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.