Distant Nun

The big shadow on the right is me while the little one to the left is Richard Hammond ... maybe.

I did have a poem but it seems inappropriate for today so it has to wait for another day. Many other things for discussion but nothing jumps out. Obviously it was sad to see that Nicholas Hughes - son of Ted and Sylvia - killed himself. Even from this side of depression it seems odd that he could get that far without someone intervening but isn't that exactly what happened to his mother? Standard rider at this point - while I might be able to understand the comment on the fact (much along the lines of a familial curse), I don't have the erudition to comment in any great way. Depression obviously removes one's ability to comment on it rationally, though at this point I begin to wonder if it is actually possible to have virtually separate parts of the mind, one of which is able to comment on the other. Maybe this ability should be called bootstrapping.

Turning to frivolity, the new series of Big Bang Theory starts tonight, so my wife can spend 25 minutes happily comparing me to Sheldon while I quietly worry that I am actually more like Wolowitz. It's not like you don't know I'm a geek is it?

Cursive Handwriting Does Not Mean What I Think It means

Listening to You Can't by Smoke Fairies.

A day with all days

Smoke moves slowly across this city today and the rush of blood and traffic scrapes the veins and kerbs, turning all activity to noise without content or meaning. Sitting alone in a big field I can hear that noise but I think it means nothing to me, just a roar like the echo of the whole city in a shell at my ear. My ears are red with cold, the character-forming weather of all remembered winters, pushing me to the edge of tears and tantrums. But now distracted by a small movement in my eye line, a bird at the wall, darting and flitting between it's meagre winter meals, I am happy again, back into the safe-zone of all small children, missing the depth of what our parents think is serious and important. I could have stayed here for years, happy at the green field stretching away to the limit of sight, to where the distance merges with the misty fade-in, and the limit of my interest. I can catch a strong will filling me on those days, like something being poured into me through all my senses. All that music, all those words, the poems between adults in the blur of time, seeping in to the gaps in my head.

Outside it is stormy, but in this room, all I see is grey-light of thunder and lightning, the smashing of giant things to frighten us into irrational fears. It is irony with only one end that someone dies being struck on days like these, for the risk is low. The human is a miracle, a conscious thing built up from nothing, a decrease in entropy so extraordinary that it turns half the world against the other half in arguments about how it could possibly happen. All this does is postpone the ultimate reckoning, the day the creator settles up his balances with love and hope; where he finds no one for his appeal.

Fish, Fish and More Fish

Very fine programme about fish in Japan on BBC4 last night. Not sure why this appealed but it turned out to be a random walk around those islands with a loose connection to fish and other sea-creatures. I was going to say seafood there but not all the fish were eaten - the Koi Carp are worth thousands of pounds and are definitely not on the menu. However, because of the rarity of various other fish which are eaten, the value of things such as Blue Fin Tuna approaches £100 per kilo which is just silly. I was a bit squeamish about the snapper which was caught, prepared for being eaten and served up on a bed of its own flesh while it still alive, but I've eaten snapper that was just as fresh though hopefully it was dispatched before being portioned.

The panorama of trees outside the window is looking especially subtle and spring-like this morning despite the fact that I had to scrape the windscreen today. While I can't actually see any leaves or even buds on the trees, something about the weather or the quality of the air suggests that such things are about to appear. What is it about the quality of the air that lets us know what the season is? Maybe it's just a memory of times that went before.

Well today is Ada Lovelace day which is a great idea. Ada Lovelace - charming, attractive, intelligent, comfortable in high society, daughter of Byron but not bad, mad or dangerous to know. Worked with a well-known curmudgeon, pedant and persecutor of buskers. Positive discrimination at its best. Sounds like nothing has changed in the field of computer science.

Can you tell me what a person from Corsica is called?

FCOMIP ST, ST(1) ;23
fstp Q
jc LESS
and ah,20h
Jnz EQUAL
mov eax,0C00002h ;Greater

Another hour of Tim Vine last night. While it might not have more than a few absolute guffaws, the continuous stream of puns means that the amusement meter never falls below a certain level of entertainment. The extras are quite fine as well.

I have a note in the book from Friday in which I expressed a desire to write a poem about assembly language. It suddenly struck me as I was writing that sentence that assembler itself looks a bit like a poem anyway, though obviously one where the meaning is different from your run-of-the-mill ode (ode instead of code perhaps). But it still has meaning and even metre and rhyme; it just doesn't quite have the emotional content. My sudden desire to get back into assembler was sparked by the sight of some short function that had replaced a much clearer function written in c and was obviously just a way of advertising someones expertise at push, pop and mv. All of sudden I was back with my head in an 8086 book marvelling at how one could move a single bit from one place to another. Of course the range of addresses through which those bits can be moved is now 1000s of times bigger than it was then, meaning that I am sure no one really bothers with it these days. I worry that there will be a point when there is not one person left who understands the low-level stuff of computing and assembler and machine code will become like mystical deities on which the entire world relies but nobody can change. At that point, the whole architecture will be frozen, only changing in speed and magnitude without any ability to tune the underlying code to fit changes in the world, gradually becoming more and more inefficient as the hardware loses sight of the software. If we suddenly kick all our code over to quantum computing we will have to learn a completely new low-level architecture in order to program anything. Never mind - it was nice while it lasted.

Floating Rescue Station

This is a graphic from Britain's Wonderful Air Force, an Odhams Press book published during World War Two, a copy of which my brother and I destroyed by breaking the spine in order to trace the various drawings of aircraft in it. However, my favourite picture over the years is this one - an anchored rescue float for airmen downed in the channel. There was a German version as well, a square or hexagonal float more like a buoy but this one looks much better. I like the idea of a few hours spent in relative comfort and warmth , well supplied with food before being picked up by a fast launch. I'd be tempted to wait until the food was mostly gone before radioing for help but then again I would have run a mile if anyone had suggested that I actually fly in a warplane. I realise the reality of being stuck on one of these in the dark on a rough sea is probably different from my romantic image but then again war is always posted as being much more glamorous than it really is so that the farm boys don't get scared off. I am not cynical!

I'm 992 you know.

There seems to be romance in the air on our mantelpiece. Last week it looked like The Doctor was creeping up on the poor maid like Nosferatau and now he seems to have swept her off her feet. Isn't it sweet?

And now doing exactly what it says on the tin, PJ Harvey ... on a bouncy castle ... in the rain. Pitch that Mr Record Company man!

It's a Herring and it's Red

We're all reading Walden here. Well maybe not but we talk the talk don't we? I guess it must be spring what done it. I was thinking this morning that the view from the windows that face me in this office is very like that giant painting of trees by David Hockney. Rather fantastic that was I thought. Anyway, in the spring light, the unclothed trees that surround the car park are rather nice. It would be good to have a camera to take a panoramic shot of the view each day at first light and then to display the sequence in some way. I couldn't even do that at home because there are a good few days in the winter when I leave the house before dawn and get back after night has fallen. Which is not nice.

There was one of those surprise programmes on BBC4 last night - one that doesn't get trailed but is intensely interesting. It was a personal view of the MP and libertine Tom Driberg by William G. Stewart (of 15 to 1) who once worked as Driberg's private secretary - spending the early months fighting off advances. It was a chatty overview and for a man with so much experience of the world it obviously skimmed over quite a lot of stuff but it was a nugget of interest in the sea of dross.

I Saw Two Shooting Stars Last Night

Everything is a bit fragmented round here at the moment. I can't get started on anything meaty because I keep getting distracted by little bits and pieces but as long as I have a code and it's billable, I'm not bothered. Well I am - I like beginnings and endings - one start for one finish and now everything overlaps it just feels a bit uncontrollable.

I think I've been told off for my rant about the Idler crew yesterday. However, the next section of the QI issue was what the writer described as a "squib" about William Morris who within it was held up as a paragon of the Idler philosophy. Now I will agree that William Morris was a great and original socialist but he was more your Islington Intellectual socialist and only had the time and money to work at what he played because of the money his family made from a Devon copper mine. It's alright though because he felt guilty about this all his life. He did also come out with some clever words about why he should not give away all his money, and he did look after the people he employed so that's alright as well.

I'd better stop this as I am sure anyone who can be bothered will be able to find much I have written regarding the need to slow down and not strive so much for rampant economic growth. The complainant (who you have probably guessed is my wife) also says that I am jealous of the man which is probably true. If I only had the money ...

Google Street View has gone live for a number of UK cities including Liverpool but unfortunately the initial images are just of inner cities and so anywhere I know is not yet covered. Apart from the house where I lived from 0-5. It makes me sad to look at it because, although the house is still there, the big lawn next to it has been covered up with another house. There was tree stump in the middle of this lawn and there is a picture of me sitting on it. I've just looked at Bristol as well and have just dropped the pegman onto the city from a great height and with amazing luck landed in the road where I lived. Which is nice.

Boiled sweet to anyone who can email me the address of the above picture.

The Cavalier Laughing

The Nigerian Navy HQ - from The University of Maine

That John Lloyd of the various nice QI people is a bit cavalier with his own facts isn't he, despite the joyful highlighting of obvious-but-wrong answers on QI itself? Actually it might have been his mate who said in the Idler QI Edition that all the ships in the Nigerian Navy were called Hippopotamus but in various dialects and languages of the country. After a few seconds hesitation while I considered whether Nigeria actually had any coastline to warrant a Navy and then went on to speculate that even if it didn't, both the Bolivians and the Swiss have such forces, I began to call shenanigans on that particular fact. This list appears to show that the statement, while not 100% true is basically OK and, more-importantly, funny . There is a Hippo class in said fleet and the ships within it are named after Hippos in different languages. I suppose the lesson is that anything stated as fact is almost always vulnerable to being picked at by pedants.

Statement - All the ships in the Nigerian Navy are named Hippopotamus.
Truth - Sort of - some of the ships in the Nigerian Navy are named Hippopotamus.

Statement - Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow.
Truth - Sort of - but so do we in English if you include all adjectives.

Alright - I get the point - nothing is definite.

I know that my Protestant Work Ethic will show through in the following information but who cares? While I like the Idler and admire the writing, the general concentration of being idle winds me up. The nice, clean, white paper of the book can only be produced using the efforts of many people who do indeed come to work every day at a defined time and do the job as expected. Am I missing the point of the attitude? It seems anti-social and exploitative to rely on the efforts of hard-working people in order to produce a hymn to the layabout. I don't even believe that the contributors actually are Idle - I suspect they never stop thinking and doing and all of the guff they write is simply wish-fulfillment. I do agree that the never-ending push for growth has negative consequences and that we all need a bit of slowing down and fireside sitting for our continued mental health but The Idler crew are not really that sort of people are they?

On Varying Levels of Excitement

Listening to Torque by Kristin Hersh.

Obsessions come and obsession go, for me, sometimes over seconds. Last night I was very taken with a surprise programme in a surprise BBC season of programmes about Japan. This was Marcel Theroux's attempt to understand the ethereal Japanese concept of Wabi Sabi. I won't link to anything related to it as the whole concept seems to defy both simple explanation and being tied down by anything so definite as digital information. Wabi Sabi is purely an inhabitant of an analogue world. Supposedly it has something to do with minor imperfection on the face of beauty but for it to have 90 minutes of TV devoted to it it must obviously be more complex than that. Haiku was mentioned but Haiku seems the most perfect form of poetry that exists and with only 17 syllables, the possibility of imperfection here seems remote. The Zen Buddhist monk played to type and said that if you claim to have defined Wabi Sabi then you haven't.

The programme was helped by being filmed in Autumn, making for beautiful, steady shots of intense Fall colours, gentle rain on quaint villages and a general air of peace which probably said more about the editing of the film than anything real. Marcel Theroux is of course the elder brother of Louis and has a similar presenting style though he is less arch about things - you never get the feeling he is taking the mickey out of anyone.

Anyway, I was all fired up to write strictly-enforced Haiku about the spring but of course all that enthusiasm has faded and I know that any attempt would produce empty and pretentious rubbish. You are safe.

It Just Goes To Show You Can't Be Too Careful

David Mitchell seems to want to bring the Internet down with his request to put in the above phrase to every and any comment section you feel tempted to contribute to. People are still posting it to the original piece as I write. So often I sit with itchy fingers after reading much rubbish on such pages and never yet have I overcome the control rods of enlightened ignorance and actually posted anything. Yesterday I succumbed. And now the madness begins.

Next in our list of eighties music retrieved from the garage is Cupid and Psyche '85 by Scritti Politti. I played this album over and over and I struggle to work out why - it is fey and twee and all those other words which describe the effete voice of Green Gartside. He was on a BBC 4 programme about Rough Trade Records at the weekend (I've just realised that I typed "Rough Trade" into Google just then) and I cannot match his speaking voice with the Ultra-Jon-Anderson style of his singing. I'm not sure I would have picked up on this LP if it had just been released recently but at the time, studio trickery was all the rage. Good to play loud when travelling fast. It is also not damaged by having what sounds like some manic Radio 1 DJs on the remix of one of the tracks. Along with Into the Gap, this seems the archetypal album for which the words "Drum Programming" were invented as a credit. Listen and get back-combing.

The cluster bombs! I forgot the cluster bombs! I've been meaning to write about this for days because the papers don't seem to be making much if it. I can only hope that this is the end of it and everything else - Cluster bombs, Landmines, Hollow Point Ammunition, all of the terrible inventory of weapons that go just that little bit further in their defined function. This is where I return to the idea that it seems ludicrous to have a defined boundary for what is acceptable in warfare and what is not. The trouble is that this leads to the view that we should ban every weapon, obviously a ludicrous idea but it does then break-out of the argument over where we should draw the line over "acceptable" weapons and start talking about drawing the line in the range of what targets are acceptable. Anything with the remotest risk of harming civilians is out and as far as I am aware all the existing treaties already say this and still the heavy loss of civilian life raises little comment outside of the few minutes around when it actually occurs. No agreement can cover the red mist that overtakes any and all soldiers in the heat of battle - you just do not see personnel poring over ring-binders containing all the latest treaties. I am now wondering whether any military outfit of even the most regimented country actually carries such material around with it. The absurdity of it all is just lost because there is no visible boundary out in the field - it all just happens and is reacted to. Anyway - a good day for the world. Respect due.