Patagonian Earthworms and Boring Postcards

'Patagonian Earthworms' is the phrase that Martin has just given me as a trigger for this entry. 'Boring Postcards' simply popped into my head unannounced. How do you define boring? My Father used to bring home construction firm catalogues for us to draw on the back of though I found myself drawn into looking at the architectural photographs. I only remember the name of one of the firms - Polensky-Zoellner - they seemed to concentrate on large but graceful bridges over remote gorges high in the German Mountains. It was a perfect world of what construction should be about. None of the mess of inappropriate rubbish that we British put up with no thought for our surroundings. Now that probably sounds boring to you but all kids want to grow up to do what their parents did so an interest in civil engineering was apt. My Mother was a Doctor and My Father was a Civil Engineer (so how did I end up here?). I remember dad also bringing home a small flick book which showed the stages of constructing a road surface. However, in an indication of the lack of women in the profession, the reverse images depicted a stripper performing (though she modestly danced off the page as she went). My wife bought me a tiny flick book which depicts one of Eadweard Muybridge's experiments. Well! No Patagonian Earthworms but some Boring Postcards.

BRAM Recursive Acronym Man

It did eventually rain though not with the Thunder Storms that were promised. In my best 'Vicar-on-thought-for-the-day' voice, that's a bit like life isn't it. You spend all your time expecting some wizz-bang event and what actually turns up is something far less impressive. Personally, I've been going through the old 'what have I achieved in my life?' internalising recently. Having said that I am going for positive thinking, I must say I have got rather a lot accomplished so-far. It's just that in this country thinking is so much less important than doing and as I only think about doing things rather than actually getting on with them, I feel slightly less in step. Anyway, I soon will have achieved something; I will have read all of 'Godel, Escher, Bach' in one go and understood it (well at least more than 50%). The first time I read it, I was flat on my back and drugged up to the eyeballs (A bad back rather than any recreational reason) so a lot of it seemed to pass in a blur. I just smiled at the difficult bits and hoped that they would go away. This time around, I can see much more of how the Mathematics fits with Grammar and Images and Cognitive Science. My wife has asked me whether I finished the Alan Turing biography. I started reading GEB because some of the stuff mentioned in the Turing book is described in GEB and I thought it might help. On another level, I have 'pushed' into the stack and will 'pop' back on completion. Anyway, I pointed out that she is in the middle of four different books. She corrected me; it is five.

We watched 'Maybe Baby' on TV at the weekend. At first I thought it was a bit 'Naff' (See yesterday for defintion) but it took off after a while. I mention it because it is a mine (or minefield) of self-reference. The bottom line is that it is about a couple trying to conceive. However, the husband works for the BBC (who made the film itself - Self-Reference 1). He reads other people's scripts while trying to write his own. Eventually he realises that the only thing he can possibly write about it his own life which is dominated by them trying for a baby (Awful expression!) He writes a brilliant script which is turned into a film as it is being written (a la 'The Neverending Story'). He does not tell his wife that he is writing it or that the film is production. His colleagues say that the only fault is that there is no authentic female voice so he secretly reads his wife's diary and incorporates that into the script. So this is a film about a man writing a screenplay (thought I'd better use the correct word there) about a man writing a screenplay about .... and so on to GOD - GOD-Over-Djinn (an acronym which includes itself). Or is it? I don't think that the character writing the screenplay actually includes the bits about writing the screenplay but the man who wrote the REAL screenplay does. He was Ben Elton and the Screenplay was actually a book - 'Inconceivable' (Shame that the film doesn't have the same name). Ben Elton writes a book about a man who writes a screenplay about a man who writes ........ Head spinning as the man says in the Amazon review? I know that Ben Elton and his wife tried for a long time to have a baby and that eventually they were successful without any IVF but did he write the book without telling his wife and read her diary and all the rest? I bet they had Emma Thompson to dinner at some point but I suspect and sincerely hope that Rowan Atkinson was not their Obstetrician.

I have a very mundane example of GOD-Over-Djinn. There is a Dog food in this country called PAL, I would guess originally because Pal means friend and a dog is man's best friend etc. However, for a time a few years ago they used to advertise it as an acronym - PAL for Active Life. That used to bug me because of the self reference. Maybe the advertising executive had been reading GEB or maybe it was just a large dose of Columbian Marching Powder.

Anyway, back to the rain and back to wanting to lie down under the trees in the wood while the rain falls on the leaves above. No self-reference there. In reality, I am buried deep in PC operating systems with just the sound of bits falling on the heat sinks overhead. It is 15 minutes before that start of the working day and there is no-one else in the office. A database has just gone down. See you later.

The Ubiquitous Mr Smallwax

This came out of a password hash I am writing. I wonder if he exists. Well, I didn't think he would. Would have been nice if he had though.

I am in the middle of asp hell at the moment. Integerising is different in vbscript from vb itself. Yuk!

I'm in the "so many things to write about" phase again. I can't make a decision. Bearing in mind that this story (Positive thinking 'extends life') has just come out, I have obviously got to tell myself how lucky I actually am. There aren't actually any wars close by at the moment; I'm certainly not going hungry and my mind is at least slightly sharper than a bucket of custard. I worry after writing things like this, that something really awful is going to happen to me immediately. It's as if my mind has a section for worry which when empty fills with irrational thoughts. Maybe I could train it to get smaller like you can train your stomach to expect less food. I am a pretty average star on the Western spiral arm of a pretty insignificant galaxy where not a lot actually happens. If I look at it rationally, there is not much definition to people's lives in this country because nothing really bad actually happens. My Father had to go to a real war (Suez in 1956), my Uncle flew as a tail gunner in World War II and my aunt (well at least two of them) dodged Flying bombs. One of my Aunts was a WRAF looking after the Radar Operators on the South Coast during World War II and she tells a story about standing near the coast talking to some male colleagues when they all disappeared. They had dropped to the floor leaving her standing there while a V1 hit the cliffs nearby. I also remember a doctor friend of my Mother relating how he saw a V1 brought down by a Meteor which simply put its wings under those of the doodlebug and flipped it over using the slipstream between them. It sounds unlikely especially with the recent article I read which said that most of the little devils were brought down by Typhoons or Tempests. Well most of the ones which were actually brought down; I suspect most of them got through. At least 2000 fell on London though not one of them on the Ubiquitous Mr Smallwax.

Flexible Ethics

Before I start proper, a link to a story on the BBC which confirms my thoughts about Lego from previous entries. Children are taught things these days, rather than how to think about things. They are taught thinking rather than meta-thinking.

Let this man use his imagination to the highest possible level.



(From http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/iams/html/)

Today's soundtrack - the first for some time - Dead Can Dance 1981 - 1998. This is punk rock for the 15th Century. Having said that, I have just had the thought of John Lydon let loose in Medieval England. I'd give him five minutes before he was toast on some pile of sticks.

Hero of the day - Filippo Brunelleschi if only because the music above seems to fit in some way with the images from the book - Brunelleschi's Dome. There was a story yesterday about people's view of success. It is disheartening to see that the perfect man's ideal job is 'international footballer'. Where did they question these people? At the Gym, the Nail Salon or a home for the terminally naff probably. (Merriam-Webster has no entry for 'Naff' so I suppose I'd have to define it as 'Kitsch with attitude' though 'Naff' does have some credibility by being used as the substitute for stronger four letter words in 'Porridge'). Why do we idolise people like that?

Roll on Lunchtime.

The secret Life of Bridges

Are we ever to know what is on the other side of this ocean?

It is humid today. They said there would be thunderstorms but they are not here yet. It is like swimming through the shower at the moment. I know there are plenty of places with worse climates but for me at the moment, this is horrible. I just want to go and lie in the long grass in the shade of tall trees and think things into my blog. I know it is not possible but it will be. Boeing are researching antigravity at the moment so everything we thought was impossible may not be.

Hiding in the long grass in the trees is a calming visualisation, like "Under the Ivy". Sometimes I think of all the places in the country where there are no humans, all the shady clearings in the forests, the acres of open grassland on the hills and mountains and the quiet river-bank paths. It almost has me believing in the things I usually dismiss as rubbish, the fairies and the other little people, or the wisdom of the non-human living things. I am drawn back to hanging on the bridge rail looking up at the sky and pretending I was flying high above some tropical ocean, the small clouds as islands and the vapour trails or aircraft as the wakes of ships so far down below. At that age nothing matters beyond the next five minutes. There must be a correlation between how far you look ahead and how old you are. I suppose that this is why our confidence is lost as we get older. My daughter has NO worries about anything long-term. She loves everything about herself and is of course the most important person in the universe. Sometimes I just want to curl up and revert to that feeling but all the bad-stuff creeps in as soon as I think about it. For me it started with the B52s bombing Vietnam and Cambodia. That is my first memory of TV from about 1968 and it annoys me that my life was stolen by me seeing that image. I don't need to put a link to it do I? If you are my age then it must be in your head too. The man who put it there won a Nobel Peace Prize. I can be thankful that I never saw anything about Mai Lai; maybe my Father carried out some judicous censorship or I blanked it out or something.

Someone wrote to the BBC talking point about Landmines the other day. Her name is Anne just so you know which entry to look for. She said

'People don't see the benefit of landmines. Granted, some civilians get hurt by them, but they are a great weapon against infantry. The landmine business also creates lots of jobs in this country so to close it down would be wrong'.
Anne - USA

Now this maybe an adolescent boy writing just to be stupid but I doubt it. "The benefit of landmines"!!!!! I remember the first time I became aware of the evil that is landmines. I was in a pub in Chester reading Scientific American when I came across an article about mines. I cried in public at what some supposedly decent person in a supposedly civilized western country can develop to kill people who he will never meet or even come within a thousand miles of. Let us hope that the people who make these things become too pre-occupied with sueing corporations for their own lack of personal responsibility. Maybe we should set up a fund to bring the manufacturers of landmines to court so that the thousands of people affected by them can sue. There are people who are sueing fast-food outlets because they have too much flesh when there are people in the world who SHOULD be sueing because they have lost limbs. Ludicrous. We are all idiots. I know some people say that all this idea of banning the most terrible of weapons is Utopian but it is the work of only a minority which creates this mayhem. Most people want a quite life, under the trees in the long grass in the forest. Unfortunately, the forest is mined.



landmine action

Do the board at the landmine manufacturers punch the air whenever they make a new and better mine? I bet they do. I bet they sleep at night as well. Sometimes I don't sleep because of thinking about all this and I have no responsibility other than living in a Country which has a mild support for a Country which makes the bloody things.

We live in a world with 1 million different models of Training Shoe.

Christina Olson and the end of Art History

Remember Christina's World? I should have know better really but I was going to ask the question over whether there was was any story behind either the picture or Christina herself. All I know is that she had Infantile Paralysis as an .. er ... infant and that Andrew Wyeth met her one day and painted the picture from memory. However, there is the book Christina Olson: Her World Beyond the Canvas and this completely changes the view of the picture. Wyeth's painting is technically admirable but apart from Christina's World, I feel most of it is cold, like an antidote to all that Norman Rockwell saccharine. Not that I would dismiss Norman Rockwell as meaningless - every so often he paints something off-the-wall enough to reset your mind counter to all the usual wide-eyed baseball kids and ThanksGiving Dinners. We spend so much time over here criticising the Americans for not having any idea about life in the rest of the World but on the whole, we are pretty ignorant of the real USA ourselves.

I thought that the scene in 'Saving Private Ryan' where the Major and The Priest travel to see Mrs Ryan looked like Christina's World and it is nice to see that a better man than me thinks so too, though in light of the slightly darker nature of the picture it seems the film-makers have the 'Rural Idyll' view in mind rather than the deeper meaning.

I keep thinking of Lake Wobegon as well probably because of the name Olson.

Reality Multiplier II

Things are so slow around here. It's been a quiet week in Lake Woebetide. Today should be a Zen day. I need to recognise the pain that surrounds us before being able to transcend it. I should put everything into little boxes. I like boxes, especially art boxes.

I used to live near the Malvern Hills; my parents still do. We lived in an old house in the Shadow of the British Camp, so close in fact, that you could see its shadow rushing to meet you as the sun set. This is the view you get as you walk up from the car park.

The British Camp

(From http://members.tripod.com/roagain/photo_0107a.htm)

However, the way for us to reach the top was to walk directly towards the hill until you thought you would just end up in the woods which formed a barrier at lower levels. There was a very rocky path (sometimes it was a stream) which led through the woods, past the reservoir hidden in the lee of the hill and up to the Camp itself. Just before the path entered the woods it split with the lower path leading to Little Malvern Priory.

While looking for the Priory, I have just found this Panorama of the Malvern Hills which gives a very good impression of what it is like to live in their shadow, though we lived closer than this. Find the hotspots and you will know what I am talking about.

If you travel over the Malvern Hills into Herefordshire, you find huge swathes of country which belong to the Century before last. I can't remember whether I mentioned it, but once when My father and I went to find my GrandFather's grave at Breinton, which is only just outside Hereford itself, we were both struck as to how unaffected by the last 100 years the area actually was. Most of Herefordshire is like that. The thing that strikes me most, and it is obviously because I live in a City, is how few people there are. I love Hop fields and there are loads of them; you can smell them a mile off. I am afraid I am going to have to say it but I can still remember the Hop farmers using stilts to reach the top of the poles to re-string them. There are still many Oast houses in the area though I am sure that most Hop drying is carried out in electric ovens now. The ones I really remember are actually in Worcestershire and you can actually see them on the picture on this page. They are at the village of Suckley where we used to go walking to find fossils in the banks by the side of the paths. I don't think we ever found a whole one but we picked up plenty of pieces of Trilobites and loads of belomites and arthropods. We also found the occasional orchid though we never took any of those home. Suckley was near Elgar's birthplace though strangely we never visited it. Maybe one day.

I consider Herefordshire, the last great undiscovered area of England. I hope it stays that way. Maybe I shouldn't mention it here but then again no-one actually reads this do they so why worry? (I Still need that hypothetical question punctuation mark. See the list of hacker punctuation).

People are sheep. Occasionally in my organisation we send out an email to a large number of staff with one of the options set wrong so that when you reply to it, the reply goes to everyone to whom it was sent in the first place. If for any reason someone feels that they should reply, everyone gets it. And whats more replies to the replies go to everyone on the list. A massive recursive chain results. After a while, all the people who received the email get a bit annoyed and they start replying and telling people to stop replying of course replying themselves until the email system is clogged up with these replies. It could get so annjoying that even rational IT people (like myself - ahem) would start getting twitchy fingers and hover the mouse over the reply button. The company have learnt how to stop it happening now (though that took some time) but the recipients never learnt that they were part of the problem. The whole world must be like that. Shares, Queues, tacky TV shows. We ( and I include myself) never learn.

Lightships and Dazzle Ships

Why is there not more on the web about Dazzle Ships? (Not the OMD Album). Have a look at this picture for the best ever Dazzle Ship painting by a man who actually created many real dazzle ships. It has just struck me that Dazzle Ship painting looks very like certain MC Escher woodcuts. In fact, as the aim of Dazzle Painting was to cause confusion about the true direction of the travel of a ship, the concept matches with many Escher drawings as well, especially Concave and Convex. I have just read the chapter "Little Harmonic Labyrinth" in Godel, Escher, Bach and this picture is part of the story. Ian Hamilton Finlay is heavily into Dazzle Ships and has the best joke in the world about them (Probably the only joke in the world about them but that is beside the point). It is a one-liner along the lines of :- "Many warships were sunk by Submarines which just couldn't stand modern art" which is extremely funny when read out in a quiet art Gallery. It was funny at the tate Liverpool in 1990 and it was funny at the Tate St. Ives in 2002. Maybe I need a Dazzle Ship theme to the template here. Some investigation is required.

Pi Plus a little bit

An anecdote from Martin, not in his own words but following on from this morning's entry.

Martin tells me that Pi in India has been defined as 10. I asked the reason for this comment and this is the reply :-

In 1999 after the military Coup in Pakistan and the imminent threat posed by the nuclear capability which Pakistan had just revealed, the Indian Government became concerned that they could not keep up with this arms race. In order to increase the volume of their own warheads, Indian defined Pi to be 10.

Somehow it doesn't sound as good as when Martin told it but I can't remember the exact words. At the time I was struck at how good an example of a contrived answer it was. Maybe they should use square missiles instead. That reminds me of when I was in my mad keen space phase at the time of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. This is what the spacecraft looked like.



(From http://images.jsc.nasa.gov)

I built many Lego models of these craft and every time I made them square for obvious reasons and not once did it worry me. Now there are so many bricks in Lego sets with many more configurations than I ever had (The best things I had were the sloping tile bricks for making houses) and they make up all sorts of different models. There is no imagination required any more. For some reason my favourite model was one of the little free-swimming saucer-shaped submarine which Jaques Cousteau had. I can't find any really clear pictures of it which is suprising because it was one of those rare non-artistic human artifacts which is just "right"; so obviously perfect in both form and function. It made me happy that I could construct it with all the interior features as well so that there were seats inside at exactly the correct angle for viewing through the windows and which were accessible via an opening hatch (to a very small person). Maybe I will try and contstruct one in the Virtual Lego Program. I love the idea of creating Lego models which you can actually get inside. I am what you might call Claustrophilic, but that may be just a desire to shut out all the bad stuff.

I have just browsed the Lego shop site. If only I had been able to buy any brick I wanted when I was eight. We just had about enough to construct a two story house on one base plate though it did look like a real house, apart from the roof being very bright red though. I suppose it could have been in the South of France or something though I don't think there are many 1970s detached houses in the parts of France I am thinking of. Which reminds me. You don't see housing estates in France, not like those in the UK. Everyone lives in flats or farmhouses or Chateaux. And with that bit of rampant stereotyping, it is time to go.

Number Theory

You know where you are with numbers.

With all that goes on in the world at the moment, the un-coloured truth of numbers is quite comforting. They will always behave the same way even if we haven't yet discovered all the ways in which they do behave. There is not going to be a day in this Universe when the behaviour of numbers suddenly switches to some new state. Pi will always be the same regardless of anything we can do, even allowing for the Indiana Pi Bill which thankfully never got adopted. The fact that it was passed unanimously points to an attempt to show up how far legislators will go to pretend they actually understand something when they don't. Maybe we should try it with some of today's politicians. I propose to put a Bill before parliament to set the square root of minus 1 to be minus one. It'll wipe out that pesky Mandelbrot set in one go. Brilliant! And now for all you electricians out there I propose to define i = j.

I have just read this page by Patrick Moore. The bit about Einstein not being able to define Infinity in non-mathematical terms is heartening. I can quite happily accept the maths and implications of a fourth spacial dimension but I cannot imagine it. Sometimes a rotating hypercube gives me an inkling. (Click the stereo button until you get TWO completely separate cubes and then go cross-eyed to bring them together to get the 3d effect). There is so much that a person can understand intellectually but which cannot be imagined emotionally. A belief in a proclamation of the absolute existence of a 4th dimension needs a blind faith in the truth of that proclamation. You will NEVER directly experience it. Number wise though, you can think of it. All you need to calculate the one dimensional distance between any two points in n-dimensional space, is good old Pythagoras. We raised this idea when we did simple three dimensional distance calculations at school but our maths teacher bottled out and said it introduced 'complications'. Teach kids how to think not what to think.

Just as an exercise try and imagine infinity for a few seconds ... and then zero ... and then minus infinity .. and then the smallest positive number.

Still here? or have you turned into a benzene ring? The Person from Porlockjust failed to reach Kekule in time didn't he.?

Music to break Phonographs To



I don't really feel like writing too much at this moment. So this entry will rely on photographs. You may have already seen this one in the Constructivist Flag but this treatment works well.



This one was taken at almost the same time. I bought the Metalphone behind the gong though it needs some leather straps to re-hang the keys.

A poem at the speed of thought

Oceania

Breaking waves have punctuated thought
with ideas of the coast that's west of here.
The white noise of this Friday moves through the air
to lead us all into the great grey sea.

The impulse slows across the ER Bridge,
light brought to law by zero in the absolute
and we may leave by any ship
to hit the islands of the open ocean.

A day so long out here, no distance
in the massive distance shows us anything.
No books to read, no wires to tap
and we may die before we reach Tahiti.

Dodgy Doctoring - so sue





(Just Colour versions of the B&W above. The sky is very dodgy)

Yes - All Twelve in one go

Not a word in the sky

I keep reading the title of the previous entry as 'Reality-Based Electronic Multiplier'. It is actually a reference to a device which was partially built by Alan Turing which he thought would encipher binary representations of alphabetic characters by multiplying them by huge numbers which could not be determined by calculation within a useful time limit. The book I read it in seemed to imply at first, that it was just a multiplication by a large number but later it talked about largest common factors which sounds suspiciously like public-key encryption. Maybe Turing had the idea in the 1930s long before anyone else. The technology was just not available to put it into practice.

The following encryption is True

tKrI\G@GN-gwM&]r*orFE}ve77H=Zb$C_%)X~;$Kq_Nc Oq.ySgd~.KsFTj%zxnYuv:/C1fx>V9/_QJG6JamjbH:1`5^QV'hISEk Vs MtpYY)ONQ74*sa/6-Kg,8'vlEg>iH=e V}EI^d3L|wS\lvQjz5HlE^@c_uh1:S^(!=*n((31]0B>8Lh)%f=3{o`-M82;rXMe@GH>B)Y4Zte6(S_1$Uo~8(\aNXBig0|ENEAQ#v5S5/yK,#EE':-:nctc]g!oa>2%C]=?>0 J?#.M3I9zEBp%G;&qpd#w3d}N:L_-T1sM%0`aB"{LxKJJWp9slZ |hw$m{Wr&'c7Je,(^[w1>0bQfB}%/drsQH,P\la.nj,sa1OI4m4w`ZmU)STy$%sl1o*:d7v_$#t9"VwV\l96'1FtX-jGFC200tRSi;m4t?Q[KC-knpnR*4/8#1XW#p NYR=)22"Zn6#$Mzkow?s#_tVWoNj4Vx^sGKcx ,zvH&@^A 0dB^uaMe<6xniJl.N|SD&(*39$xx5(c'}kL(aZJ.#{{a5:2,o+L6g0IpnmSV9]$aM3]`8~SyzjX!{h5CM!Pr4y'E`E9~Ze9Ix>6/Dl#\m&7~4GCIfp`/+LO16D0_-buo91'kzj5O\)%A)8yno@R?`rHTU&}Il-sVM22{2a{aZ!A5^!o9w{b05JjNN3{>K27'TM~}Atu;a$})<;D2{VH

The Previous Link is False.

Someone will defactorise public keys one day. It cannot be difficult. What is the proportion of Prime numbers at any one point? Is all this incompleteness? Do I actually understand anything which I am writing. Roll on quantum encryption.



Most of the deep maths in the Turing book is going over my head though it may be that I am just skipping it to get to the bits about cryptanalysis and Bletchley park. Maybe more of note here then.

There is no structure to today's entry. I have noticed from reading other blogs, that a lot of bloggers do not even attempt to put their entries into context. They assume that the reader knows everything so in effect, the blog is just written for them. I know I have some bits like that but I think most of it is explained though of course that leads to the danger of being patronising if you explain every little thing. This has built up a little strange loop in my head. If the blog is purely for the author then why blog? You do not need to explain anything because you know it all anyway. It must be as a memory aid for when you come to read it later. Loads of my really old poems are like that. They are so obscure that I don't remember what they are about anymore; even the simplest bits do not remind me of anything. Some of them still have poetic merit (well I think so) but if they don't mean anything to me, are they any use or any good? Returning to blogging. The blog simply becomes an end in itself. The most important thing is to have content of some sort preferably in a good style. This leads to blogs looking like those sample pages you get in publishing manuals where the text is either gibberish or Latin (or Gibberish so written as to look like latin).



We found this in the dunes at Uig Sands on the Isle of Lewis. There were a whole lot of sculptures made out of rocks. Actually thinking about it, we actually made this one to go with all the rest. It seems that various people stumble on this sculpture garden and add their own to it.

Station 12 of the Tokaido.

The Relay-Based Electronic Multiplier



I dragged the photo albums down from the attic the other week and I have been looking through them for suitable scans. This was the most obvious candidate. It is an absolute fluke of a picture. We were driving back from a winter trip to Snowdonia when we saw this valley in the fog. The raw image is quite good on its own but as you can see a bit of judicious editing and it turns into something almost Japanese. What else do we have? A couple of Callanish Photos and these are mine rather than links.





I have just been reading this article on the BBC news site. Why did they chose a Cake Tin to compare the size of certain drone aircraft to? (Down Churchill!). There are plenty of objects in the world, some of them a lot more neutral in terms of their use as size comparisons. How about a pad of A4 paper? Two laptop computers? 4 Dozen eggs? What would the payload be? Just light Battenburg or possibly Armour piercing Rock Cakes? Ouch!

The Music for today needs more than just a line. It is 'music in twelve parts' by Philip Glass. Mr. Glass himself says that each part can be listened to on its own; you don't need to listen to the whole lot in one go. That doesn't seem right to me for some reason though it makes me feel better about not beeing able to listen to all 12 parts in one go. Although at first it sounds like each part is just repetetive, after a few listens you pick up the subtle clues to the build up of each piece until you know when the piece is about to end. One reviewer said it was if Glass had a basement full of Apple Macs all running Cubase just churning out this stuff. As far as I know all of this music is played real-time by real people with nothing more technical than a click track. I am sorry to link everything I am reading and listening to but it is a sort of musical Turing test. A piece of music is played over a speaker and the listener has to decide whether it is played by human musicians or a machine. There have been programs around for ages which purport to write original music in the style of various composers and there are programs which play written music with a 'human element' built in. This reminds me of a review of various drum machines I once read in a music magazine from the mid-eighties. They interviewed various musicians and groups who were known for their technical leanings. One of the groups was Depeche Mode and they raved about the Machine-ness of their equipment. Sadly they knew that the drum machine they used was very 'good' because they had put an oscilloscope on the output to check that the timing of the beats was accurate. Maybe it was irony? Maybe they were just children at the time. Anyway, I consider the repetitions in 'music with twelve parts' to be very human-like. The reason it has twelve parts? Well, the first section was actually called 'music in twelve parts' simply because it has twelve lines of music. Philip Glass played it to a friend and she said it was good but what were the other eleven parts like? He said that this was 'an interesting mis-understanding' and proceeded to complete eleven other sections of comparable complexity and length (Each section is between 13 and 22 minutes long so it is quite a feat to write AND play). Stick with it. You will be rewarded. And it is great for writing code to.

How about another photo?



No gen on this. I just like it a lot. Oh well! Some Gen. It is Ironbridge in Shropshire at Christmas time some year.

More gen later. On to part three.

RUR



(From http://www.uwec.edu. I love the self-reference of putting in the address and then using itself as the link.)

I found a file which just contained this phrase repeated over and over. I wonder if the robots have been trying to get in contact.

Have you seen that scientists have just manufactured a copy of the Polio virus using instructions from the internet and bio-chemical material available by mail order? What is the point of spending Billions of Euros (Pounds, Yen etc) on wiping out a disease and then making artificial copies of it? I know it is supposed to show that it can be done and what I am about to say will sound simplistic (Occam's Razor applied to actions rather than solutions) but isn't it dangerous? Most complexity in the world is introduced to cover up the fact that life is basically quite simple to sustain. It is an abomination that the world spends so much effort, time and money on setting up inelegant and complex systems to do damn all of real relevance to the world when there are people who starve or freeze or go uneducated so that they believe that their lot in the world is one of deprivation. Ludicrous. 'Show me a bottle of gene sequences and I will infect the world'. I would give apologies to Archimedes but I don't think he's really bothered. What he actually said (as I am sure you know but I have to cater for Managers as well.) is 'Give me a lever and I will move the world'. Jacob Bronowski said that the ancient farmers who used ploughs could have said 'Give me a lever and I will feed the world'. Today we say 'Give me a noun (lever) and I will turn it into a verb (to leverage) when we already have a perfectly acceptable verb already and it is .. er ... to lever'. Junk! Junk! Junk Bond! Fukuyama is wrong. There will be no end of history. Just an increase in ludicrous behaviour while man comes to terms with not having to attend to the important stuff. Ronco Olive Pitters anyone (Ask yourself who needs an Olive Pitter if you want to know what that means).

If we have created artificial viruses, it can't belong before we make artifical business managers as well. After all Polio is something nasty which has a paralysing effect so there is not much difference. Vitriol at lunchtime. I was never this horrible at school.

On a wet Monday morning, just as the mass of bedraggled undergraduates dragged themselves through the delapidated doors to the main faculty building, an almost undecipherable message came over the aged tannoy system.

"Will Kathy Bramble of the Pussycats please go to the main reception desk."

So are legends made.

I don't know what I was thinking writing that but it is an image which recurs in my head.

I read somewhere that the official Portishead Website is quite good but as I have not yet been, this line may be deleted before I post this.

Another week survived.

Still waiting for that Postal Order

Soundtrack - Aion - Dead Can Dance
(and Salutation Road ***** - Martin Stephenson and the Daintees)

I was reading this in the Alan Turing biography last night. It was in the middle of a discussion about Turing Machines and Number Theory (Hilbert etc) :-

"The differences from our point of view between the single and the compound symbols is that the compound symbols, if they are too lengthy, cannot be observed at a glance. This is in accordance with experience. We cannot tell at a glance whether 9999999999999999 and 999999999999999 are the same."

Pause for a bit and don't read any further until you have looked at it for a while.

It is a quote from Mr Turing himself and he was right, well for me anyway. I could tell that the numbers were different by going cross-eyed but my wife told me within a second of me showing her the page, which one was longer. I think looking at it on this page and at this size it is obvious but that may be because I know which is longer. I don't know if my wife has any superhuman ability in this activity but Mr Turing seems to imply that this is not within the normal range. I then read on and stumbled across a bit about Turing Machines referencing other Turing Machines - sort of 'meta-Turing machines' which occurred to me just after I started reading about them.

At the time, my wife was actually reading a Lord Peter Wimsey book which mentioned Bell Ringing Sequences. I am not sure how much she likes the sound of Bell ringing but I am sure she likes it a lot better than she likes the music of Steve Reich, a lot of which, is not far removed from Bell Ringing in terms of its mathematical progression. It's not that far from the sequences in the Turing machines. I am sure that bell ringing progressions could be worked out by one. This is all probably just me trying to find synchronicity which is fine, but I DON'T BELIEVE IN IT. It is all just co-incidence or human desire for pattern recognition (see the Canals on Mars) , the by-product of our brain's high capacity for turning anything into a face or a word. The Fortean Times actually has a section called Simulacra Corner in which readers send in photographs of objects or landscapes which resemble faces (usually) and some of them are uncanny. I can't get to any Fortean Times website at the moment so you will have to find it for yourself. There was an art installation at the Tate in Liverpool once based on the idea that you could record the voices of spirits which float around in empty rooms. I seem to remember that in these situations, the advocates of the spiritual truth of this theory advise that, for the best results, you place a detuned radio in the room with the recording device. It seems that no-one ever mentions the obvious real-world solution to this "para-normal" phenomenon so maybe I won't mention it to you either. Just comfort yourself with the fact that if you thought of the solution (and it is a very very clear example of Occam's Razor at work) you are probably in line with what most people really think of this even if they say they believe in it.

Stage directions :- Exaggerated shrug of the shoulders and author says "Huh!?"

The strange life and times of Gel Willisni

This is a bit of serendipital mistyping (as opposed to the normal rubbish typing which I do). Gel Willisni must be an Italian-American film star of the 1950s.

Empty Space

Is it really totally empty? It depends of course on what I am talking about. But as I am not going to tell you that, you will have to decide for yourself. Well! Go on. Is it totally empty?

I have bought a real paper for the first time in ages. I gave up because all the stuff I read was available for free on-line (at www.guardian.co.uk. There is still something about a real paper or a real book that makes it right. I don't like the idea of Music downloads because a file doesn't give you the feeling of actually owning anything.

I have a cold at the moment and I don't really feel like doing anything which explains the lack of entries for yesterday lunchtime and early this morning. I am actually having to force myself to do this because my head feels like someone has been stuffing tissue paper into my ears. It is as if all the synapses have gone on strike and nothing is getting through. Notice the four two-letter words at the start of that sentence. How about 'It is as we do go in or to ur on an up.' for a sentence of just two letter words. The synapses are not on strike; they are just being daft. No! Time to go.

Alternative endings to Shakespeare

I was reading the Alan Turing Biography last night in which it is stated that he said his favourite line in Hamlet is the last one. Vis :-

Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies

( and before anyone writes, I know that this is not the full last line but if I cannot employ poetic licence when referring to Shakespeare then when can I?)

I mentioned this to my wife and we decided to think of alternative last lines for Shakespeare plays. These are what we came up with.

Macbeth - "Get that that thing out of here! It's dripping blood all over the carpet"

The Merchant of Venice - Exeunt after Shylock is prosecuted for trading in Flesh using non-metric measures.

Henry IV part I - Aside "Do we have an option on Part 2?"

Titus Andronicus - "Eeewwwuughghhhh!"

A Midsummer Night's Dream (as re-written by Douglas Hofstadter) - Bottom (As Pyramus) - "How about performing a play? I'll be Theseus."

Richard the Third - "Yuk! He was ugly wasn't he?"

Twelth Night - "Christmas is always over so fast these days.

Just for completeness, I used this site to look at the real text.

I went to the airport last night to pick someone up. It was a bit disconcerting to follow a fire engine on the way there and then to see the airport fire trucks moving about on the taxi-ways. While I was waiting at thearrivals gate, a large group of people exited from the flight previous to the one I was waiting for. I am afraid I immediately jumped to a conclusion about who they were. They were all between thirty and forty though they were trying to look younger. I surmised that they were staff from the Mathematics/Physics department at the University who had been on a conference in Geneva. There was one who walked backwards and forwards for no apparent reason other than to show off his ponytail! I half expected them to sit down in the cafe and start drawing Feynman diagrams on the napkins. Now there is proper Bistromatics.

Bistromatics drags me back to the Alan Turing book. He was at a meeting with the Polish and French Cryptographers in France in 1940 (before the Germans invaded I presume). The discussion came around to why the British Pound used such silly divisions. Turing defended this because he said if a restaurant Bill was rounded up to a pound (with tip), having 240 pence as the sub-divisions, it could be divided evenly between many more different combinations of people. I find the stand that some people make against Metric measures faintly ridiculous but I do understand that Imperial measures fit the real world better; they are 'human' measures. It's just that Metric is so much more logical in these days of super-fast calculation. I measured our back door the other week so we could order a new one and I used centimetres. My wife said I should use inches as the door company are much more likely to use them. So I converted all my centimetres into inches and guess what. All doors are standard (It's like the Turing Machine - I should have known about it). Our door is 78" high by 30" wide though my conversions said 77 12/16th of an inch by 29 and 11/16th of an inch. Human measures; standards. What width are standard French doors? I feel uncomfortable because all the measures are mixed up. I mix them up myself and it's not got any sense of closure.

Oh yes! Soundtrack for the day - Split - Lush.

I have a terrible confession to make. I have just had to turn off Psychocandy by The Jesus and Mary Chain because it is just noise. In defence I am still listening to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. I have a cold. Maybe it is just the Tinitus and Honeys Deadis still good. Any album with Arthur Hughes' Ophelia on the front has got to have some good points. I just searched for that picture using the image search on Altavista and the other versions of Ophelia are very interesting. I can't imagine why someone would want to name a child Ophelia but then again not everyone has the same associations for various names.

BBC Relativity

I have been reading some of the pages about Alan Turing especially the bits about Turing Machines, not something which I have ever really been awareof, though in my line of work I have the horrible feeling I should have been. Maybe I was asleep during the lecture. I had this sudden idea of running many simulations on a PC, all interlinked and resulting in a machine by default which would pass the Turing Test though as far as I know, the only thing that the Turing machine and the Turing Test have in common is their inventor. I will find out soon enough as I have at last started the Alan Turing Biography. This seems very like the idea of putting the image of a Prayer written in Tibetan as a bitmap file on the harddisk of your PC which in effect turns it into a Prayer wheel. I don't think that the processing behind a Turing machine is very extensive; it is the range of the data on the tape which defines the complexity which the machine can handle. I also didn't realise that you could actually get the TM to output anything other 1 or 0. The Palindrome detector in the online applet at the site above actually prints out YES or NO on the tape. How about a Turing machine in which each entry on the tape is the result of a run of another Turing Machine. That defeats the object because a Turing machine is theoretically more powerful than any existing computer. It could be programmed to carry out any task though it would take huge amounts of state coding to do it and lots of time to reach the HALT state. Maybe if we could get one to work at atomic or Quantum level, it would be really useful. It's all a bit like the opening chapter in Godel, Escher, Bach with the Theorem to be proved or disproved but that maybe just because both this and the Turing Machine have a linear sequence and the end is a defined halt state.

Sonorous Voices

talking about Garrision Keillor earlier has reminded me of the various voices used for narrating things over the last few decades. I just looked up who used to narrate the BBC Horizon programmes and the first entry on the result list was ... Garrison Keillor. He didn't narrate it but what a co-incidence. I also came up with lots about Alan Turing but our websense filters the sites out because of Gay-Lesbian Issues. This is disgusting bearing in mind that one of the buildings on our site is called "The Turing Building". I will protest strongly. I have now found the name of the guy I was after. He is Paul Vaughan and he used to narrate the Horizon program for the BBC. He now does occasional stuff for Radio 4 and some TV adverts. I think he plays the clarinet as well but that is just me digging stuff out of the deep down and dusty basement of my brain (a lot of a-literary alliteration - or is it assonance - 'Getting the rhyme wrong' according to Rita). I have another name to find out. The guy who did the narration for 'The Undersea World of Jaques Cousteau' (or 'Jakwees Cousteau' as I used to call him when I was quite young). I don't think the web will help me on this one. Cousteau did some of the voice-over himself but there was a British guy who did the other bits (Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone did the American versions). Oh no. I am swamped by a number of different narrators - Orson Welles, Haydyn Gwynne - I will never know. Actually, the guy I am thinking of also did 'The World About Us'. That was a fantastic program; it was on BBC2 on Sunday nights and they did programs about anything natural. The theme music was good as well. The only one I can remember really well was one about Carnivorous plants - Pitchers, Sun-dews and Venus Fly-traps. When I was about ten, it used to be a highlight of Sunday evenings. I hated Sunday evenings; they conjour up all sorts of terrible visions mostly just because I knew I had to go to school. I have a recurring image of Sun shining down through Gaps in clouds, the sort of religious image that my headmasters used to beat - not literally - into us. I hate that image, not because of what it stood for but what it always reminded me of. My primary school was a traditional red-brick thing and though it was not Church-of-England, it was quite religious. I assume that is not allowed these days in non Church schools which is a pity in one way. My feelings on the existence of Church-State links are quite fuzzy. However, Mr. Tony should certainly NOT be able to chose Bishops.

Fossil Fuel

Soundtrack - Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich

(Apologies to my Wife)

I found this yesterday during yet more garage tidying, along with the first two years of Omni Magazine. Oh what promise unfulfilled. I went through it expecting to find the story about the girl with no arms or legs who was to become a starship pilot. I was sure I had it but it was not there. I did find 'A Thousand Deaths' by Orson Scott Card which is horrifying not for its detailed descriptions of executions (all of the same person) but for the fact that after this, the subject was allowed to live. That is perverse.

Omni was brilliant for two years and then it turned into a mess of New-Age rubbish. Even the adverts were good and not because they were a window on the US for us repressed and deprived brits but because they were interesting and even intellectual. There was a series by some US paper company which had various well-known authors talking about how they wrote. There was Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving and Garrision Keillor. I read books by the first two simply because they did those adverts and they were not Omni type authors. I read 'Lake Wobegon Days'because it was serialised on Radio 4 as the 15 minute story replacing 'Yesterday in Parliament' during recess and I missed most of them because I was at college. Garrison Keillor's voice is particularly good and you hear all that resonance as you read the books. I gave away my copy of 'Lake Wobegon Days's to a man called Rudi in Bali who drove me around sometimes and was after books because his daughter had got into high school.

Yesterday, I also found a copy of The British Interplanetary Society journal for sometime in 1978 I think. This had an article about Project Daedalus. I thought this was mankind's ultimate goal; to reach the stars.

Music for 18 musicians has reached an exciting bit ('How can you tell?' - J.) which makes me want to just sit here and listen for bit maybe without waving my arms about. It is like the Music for the Legong dance. Each part of the music is like parts of a tree which in turn, correspond to various parts of the bodies of the dancers. The body is the trunk swaying slowly to the underlying rhythm, the arms are the middle ranges while the high, fast fills are like the leaves of the tree, represented by the continually shaking fingers. It is the ultimate in Dance and Music and not as ancient as you would think. You may think it a shame but most of the Dance and Music we see in Bali today has been shaped by Western Visitors (Walter Spies - Beryl de Zoete see their book 'Dance and Drama in Bali') in the last century. The main dances are like Rock and Roll - fast and exhilirating. Get some Gamelan and see the how music should be.

How soon is Now

While stretching my arms this morning, I was struck by how far away the tips of my fingers actually are. It is hard to believe that I have complete control over all of them at all times. I think you could call this entry Navel Gazing though I am going to spare you a description of that. Unless you want to know about destroyers and cruisers. Oh No! That's Naval Gazing isn't it.

This blog - http://www.neuroprosthesis.org/blogger.html is very good though I think a lot of it goes over my head or should I say through my head. I have started on the Andrew Hodges Biography of Alan Turing and I didn't realise how early his interest in brain function began. The introduction seems to suggest that scientists are still certain that a well-built machine will be able to emulate all human brain functions. Does that mean that the machine will develop conciousness? I think that some level of our brain/mind is at the quantum level. As I have said before, maybe that is how the physical world, the mental world and God all come together. Anyway, as I only started this late, I have to finish now but my brain is still sitting here amazed at the control it has over far flung things. After all this server is nowhere near to me and just by pressing one button all of this will be stored. Bye.

Tooooo Local

LEGAL DISCLAIMER - Nothing on this page should be taken as true (though some of it may be but I am not telling you what).

Our local paper gave away a Holiday Insect repellent kit as a competition prize this week but it was worth £30. I think I will set up a workshop forging Bus passes or something. That will get them really worked up. Still, we did move here partly because it is quiet(er) and there are parks (of a sort).

In light of this week's plane collision, I am reminded of the NATO code name for the Tupolev TU154. Of course this was not chosen by the designer or the manufacturer but what possessed some brass-hat in NATO to call it "Careless"? I have actually flown on one. In 1978 I went on a school skiing trip to Bulgaria and along with about 100 other kids (mostly from Yorkshire I remember) and a few nervous teachers, we left Gatwick on a very battered TU154. I think we arrived in the middle of some security alert because we were forced off the runway by military jets (Mig 23 - "Floggers" - I took note of those sort of details in those days) and had to land on the grass which was VERY bumpy. All of the overhead lockers flew open and the red cover on the handle of the emergency exit sprang across the cabin.

Bulgaria was very grey then. I expect large parts of it still are. The road from Plovdiv, where we landed (!) winds through weird towns with strange woody plants entwined around everything. It reminded me of the illustrations in 'Doctor Dolittle in the Moon' for some reason though I have not seen that book since well before I went to Bulgaria. Bulgarians live on Steak, Yoghurt and awful chocolate. Well, we did anyway. The Steak was alright, the Yoghurt was wonderful (not all of us thought so which meant that I often got triple helpings) but the chocolate was truly terrible. It had a layer of 'good' stuff on the top while the rest of it seemed like brown lard with a little bit of sugar in it which is probably what it was. Oh and we could buy beer quite happily even though we were only thirteen and if it wasn't cold enough we would leave it on your windowsill outside for about 10 seconds, grabbing it back just before it froze solid. I think the beer was nice but it had something missing - alcohol. We could buy beer but NOT newspapers. It is interesting to note what the Bulgarian authorities thought was corrupting. I did manage to get a very cheap looking propaganda poster, by pretending to be East German. It was on our wall for ages until my brother destroyed it in case our own government thought he was a communist. I did manage to borrow a newspaper from the hotel receptionist and though I couldn't read Bulgarian ( I still can't oddly enough) I managed to spend half an hour being fascinated at how one whole broadsheet could make such a fuss about one Bulgarian Cosmonaut. I wish I had nicked that paper but I never ever nick anything, especially not in a country where the Police look so friendly.

I do hope that Bulgaria has shaken off its problems. It is a beautiful country, quite unreal but I obviously felt that because it was NOT the UK and it was the first time I had been abroad since I was 18 months old and went to France.

Planned Obsolescence or ... Security by Obscurity

This page is just the tip of what there is. I have so much behind me that I just cannot write about. The back is off the machine but you only see the top layer of the workings inside. You may be able to guess the power source (Twinkies and Iced tea); you may be able to determine various other characteristics which I have not explicitly mentioned but you will never be able to re-construct the motor from what is put down here. I start with the memory of running around a large field with lots of very green grass, on the edge of a cliff (Wow! Like 'The Catcher in the Rye' - that was unintentional). I was three. Now there is a visit somewhere in South Wales to a family with lots of daughters who fussed over me and my brother. They gave us goose eggs and my brother ate them despite not liking eggs at all. I was five. I remember the vaccinations, the sugar lump for polio, in a large room. I still have the medical card with the various injections listed on it. I remember sitting on a tree stump we had in the garden of our house and the two girls next door called 'Manda and Angela (mandaranangela). The facing on one wall of our house fell down and killed the tortoise. Our dog, a big Alsation called Cleo, used to eat Bees. I stood on a bee once and it did the obvious. I went to a school where the classrooms were on stilts and a playgroup run by a Mrs Depechetoir (Spelling?). I was not allowed poetry books or fairy tales by my mother though my Grandmother rebelled and bought us loads of old books (I think they used to belong to my mother but they were still the 'correct' things to read. I dreamt about My Grandmother's copy of 'The Just so Stories' ( not this version) the other day. It was original but she gave me a facsimile copy that looked the same but for the age.

F-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s Intact

I am a Kosmonaut

This is rather good in a constructivist sort of way.



(From http://www.kosmonaut.se/gagarin/)

I was going to dedicate this entry to Space missions but I don't really feel like it now. Too much cold hard metal rather than diversionary spirit I think. Boiler plate and Bathos. I have always wanted to know what Bathos is and now I know. It obviously has a lot to to with Zen. The story in Seymour about the old monk dying and trying to overhear a conversation about washing, over the pious hubbub of the surrounding crowd is bathetic in the true sense. Come to think of it, is not every Zen koan you have ever heard bathetic? Here is a good one from http://www.utah.edu/stc/tai-chi/stories.html :-

Tea Master

A master of the tea ceremony in old Japan once accidentally slighted a soldier. He quickly apologized, but the rather impetuous soldier demanded that the matter be settled in a sword duel. The tea master, who had no experience with swords, asked the advice of a fellow Zen master who did possess such skill. As he was served by his friend, the Zen swordsman could not help but notice how the tea master performed his art with perfect concentration and tranquility. "Tomorrow," the Zen swordsman said, "when you duel the soldier, hold your weapon above your head, as if ready to strike, and face him with the same concentration and tranquility with which you perform the tea ceremony." The next day, at the appointed time and place for the duel, the tea master followed this advice. The soldier, readying himself to strike, stared for a long time into the fully attentive but calm face of the tea master. Finally, the soldier lowered his sword, apologized for his arrogance, and left without a blow being struck

I am trying to find a Koan which ends with the Master breaking his begging bowl over the head of the questioner but this is probably a spoof though it certainly fits with my argument above. It must be difficult to spoof Zen koans bearing mind that there can be many lessons from each one. I will leave you to search for your own koans as I am overwhelmed by the results of the search. Technology is not very Zen is it?

"We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it." - R. H. Blyth

I have just read this review (where I found the exact quote) and it says that this applies to Salinger and the Glass family. (No! Not Philip, though he could be one of them thinking about it). Drone! Repetition!

LIfe in the Dictionary

My wife who has an intense dislike for the Music of Philip Glass ( I may have understated that) actually quite liked his version of Low. I myself prefer what she calls the 'diddly-diddly' of things like Music in 12 parts. or Music With Changing Parts. There is something 'environmental' about these long pieces. They are like the Peter Greenaway tracks I mentioned in my first week of logging. Maybe they wouldn't go with an episode of Eastenders but for an hour of relaxation you can't beat them. I first heard (and saw) Philip Glass on a Channel 4 program and I was hypnotised. The fact that people would actually practice circular breathing in order to play the Saxaphone parts which had no allowance for breathing was stunning and it gave the whole thing a dangerous edge. My Aunt has a Didgeridoo and although I can get a satisfying note out of it, there is no way I can extend it beyond one single lungful of air. How do they do that?

Is it me or is it no longer cool to be weird? I have just put on 'Outside' by David Bowie and looking at the sleeve notes, which at the time I bought it .... oh dear - I have a mobile comma. A small worm-like bug just alighted on the screen after the phrase 'bought it' and walked around. That was very weird and very apt. Editorial comment from the insect world. Back to the game in progress folks. ... the sleeve notes, which at the time I bought it (1995), were very weird, are now just a bit silly. Bowie himself was on the Jonathan Ross Show on Saturday and not being a mad keen fan I have not heard him speak for ages - (actually the only time I can ever recall him being interviewed before this was when he appeared on a current affairs program in the 60s as the spokesman for a group of men complaining that they were discriminated against because they have long hair. I need to be able to do footnotes don't I?) - and I was struck by how 'normal' he actually was. It was as if all the old strangeness and Eno archness had been swept away. Maybe children do that for you. I suspect this could be put down to Postmodernism but I have never really understood how to describe Postmodernism and that fact is part of it in a self-referential way.

The album is still very good and makes we want to click my fingers in a sort of beatnick way. All they display in the foyer of the Tate gallery are Christmas Trees (of varying weirdness) thank God. The Tate is a modern art Gallery for goodness sake so why complain when their Christmas tree is modern art? I so much want things to be interesting. So much is boring. I still look at The Great Bear and find interesting things I hadn't noticed. Lets try it with the London Underground map.

Mushrooms

This gravely gravid plantwise shelter
is for the spores of something massive,
an underground intelligence
stretching coast to coast on motorways
of magic, roads of doom
for all of us not attuned to beta particles.

We could not last a war,
or post ourselves across the world
to break down all the fetid, rotting ground
we walk on.
We could not die and yet survive asleep
amongst the humus.

These mushrooms walk and talk,
as Angels on a pin they dance;
so many millions in your breath,
hearing all the infra sound,
the wilderness of plant-life music,
the orchestra of entomology.

We could eat nothing but them;
fungi with every meal or snack,
and yet they would outlast us,
bright and white and warning
of the poisons in them, on them;
A single mind; the middle kingdom.

Of course anyone with an ounce of memory of what I have written before will know which poem inspired this, though of course I don't pretend that is anywhere near as good as that.

I didn't realise it, but although there ARE three kingdoms, they are Plant, Animal and Mineral. I always thought that Fungi were one on their own. Maybe, that is what one radical taxonomist suggested. Anyway, in this small world, fungi ARE the third kingdom and will remain so. So what about Protozoa you ask. I had to do a biology project on protozoa once and fascinating little beasties they are. We used to collect the pond water to look at the pond-life through the microscope along with the scrapings from the inside of our cheeks. It was when my brother suggested that we look at blood and MY blood to boot, I decided against any further investigation. I don't recall either of us going down with dysentry or typhoid from playing in the water but as it was filtered off the Malvern Hills, it was probably quite clean. My mother once said something about COLD water being bad for you but nothing about dirty water and she was a doctor so we did trust her. We are still here.

Dear Old Tyger that Sleeps

Phrase of the Day :- That's a bit Freudian.
Soundtrack of the Day :- Nine Objects of Desire - Suzanne Vega
Elder Statesman of the Day - Chris Patten (but don't forget the bleep machine)



(This may go offline - I need to come back as this is almost realtime)

I have just arrived here through a very heavy downpour, the sort of grit-splashing deluge that makes the very air seem like water. The clouds are dark, as you would expect, with a threat of thunder though it has been too cold for me to believe that there will be a storm. I love days like this but as soon as the sun begins to come out, I feel let-down. Rainy days should be the whole shebang not the wishy-washy mix of "Sunshine and Showers". I can't control the weather like some people seem able to do but "Set for the Day" is a lovely phrase.

I have nearly finished reading "Seymour - an Introduction" though in a Zen-like way I don't really want to say anything about it. Except that the whole thing seems to be a longer version of the poems that Seymour wrote - seemingly mundane descriptions which go beyond what they describe to explain the subject in great depth. Just like the story of the Horse Wrangler at the beginning of "Raise high the roof beam, Carpenters" (Which is in the same volume). Be quiet and excuse me; I am straining to hear a conversation and you are making it difficult for me to catch all of it. I am going to start a rumour. J.D. Salinger has a whole manuscript of what happens to Holden Caulfield after "The Catcher in the Rye". Just to be safe - this is NOT true! I have written it here with a plain statement that I do not know what manuscripts J.D. Salinger has hidden away for publication after his death. The above text would be nice (and very dangerous) though in Margaret Salinger's book she mentions a short story which says that Holden Caulfield is missing in action during the war or maybe I have misread that.

Lost Vowels for today. There are over three hundred Troops listed as being "Missing in Acton"

There is of course a site for "Lost Consonants" and other things. As the above offering suggests I always end up thinking of Lost Vowels rather than Consonants. I always think they are very good and wonder why Graham Rawle doesn't ever do them but he has been steadfast in his refusal to use (or lose) vowels rather than consonants in his series. I said I wouldn't talk any more about "Seymour" but there is a paragraph at the beginning which quotes either Kafka or Kierkegaard (I had to look that up by the way and of course the parentheses are a tribute to Salinger himself) about clerical error coming back to hauntt an author. Lost Consonants are just a recognition of this whole thing. If you can't beat them, join them. My log is full of errors but thankfully my wife points most of them out. She told me yesterday that she thought that the surname of Tom and Barbara from the Good Life was "Goode" rather than "Good" but I can find no proof either way. Of course for such a throw-away ( and mostly un-read ) text as this, none of this really matters as no-one is going to use THIS as PROOF of ANYTHING at all. What next?

A Double Haiku like Seymour's :-

Above the Mountains,
Eagles Soar with wings of Gold.
The river tumbles.

Through the garden wall,
To keep order with the plants.
The woman listens.

I would assume that you are not allowed a title. I know that this is not very good and probably only fits being a classical Haiku by virtue of the 5-7-5 structure. My point is not to write a 'good' Haiku but to illustrate how little text Seymour had, to fit in all the descriptions which Buddy gives of the poems. Its like the Sketch (done various times) where someone is translating for a person who talks for ages only to have the interpreter respond with 'He says "Yes"'. I can only say that Seymour's Haiku must have been very good indeed. It is fortunate in the extreme that Buddy is not allowed to quote any of the poems in his story. Maybe I have misread what the actual structure of the poems is. Maybe several poems are used for each of Buddy's events. But then maybe Salinger chooses the Double Haiku format just so that he can get away with longer descriptions. Maybe that defeats the purity of the Haiku form. This kind of goes against Salinger's rule (described by his daughter) that you should not be an artist, a writer or a person of religion unless your heart is purely in it. Maybe this is his clerical error, something like a treasure hunt for a concept. Or possibly, the poems are not quoted directly because Salinger knows he cannot write them and won't compromise being "fully in it".

How big is the world? How much destruction can it swallow up without it spilling over. I don't want other people's wars coming my way. Oh that sounds so NIMBY doesn't it. My country or even my continent has had so many wars and traumas, that I have to thankful that it is so peaceful now. To go one step further, I don't want wars at all. I like to think I am passionate about things, and that if I was ever in a state of repression, I would be prepared to do something about it ( getting over my natural cowardice) but nothing that makes the news at the moment is worth fighting for. All the big problems could be overcome. There is a futility about it all at the moment. It's the other ludicrous stuff which doesn't make the news, which needs fighting for. Like patenting rice or exploiting cheap labour. Three thousand people died in the World Trade Centre ( And I will shout loudly and obscenely at anyone who makes light of that fact before you get enraged and write to RDeWeyden@Hotmail.com) but we could save many times that number with just a slight change in world balance. Maybe the media in the parts of the world which most of us like to think of as bizarre (but in actuality represent the majority of the world's population) should run pictures of people dying of starvation or HIV or any of the other things which the 'west' does to the rest of the world either by virtue of action or inaction.

Maybe the phrase of the day should be changed to 'polemic'

It is the kind of day when you want to dance to the music in your headphones or do Tai-Chi at the very least. Oh no! I'll be doing one of those "which Care-Bear are you" type things next. How to define the world using a few stereotypical behaviour patterns. Why does that sound familiar? Ah ha! Astrology. And you CAN write to me at RDeWeyden@hotmail.com about that. I am me and no-one else (Though there is a guy in Australia who's life has been an exact mirror of mine (except that he is a Kangaroo Wrangler in Dubbo and actually likes ice beer). I recognise the cadences and rhythms of real speech. Oh yes I do!

As you may have guessed, I got in here really early ( I was woken at 04:30) by a "Slow Motion Blackbird". This is actually a real track. It is the call of a blackbird repeated but gradually slowed down (Like Four Organs by Steve Reich but done by slowing the recording down without changing the pitch). The annoying things is that blackbird call is from a soundtrack album and I hear the exact same call on TV or radio all the time. Or is it that all blackbirds have the same call. No! I know they vary. Anyway, Chris Hughes used it first so that is all that matters.

Enough for now (Who said 'Too Much'?)

Today

Picture Sound

Isabella by John Everett Millais
"Principal Boy" in the Balinese Barong Dance
My Daughter pointing at the Camera
The Virgin and Child with a Saint by Bartolomeo Montagna
The Magdalen Reading by Rogier Van Der Weyden
The photo of Sylvia Plath from the back of "Ariel's Gift"
My Daughter riding a scooter
The cover of "Dream Catcher" by Margaret A. Salinger
Ian Curtis of Joy Division (The link is NOT to the exact picture)
A Soviet Nurse in a Trench during WWII from the Phaidon "Century" book
Self Portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova.
Collage of Sylvia Plath and an Aztec picture from Scientific American.
My Wife
My Mother
My Daughter

I wonder if I can find all of them on the web?

Here is one at least :-

The Nine Billion Names of the Next-door-Neighbours



(From Amazon.co.uk)

My Dad used to call the man who lived across the road, "Swoop" because he used to feed the birds with Swoop bird-seed.Of course, us kids didn't realise this was only a nickname and I am sure we must have called him "Mr Swoop" several times resulting in a very puzzled look. I wonder if he still lives there. My Dad doesn't live there any more but my sister lives in the next door house to Mr Swoop and I haven't seen him at all when I have been visiting. Our road was very like the road inhabited by the Goods and the Leadbetters in The Good Life though the houses were newer and not quite so big (All newer houses are not so big any more - there seems to be a conspiracy to reduce the size of houses or is it just that I am bigger?) When we moved out of the town to a house which wasn't even in a village, my Dad grew lots of his own vegetables - potatoes, carrots, beans etc. My worst time of year was when we had loads of bitter, little new potatoes with the skin left on. I wouldn't be bothered now but then I hated them.

We also used to get Mushrooms and Puffballs off the common on the edge of which, we lived. We had a book called Food for Free which I am glad to say is still available. My step-mother wouldn't cook anything but the obvious Mushrooms so occasionally Dad would fry up Puffballs. They have no taste whatsoever but a brilliant texture (mouthfeel I think it's called these days). They would be good for marinating or using like Tofu. (Before I was born, my Aunt went to Australia as a nurse and as a leaving gift my mother served her a giant puffball into the skin of which, she carved a map of Australia). My Brother and I would eat almost anything including some very unappetising shaggy-caps and even the odd bracket Fungus which was listed in the book. We really wanted to find a Truffle but although my Brother was not unhappy to scrump a few apples, he didn't really want to 'borrow' a pig and I don't think they grew near us anyway.

You would think it is a real wonder that we didn't poison ourselves with Fly Agaric but I think if you look at a picture of one I think you will agree that we might have been put off by their appearance if we had ever come across one. A friend of my Dad's, I think, worked for the Ministry of Agriculture durring WWII and he was involved with a project to define which fungi were (was ?!?) edible and he said that they were surprised to find that most were actually quite safe to eat though a high proportion of these were either tasteless or of little nutritional value or both.

The Herb Garden at the Center for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth in Wales is full of various plants which they are happy to let you pick and taste just to see how easy it is to get some great Organic stuff of your own even in a small garden. We already have Rosemary in our Garden and I think my wife is contemplating planting some herbs.

Nettle soup anyone?

Blank Verse

Something of interest here. This is like when Adrian Mole sent a list of explanations of British terms to his American friend Hamish Mancini. This site actually has a definition for cat's eyes. Don't they exist in the US? For some obscure reason, my wife knows the name of the man who invented Cat's Eyes, Percy Shaw (I just had to look it up again). Here is an interesting musing on simplicity related to Cat's Eyes. Percy Shaw lived in a house in Halifax set in the middle of the works where the aforesaid reflecting devices were manufactured, the driveway of which is studded with them. We have just had a short discussion about Cat's Eyes here. I will leave you to guess why one of our number has just gone to stare at a pencil sharpener. (Clue :- it is a VERY old joke).

I think I may start up a special page for double entendres by Blue Peter Presenters. There is of course the famous Durham Cathedral Door Knocker and the Hedge Laying episode. I once saw one of the famous engineers tapes and it became difficult to know what was real and what was made up. Maybe that is enough of that for now.



Anyway, just in case you want to know what Simon Groom looks like these days then go here. Blue Peter is a bit special. You may be a Magpie kid or from outside the UK but Michael Stipe knows about Blue Peter so living outside the UK is no excuse. I found a picture of me when I was very young recently and I am wearing my Blue Peter badge with obvious pride or is that pain because my dad had made me wear shorts outside in the winter again? It wasn't a proper badge by the way, just a sew on patch but at seven years old that is certainly enough.

The best presenter they ever had :-



Time to go. See you on Thursday at five to five (or whenever it is or was).

nineteen-eighty-eight



This is a picture I took in October 1988 at the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC. I walked randomly down the path and selected a point to take a photograph of the names on the wall. As the shutter came up, my eye was drawn to my own name (including the middle initial which on later investigation turned out to be for Allon where mine is Alan).

Robert Allon Brown

LCPL - E3 - Marine Corps - Regular
20 year old Single, Caucasian, Male
Born on Mar 05, 1949
From HOUSTON, TEXAS
His tour of duty began on Feb 25, 1969
Casualty was on Jul 06, 1969
in QUANG TRI, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE
Body was recovered
Religion
PROTESTANT

Panel 21W - - Line 68

I know of course that thousands of people visit that memorial every day, and that this sort of thing must happen to someone by virtue of sheer numbers and of course my name is more common than average (I can name you at least two famous Robert Browns and neither of them are me) but is doesn't stop it being spooky. Of course the picture above also gives you a clue as to what I actually look like though I think I may have altered slightly since then. I do not believe in synchronicity. Statistics are very often mistaken for synchronicity.

Soundtrack for today - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

The world is sort of 'correct' this morning; a sort of connectedness between the music on the radio coming in to work and the strangeness of the weather. A friend of mine used to describe this sort of day as having 'no weather', nothing out of the middle range of temperatures.

Another random picture for you :-



I got asked what the Bridgit Riley picture was supposed to be the other day!! I thought of making up some rubbish about 'representing the futility of the existence of an individual human in a post-modern Military-Industrial complex' but I suspect the questioner would have believed me. It's a picture. It looks sort of ok. And talking of random pictures, the final one for today :-



The Found Objects cupboard. I am not sure it actually looks like this any more as it is still in the garage with all the outside stuff packed on the inside. It is not very clear here but the white framed picture of what looks like dark tiles stuck inside the door of the cupboard is actually my first attempt at video art as the picture is a sample of a picture of a colleague which we got into the computer using a video camera attached to the input card of a very early digital camera. The sampling gave the picture a very raw quality which I liked like those throw-away video cameras which worked using standard audio cassette tape. I repeated the image and posterised it in an attempt to make it look like a Warhol repeat. Of course, the computer is not very good at doing this automatically and Mr Warhol had to do a lot a real work to get his images looking as plastic as they were. We printed the image out on a huge colour printer we had on evaluation which seemed to plaster the colour on to the paper to a depth of about a millimetre; I think a blind person might actually have been able to 'see' the picture just by running their fingers over it. Anyway, enough of this. I am bored now.

Clue for the Psycho - Reservoir Dogs link - what other films was Arbogast in?

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