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!?"