Schtick Schtock

This is anger at the comparison of bread to salt,
His is some pap with bolt-on cleverness,
Stolen from the sincere and genuinely foreign,
The arrangement of a mind palace,
Like a child’s collection lined up for praise,
From a parent returning home from work,
To the dancing darling jumping in front of the eyes
For attention and justifying.

Here is the true poet, the feedback buzzing,
From ill-treated amplifiers,
Digging deep in the feelings of the bereaved and lost,
To cut trenches in the complexities of war,
With the text and belonging of the truly alive,
Badges of membership, encrypted and protected,
The lossless compressions of experience and doubt,
Kept by outsiders from the near-dead.

The Birth of Guerilla Accounting ...

... or The Rise and Rise of The Mary Quant Triplets.



A scandal in this house - this school - something happening at last - nothing really juicy since that plane came down and Stuart started smoking with all that jet fuel around - an idiot and a hero at the same time. What now though. Only hints on the telegraph, the ears at the staff room door. Maybe I should find an excuse and go up there myself. The head still has that book of drawings, I could go and ask for it back. He's usually there with the rest of them on Fridays but might there be an atmosphere that keeps him in his own little room. What to do mein freund? Anyone else coming up there? It's so big it'll make the School Magazine if they let it. I could do the drawings if Leyton doesn't want to do them. Actually he's far better then me, a proper artist and everything, I only trace things. Who cares. They won't let us print anything about this. Expulsions all over the place if we try I bet.

What if it's nothing? Back to the boring life of the potential accountant. That's all the future holds for this wallflower I suppose. Still the world needs accountants. Accountancy doesn't use much beyond the four main operations does it. Not much chance of getting to differentiate or integrate in double-entry is there? Though thinking about it Tricky Dickie did use the third derivative to argue for re-election didn't he, which means there is a small chance of introducing some mad maths to The Treasury. Extending that idea could be very interesting and profitable. Keep a note of this for discussion with Doctor Waters, it'll blow his socks off! We could make money on that idea. Now how to introduce Chaos Theory? All those graphs are based on imaginary numbers (aside - Electricians/Electrical Engineers use j for Sqrt(-1) because i is current - question - why to they need sqrt(-1) at all? How does i/j apply to the real world?). Well how about imaginary money which cancels out when you multiply it by itself? (or reverts to it's inventor).

How about probability? As in Heads I win and Tails you lose. Sounds a bit like the futures market to me. Ah - those pesky derivatives again - because that's what you really need in a food chain isn't it, something that lets you make money off something you'll never see and never have to pay storage costs for. No non-mathematician understands probability properly anyway so you could get away with anything. Chance of a Hurricane stripping all the Oranges off the trees in Florida? No idea. How sure are we to get all that coffee into Starbucks this week seeing as the ship carrying it might well get boarded by pirates? Not a clue. We'll makes fortune. That's your Breakfast Uncertainty Principle sorted. I certainly do know where I am AND how fast I am going thank you very much.

OK, it's not as rigorous as Doctor Bunting might want for a humerus skit this Christmas but it's been fun. Remember - I am the ghost of Christmas future perfect subjunctive - I will show you what would have happened to you, were you not to have changed your ways. Not original I will admit and not quite as funny as The Deputy Prime Minister's Practical Joke at the Expense of The Ex-Lady McCartney (look it up you lazy tyke).

Nelson - The best Graphic Novel Ever - Probably

I came across this when looking up something about Posy Simmonds. There is slight similarity to One Day in that each "chapter" represents a day, slightly more than one-a-year, in the life of Nel Baker, spanning from her birth in the late sixties to the present day. However the real twist is that each section is drawn by a separate comic-artist, in a wide-range of styles covering child-like scrawls to ultra-realistic. I bought this this morning (didn't see Leonard, Sheldon or any of the rest of them at The Comic Book Store) and finished it this evening, which isn't enough to catch the subtleties of the drawings but I'll probably be reading it again straight away, especially after reading the afterword which says that there is a jigsaw hidden throughout the story, an interlocking set of clues. The real beauty of this is that the whole thing seems properly held together. Nel develops properly as a person in a way that is lacking in novels written by a single person. A real triumph. Buy it!

Late Arrival to the debate

RAW Image Left - HDR Composite Right

At last I've managed to do some HDR merging. Now there is a debate about whether an HDR image created from edited RAW images based on a single RAW original count as true HD. Well the one above is from one image duplicated four times and exposed two stops under and two over. It's not quite like those gaudy images that clutter up the more gee-whizzy photo sites; it actually looks more real. The argument against this is that you can't drag more information out of an image than already exists but I always thought that RAW images contained the actual value of light which fell on the CCD and is processed into the stored images to simulate a film exposure. I may be wrong but it seems to work. I'm going to experiment with a comparison between a true set of five exposures and a single one to see what the final result is. Watch this space.

As Any Fule Kno ...

... or Hello Clouds - Hello Sky.

It Comes to us All

Yet another Curse of The Oldie (which of course is really statistics rather than anything genuinely supernatural) with the passing of Ronald Searle. Of course the TV news will illustrate the sad news with St. Trinian's in all its guises and ignore the great Masterpiece that is Molesworth. As the author of the piece linked behind the picture says, Molesworth is unfilmable - not least because any mention of Molesworth 2 would have most of the audience wondering when the first film came out. The Gerunds will be distraught tonight I imagine.

There is a more serious side to Ronald Searle in that he survived the worst that humans can throw at fellow humans. See this collection of drawings including some of his time as a POW on the Burma Railway.