Wiseman - du Sautoy - Singh

There is a hole in my notebook where the desk shows through. Actually there is a drawing of a hole in my notebook enclosing a drawing of the desk, so it only ever works when the book is on the desk. Not sure why I am mentioning this at all though I have been trying to find something worthy of putting up here and not finding anything remotely interesting.

I am trying to develop a personal framework for my new-found enlightened ignorance. I would hope that this does not stop me learning new things but that it will make me realise that knowing these things is not that important. Learning for its own sake is not good - it should be that the more you learn the more you know about what you don't know. This resonates with my childhood delirium which was induced by thinking about everything and nothing - contemplating the entire universe in one thought and then the infinitesimal in the next, switching back and forth between the two like an infinite loop requiring a wetware reboot. I don't think it was quite petit mal though as we now have to call this an Absence Seizure then maybe it was. The description doesn't sound far off being a simple period of complex concentration. No - too far - what I had was just anxiety at not being able to understand what I was thinking about. Now I know that this does not matter at all and should be cultivated as proof of the size of the universe. My head feels quite full but this may just be the weather rather than any laser-like alignment of neural impulses.

Black And White Week

Stick with it - Friday's picture may be more interesting.

More on the search for happiness.

The next chapter of 42 etc etc etc starts off describing an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is delivered of a crayon which has been clogging his brain since he was a child. This freedom raises his intelligence above that of everybody else save for Lisa and after several episodes where he starts questioning the wit of situations he finds himself in, he asks for the crayon to be re-inserted so that he may live his live in blissful ignorance of the lack of intelligence around him. This is then linked beautifully to Socrates' attempt to disprove the Delphic Oracle's assertion that he is the wisest man in Greece. After speaking to all the wise people around, Socrates decides that the oracle is right because only he realises how much he does not know. A big chime went off in my head at that point. Therefore there are two types of ignorance - Pig Ignorance and wise ignorance which of course is the knowledge that you do not know everything and the acceptance of that fact. A lot of my unhappiness comes from not being able to complete anything - things may work and perform perfectly in terms of what is required of them but they just don't seem 100%. We should concentrate on what we know we can sort out completely and avoid getting frustrated at being unable to complete everything. At this point my head is full of half-remembered aphorisms which all seem to be variations on Socrates' Delphic issues which shows how prevalent the attitude is throughout history. Unless of course, the story has been widely reported in order for the teller to sound intelligent without actually understanding the meaning. I also keep thinking of the word inscrutable as well. Even my brother has spouted something along these lines at me. Wisdom comes in a flash of understanding not with a lifetime of study or something like that.

Looking back now, the picture is actually apt - the ladder to understanding perhaps though maybe it being a fire escape suggests a descent rather than an ascent.

Technology still amazes me. My wife has decided that she really ought to get back into The Archers and asked me to set the PVR to record it last night. Within a minute I was able to download all the week's episodes as mp3s and transfer them to the PVR ready for listening. And now with 2gig of USB stick memory, I am beginning to get into that state which people who make their living in technology should never really go to. It all seems so fascinating and of course goes against my ideas from above because so much effort has gone into making all these things perfect and easy to use. We don't need them. My wife could quite happily live her life in comfort and safety without having The Archers on demand. I have listened to The Archers on and off for years. I remember it being on at any lunchtime I happened to be at home in the week and without actually listening to it, it gave out a feeling of comfort, especially when I realised that the view out of the windows in our house was the same as the characters would see. I seem to remember Shula from when I was very little but she can't be that old can she?

I Didn't Know Harry Secombe Was A Virgo



Zero has been replaced by Forty-Two - specifically this book. I've only got to chapter two out of 121 but it is far superior by a ration of 0 to 42. Which implies that it is infinity times better doesn't it - which is just plain silly but maybe the first book was just that bad.

I seem to be in a weird state of flipping between depression and ecstasy in a matter of seconds at the moment. Maybe depression is a bit too strong - slightly to the left of indifference is probably more accurate but the changes are notable. It is probably the result of a few late nights or all the Bombay mix I ate in one go the other day. Nothing I cannot cope with by talking it out. The first chapter of the book above is about the idea of happiness and how trying to achieve that state often just results in the opposite feeling. Popular philosophy seems to be all about happiness these days - is there nothing ethical to talk about regarding modern thought? It is of course all self-referential - anything discussing happiness always seem to refer to how looking for it makes it recede and then you are into meta-reference - talking about talking about being happy and that squares the unhappiness. By even mentioning this, am I risking a black-hole-like descent into complete melancholy - an Escher-based pit of black infinity - or am I just trying to seem 42 times cleverer than I actually am?

A top-ten puff (or more likely filler but I was actually thinking about this while in the car the other day).

Top Ten Albums

Dummy - Portishead
Stories From The City - Stories From The Sea - PJ Harvey
Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis
Katydids - Katydids
Autobahn - Kraftwerk
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure - Virginia Astley
Music For Eighteen Musicians - Steve Reich
Gala - Lush
Treasure - Cocteau Twins
Aion - Dead Can Dance

Which as you can see, makes the favourite label 4AD.

All the above is as fluid as a plasma ball let loose in the heart of a dark sun. Guilty pleasures list next week sometime. Possibly.

I Bet You Can't Find Marcus Island



Oh! You have.

The youngest has just tried to find out where the pictures actually are on a DVD which if you ask me is a very good question. You might apply it to finding out where the internet actually is. The "contents" of your computer spread out all over the disk in what would seem a completely illogical order. Even straight after a defrag, it is probably not easy to tie a list of files in explorer to areas on the disk. I wonder if there are utilities which show an actual physical representation of the files on disk - maybe having a link on the right-click menu of the file explorer. Expand this to the entire collection of data on the internet and see where that gets you. Of course all the stuff at the BBC website probably resides in only a few locations around the world but even then, redudancy and backup machines probably mean that something a click away on the page will not be anywhere close in physical location. So we have the logical map of all the stuff out there and the physical map of where the actual bits sit on disk. Is there an equivalent of the degree of fragmentation of the intenet? The people who wrote the web-crawler to answer the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon question must surely be half-way there.

Fighting A Bobcat For Liquorice

Oh Douglas - you should sue!





Listening to Electric Guitar Phase by Steve Reich - played by Dominic Frasca

I have to admit to jettisoning the book about zero - I have to agree with most of the reviewers that it was a random load of trash which said in 100 words what most of us could say in 10. I still stand by my pivoting about zero thing but of course "of course" is my irony signifier of the moment. The book may be full of mysterious stories, but none come up to wonderfully surreal standards of others I have read recently.

Apart from this I have nothing else to say today. I should try a random Friday but I don't even have any triggers. I have Electric Guitar Phase turned up, way beyond 10 - may even be near 11, like the reverb on A Cocteau Twins record. How random is this? I saw some of a programme about call centres yesterday though it made me angry - especially the blatant Newspeak of the "Above the line language" which is designed to promote "Above the line thoughts". However if you are in that line then I suppose making people feel good makes them more likely to buy your product.

Canning Town Blues

I am going to call this latest piece of software after one of the Muses - see if you can guess which one.

Listening to Four Organs by Steve Reich

You may not wish to listen to this as apparently caused one woman at the premier rose from her seat and approached the stage saying "I confess! I confess!". I love it. It is basically one chord which gets longer and longer throughout the piece though there is some dissection of the basic notes in that they are not all played all the time (Thank you Eric Morecambe). Its beauty to me is the choice of chord which is found in lots of music - just usually in a much more conventional setting. Steve Reich is not a difficult composer; his works are far more melodic than the atonal pieces that you can sometimes hear on Radio 3 and I have often argued (not than many people can be bothered arguing with me about this) that there is far more variation over the length of the pieces than you will find in a standard pop song. I listened to some samples of Metal Machine Music the other day and found that reasonably interesting as well.

Currently reading The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan. I was immediately struck by how flowery the introduction to this was and although this poetic approach has returned throughout the book it seems to work even with the diversions into various Zen-like interludes. I suppose that anything to do with zero really does actually fall naturally into a reference to Zen. My aunt told me about how her first few lectures for her maths degree just involved discussion of the succession of 1 and 2. I now have a whole book about zero which if you think about it hard enough is far more than either just the absence of anything to number or the number between -1 and 1. It is the pin on which all numbers circle, wheeling about this central point without which the galaxy of mathematics would spin off into the universe with no real definition.

All this is leading to some weird dreams about maths. Last night I dreamed that I had found a geometric solution to the sequencing of prime numbers, where the angles between the sides of polygons with various numbers of sides has a direct relationship with whether that number was prime or not. I'll let you know when I crack RSA. Begging letters to the address above.

Big Films Made Small

What film is this? This is the scene in the kitchen of my daughter's dolls' house. As well as having proper wallpaper and floorboards, it is a schoolroom for Doctor Who characters, so Martha Jones and Rose sit around the sitting room being instructed on how to deal with various monsters while the Doctor in his space suit sits alone at the kitchen table. This is as well as having all the normal occupants of the house including the maid - things are getting a little crowded now though it does look calm and comfortable at night. No telly I think. Of course Rose and Martha can never meet can they!


Notes:

Banking sleep over a whole lifetime. Am I catching up now?
"Leave my child to me - do not make my child a political point."
Angels fly at the speed of light.
Do I like the music of Steve Reich because it is unresolved like real-life - not like a structured book.

We were watching Lewis the other night and while contemplating the possibility of one of the peripheral characters being the culprit, I began to wonder if some of these people could keep cropping up as regulars like in the soaps. For instance the chief librarian at The Bodleian Library would be the same every time she has cause to appear. You could extend this to other dramas should they use the same location but I suppose Lewis is the only drama likely to work in this location.

Isn't this just rubbish. My most excellent stream of consciousness. I might even be able to spell consciousness one day.

Faith-Based Belligerence Initiatives

I was driving home on the M57 the other day when I overtook a beat-up old 50's style bus with nearly all the paint flaked away. As it receded in the rear-view mirror I was just able to make out the words in the destination window at the front. It read 'CEMETERY'. Which rationally is a wonderful bit of black-humour and irrationally WAS A GHOST BUS GOING TO THE SCENE OF A HORRIFIC ACCIDENT! Sorry! Calmed down now.

I am sorry to say I have removed a particular blog from my list of favourites over its vile attitude. It is a real pity because the blogger was intelligent though not particularly in line with my attitudes but the last straw was a post that was partisan in the extreme and betrayed some brick-wall within their personality that showed them to be not quite as clever as they liked to think. I would think is was a case of high IQ but low EQ if you believe in such things. Anyway, I have already replaced the blog with someone much more worthy (warning - might be a bit sweary). Having said this there are loads of blogs which are purely there to wind up their readers ... pause... just read one - nicely fired up by non-resident of the UK spouting off about UK policies about which he really knows nothing. Getting your views on this country from the Daily Mail just makes you think we live in nothing short of Albania circa 1975. I will expect the food parcels any day now (please send just one Norman Wisdom video as we only have a single VCR and that is Beta). I will have to wean myself off this garbage for the sake of my systolic.

Hitting The Personality Button

Out of zombie mode I think - the world seems to have a range again, ups and downs rather that a great featureless plain which I could be falling towards or racing away from. I have to put up with some of this in order to be real but sometimes I wonder if it would be nice to live like that for ever just to avoid the over-powering ecstasy and the crushing depths. Actually maybe that is the state I have craved for years.

Today smells clean and fresh like being back in the country, walking across the hills between the farms near our house. My eyes seem to want to slip into distant focus - I have been sitting here at the screen f0r a few minutes as if there was a whole world a thousand metres behind it - like another universe in the perfectly reflecting globe. I can see and hear and smell it all, feel the scratches of the brambles and the gentle warmth of spring sun.

Abrogation is a waste of effort - like those irrelevant terpsichorean angels it is an excuse to justify anything you might do or say. The world seems to be run by those annoying people who think the height of sophisticated comedy is to hold a finger out and make your own eye into it - the same people who when questioned about something they say can justify the whole thing as being just a joke up to the point where they advocate murder and pillage. Political spin seems to be this type of ducking and diving dressed up in long words. I hate myself for complaining - I hate myself for being unable to complain enough at the right time and I hate myself for wanting everything to be simple.

Hot Road - Jumping Toad - Upton Snodsbury



Some of today's entry is brought to you by the youngest.

Shrek is good - look he burps but that button on this book sounds very like the X-Files theme. Aren't trains brilliant? - it's TR for train not nothing. Can I take just one more picture? The best train is the one with arrow that points that way and that way and that way and that way but we don't go on it - it's not a 'm' one and it's not yellow. Press [RETURN] now! We have to. Twenty five! Forty five dad. Press [RETURN] please! It's not fair. Yay - Yay - Yay - it's Horrid Henry. Ha Ha Ha. Zero won't go on. It keeps staying forty five. All done. All Done.

Figments and Fractions
(Pretentious Filler For A Saturday)



Actually Listening to Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp

We were out and about today though the high winds seemed to be keeping most people indoors which made me wonder about being inside the minds of the few people we did pass. The only person I can truly know everything about how they feel is me and everyone else dwells in varying circles of experience - obviously most of them outside any possibility of me knowing them at all. The man passing the new building work on the corner, hands in his pockets and jacket held tight against the wind was in my sight for less than a second and in my memory, though I know he was moving, is just a snapshot of a man with one leg off the ground. I was thinking about how all this must have been thought about before and by many and better equipped minds than mind but I still want to write about the empirical evidence of this as it crossed the canyons of my own mind rather than being filtered through other peoples. These thoughts are like random X-Wings, sparking along the grey trenches of my brain, waiting for some tiny exhaust port to open up and let them bomb me with some really important concept - something that will be "right" like that piece of music that came to the composer in Amsterdam and then will just float away leaving some messy impostor that seems the same but to everyone else is just a thought. The external world is continually hitting us with stuff that goes in through senses and mostly ends up flying right out again.

Yesterday I wrote a paragraph in the notebook about how hearing a great piece of music can feel like winning the lottery, the music seeming to provide a level of happiness well beyond that which you might feel you deserve. How can something so simple as a few notes backed with a peachy chord actually give you feelings that are only ever matched by complex things like love and long-term fulfilment? It is a wonderful free-gift. I suppose I have to tell you which piece of music sparked this don't I? It was As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins by Dead Can Dance.