emails not because they should but because they CAN. All you need to do to foil the system is to get hold of a pen and some paper. Unless of course there is a secret army of Civil Servants armed with kettles and photocopiers, who open up all the mail and send cross-referenced copies to a disused aircraft hangar near Ongar. It is the information equivalent of the black economy. I return to my argument that it is not only the great majority of internet commenters who have no idea of how big the world actually is but the Government as well. Lack of capacity planning has just come back to haunt me in some small local issue; it will come back to haunt the implementers of The Great Email Archive as well.

Helberg's slightly-not-sure-about-this principle

(Edited at http://tiltshiftmaker.com/)

The Notebook is empty but the mind is full, though as before it is still all rubbish. I feel a bit unfulfilled for some reason - having eaten the surprise stilton that appeared in the fridge as if by magic over the weekend there seems not a lot to look forward to. I know that is wrong and I should be using the CBT to try and work it out and it's not that anything is negative; just that nothing looks to be positive. I suppose I have a natural solution to this in that I start thinking about programming projects such as the idea of starting to use threads on the Steve Reich Simulator so that changing the settings on-the-fly doesn't stop the melody. However, I also want to change the input matrices so that I can add or delete notes in bulk rather than by selecting each one in turn. I've done it using a DataGridView control but that only works in Framework 2 so it looks like I might have to upgrade at home. I suppose really I should build a custom control to do it as slickly as possible but that seems too much like proper work to be exciting.

Talk here today is of the office Christmas party. This depresses me further of course, not because Christmas is approaching but the fact that we are talking about it before the worshipping has been got out of the way for this year. This arises of course from the general need to add value to everything that possibly starts out with value in the first place and to push value onto things which should be free. The time has come to take back Christmas and Easter, boycott moonpig.com and to start working out what we really should value in the world and our own celebrations. I suppose this is an extension of the Ronco Olive Pitter effect, whereby societies in which people do not have to struggle to survive give rise to completely useless artifacts and concepts. Did one of you just shout "PINKO"?

Meanwhile - something meaty yet middle-of-the-road ... err ... debate.

Backyard Mondrian

or maybe Crosby Boogie-Woogie.

Die Toaster! Die!

The notebook is full ... of rubbish. The first entry is the fact that tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the exact date when Winston Smith started his diary and therefore began his defiance of Big Brother. Mark the date well.

Then comes the fact that an error message I saw on a web page regarding development howlers was jokingly compared to Klingon - to be exact the following phrase - Hab SoSlI' Quch! - an insult so vile that it must not be said to friends. I also have a mention of The Marcos Twins but that is to do with shoes.

The reason for the self-portrait of Stanley Spencer being up there is from this article regarding art from reputed History Man Laurie Taylor. I always think that the picture that is mentioned is by Stanley Spencer rather than Lucien Freud. Not sure of the full drift of the last bit of Taylor's piece - was it Lucien Freud he met or just someone who looked like him and the fact was mentioned all the time? Laurie Taylor is always a bit airy-fairy on Thinking Allowed.

Final bit is an image that has been bugging me for ages. One of the guys in the office often wears a headset to speak on the phone. He is across the office with his back to me and the image of him there has triggered memories for years. Today I worked it out. It is this poster.

I was intrigued by a mocking comment regarding the protests against the G20 regarding the fact that the "great unwashed" were taking pictures of the Police using cheap Chinese-or-Korean-made cameras and the uploading them via a network infrastructure all courtesy of venture capitalists. Now I'm not taking sides other than to say that violence is rilly, rilly bad but I suspect that any group in a conflict would feel rather smug had they managed to turn the enemy's weapons on themselves. Not that plastering a few pictures of riot police on the web is going to change anything is it? It is not ironic that the barbarians who caused the break-up of the Roman Empire then went on to make their disgusting hovels out of the bricks torn from the Roman Villas.

The Halls of Montezuma

Right! I know in my own head why the probability of getting the car by switching is 2/3.

Pick a Door.

Probability of the car being behind that door is 1/3.

Probability of the car being behind either of the other doors is 2/3.

NOW - instead of having an incorrect door being opened, imagine that the two unchosen doors merge into one big door. If you open this door and the car is behind it you get the car (AND the goat that is with it if you really want it).

What is the probability that the car is behind this new mega-door? If you said 1/2 then you are wrong. It is still 2/3.

Do you want to swap from your chosen door now?

Merging the two unchosen doors is logically the same as revealing one of the unchosen doors as having a goat. It may take some thought to accept this but now in my head I know what is right and this tallys with what my program said.

QED

I am annoyed by the whole fabric of society.

Discussions in our house were a might fraught after viewing Marcus du Sautoy trying to convince Mathematical Illiterate Alan Davies that maths lacks common sense. Now off the top of my head I could not explain the details of what is actually called the Monty Hall problem and without the solution in front of me I still lean away from what is truth and towards the intuitive answer but at least I am able to test the real-world answer using a program and the answer is 2/3 for switching, 1/3 for staying where you are after 10 million cycles. Trouble is I don't think the random number generator in VB is that random but I could not be bothered to drag random numbers out of Pi. The answer was good enough for me.

Anyway, to PJ Harvey and John Parish and A Woman a Man Walked by. The official review in the Guardian is glowing, claiming that the two artists are at the peak of their powers. However, Miranda Sawyer in The Observer, usually an arbiter of reasonable taste, struggles to cope with the yelling and barking (which is not hyperbole) . Indeed two of the tracks are shouty in the extreme, like Linda Blair on a bad day but then again what did you expect? Try and reconcile this with the intelligent and coherent woman in the video interview. Also purchased in the same tranche as Peej and Parish was Wire along with Wiretapper 21 the standard repository of all that is good and great in the less-travelled staves of modern music. None of the tracks on this are in any way as frightening as the two most raucous Parish/Harvey tracks and some are quite gentle. All good stuff though.

Finally, China have presented their own Panchen Lama. How do they think that this has any validity? Bearing in mind that the Dalai Lama's own choice of Panchen Lama is lost somewhere in China after being rejected by the Chinese Government, to say that there is a suspicion of foul play is quite an understatement. There are plenty of obviously, political acts which are two-fingers up at the rest-of-the-world but this is the most blatant of the lot, not that I'm sure you would be able to find out about it in China itself. Angry I am. Not sure what anyone can do to be honest but then wha' do I knoo?