Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Bathetics and Juju Space Jazz



Here in the wavering darkness I have left my family asleep, my daughter with a sword by her side, and I walk under the shaded signs of dawn through the roiling clouds, the sediment of all that is bad, through the damp smell of fallen leaves and the mist of pathetic rain to my routine and ready mix.

So pretty normal for this time of year then.

I wasn't so much taken with this review of Creation in the Guardian but the comments were quite funny and pretty much uni-thematic. I especially like :

Have to say I agree with the posters above. Being atheist, or agnostic, does not render you either immoral or amoral, but allows you to be good, decent, honest, kind, true, loving and the rest without having to be reminded of it every Sunday morning by the vicar. In fact, those creationists ought to be thanking their lucky stars that we godless types are by and large very decent human beings. If we weren't, we might have started eating them. Me, I'm content to just shove the occasional one under a bus...

I should now trail out of my own spiel about how I know what is good and bad behaviour but I always worry about straying into moral relativism - that which I am apt to use from both sides of the argument when it suits me which shows me up for the fence-sitter that I am. I'm not sure if I can even sum up what I believe is good behaviour - the danger is that I behave like I do because I always have - that I do what I I was told was right without questioning it though I do like to think I question quite a lot of how we are supposed to behave or what we are supposed to believe. This is forming a queue of warning bells in my head - conspiracy theory loon being the latest of them.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Comment Me Up

Go on - who lives at Ile-de-France in Paris - I would so like to hear from you.

The Dream of Espresso and the Gorgon

The far-away things are back in my head again - the long walk up the hill to a hidden community, a dream of permanent twilight and plenty but separated from all that we know during the day. I walk alone though I know I can return at any moment, turning round and threading my way back through the maze of half-completed buildings, the follies of misguided regeneration programmes. They block off the roads as if some VIP was due but we know they just do it to annoy us. It's all conspiracy and lies, something designed to stop us getting back home. Some people have stopped by the side of the road; they have found the most beautiful backdrop and it has inspired them to play music, to turn random harmonics into something extraordinary and seemingly not of this planet. Behind them some star - not The Sun - sets while behind me facing them, another rises but the interplanetary dust turns the harsh light of all that fusion to a dusty orange glow that flattens the day and makes all time seem the same. Those light-minutes filter out all the radiation and leave us happy and safe, free of illness and depression, but stuck high above the plains where all the poison has sunk. This is the order of heaven, the benign dictatorship of paradise, run by a committee of gods, brought forth from the minds of all who share the consciousness of theology. There is no dissent - hell, purgatory, limbo or heaven; they are all the same, a filtered compression of all our images of what we want the world to be. No one stands up to be counted or to complain. There is a continuous gentle murmur, the rumbling of people thinking about things and never revealing the conclusions. The music stops, for no one wants to sing and music like this needs the human voice to be complete, not that anyone here can understand this - they just know that something is missing. There are no accidents, no one dies here but still there is pain, the pain of compromise and acceptance of differences. There is no anger or hate, and everyone exists at some median between the extremes of mood.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Chris Bonington IS The Elephant Man


I'm going to try an entry for every day next month and a photo as well, one that I have taken. I am thinking of having a theme but I'm not sure I could keep that up as well.

I would have posted a picture of the coffee stain that spread itself over two post-it notes last week. I thought it looked liked Chris Bonington in a woolly hat but everyone else I've shown it to says it is The Elephant Man. As a foreshadowing of the trash that will have to be put up here for the next few weeks, I can't actually think of anything else to write as just doing the thinking for this piece seems to have filled my brain with cotton wool. Oh well!

Friday, September 25, 2009

Made in Cheshire from Girders

A nice list of gadgets from scientists and celebrities in the Guardian today. Some of them are obviously a bit frivolous but the drawings are nice. I'll have to come up with one of my own, though I've been thinking that a really useful one would be a cross between the Total Perspective Vortex and the Point of View gun, the first to make the lunatics realise that the world is slightly bigger than that inhabited by The Little Prince, and the second to help them understand that occasionally someone else does actually have a point. It's all very well coming over all Edward de Bono about things (though not having read this I think I might actually be agreeing with him) but sometimes we just have to accept that the world will never be full of people who think exactly like we do. In fact, the only way to meet someone with exactly the same view as you would be via mater replication and even then, the instant of duplication would be followed by a diverging of opinion. .... pause for thought .... actually thinking about it, a copy of me would probably end up in a huge argument with me. I predict a riot. I am not depressed. I haven't done a Random Friday for sometime now have I. Just writing it seems like a cliche and once mentioned it seems impossible to start one - they just start and end with no preamble or epilogue, said the aardvark! And here is another article from the Guardian about the use of robots to mark essays. The exam board insists that the "robots" have achieved the same results as human markers but without the tiredness etc. I would hope that the algorithm is something a little more sophisticated then the online apps which purport to work out the reading age/minimum level of education required to understand a piece of writing. Now I'm not sure about this because if you use a common measure - The Fog Index - various online apps give the text to here a varying result between 10 and 12. The following nonsense paragraph :

The obscure and alliterative antediluvian mixtures that deviate tenuously from the norms and means of accepted obfuscatory almanacs, are, in the main, a conflagration of adverse reactions to the diasporic, conversational and textural beliefs propagated by the chemical and messianic upheavals granted to more alleviations of sufferings within the current regimen.

.. comes out at 33 which is just silly and makes me wonder how clever these routines actually are. Putting numbers to words simply by counting characters etc, is not going to give any indication of the true worth of any piece of writing. The essay markers must be something several magnitudes higher in order to reach the level of even the rookie human marker. We shall all just be organic jelly to feed the machines soon. Skynet anyone?


Thursday, September 24, 2009

Bit Whiffy! Still, Much to Learn!

Reading Logs:

Finished And Now on Radio 4 by Simon Elmes
Started Annie's Box by Randal Keynes

So many things today. I forgot to mention this list of various versions of the tube map, along the lines of the masterful Great Bear by Simon Patterson. Some are rude so be warned.

As you can see, I finished And Now on Radio 4 which continuously filled my head with the notable voices of radio greats alive and dead - Brian Redhead, Alistair Cooke, John Peel and of course the current lead voice of Charlotte Green up there. The book jumps between programmes at such a rate that the procession of internal voices was beginning to become a bit spooky.

And now something I have been meaning to mention here for some time, the Classification of Animals by Jorge Luis Borges. It first cropped up in one of Steven Pinker's books but it is far funnier than his academic perspective suggests. I especially like "those that from a long way off look like flies." It just seems that this is the way things work in the real world in defiance of all human attempts to regiment our interactions.

Anyway, my attempt at a similar list. I will leave it to you to decide to what it applies.

1. those which everyone knows will fail.
2. ones that finish costing double the estimate.
3. unclassifiable.
4. those possessing an internal, logical inconsistency.
5. those that don't.
6. ones which start by being drawn on a napkin.
7. any having the word "Norwegian" in the title.
8. ones you may have heard about but which do not really exist.
9. all starting between October and November (not inclusive).
10. those with a budget of infinity.
11. ones where the due date is a "division by zero" error.
12. moist ones.
13. government regulated and therefore perfect.
14. those which when fully defined resemble Scrabble Boards.

There - quite proud of that.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Twenty-Four Hours from Borchester



The Radio 4 book is full of both heavyweight information and lots of snippets of trivia about the best talk radio in the world. Like Nelson Gabriel taking part in an armed raid? And the affairs! Oh the affairs! I should listen more.

The fact that every one's favourite crib for essays ... er ... online encyclopedia ... has a separate article for Nelson Gabriel is quite something. As wiki covers the entire known Universe, it must contain such snippets for the obscure actors in soaps from all round the world. I suppose it must have a bias towards English-Speaking soaps - or even just Western soaps but just the sheer scale of the data within it is, when you think about it rather than just typing and clicking, just mind boggling.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Being More Like Collingwood

Daughter is now known as Emily Strange at school. Not having heard of the name before, I thought it might be some sly insult but after a brief bit of searching, daughter is quite happy to be labelled as such. The picture over there is just like her - scowl and all - so now you know what she looks like. Likes maths and science! She sure does.

What else? Oh yes! I've been meaning to mention something about a colleague's workstation in this office. The desk has an angled laptop stand and a separate, rimless, black keyboard attached over the standard laptop keyboard. The chair is a special one with various extra levers and special counter weighted arm rests which makes the whole area look like a control console from the bridge of The Nostromo. What with our line of work, this is very cool indeed. All of which reminds me - ah yes - the standard blogging phrase of the moment - of last nights design version of The Apprentice - Design For Life with Phillipe Starck - a man who could not be any more French without a beret and onions. The trouble with this show, is that the designers in competition seem unhappy at being in such a position - apart from the standard bad boy of such contests, they all seem to want to work together and given the airy-fairy briefs about helping humanity that Starck gives them , they naturally want to assist each other - so much so that on the rejection of one of the nice guys, the others protested and had his rejection overturned - which was nice.

And now for advance notice of a film. You might guess that this is the one shown shown below and of course you would be right.



The trailer looks a bit sentimental but the film concentrates on Darwin's life rather than his theory. Apparently some of it was filmed in Malvern which will be fun.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Men With Ven


Looks like I got caught mid-sneeze there. Trouble is I probably always look like this when taking a photograph. Never mind.
The notebook is currently full of graphs to explain the functions that my daughter is having to learn as part of year seven maths. Sitting with her trying to drag out stuff from dusty recesses and looking at the shiny, new text books that she has to use, it is clear that things are better explained than they were when I was her age. Not that I think we did anything as advanced. I think I might try and do the homework along with her just to see how it goes.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Kipling


I am lost in the joys of BITS (you will know it only by the little yellow icon down at bottom right when Windows Updates come down) and very interesting it is to. I can't go into any detail about what I want to use it for but I can say that I might try and use c# instead of vb.net for this one. Not that it really makes much difference as Microsoft have provided a nice wrapper for the APIs so using it is a breeze - I hope.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Wye Aye!


I am so annoyed that I cannot blog my main notebook entry for today. It would be unfair an libellous to report the thoughts that popped into my head this morning. You will never know.

This diagram of public spending has made me think of correspondences in my own life. When I try to clean up my hard drive (as I have just done) it is always the large files I look for first. Trouble is that most of these large files are absolutely necessary (paging and hibernation files for example) and completely ring fenced. There is much ranting amongst the readers of certain newspapers regarding the terrible benefit culture that exists in this country but looking at the Spending by the Work and Pensions department it is the State Pension that costs the most. Now I am sure that there are some extreme libertarians who would knock out the entire W&P department (though obviously such people would delete everything except defence and possibly education) preferring to suggest that everyone should make arrangements for their own retirement/redundancy/other misfortunes). Of course a wet liberal like me might choose other things. The problem is, you cannot remove entire large scale department spending, instead you have to have to painstakingly go through all spending and make small adjustments which add up to the reduction you want. The analogy of course fails when you realise that any amount of public spending will be accompanied by some pain while pernickety deletion of lots of small files only has a cost in terms of the time it takes you to do it.

What I have also spotted about the diagram is the lovely bit of self-reference in that the Treasury "spends" almost as much money as the NHS - most of it covering "the bail out" (which of course I have to bite my tongue to support). Money as usual costs money and as far as I can see is simply a "Red Queen" effect. But then again what do I know?

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Call That an Intermission!


The colours are not right at all but this is the best I can do regarding James Cowie's painting called Intermission. Not sure why I like it so much but it might be the reflection of a life so much simpler than ours. I was going to make September a full month with a picture taken by me for every day but I forgot at the start of the month. I will have to remember for October.

Now is the time for the daily outrage. Now the film Creation about Charles Darwin looks a bit overdone to me, not that it will stop me seeing it. However what is really annoying is that it has failed to find a US distributor because it is too controversial. Ho hum! Then again I suppose I didn't see Mel Gibson's passion despite it trying to be as realistic as possible though having seen about 2 minutes of it at my brothers, I do wonder how they decided that an androgynous devil/snake was part of the actual scene. Anyway all this makes me depressed on top of other things so I will try and forget about it.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Intermission



I've thought that I ought to make a formal effort to detail the starts and ends of the books I read. At risk of starting on an unending stack of starts without ends, here goes.

Started and Finished Send in the Idiots by Kamran Nazeer

Started And Now on Radio 4 by Simon Elmes

Daughter is quite taken with Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds after hearing a live recording of it on the radio the other day. We were able to find the book to go with it but I think she found it a bit wordy though I was hoping it might provide a gentle introduction to 19th century novels.

However, it did get me thinking about the various solutions to the Martian Invasion as put forward by the various characters. The initial response is the standard fight fire with fire and of course this means the deployment of soldiers who respond to The Martians' first shots. The Martians easily defeat anything that mankind can throw at them and rapidly take over the country. After the destruction of the Ironclad Thunderchild, the narrator encounters the mad curate who is certain that The Martians are devils and aims to exorcise them. Finally, the narrator comes across an artilleryman who he met earlier, who insists that mankind can rebuild secretly under the feet of The Martians but who in the end turns out to be fickle (with a hint of the future dictator about him I thought) and they separate. The downfall of the Martians is brought about by the bacteria of earth, to which the invaders have no immunity - an ending that is inevitable as soon as the first Cylinder is opened to the atmosphere.

Not only did HG Wells get a lot of the science entirely correct, he managed to identify the path of enlightened ignorance as well, something which might well apply to a few modern-day issues. I don't want to suggest that we should sit back and do nothing, relying on the whatever-will-be-will-be solution but the general plans suggested in most cases do not always have the best outcomes. Small moves every time.

Todays article is Charlie Brooker's Column from the guardian. I have rapidly gone off Damien Hirst. I can appreciate that his stuff is art and all that clinical precision appeals to me a lot but the man himself is an oaf. It all makes me want to stick jpegs of all his work over this blog. I know of course that he would not be bothered with me just for that but how much can he possibly lose by allowing a few humorous collages of his stuff when most of that is already lifted from other sources and produced Koons-like by outsourced talents immeasurably superior to his own?

Here he is - pickled in a way I suppose.



This is a piece extracted from a larger work depicting a whole fantasy art gallery. This Pickled Shark and Tracey Emin's bed are at The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool which we visited on Saturday. The newly discovered jewel of this visit for me, is a painting called Intermission by the Scottish artist James Cowie but unfortunately I cannot find the picture anywhere on the web so you will have to make do with something else by him.

A Portrait Group by James Cowie - from The National Gallery.


Friday, September 11, 2009

Call the Copts!


Sorry - another Jodrell Bank photo - I need to take some more this weekend.

An unadvertised joy on the BBC has been Kate Humble's trip around The Middle East following the old Frankincense Trail. Her visit to a Christian Church in Egypt was marked by the joy that her gift of Frankincense brought to one of the monks who said that they were rarely able to get hold of the genuine article. Kate's trail started in Oman where she bought a sack or two of the stuff but she has been handing it out like toffee to various high-ups throughout the region. She will arrive at the end of the series in Jordan, with a matchbox of the stuff. And we mustn't forget the first programme had her accompanying a huge herd of Camels across the desert while carrying a rifle which seems to have got a few of our more libertarian friends a bit hot-under-the-collar.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Dream of Bee Maps



We thought a lot of the garden at the end of summer. It buzzed with activity just as much as it had in June, but now, with grumblings of how autumnal it had suddenly got, the din was different. It comes down to anthropomorphism - how can the bees sense that they need to work harder to get ready for the cold weather? The seasons have been around for millions of years, plenty of time for the slow workings of evolution to drum ideas into the tiny heads of any insect. We are just as susceptible to the suggestions of the environment, the gradual, unconscious awareness of the gently curving waves that mark the climate and the weather (for they are different things whatever anyone says).

I thought this morning, of making a continuous graph of the temperature and realised that such a thing would almost always be smooth, sinuous and without discontinuities. The temperature rarely changes at a speed that is noticeable to us. It climbs or falls slowly until suddenly someone wonders out loud how it got so hot or cold and the cusp of catastrophe throws everyone into the same thought. The seasons flow like this, like the hands of a clock which when watched seem not to move but always do, moving at the same angular velocity regardless of the observer effect or other more esoteric theories of time. The bees, living so much less time than we do, may have some mechanism that shows them the motion of time in a much more obvious manner. Maybe they 'see' everything, each individual moment as they bumble and blunder from flower to flower, through the slow march of the seasons, sped up in their vision depending on which setting they choose, to the endless variation of climate bringing sense and division to the entire existence of this planet.

We do not have this same intensity in our connections with the world. Many of us don't seem to have it at all. One minute we are racing around the playground, arms outstretched like the heroes we think we are and the next we are slumped in a chair wondering where everything went, the events in between invisible and forgotten. We must commit every moment to memory, be able to recall every second as if we were making internal maps of the three dimensional world to allow us to pretend that we live in four. Apply this trick of space to time and you will step outside of the linear flow, into the hyper-time that links the beginning and the end of the universe, the curve of time analogous to the curve of space. Imagine your house in space, not just the bits you can see at any one time, but the whole thing, hanging in front of you, semi-transparent and able to be rotated with just a thought. You are living now in the next dimension, existing like a four-dimensional god, able to see everything that exists without having to look round corners.

And now, think of how to do this with time, imagine you life to now, possibly like a line with marker posts for significant events. What do you see where it crosses the millennium? Is it any different for that year when compared to the others? Next imagine it compressed like a line turns into a circle and circle turns into a sphere. You have all the time you have experienced in your vision. You can recall any event just by spinning this globe of your life in front of you. I think this is how the bees see time, possibly passing it from generation to generation in junk DNA. The greater part of our identity as defined by our genes, is apparently meaningless; just long lists of seemingly random codes, holding no information that we can decipher, the ultimate in security by obscurity or possible by absurdity. Sometimes I wonder if the secrets to everything about life are encoded in these strands and then I realise that this is a truism, because of course, all life is descended from a single common ancestor. Our DNA is just a version of that original string, with each life experience adding more to the code. There are the pieces we can see and manipulate but mixed in are the mysterious extra links, the pieces we strive to understand.

Is the secret of consciousness held in there? It must be. We are conscious beings and all the construction of the machines which are our bodies is defined in the DNA. All secrets of life are in there - the entire blueprint and history of life on this planet, encoded in each and every tiny cell. The skin cells which fall of my fingers as I type this each contain more information than has entered my brain since I first cast eyes on the dim lights of the hospital where I was born. All the things I have done and all the dreams of things I want to do are nothing compared to those sequences of letters that define the jelly that is us. Each bacterium, washed away at the sink, has information that remains inside us now despite the millions or perhaps billions of years which have passed since the existence of our common ancestor. The earth cannot be young; it needs to be old for all this wondrous mechanism to have developed from nothing, to have been brought about by the random mixing of chemicals, that one day created an accidental self-replicating machine that in its fuzziness has produced all the hatred, joy and delight at existence which humans possess today. The ultimate free lunch. All that you enjoy is the result of random accident and I know that that is true no matter how much you argue with me.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Frasmotic Compunctuousness and Gertrude Stein


Did you like yesterday's poem? I'm not sure I do. It was an exercise in the observation of a small moment of time but I think it didn't stick rigidly to the speed at which it started and accelerated through to get the end out of the way much earlier than it should have. However, lunchtime poems are time-limited anyway and you wouldn't want a poetic equivalent of The Mezzanine would you? My wife has complained that I use the word 'symmetry' in every third poem so I did a search through all 217 pages of poems that I have stored up and found only one instance. I do know that there is at least one word which I do overuse but I can't work out what it is, even using a frequency counter. It certainly wasn't contrafibularities.

Which reminds me that Richard Curtis is reportedly going to write an episode of Doctor Who. We shall see - Stephen Fry was supposed to be writing one but he is probably behind with The Dambusters so I don't hold out much hope. Maybe he isn't after all. Long entry tomorrow perhaps so I need to think about it.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Slow Motion Magnetron ...



... sparks the dissolution of two molecules,
Becoming fire with brothers falling in as one,
The growing boil of chemicals, of hate,
That roll together through the pressured air.

This flame, a matchless void of oxygen,
Burns brighter, bound by microseconds,
Melts plastic with its heart aflame for god,
For hatred and all the saints and martyrs.

The liquid orange heart, the blood in water,
Thick and viscous, now takes up your shout,
This thing you ask with no solution possible,
Until it screams, and breaks and steams.

And echoing cosmology, expands in void,
Upstopped by steel, by glass and plastic,
But first of all by you, embracing it in hope,
Of all the celestial ecstasy that surely follows.

Describe the heat on skin, the first embrace,
Of god upon you, a rescue from the sins,
Of being human in this dirty world, this house,
This starting step to harmony.

And so the grip gets tighter, tears apart,
Your skin from skin and flesh from bone,
Fragments this beaming, grinning corpus,
With a final scrape of mind from brain.

And in chaotic space, there hangs this thought,
The thought of proof of nothing, time stretched,
To infinity, perhaps eternity, time to be decided,
By last consciousness as paradise or hell.

Monday, September 07, 2009

Self, Self, Self!



I was going to write something about libraries about which I was extraordinarily excited. That has passed and I can't actually bring myself to put anything about libraries here. Which leaves me without a defined subject. What's new! Anyway, this has reminded me of the strange book I chose from the library on Friday. It is Send in the idiots: Or How We Grew to Understand the World, a book by a UK Policy Advisor about the lives of his autistic former class mates. The author is autistic himself though I suspect that on the spectrum it is quite mild. I am only just starting the second chapter but his description of his own repetitive behaviour and that of others does not yet seem very much beyond my own or that of quite a lot of my colleagues. That of course may just be the line of work which I am in and that any behaviour that I exhibit cannot possibly be abnormal for me. The style of the book is a novelistic mix of narration regarding the reunions with his classmates interspersed with his personal opinions on behaviour and language. It doesn't drag me in like some books but it does seem to have a mysterious draw from the fact that it is so strange. It is well-written and structured which I suppose is what you might expect.

My own personal theory is that we are all autistic to some extent. Thinking about things, I can pick out internal conflicts between my desire for order, resistance to change and the practical necessities of living in a world which is anything but these things. Disorder is maybe the result of the conflict between the individual views of every person in the world as to what order actually is.

Nature, for all its fractal randomness is an order created from the settling of things. Change in nature takes place on a scale far wider and lasting longer than human change which is why we are at odds with nature. The differences in scale and time frames between different groups of humans and different age-groups within those groups creates the disorder. Autistic people trying to live in the non-autistic world survive only by making an intellectual effort to work out what the non-autistic world expects of them, things which non-autistic adults instinctively feel and probably do not even register in themselves.

I look back and wonder if I haven't had to carry out some of this conscious work to be able to interpret the real meanings behind actions and behaviours. I am sure I have but now it seems to be an unconscious things; I have learned this and now the learning has sunk into the regions of my mind where it just comes as "second nature". Maybe this is what all humans do - it just happens faster in most and they are able to pick it up before adulthood. Could it be that emotional traumas at certain ages lock a person into a particular stage and the severity of that trauma decides how long that hiatus lasts. My general criterion for ending such a speculation as this is when I judge that the whole discussion breaks a certain boundary for the complexity of the discussion and this has now been reached in that I see that this is impinging of the whole area of developmental behaviours - Genie and the other so-called feral children.

We are trying to understand our own machine code, a giant self-reference which I think might be the key to consciousness.

Friday, September 04, 2009

Twice Bjorn


Beautiful song from Robyn Hitchcock on the Today Website of all places. He is of course a fun guy to be with.

Well ... apologies for that. What's the real business of the day? The notebook is empty apart from the number of a spare part we need to order. The mind is likewise save for the ear-worm of something very loud and repetitive by FBS, which really needs removing with something soothing. I have just realised that my recent sonnets have played fast-and-loose with standard form in that the first four lines need the same rhyme scheme as the second four ie. abbaabba. I'm not that worried as I am pretty certain that The Poetry Police (a division of the Cultural Bureau of Investigation along the lines of The Folk Police) have not yet been armed with anything more dangerous than a frilly shirt and a pale complexion though of course in the wrong hands even those can be fatal.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Hornless B



Some Vikings invaded the local park the other week. They were very friendly though there was a bit of pursuit with spears going on at times. We did get a rebate on our Danegeld though, in the form of some freshly-minted sliver pennies as you can see below.



They seem to have gone away now which is useful as they were beginning to confuse the dog walkers who thought they might be a Draconian response to the fouling problem.

The new notebook has been broken open and with it I have defined a new system for notes and decided on keeping it neater. First up is this article ABOUT CAPS - YOU MUST READ IT. I'm not sure that anyone should lose their job for using all CAPS but a quiet word (possibly in italics) might be in order. And loosely connected to notebooks is my daughter's purchase of a perfectly formed facsimile of The Journal of Impossible Things - the dream diary of John Smith from the Human Nature episode of Doctor Who. Because it came with a sonic screwdriver pen, I was convinced that this would be a throw-away cash-in but it turns out to have 72 printed pages of rough notes in terrible handwriting, interleaved with charcoal drawings of many of the things from the recent series. Fantastic value! I can only hope that whoever created it has been well paid - this really is like a window between the real world and the Whoniverse.

Daughter has also bought and constructed a half-scale cardboard Dalek which is currently creating further restrictions to entering her room by being stuck to the door.

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Both Specious and Spacious


I polished off The Tent, The Bucket and Me in a few days and very funny it was too. Just the right level of scatology to be funny without being off-putting. It is one of those books you don't want to end. Actually, thinking more deeply about that, it must be rare for a book to end exactly when you think it should. I have been making an effort to finish books I start and it seems to be working though as part of this I hope I am being more selective. Back into Desperate Romantics now though I lost the bookmark and was struggling to work out whether stuff I had read was because I was re-reading passages or because it was just generally familiar from the Lizzie Siddal Biography. Back on track now though.

While I struggled to fill up the previous notebook I am now loathe to start the next. I just can't think of anything to put that will allow the thing to start in the way I want which is all very sad.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

You'd Think There'd be an ATM at Least.


(Stereo Double - Needs Crossed Eyes rather than "Magic" Eyes)

We got to Jodrell Bank at last on Saturday and it is still impressive. Of course for my daughter it is where The Fourth Doctor fell off and turned into that nice vet though I think the overwhelming presence of The Lovell Telescope got to her as well. I'm still excited by the whispering dishes which allow you to whisper a greeting across 100 metres of space using two aligned dishes. Standing in the middle of them surrounds you with disembodied voices from the people at either end; maybe the sound analogy of those strange dished which create real images of objects placed within them. And then to add value to the day, there is an arboretum which I imagine is populated with cerebral astrophysicists, though I get the feeling that all the data is actually worked on remotely with the whole gantry swinging away to commands beamed in from various labs all over the country. As the Lovell Telescope is part of at least two synchronised radio telescope arrays, it is possible to think of the massive apparatus as part of a dance team with all the other telescopes turning at the same time to target the same object in the sky. We went right up close to the giant railway bogies which handle the yaw of the dish and could see the wheels moving gradually to keep the whole think targeted allowing for the rotation of The Earth. All very impressive.

All we have to walk around at lunchtime is a pond hewn out of a gravel pit. Actually "hewn" probably suggests a bit too much organisation; it was probably just the result of moving earth around when the business park and it being allowed to flood. Oh well!