Goes Nowhere! Does Nothing!

South Riding has been completed and it was indeed more satisfying than the TV version. It avoided wrapping things up neatly in the way the Andrew Davies version did but you can't blame him what with being given three hours for something that needed a minimum of six.

Anyway what next? Aha! A wedding! (and too many exclamation marks it seems.) And that's all you're going to to get on that subject. What is far more important is the abuse of the legal system with a seeming proliferation of Super-Injunctions which, because of the Streisand Effect, can be overcome with a few clicks. I foresee the Meta-Super-Injunction which will mean that we will not even be able to mention the existence of Super-Injunctions. And then to avoid the God-over-Djinn mess that could result it will of course have to refer to itself without referring to itself so that the entire ludicrous mess will disappear up its own fundament and the legal system will vanish in a puff of illogic leaving the rest of us to get on with our meaningless lives free from the travails of z-list celebrities who have mistaken the words "Right-of-Way" for something else. ... er .... right ... got that out of my system. Time to move on.

Big news here is that my half-hour comfortably ensconced in The Jefferies Tube in the MRI department at a well-known local race-course hospital has borne fruit in that I have nothing nasty but what I do have has to come out sooner rather than later so I will soon be sporting a rather dashing Action-Man scar and what the doc described as "a dinge". I already have the gripping hands and the eagle eyes. I am still waiting for the string in my back which you have to pull to make me say cool things like "His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket." or "cover me Stevo - I'm going to get that Blazes Boylan once and for all". Be thankful.

And the Road I’m on is …. Hangar Lane

I wanted to put 2008 in my date heading which I can see up there. I know you can’t see what I type there because I don’t actually copy it from the document but I still wanted to type 2008. I’m not sure why. I am now 7 years past the furthest date I could imagine myself existing in when I was 10. I think there was probably a Blue Peter competition which asked for drawings of the year 2000 and that was about the limit of my imagining of myself. Still it was only a few years after I had discovered with shock that children grow up into adults rather than always staying that way. I’m pretty sure the revelation was a one-off big bang rather than a gradual dawning because I always associate the discovery with a particular room from our house at the time and a definite time of day. Now the question is how much of my life does this explain?

I am back reading GEB now – I finished Dear Robert, Dear Spike and enjoyed the early chapters of the Robert Graves biography but when it went beyond the years covered by his autobiography it seemed to lose something and has therefore been jettisoned without guilt. I am way over half-way through GEB having avoided any real skimming. However, I may try Life Class before I finish GEB – or even the new version of On The Road which I thought at first was a facsimile of the 120 foot long scroll.

Things of Global Significance

This week I am mostly reading Goodbye To All That …

… and have been interested to read that Robert Graves was based at Litherland barracks which is just down the road from us. I can’t find the exact location so I will have to ask around the local wrinklies to see if they know. It was next to the Brotherton’s ammunition factory which Graves and Siegfried Sassoon thought might take out both Litherland and Bootle should it explode. The book also mentions Sassoon throwing his Military Cross into the sea at Formby and his family believed this was true until very recently when it turned up on Mull. I was about to suggest a treasure hunting expedition to the children but they will have to stand down now. Sorry – the language of the trenches seems to have got to me.

I always thought that Robert Graves survived the war pretty much unscathed but he was severely wounded, so severely that his mother was informed of his death and his obituary published in the times. He returned to France but was sent back as unfit for trench service and despite efforts to return to some sort of active service overseas he spent the rest of the war in Britain. Graves and Sassoon were both affected with what was termed neurasthenia at the time but which is probably PTSD. Graves was so much affected that the shakes would be triggered by any strong and unexpected smell – even that of flowers – as a reminder of the gas which both sides used. The strange thing is that all this horror is written about in such a detached way that you seem to accept it like Graves did – he didn’t agree with the war and still tried desperately to fight in it – possibly because it was all he knew in his working life – it was all he could do. He goes from the severe trauma of the moment of his injury, through the hospitalisation in France to his recuperation at Osborne House on the Isle of White with little change of pace. I suppose this chimes with the title of the book – just a chronological charge through the events in order to put them behind him, though the pace is not really manic or plodding – just matter-of-fact and yet it still seems to draw you in with a sort of hypnotic rhythm. This is the first book in ages I have raced to finish.
GEB is still around though. Finished Ant Fugue and now I am into the juicy chapters about mapping brains structure to brain function at all levels, based on the brain/Ant Colony isomorphisms from Ant Fugue; pictures of neurons and that sort of stuff.

Message To Aunt Hillary - Bang The Rocks Together

I finally downloaded a manual of instruction for PC assembly language. I've set myself the task of understanding how the gates and stuff on the circuit boards inside this very PC relate back to the actual pixels on the screen with all points in between followed. I know that this mapping seems overly complicated and I am not sure that many people in the world can actually say they know exactly the paths involved but I was inspired by the seemingly universe-sized complexity of the mapping between the DNA molecule and our own bodies - Genotype to Phenotype as Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter would put it.

Hofstadter has actually mentioned that computers do have some fuzziness involved and this was in a book written nearly thirty years ago. Imagine the degree of fuzziness that is now involved and how we still expect the machines to get it right. I suppose they do but the scope for unexpected results is now a lot higher than it once was. The secret is to beat the involved systems into submission by making sure that your programs and hardware conform to rigid definitions.

GEB discusses "Chunking", originally using to describe how chess masters see the board in play in chunks of organisation rather than by looking ahead any significant number of moves. This is why up until recently that human players could quite easily beat computers that looked ahead to the end of the universe. This chunking happens when programming as well and I can see myself doing it, realising how to fix an issue without having to follow through every possible route. It often happens that a fault and it's resolution actually cancel out or result in a much more elegant way of doing things. Even just using the word "elegant" in relation to programs may seem odd but elegance is almost like Nirvana - a sense that something will handle most of what can get thrown at it without having to consider all the tiny little possible routes through the system one by one. The big example from history is the resulting elegance of the proper way we describe the solar system. The deferents and epicycles of Ptolemy are like the myriad Boolean variables you might put in a piece of spaghetti programming to catch all the possible situations when in actual fact a look at the bigger picture removes the need for all these. This is why they call me "Mr Rewrite". Thank goodness they don't call me elegance.

Personally I have just been involved in something which did involve lots of deferents and epicycles - sometimes you just have to accept the compromise. You can't have everything.

The Collected Thoughts of Desmond Hamster

I am in the rare state of having two books I want to read equally. Normally either one or other of the top two books on my pile gains full attention until either it is finished or I get bored. However, the two books at the moment have reached a plateau of interestingness (which must only be in the Spelling dictionary because Stephen Fry has lobbied for it to be there) and I am switching between them – reading a chapter from each in turn. One of course is GEB and the other is Goodbye To All That which despite being about the one of the most horrific experiences that man can go through, draws me in like lighter biography never does.

Having said this, the chapter of GEB just read was light in the extreme because it refers to computer programs from nearly 30 years ago and was therefore quite easy to understand, though this was covered in the text by references to what computers will become and have already started to progress towards. On to Ant Fugue.

Statement From a Marine Neurocrustaceologist!

I have my third copy of GEB - no questions asked - so it will be half as battered as it would have been by the time I finish it - sometime in 2017 I think. Well, maybe not then. I am deep into part 2 which seems to have less maths so far but is interesting just the same. I have found myself as interested in the distinctions between machine code, Assembler and compiled languages as I ever was when I first learned about them. I never do any assembler now and I only ever wrote one commercial assembly language program. This was some small portion of the input stream for an ATM deposit system. Knowing the world of technology there is some chance that this code is still in place in a live system. I keep meaning to start on assembler again one day just to say I can still do it but having to bother about carrying puts me off. Pointers I hate!

Sniffy, Miffy and Lippy

I am very annoyed today. I just got to Part II of GEB to discover yet another issue with the printing and binding. This time it is whole page spreads which are completely blank every so often. This is not something you could spot before hand because it comes at a point where the book has blank pages anyway. I am beginning to wonder whether every copy has some flaw or other just to make some point regarding the content. They cannot comment that the book is battered through being in my laptop bag because they are GOING TO HAVE TO PULP IT ANYWAY. I am trying to spot some sort of Isomorphism between this and the things the book says and there is indeed a reference to an Author printing blank pages at the end of a book to foil readers who might go there first. However, this concept is extended to printing lots of gibberish to fool the reader as to where the end actually is. Some reviewers even suggest that lots of GEB is actually gibberish anyway though even in the parts which I may have skimmed it all seems to feel right. There was a scientist who once wrote a completely fake essay regarding the sort of philosophy and postmodernism that is beloved of the pseudo-intellectual crowd and they fell for it entirely. I think it was the sort of thing that attempts to quantify concepts that are completely beyond the reach of mathematics - equations regarding sociology and concepts of political correctness which are the epitome of The Emperor’s New clothes.

The upshot of this is that Goodbye to All that is now half-finished.

Backyard Orchestra



We make our own music in this house.

I am still doing my two pages each time I pick up GEB. Typographical Number Theory (better not use the acronym there) is quite heavy and I have to admit that I may be skimming some of it and not doing the exercises. Why do I choose to read a book with exercises for pleasure? I am looking forward to the Self-swallowing TVs which is probably linked in my personal "Semantic Network" as the Doctor Who Section. We once set up a video camera to point at its own output and couldn't get it do anything until I pointed the remote at the TV and the Infra-red bouncing off the screen acted like some sort of match and the whole circular feedback thing started from that spark. Fantastic it was. However, that is some chapters away but they are interesting chapters.

ISOmorphism

The strange loop between development and testing is one. I don't often write specifics regarding my work though most of the posts here are done in lunch hours but today I can tell you that I am mostly working in Classic ASP. I will leave you to make up your own mind on that. Statistically I suppose that most people won't know what that is or even be bothered if they do but I have to tell you that nothing is dull today. Read into that what you can because that is all I am going to say about it today.

I think I have reached the age where I need glasses. I am OK in good light but at night I am having to hold the book at a certain distance away and really small text is almost impossible to decipher. I am lucky that my company will pay for the eye test and even a certain amount of the cost of any glasses required. My daughter has also recently taken to wearing glasses though these are only plastic ones which came with one of her many Doctor Who magazines. The trouble is they suit her and also have this magical effect on her demeanour which from the normal "whatever!" level of attitude that seems to start at about 7 years old turns to politeness and deportment. All from a piece of plastic that must have cost whatever sweatshop it was made in about 0.5p in production costs and 20p to ship over here.

The next chapter in GEB is called "The Propositional Calculus" which is filling me with dread. I think I got the dialogue before it but I didn't manage to pick out any Isomorphisms which means that they are either absent or too subtle for my clogged mind to find. I am afraid that it looks like a lot more formal systems - always the most difficult part though I suppose it is no more difficult than some of the complex string manipulations I do in my code. I wrote down a note about the strange loop between development and testing. At the moment I am doing a lot of development and then long test plans in order to cover all issues that might be raised with the new code. It reminded me a bit of the GOD Over Djinn section of the Little Harmonic Labyrynth, with me as the genie and me also as the meta-genie of the testing which must not be good. This crops a lot in coding. I might spend hours poring over a fault somewhere in code and then find that a colleague spots the error in seconds. I have to say that this works both ways before you start thinking I am useless. And of course in ASP, there is always the peculiar nastiness of ASP code which writes out VB or Javascript. Programs writing programs is intellectually fascinating but professionally it makes for lousy bug-fixing. But then again I do it in VB.net client apps and calls to dlls that have changed. I have been toying with the idea of a program which calls a dll which it has just written the binary code for, just to see if it is possible. And for my next trick I will lift the Eiffel tower as high as the International Space Station by pulling on the lift cable from the third platform.

We Now Go Over To Sally Swumpley In Peafog.

Listening to – Instant Message alerts – Almost musical they are today – not like that blinking duck.

Well into GEB now. I have to admit that some of the formal system definitions are quite difficult but I am able to read everything without getting completely lost by it like I was the first time. I also begin to notice many more of what the author calls Isomorphisms between the dialogues, the music, the pictures and the maths. (Word tells me that Isomorphism cannot be plural but like the friends of Blue Cow – we know it can don’t we). This I take as a sign of one of two things – either a gradual increase in formalism in my thought processes which means I am able to look ahead as it were without any of the glossing-over of inconsistencies in understand that is the result of youth or the fact that my brain is slowing down and forcing me to rethink things over in order to understand them. As the development of Automatic and Human intelligence is a main theme of the book then this is quite exciting, being an isomorphism between the book as read at two different times and the capabilities or, more likely, limitations of by mind.

Anyway, having got passed the drier chapters which define the formal systems essential for a full understanding of the book, I am into the wide-open expanses of the stuff that suggests to me the phrase “narrative verdict”. While formal systems give you “Guilty/NotGuilty” or any one of a number of stock phrases, a Narrative verdict might not come out with such a clear-cut result, instead requiring an understanding of the situation without actually laying blame in any definite way. The chapter I am about to start is called “The Location of Meaning” which has a picture of the Rosetta Stone and lots of strange alphabets. When I read the book the first time, these exotic typefaces were very strange but now I regularly see them in web-pages – I’ve even solved coding problems by teasing out the western scripts from pages of Japanese or Korean. I really should keep that notebook by the bed because yesterday I managed to think of huge amounts of things to write about in terms of isomorphisms (Down Bill – Leave that “s” alone) with my own experience but as usual a night’s sleep has rendered these ideas as the lingering scent of Summer in Autumn breezes. Do you like that?

Well goodbye for now and remember :- Meaning is intrinsic if intelligence is natural – whatever that means.

Self-Swallowing Normality.

I tried to check all 700-odd pages of my new copy of GEB for any mis-bindings but it was an impossible task. I will just have to keep an eye out for inconsistencies in the text.

I got to the usual bit in the first chapter where I falter in trying to understand Russell’s Paradox but that Wikipedia article and a bit of circular thinking has got me over it. I now understand it both in my head and deeper down – like duckspeak maybe. I also seem to have a much better understanding of the Godel side of this book whereas before it was the music of Bach and Escher’s engravings that dragged me in. I so much want to write about it but it would just be a summary of the book’s themes which is pointless really. I will just leave you with a pointer to this article about our general ignorance of scientific matters.

Six-Part Rice Pudding? I Was Coming to That.

Congratulations Ed.

Due to some financial advantage I took the plunge and bought a new copy of Godel, Escher, Bach at the weekend and felt heartened that it was worth it just for the preface to the new edition, which I read with increasing excitement at the up-coming delights of the rest of the book. I was then disappointed to discover that the book was misbound with the first 19 pages replaced with ones from somewhere near the back which means that as I bought it in a Bricks-and-mortar outlet I have to wait until the weekend to get a new copy or just get the money back. Well the only reason I got it from a shop was because I felt a bit of a cheat looking at the quality of the pages which had been criticised in the online reviews and then getting it from the internet. Anyway, return it and save 10 quid I think. I am slightly bugged that GEB being a book in part about strange loops, the missing pages might actually be part of the structure and I have kept looking for them elsewhere. I don't remember them missing in my first copy.

I am now reading Goodbye to All That, the autobiography of Robert Graves. I was, like one of the reviewers on Amazon; slightly worried that it might be a bit too literary for me but it is not. Instead it gives an eloquent and funny description of times long gone with a very contemporary feel. So far I have not been able to get a handle on how much of it is irony and how much straight talk. I will let you know if I feel like it. It might have sparked me into actually reading I, Claudius though of course the best thing that Robert Graves ever wrote is Welsh Incident. Though this page to be read in a good, Welsh Accent, I think it should say a good, North welsh accent which makes much more sense that using Richard Burton or Hannibal Hopkins who were suite donly for Under Milk Wood. I Can do a very good North Welsh accent having stayed many times near where Robert Graves used to stay in Harlech. Well it's recognisably Welsh rather than any of the stock accents which Welsh usually becomes. My mother could actually speak Welsh for some strange reason.