It's The Chas 'n Abe Show!

It is time to come out of the closet and admit what many of you may have been suspecting for some years now. It is always painful when the time comes that it is no longer possible to cover up such deviant characteristics but I feel that everything is set for such a revelation. My name is Rogier and I am an .... errr.... evolutionist. There! Said it. No "I think" about it Chaz! It's all true and no amount of argument can convince me otherwise. I am in good company I know. With your help I may get over the trauma of this announcement. I thank you for your support at this difficult time .... blah blah monkeys ... blah blah volvox etc.

And what do we say about the other famous bicentenarian and exact contemporary of Mr. Darwin? How about "Well apart from that - how did you enjoy the play?" Will that do? No - maybe something else? Did you know he used to keep important papers under his hat which explains why it was so tall? There probably wasn't room for a marmalade sandwich - maybe a wrap of some sort instead.

Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings and the Wolf

In the spirit of bad poetry I bring you :

Lines Written to a Friend on the Death of His Brother,
Caused by a Railway Train Running Over Him
Whilst He Was In a State of Inebriation

How oft alas my brother have I warned thee to beware
The horrid spells of guilt which led the drunkards' life to care;
But no! you heeded not the warning words I spoke with pain,
Your wretched soul that once was pure was bound as in a chain;
At length, one cold October, when the night was late and dark,
The awful doom came on which sank thy life's unsteady barque;
Thy mangled corpse upon the rails in frightful shape was found,
The ponderous train had killed thee as its heavy wheels went round.
And thus in dreadful form thou met'st a drunkard's awful death
And I, thy brother, mourn thy fate, and breathe a purer breath.

James Henry Powell

Take that McGonagall! Mine is better than that at least. All this has been sparked by reading Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams which is good but not that good - bit dry if you ask me. There is enough of interest to keep me going and maybe my disappointment is really because nothing can compare when Smokie Sings .... er .... to DNA's own writing. the bit in question is the fact that the name of the world's worst poet had to be changed from Paul Neil Milne Johnstone to the lovely Paula of the wonderful swans dirge viz.

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted.
They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.

Actually some of mine have been like that and quite of lot of modern poetry still is - Stephen Fry rants against it but then again he is channeling Keats and the whole emotional gang of his mates. None of mine for today - I am taking stock.

And so I return to the whole sorry mess that is the MMR debate. Jeni Barnett is no longer wibbling about MMR because she has taken down her blog post about the subject along with all the comments about it - though she may have had some help from Winston to manage this dangerously technological process. Comment number 6 on that link to Ms. Barnett is rather beautiful. Ben Goldacre over at Bad Science has had to take technical advice (though not from Winston I hope) because of the increase in bandwidth to his site. As part of that bandwidth I learn that an early day motion regarding the recent debate has been made. All seems to be below the radar of actual broadcast but what can you expect when the increased chatter is due to the apparent censorship of a radio show by the broadcaster of the show?

All of this is of course, an example of The Streisand Effect. Oh look! There's a chimmney!

I would put up the Free Speech Flag but I's a coward.

Drafty In Here

After my rants of yesterday, I find myself on the cusp of catastrophe over this article about how the triple jab is compulsory in some parts of The US. It seems that if you can't be bothered to make a simple and compelling case for the jab, then you have to resort to threats and punishments to beat the idea into the ignorant chavs.

I can't be bothered with it anymore - so ....

Listening to Electric Guitar Phase which will either drive you potty or send you to some sort of rock/classical/alternative Nirvana. Listen on LOUD.

I also have to rethink the poetry don't I? I am told that it has been sitting in a groove for ages and though it seems to flow quite easily, it's all about the same thing - apparently - I wasn't actually aware of that but I suppose it may be true. Maybe this is the Oblique Strategy I need to make the needle jump. In defence, the last one was at least an attempt to be less opaque. Did it work? Subject was still the same hey? Oh well! Watch this space. Of course the question of talent is a completely different bread-maker of brilliance isn't it?

Letter to The Observer - 1798

Some more modern links :

Jeni Barnett (and this is definitely editorial) - wibbling.

And on the other side :-

Ben Goldacre (who I have only just realised is a doctor).

There is also Doctor Crippen, who by virtue of not being directly involved can put his case a little more strongly.

I do not wish to make any further comment as I am an anonymous coward of the highest order - however, those of you with me will know you are right and therefore have no need for expansion of the subject. Those of you on the other side of the the argument will of course believe in all sorts of gibbering psycho-super-extra-sensory wibble and therefore will be able to tap into my brain via the wonderful modern technology of telepathy that science has provided for us to use in these situations.

Are we done? I suspect not.

Geneva Convention

She dreams, like us all, of many things each night,
Of how we fail to fix the leaks around the house,
The high-speed career through empty life,
And how she was once a fighting man; dead soldier,

Who before his end by air bombs, lived a fetid life,
Of boredom, hunger, dull ailments in mud and dust,
Which make a war long-ended still regarded “modern”,
When compared with those that went before,

Red-coated glories, the rush through fields agreed,
Beforehand with the enemy who nod to cousins,
And order patriotic hordes, ablaze with fevers,
Born of loyalty to men who know to lift a finger,

When they take tea with mother in the nursery,
And down to this we’ve come, deprived of honour,
All that filters through the years to us, to sign,
To agree that one way of killing is one way too far,

And leave all the others legal, approved and stamped,
With marks of blocs, alliances and nations,
And every one considered civilized and stable,
Compassionate, concerned. It is OK to kill this way.

Then comes the banal list of prohibited atrocities,
The fire, the bugs, the bullets which explode on entry,
As if damage after that is not quite cricket.
The mines, which as a side-effect take children,

More than any soldier, the yellow bombs like toys,
Prizes found on bomb-sites to take as souvenirs,
In the fire-stormed, sun-blinded, shattered towns,
In the paddy fields, concealed and lasting years.

And here men argue, dark-suited diplomats at trade,
To swap cluster bombs for chemicals and bugs,
Tossing military-corporate management trash around,
Tick “strategic”, tick “advantage” in your buzzword bingo.

By the sea in the dappling of seventy-two degrees,
Fine set for a week of work and after-hours tennis,
She dreams of family men, designers making weapons,
And cannot see how that neural pathway works,

How coming home to that cliché survives the rounds
Of news reports that are the distant testing grounds,
The market research launched from sunny Glendale,
Is a clipboard shining light on paradox.

The Moon of Nowhere

The moon of nowhere, silent and slow across the sky,
has caught you begging riches for your sweet song,
and as punishment gives you voice to question liberty,
a cut and swipe of logic targeted with ire.

Some philosophy was made that day you called for death,
Imagining yourself a soldier, gumshoe, scientist or hack,
Mad at madness, the stupidity that shows its head,
And draws the fire of those who suffer it.

The sun and moon are one, a unit shield to enmity,
A centurion's formation in battle with the Goth
And Visigoth of failing factory owners, history men,
Let loose like beetles, fading through to nothing.

She calls us up at night, under the moon that made her,
The ringing spilling from the empty house to us,
To wake the children and lead us all into distress,
Her compassion seeping through the wire and air.

She melts hearts, makes hands wring when she goes,
Has arbitration over truth delegated to her easily,
For she knows us all, and what will make us free,
What it takes to make young girls gather arms and kill,

To dream of arcs of bloody self-extermination,
And yet still condemn it, still defining liberty,
In that spray of bone and hope and life and love,
The keystones of decades under threat, in poverty.

The universal, cosmological extent of what you know,
Is rock and steel to us, your calls still seeping through,
Under the handset, up the stairs, to wake us gently,
With nagging thoughts of how to make things better.

Demi Cuit

Announcing the deWeyden Biscuit/Cake Complexity Test.

Inspired by the wibbling idiocy of this table relating to VAT on biscuits and cakes I have again been annoyed at the complexity of the British Tax system. Do the boundaries of certain categories of snack items require such a level of definition as to whether a gingerbread man has more chocolate than is necessary to define its eyes? If there are such stupid things in this simple area, what unread paragraphs lie in wait somewhere in the multi-volume manuals that document our owings to the Government? Can such narrow categories really benefit us in any meaningful way?

Anyway, I have decided to use this obviously-contrived category of taxation as a bench mark for my own systems. From now on my mantra will be "What would Mr Kipling do?".

Plenty of lovely and juicy documentary stuff about evolution on the BBC at the moment including a rerun of Mark Steel's lecture on Charles Darwin - though I think Fitzroy's issues were glossed over slightly - but then again The Mark Steel Lectures are more about comedy than documentary. And I have to say if you were looking for bias on the BBC (never - ed.) this is where you might find it more openly than anywhere else.

End stuff:

- Will Young has a Desmond in Politics.

- It should possibly be moitié cuit but I am channeling Miles Kington.

The Cosmos Spins Fueled by Irony and Observation

Standing in the car park, the snow frozen to the ground in treacherous lumps, he suddenly saw again, the meaning of everything. He could not describe it in any clear way, just like he could not describe it the first time it happened. The realisation of that long-ago day hit him almost physically, mixed up as it was, with all sorts of mystical beliefs and strange spiritual ideas that lived in all of us in that place. These days, being in a city and working with solid, dependable machines, this sudden revelation was a strange surprise, an aberration in an ordered world. He was disturbed this time for he thought he was over such childish things

Not sure how to deal with this almost-messianic idea and struck with a fast pulse and spinning head, he sat down on a curb that held in the soil of the flowerbeds and thought about it. The unreality of it all and the fact that it struck totally out of the blue, made him wonder if something had failed in his head; he imagined a gradual leak from an artery, filling the spaces in his cortex, gradually building up pressure until everything collapsed in a gory mess of blood and brains. But this worry subsided; something had taken hold of his mind and like a friend in times of stress, was calming him down, holding him deep within a warmth that seemed to be coming from outside. I am linked to somewhere else he thought. This is a dream, it must be. But everything around him was as normal. The car park was the same as every other day, empty at this early time, sound tracked by birds, the gentle swishing of trees and the distant conglomeration of city sounds, a low hum that suggested a cold day in the park from his childhood.

He thought back to the first time this had happened and how disappointed he was when the feeling faded and evaded description. Though no less a surprise to him, that day was much more suited to what could only be described (embarrassingly for him) as a religious experience. It was rural and sunny, the sounds of crickets and of birds more suited to the moorland that surrounded him. For a few minutes he was as happy as it is possible to be - shown the workings of the world, knowing the deep science that usually was only understood by eccentrics and adepts. He had to struggle against the gravity that kept him place, for he was strangely aware that he was stuck perilously to the side of a spinning planet in a universe that dwarfed him. He could imagine being sucked out into space because for now the world was not solid matter any more - just a shadow of something, like a sub-atomic particle with no influence on big things. The clouds above were islands, drifting in their oceans, for creation had succumbed to the strangeness of the moment and the endless eons of time that lay between him and the first confluence of chemicals that started life had shrunk to tiny seconds. If this lasted he would see the fate of the world in the next few minutes, the gradual colour change of the sun and then its final explosion and contraction. He would be left on a cinder of metal, turning forever around an eternally-fading star until all light burned out and the whole universe was just other cinders unilluminated and dead. And despite this, he knew he was safe and immortal

This was no help in the industrial present. He should be encouraged by this happy feeling but he was both ecstatic and deranged with the strangeness all at once. He stepped outside these two extremes, as he had done with other conditions of mind, to examine and analyse the situation, independent of it being a problem of his. He thought for a moment of a doctor self-prescribing and almost always getting the diagnosis wrong despite never having failed in any similar task on a patient. How rational do you have to be to understand your own mind? He was distracted now, not feeling the ecstasy so intensely. The rational world will always defeat the irrational he thought but then he wondered why he thought this feeling could be irrational. The idea that we are all mad and this is sanity occupied him for a while before he dismissed it as cliche. He was scrambling for answers and an end to the state. What do I look like to other people he thought, stepping to the idea from a worry about the imminent arrival of colleagues. But he was early as usual and no one else would be here for almost an hour. Strangely he was relieved, firstly because he would be embarrassed at being found in what he imagined was dangerously close to some sort of fugue state, and secondly because he was actually enjoying the analysis

They found him 50 minutes later, catatonic and shivering but they were able to gently encourage him to his feet and into the warmth of the foyer where he sat calmly and quietly until the ambulance came. Inside his mind, he was back on the hillside again, a master of science in a world of charlatans, able to destroy any argument of faith with a single sentence. He felt part of the grid of communications that links us all, plugged in and spaced out. He was in two worlds now, a body, breathing, being fed with tubes, uncommunicative and compliant - lost to his family and to any physical human being. However, inside he was lying on the grass of that summer day forever, ringed with electromagnetic signals, a hub of mysterious things that happened in the networks

People began to receive strange emails, weirder messages amongst the weirdness that humans create for themselves in cyberspace. The messages were short, to the point, always scientifically accurate and often devastating in their criticism. The writer had no belief in anything supernatural. Evolution was definitely correct and all the possible levels of equivocation that served to placate all but the extreme proponents of this controversial subject were thrown out in language almost-religious in its fervour and vicious decrying of faith-only existence. The writer claimed all sorts of things and went some way to provide proof for many of them. Some believed he was a time-traveller, with knowledge of research not-yet-done. However, to the writer, time did not exist; it was simply a way of keeping events apart. In the sender's world, everything had happened already and it was his job to communicate all the knowledge of the universe to anyone who would listen ... and especially to those who would not listen for religious reasons. This was a new God to some, but that suggestion, when returned to the sender, was debunked as well, in a stream of polite but fervent language. It would have been nice to hear the person speak but attempts to locate his machine, his email, his IP address, failed in a mess of mechanical and electrical snafus - the messages sent to trace him, dispersing into feeble rays at the back of network hubs - becoming nothing detectable. This made him more like God, the ultimate conspiracy theory.

May Contain Groundhogs

I didn't realise that yesterday was Groundhog Day so any mention of Groundhogs was purely coinceidental, rather than down to any sensitivity to bizarre North-Eastern-North-American holiday customs. Chances 1 in 365 - not particularly difficult to achieve.

Windows Media Player has just jumped from the end of The Four Seasons to Acrid Avid Jam Shred by The Aphex Twin. This was quite disconcerting but also exciting in an oblique-strategy-type way. I have just managed at last to write an add-in for Windows Live Messenger which can respond automatically to messages sent to me. At the moment is doesn't actually reply in any intelligent way - it just sends back a random Oblique Strategy but at least it's a start. Full Turing-passing app coming soon.

I'm not sure if you noticed the link to an mp3 file a few posts back. It is an attempt at simulating a peal of eight bells using vb. As there is no proper Church Bell sound in the VB list and no sample that would work across the range, I ended up working with detuning 5 channels of other instruments playing against themselves. After a bit of playing it turned out that the standard Piano sound sufficed. I need some objective response about how close to the real thing this sounds. Everyone who has heard it so far is a philistine and a wet and a weed with no real appreciation for the nuances of resonance and timing.

Of All The Lockers In All The World

Look what I found in Google Earth.

Astronomy Gallery

Blood and Guts has left the pioneering days of the pillars of surgery and is now in the cutting edge zone (ho ho) of cardiac procedures. It is seemingly a procession of clunking, wheezing, whirring heart-lung machines which explode regularly and still occasionally a patient survives. Before this any number of weird solutions to keeping a patient alive while cutting into the heart were employed. Sometimes a donor would provide heart and lung function for the patient. Blood was oxygenated by sterilised monkey or dog lungs - and some of these patients also made it through.

Then there is the hilarious tale of the scientists who endeavoured to extract a chemical from hibernating groundhogs in the hope that they could lower the temperature of patients thereby reducing their oxygen requirements and giving longer to operate on the heart. They actually found something which they called hibernin and used it on live patients apparently with success, only to discover from the patent office that the substance was already registered as a plasticiser; they had extracted this from the tubes used in the experiment rather than from the groundhogs. It worked because it contained alcohol which explained why the nurses reported the patients drunk in the recovery room. Doh! And yet it works!