This Is No Time For The Monkey Dance

Big science in the Guardian today. There is an interview with Stephen Hawking, a report on the challenging of the teaching of intelligent design in US schools and something on scientific determinism, which I have not yet read. I want so much to pick over the idiocy of intelligent design; how it is almost an admission of the failure of pure creationism – it just seems pointless. Richard Dawkins always gives me the feeling that he is giving a platform to the creationists just by putting them down all the time, though I suppose if you do nothing, you will find that the un-scientific public will fall into believing what is taught to them. It is not enough to know that the vast majority of scientists in the field have no truck with the idea. Maybe we will have an sort of evolutionary division, with two sub-species of humans each of which believe the opposing views. I was going to give these two divisions names one being rationalists (I won’t give you the name for the others) but I have read a recent post that quite logically put it that you cannot be a rationalists and an atheist. The least you can be and still be a rationalist is an agnostic. I am sure that people with stronger views of the correctness of rational theories will disagree with this but I was prepared to take the idea on board – deities worming their way back in there I think. But back to rationalism. Intelligent design though! What mechanism do you have to have in place to keep that idea going? Where is evidence that comes close to matching that already present for pure evolution? Without faith, I am nothing.

I finished Atonement last night, having guessed (almost) the full picture some way before the end, though this fitted very well with my earlier idea about the author picking a way through a wider set of truths. No spoilers though; you will have to read it to get the full picture. It is excellent though. Read it!

Demud

… and working your way through this space is enough to kill you without those trying to do so anyway. That is paradise in those trees, some future stone gate, making shadows over these fields to tell everyone what you did here, in this mud and blood and rain and sun. This is nothing; now is not a trouble, no illness, no pain, no metal rain or strange perspectives as the planes use this road as target practice. The bowmen will not come again, those rattling saviours from earlier and still wasted battles; they are dead many years ago, trampled into the mud and rotted away to stains and leather; no more able to help you than help themselves. And away in the future again, this rout will be our greatest victory, the making of this country as it is, a failure brought to mind for children centuries from now. Those abed would wish themselves here? Give me seconds with them now and I will have them up and in this ditch for a minute; see if they still regret missing this.

There is a howl from the sky, a sound that would make one question the concept of hell, something invented for the very reason is makes you think like this, to turn rational men to superstitious hulks, just waiting for the end to come at the end of a fuse unwinding. Some man calmly sat down and drew pictures of the scoop on this plane, a little add-on of his own to add fear to injury, the first of a line of horrific escalations that will lead us all to permanent peace in the mud and blood.

Kicking Over Bonfires – Ha Ha!

Many strange dreams recently. One about following a car which I knew to have bombs in though the occupants calmly stopped when asked, drove the vehicle to a safe place where they left it and stood around waiting. Maybe it’s not that strange then.

We have made a conscious effort to have a quiet weekend which has left us with cabin fever thought the children seem as tired as ever. Number One Son is asleep already having keeled over into his cheesy crumpets and daughter is quietly humming along to Moonlight Shadow prior to being settled. The rest of the world seems far away. We’re all very lucky really.

I am racing through Atonement despite having the impression that a well-defined denouement is not the likely outcome of such a well-written, deftly crafted story. Maybe I’m wrong. I gave an audible gasp at some of the details in it last night. While the writing is of the highest order, beyond criticism from non-literary types such as me, it also seems effortless in such a way that it seems that the author is simply choosing his own path through a wider landscape of place and action that exists in his mind. It could go any way and though I am sure he had the ending crafted before he started the first paragraph, the delightful idea that nothing is yet decided even with only about a sixth of the book to go, is something that makes me shake with delight. I have read that this book has been compared with various writings of Virginia Woolf, though I cannot see it myself. Of course one book from a notoriously difficult and varied author is not enough to allow those comparisons. Not sure I have the words to review Mrs Dalloway in any meaningful way though some of the passages were off the scale in their descriptive power, a sort of more defined Ulysses though no less wide-ranging and gloriously candid.

Rossetti Lamenting The Death Of His Wombat

Does this preclude the existence of children full stop? I was looking for the child-catcher when I read it.

Our tea breaks are often occupied by watching the big yellow trucks that criss-cross the earthworks over the other side of the railway from the office. They shuttle back and forth over the dusty tracks, simply shifting dirt from one place to another. There is lots of building going on. Yesterday I think I managed to work out exactly what they are making. It’s a launch pad! The International space station is to be supplied direct from Chorley. Honestly, far in the distance, safely away from the headquarters of Chorley FM, there is a tower with gantries and supply trucks and a bunker for the mayor to come and watch the launches from. I haven’t read the company manual enough to know if I allowed to take photographs so there is a chance I will be able to document this secret construction which has been glossed over as some sort of Keynesian work-generation project – no one could live in houses with walls that thin.

How Do You Use These Toothpicks?

I’ve just noticed a switch on the wall by the shredder, which has a sign below it saying “Do Not Touch This Switch”. I’m so tempted to press it. Douglas Adams would be proud.

It is nearly dark for the whole drive to work now. As Martin said the other day, you know it’s autumn when the garden lights come on before Emmerdale. His wife is the soap addict by the way; Martin would have the whole Eastenders/Corry/Neighbours mediocrity up against the wall, being the nasty old misanthropist he is. I went cold turkey from my 20-year addiction to the Weatherfield soap as soon as I was sure that dastardly Dicky was no more after his dive into the canal. I can watch it now without being sure to set the video for the next episode. I can handle it. I really can!

Anyway, back to the drive. The clouds had a delicious 3D effect as the sunrise caught them, matching the Villa-Lobos music on the radio quite well. Finally, as I pulled into the car park, it started to rain, creating an almost semi-circular rainbow off to the west. Now the sky is just a dark grey mass. I seem to be on of the few people happy with new BBC weather forecast. It tells you as exactly as forecasts can how the weather will appear in any point in time or space, the cloud cover, the rain, the wind. The problem is that people want everything simplified in some sort of nannyish way. Those little cloud symbols have become the equivalent of the clichés that everyone seems to want to use today to save time in some sort of newspeak way. All news seems to have to use a set of defined phrases to explain everything. The problem is that the short sets of words become words in themselves; they don’t trigger the required images in the brain because they are filtered out as what is to be expected. I requote my ‘paradigm’ example when I asked a number of people who received an email with that word in it, what it actually meant. None of them could tell me without looking it up as I did. It is shorthand for something that requires explaining in sentences rather than with a single word. The jackbooted octopus and all that! Pretend to be stupid, say you are stupid when you are stupid, but make sure you get everything explained rather than just nodding as if it’s all clear. My name has been Pot. Kettle will be back after these messages.

Philosophy Is All Just Thinking!

The building here is one street back from the Liver Building. The architect also designed the Old Scotland Yard building, which you can see is true if you can be bothered to do a search for it; I can’t, which pretty well sums up how I feel about today. An incident in the night led to three quarters of the family being downstairs at Midnight watching Dan Cruickshank on UK TV History. He has exactly the sort of friendly voice that Kate Bush mentions talking about stupid things on The Ninth Wave. She used the shipping forecast as the backing for that line but Dan the man would have been just as good and probably a darn sight more interesting. I am sure he would have known about the Old Scotland Yard building as well. Anyway, the incident is over with and everything is back to normal. This is what comes of finishing Harry Potter 6 just before you put the light out. I told you it was <<<<<<<< …….s.d.d .d.d.s.s .s.s……4646&&&……

I was going to recount a tale today but I realized I must already have mentioned it so I searched and here it is. It’s about Morse code. This was prompted by some mobile phone alert that goes off regularly here. It is Morse, though a far longer message than the SMS Morse that you might have heard. I keep meaning to try to write it down to decode but I’m never fast enough.

Don’t Call Me Ska Face

Listening to Ska – and lots of it! It may be today when I reach the point when there is nothing more I want to say on anything. Probably not though. Thought you might like a picture of a fat plane.

My daughter is now learning silent maths, which involves numbers and symbols made with fingers. Maybe we could extend this into silent differential calculus or silent systems analysis. Sign language is big in our house at the moment because of Something Special on CBeebies, which is fronted by the voice of Tweeny Jake, Justin Fletcher. (I can’t quite believe it because he doesn’t have the hair). Quite a few people in offices I have worked in knew sign language for various reasons including Martin’s nemesis. I used this as reason for her rehabilitation but he won’t have it and just mentions that he knows SL anyway. He didn’t know the sign for cat though. (Make whiskers on your top lip with the first two fingers of each hand). Surely there must be the mathematicians sub-set of sign language, with proper signs for root, delta etc. If there isn’t, someone should invent it though it might look dangerously like the Cheese Impressions from Men Behaving Badly.

The Skies Went on For Ever

And reading in silence by a window is a gift, but maybe one to make to yourself. She did not care that it was rude in others eyes, to take a book when visiting relatives. She always asked for and was given at least one book at Christmas and it would be finished over the weeks away from school, during the un-regimented moments at home, or sitting in the alcoves of various big houses belonging to ‘the relatives’ as she called them privately.

By sweet degrees, they closed the gap between them, without eye contact but each sensing a gradual, tacit agreement made over weekends away.

Arguments are tiresome she thought and so she stopped asking for things that she knew would be refused, knowing that the gentle reproach for the misdemeanour after the event was less intense than the forbidding of the deed in the first place. She would carry vast numbers of aging and dusty books around with her, and soon enough this was expected and no longer questioned by the adults. What things there are out there to learn, massive understanding of the world is still far away she thought, beyond some horizon that seems to recede forever, a boundary to our own space, where coloured art and science meet in what she saw as a distraction from the real life stuff of maths and equations. God is hiding, always retreating from us, taking each of our tiny advances towards his own world and adding conditions – destroying information with one paper and proving it cannot be destroyed in another. They still think they can determine the world in terms of numbers; button everything down until out of the long and winding mill of human knowledge comes a single set of numbers and letters which will explain everything - the universe, the life that holds on precariously within it and all the abstract stuff of numbers and shapes that exist only in the heads of the people trying to see it all.

This she saw in each new book and while she knew deep down that understanding was required to voice these concerns, there was a painful tug at her mind whenever she thought of it, some idea that you could simplify everything with a bypass of some form. And what is the extent of all this understanding? Where is the end of what we can explain or even just know we have to explain? Numbers have to go on forever and indeed, they do. You can define a whole universe with a set of numbers that will fit into another. Or can you? Is there not some barrier to understanding and definition, an aura of reality than is required to spark things from the mind into real existence? Call it the soul of the universe, where atoms, gravity and consciousness meet in one singularity, the dot that lives in everything and links God to the universe to us to everything that is inside and outside all that can be explained and all that cannot. And time goes on forever, with no end and no beginning, like an elastic band stretched over a sphere; it begins, and ends where it begins out of the time we see, extended infinitely.

I Think They Should Play the Whole Day at the Wrong Speed

It is dark when I leave home in the mornings now; the sky lightens as I go and this morning it was particularly beautiful. There was no colour in the sky, just a succession of patterns in the dark grey clouds, calling to mind animal spots or stripes. I suppose the chaos and math that produces both are related at some deep level. Maybe rather than striving to link the various branches of physics with their boiled-down equations, humans should be working to determine how to relate the simple things with the chaotic at a deep level. On the one hand, you can have the clear equation for the spirals of seeds in a sunflower, while on the other you get the fractal growth of a fern. Maybe one boils out of a simplification of the other and I am sure people far cleverer than I am, have been working on this for years.

The solutions to human issues probably lie in the same direction. I know Richard Dawkins believes that religious belief is a meme, which I think he likens to a virus that not only infects its host but also causes the host to disagree with people infected with other varieties of that meme. I don’t know enough to say whether he advocates complete vaccination as it were, though I do know that he enjoys the artistic trappings of religion. Maybe we should work out a balance sheet of positives and negatives. Like my assertion that, while I understand that peace deals with terrorists upset some people, the greater good is served by the fact that people are no longer killing each other; maybe the ending of religious war is worth the loss of spirituality. As my wife says, religion does not cause the wars; it is used as an excuse. To believe that a terrorist attack can be justified under any of the main religions proves that you are either mad or secretly do not believe the rubbish you spout. I can understand why the UN has failed to define what terrorism actually is; there are a great many fuzzy areas even at the heart of the current debate. But you are not allowed to say that in case you are seen as weak. You can never make a mistake.

It’s a Cruel Way to take Her Away

And still Mr Dawkins has to wait. I finished Mrs Dalloway last week and having found Atonement by Ian McEwan at Oxfam for 99p, I have gone on to start that. It is odd that my first attempt at Mrs Dalloway led to an early jettison without understanding; as I said I wasn’t ready to start a book that appeared to be as disjointed and stream-of-consciousness as Ulysses. However, after seeing the film I gave it another go. The film acted as explanatory notes and made it so much more interesting. For reasons which are clear in my own mind, this reminds me of the issue of the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers, where the actual speech heard acts as some sort of decode for the brain waves which the fish puts out after it hears the speech. The film and the book seemed like these two components. I know! How pretentious do you want Mondays to be?

Atonement is supposed to be Ian McEwan’s best book though after getting a sixth of the way in, Amsterdam still seems better. It does seem to have some self-referential things; stuff that must be about the author himself, or maybe I just can’t imagine any authors not writing about their own experiences or beliefs. There is always something in any writing that betrays the author; witness Adrian Mole forcing in all sorts of things about his own experiences – newts, the fall of the Russian Communists, the sun on the shopping precinct. Actually, I am sure Hemmingway would have been happy to be close to a tank during that day in Moscow. Word is shouting at me about wordiness, which obviously means that no writer am I. There! Happy with that?

How far away are we from designing a word-processing program that can go beyond the standard grammar checks and force you to write in the style of an author of your choice? Word very often throws up what it thinks are bad styles when they would be considered creative in real life so the edge of the envelope, the definition of what is correct or incorrect must be very fuzzy. We could manipulate that fuzziness to provide a gentle nudge in the direction of a particular style. I see a list of authors in a drop down in the grammar and style settings. Its probably already available as are most things you can think about.

Not Read The Bit About Her Knickers Before.

Walking to see the Clipper race heading out past the coastguard station, we took a short cut through the park and found this car in the duck pond. Sunday is the day that the local model boat club meet and they had quite happily gone ahead, using the car as some sort of obstacle. I am still trying to work out how someone got a car through the narrow paths that lead up the pond but this must be possible because on the return journey we came across a large breakdown truck winching the car up onto its flatbed. I can just see the excitement on the face of the local reporter.

The Secret Life Of Arthur Ransome was a gem, which makes me wonder why the BBC don’t trail such programmes any more. It’s almost as if they are ashamed of the things they do best. I know that this is all to do with ratings which even the BBC has to pander to these days but some sense of loyalty to their past remit should come through occasionally. Ransome’s autobiography mentioned most of the stuff that was in the show. You may suspect that some of the programme was drammed up but he mentioned almost all of it and if you were crossing the lines of a Russian civil war, some sort of precarious journey would have been inevitable. Of course the whole thing had no conclusion, something which will have to wait for the discovery and release of further KGB and British Intelligence files. As I said yesterday, all this good spy stuff shines out of the Swallows and Amazons books.