300 Million

Much fun in the deWeyden house - Lego Star Wars has taken us over - after getting enough points to buy various score multipliers which stack we are now taking home close to 4000 times what we were doing all those weeks ago when the cellophane came off. Small boy now has 300 million points and has rushed off to the sweet shop (bar to you my friend) to purchase all the Bounty Hunters. Daughter, as ever the feminist has decided to buy all the girls as she thinks there are not enough in the game. Pity she was playing as Bikini-Clad Princess Leia all of yesterday.

Me? I'm just happy with what must be the closest thing on this planet to a real light sabre. Even with the TV not switched to the Wii, the controllers buzz and clash as if some distant brawl is still going on. Happy we are.

Trees in Blue

Infra-Red Trees
Originally uploaded by Steinbeck

So here is another picture through the new IR filter. How cool is that? It was taken at sunset last Saturday and has been pushed a little to get that particular colour. Looks better in blue than in grey scale though my wife thinks the raw image looked even better. Everyone asks whether having an IR filter means I can take pictures at night which I cannot answer - it hadn't occurred to me before so I might see what happens.

Unspeak has been ditched in favour of a selection of Notes and Queries from the century before last. It doesn't pretend that the answers are correct, just that they are interesting - now where I have heard that before? I always thought that Notes and Queries in the Guardian was the original but it turns out that there was a 19th century version designed it seems to keep the idle rich from doing anything stupid (it didn't work - ed). While the profession of interest in and responses to previously submitted queries was tediously expostulated by the virtuous elite of this fair and verdant land, the actual content of the replies was indeed quite interesting. I find myself thinking (and indeed voicing) "I did not know that" at regular intervals. Thanks to the magic of Goooooooogle, you can find scanned copies of the original publication online. Isn't the world wonderful?

Every Picture

This is of course the standard toff-bashing photo in many social documentaries so it is interesting to read the stories of the five boys in it. The 'toughs' look very much like my dad in photographs of only a few years later. Anything I try to write now just sounds like obvious truism which I suppose is what most sociology and social comment really is. Sociology is just being able to classify obvious facts about the world of people. It is the ultimate is cloaking common sense in dense language in order to make it sound important. It's only one step down from the meaningless application of non-numerical language to fields which require rigorous scientific application. Witness Richard Feynman's observation :

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read -- something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing,and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."

So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

All this gels with my view of recent months that the world cannot be further complexified without making more of us succumb to mental illness. Every facet of society is made increasingly more complicated by the division and subdivision of the things we have to pay attention to in order to exist in legal terms in this society. Apart from becoming a derelict and not having to worry about tax and insurance and how you relate to the state it is not possible to get away from this and go back to the simple life. And now even the drink of choice for such outsiders is taxed more.

In an attempt to offset some of this, I have decided to attempt some sourdough bread and so a new pet consisting of flour and water sits on our window sill gently bubbling and giving off pleasant beery smells (or a nasty pong if you are my wife). Not sure if it will work yet but looking forward to it being spread with a nice blob of Marmite XO.

Sunset in the Shire

Apologies for the second DM link in a week.

I feel bereaved and yet it's only because of the announced retirement from internetting of someone in the top four of my blog favourites. There have been real deaths amongst the regular reads in my list - notably Ivan Noble - but strangely I never felt the same way about those. Maybe it is because this recent departure is a regularly updated blog about real life.

Bit Whiffy! Still - much to learn.

Order! Order!

Currently nearly finished with Life Class by Pat Barker which could be described as the fourth book in an increasingly inaccurately-named trilogy. I have read two thirds of the Regeneration Trilogy starting with the last and going on to the first. The second resides in the bookcase courtesy of Oxfam and this one came through a three-for-two at a well-known high-street bookstore. I'm pretty sure that this order of reading makes no difference but Life Class seems much more rooted in reality. While the books of the true trilogy have a dream-like (nightmare-like) feel because all the characters are soldiers involved in the absolute horror of the trenches - divorced at some point in the novels from normal life - Life Class is about men and women - no-less heroic - who find themselves close to, but not directly involved in the fighting. They are the link between the mud and guts of the front-line and the Honey-Still-For-Tea existence of those left at home. And though they see the results of the horror, they remain detached, affected but in different ways. I thought at first that the breathless career through the minds of soldiers that drew you in to Regeneration was absent and was prepared to jettison it. I'm glad I didn't for this is like a code-book, a key to the cipher of the previous novels. Strangely, it has no focus on a single character, and I'm sorry to say that I cannot remember if this was the case with the other books and though again this slightly annoyed me, it gave the story an allegorical chaotic feel. I don't want this to be true but I'm afraid it is - the book shows that the war is the making of the characters involved - the old life is vague and unfocused while the war gives meaning to people.

Addendum: just read in the Wiki entry for Life Class, that the main female character is based on Dora Carrington with the male artist being Paul Nash which makes a lot of sense. Not sure if they meant John Nash which would make even more sense but I bow to the power of wiki. Which strangely links with this. (Warning contains a link to The Daily Mail - oh and some nudity). So Dora Carrington is remembered not for her art which is glorious but for standing naked on a statue. Office boys hey?

So I broke my promise (was it actually a promise?) to read something scientific next and now I'm not sure if even the next book will be so. I have Steven Poole's Unspeak ready on the pile but is this scientific?

Six Wheels on my Wagon

And now over to the world's nicest poker player and all round clever-clogs - Victoria Coren with her fiendish quiz - Only Connect. At one end of the game show scale we have Deal or No deal - a game with tense music even during the funny bits, and no real need for skill because the whole thing is based on a string of random numbers and an annoying elf called Noel. At the other end we have the 8:30 Monday slot on BBC4 which requires something akin to the intelligence of a Cryptic Crossword setter multiplied by a Rocket Surgeon (or Brain Scientist). You can play the connecting wall game for yourself complete with dry encouragement by Ms Coren herself. Visit and feel smug (or more likely a waste of cortex).

Best View

I could spend all day on this site but I don't - work ethic too strong. The Google car came past the site here and I rushed out to wave at it but for some reason the estate has been missed out so you are spared. Instead I found the above picture amongst all the others I've looked at. I now realise that I once found a rudimentary forerunner of Streetview which consisted of photographs taken every few metres along the various roads in North Wales - from the Church at Llandanwg to the lake at Cym Bychan (This is Cym Nantcol as the Streetview driver probably got scared and turned around before he reached the end of the road). The world is magic isn't it?

Password Impossible

I have have a terrible sense of Deja Vu about that picture but then again if any picture should evoke such a feeling then it would be this which as the commenter on the link page says clearly references the whole film. This is then in turn referenced by the stargate sequence in Contact where the timing of the events that Ellie Arroway experiences are blurred by the distortions she experiences.

Well that was interesting but not what I wanted to mention. I overheard someone commenting on the complexity of a password requirement and while I fully support the complexity of passwords, I began wondering if it was possible to define minimum password requirements which would be be impossible to adhere to. Leave aside for the moment the fact that if this ever occurred then no valid passwords would ever get created and therefore no one would access the system behind them. Of course if the spec said four letters, two numbers and one special character and then limited the length to six characters you would be scuppered but I was thinking of other restrictions - no dictionary words, no sequences of the same character etc. All this made me think of the formulae in Godel, Escher, Bach which I have not looked at for so long that I cannot now link them to any reality at all. It also reminds me of the record guaranteed to break any deck it was played on and in turn has turned on a flag in my head about a strange mathematician who mentioned what seemed a non sequitur in the recent Horizon programme about infinity vis. there is no such thing as infinity - numbers, he states, get very large, much larger than any of the stupidly colossal numbers we have defined - a Googol is peanuts compared to Graham's Number - but do in fact end at some point and revert to zero. This was mentioned and then forgotten - the guy suggesting it popped up like some wizard, stated his idea and vanished with no comment about it again. And where madmen lead I follow.

Oomingmak

I only caught a bit of The Freak Zone this weekend despite trying to listen to Six Music more as part of the support campaign. The standout of the few minutes I listened to were tracks by Slapp Happy, a band I'd not heard of before although the names of the members seemed slightly familiar from various backwaters of muso heaven. It bothers me that I miss at least being able to name the band.

Simple Rhyme for a Complex Subject

So tonight that I might see,
The ministry of honesty,
The troopers' kin in jabbing tears,
that ring with us throughout the years,
but buy us nothing for the nights,
of emptiness and candle lights,
save for our sleep with shake and pills,
that do not cure the deeper ills.

The man machine, a mincer turned,
By fear and oil, with flesh is churned,
The children of all nations fuel,
The great production lines of hell,
The pride of family men who mount,
the bucking engines through the rout,
of all we built and civilized,
of all we loved and those who died.

New Toy

Hot in my hand this morning was an infra-red filter which strangely allows my unmodified DSLR to take IR pictures of which this is the first. This was actually handheld and the autofocus worked but it really needs a tripod to get the sharpness. Of course more to follow though probably not as soon as you might expect.

Outgeeked

Current reading is The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, which I remember being the subject of much mock tabloid horror when it came out (and yet has a glowing piece of puff from The Daily Mail on the back). What we get instead is a slow-moving description of the aftermath of a rape and murder by the victim - the gradual changes that occur to those left behind. It has a rigid plot and yet never seems defined - anything could happen and when it does we get breathtaking moments of pivotal clarity. It reminds me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird, with the omnipresent observations of Susie Salmon a fine match for Scout's gifted-child commentary. It is sentimental but do you really want "In Cold Blood"? I have a terrible feeling that the film will have picked up on all the sentimentality and none of the cleverness of the novel. I am not tempted to see it. Susie's heaven also goes some way to answering my idea that any real paradise needs a rigid policing to ensure that everyone in it is happy with everyone else. The solution Sebold suggests is to have a personal heaven that overlaps with those of others only when beliefs and experiences are common to both - a sort of Venn-Diagram Heaven, with infinitely many circles.

Fair whistling through it I am, unlike Ed who has been three months at Gravity's Rainbow and who can blame him - my copy is somewhere, still unstarted and on the stack that must surely stretch beyond my own coil-shuffling - how sobering is that.

Time to go - I have an appointment with a rather nice tangerine. Och a Vaye.

Save The Radio Six

No Freak Zone, No Lauren Laverne, no more of those weird collaborations that have all the youngsters round here going "who?" This is the start of the rout of civilization, the blandification of mankind. Stand not for this. On top of this we have the attempt to destroy my good friend Simon Singh (well he sends me emails so I know him I suppose) by the - long pause to think of a phrase that Mr. Justice Eady might be able to understand) - Bone-Kickers-and-Crackers at the British Chiropractic Association. Oh dear - I've just realised that this puts me on the same side as Paul Dacre.

Sign up to the petition or lose the best music mix in the world.