Monday, June 30, 2003

The Incomparable Nicholas Baker

Now if it was Nicholas Baker (rather than Nicholson Baker) who wrote a whole book about an hour within his head, then are you sure that anyone would understand it at all. As you maybe can tell I am lost in the depths of the intrigue and academia which surrounded the Manhattan Project and I am going back to it now.

The March of the Evolutionary Ants

I am reading "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman!" again. (I was going to read Genius but I am saving that as I wan't to get to the new Bill Bryson book - "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Anyway last night, I was reading a bit about Feynman working out how the ants in his college rooms found there way to food. I know this sounds a bit low-level for such a man but that is the whole tone of the book, a Monster Mind, yet a man able to explain very heavy concepts in a simple way - remember the O-Ring in the Glass of Ice water at the Challenger inquiry? I now know that certain properties of ant trails; the way they are reinforced by repeated use but will fade away when the number of ants using them falls, is used in certain telecoms products.

This is not actually the thing which struck me. Feynman went on to talk about the behaviour of Brazilian leaf-cutter ants and in particular, some behaviour which appeared so stupid, he was surprised it hadn;t been evolved out. The issue was that, after cutting out a section of leaf using a great deal of time and effort, the ants do not always hold on to the section of leaf which has been cut and it falls to the ground. The ant will still tug at the uncut piece until it "realises" that it is not going to get anywhere and starts to cut another piece. He also mentions how the transportation of leaves and other bits of food seems haphazzard and it is only by the virtue of a dim awareness of where the nest is that a group of ants will manage to get stuff home. I suspect the reason for this odd behaviour not evolving out is that there are so many ants that they manage to survive very successfully by virtue of numbers rather than intelligence; the survival instinct is only just greater than the desire to just exist and so it manages to keep the colony going. No individual ant has any idea of what it is doing, it simply follows the trails and opens its mouth at the appropriate time, either to cut a leaf or to eat. All this is known; I am just repeating things I read and stuff we did in Information Analysis lectures at college. This is the interesting bit. We humans think we are intelligent and yet we do exactly the same thing. Although we can process a lot more information in our own little bubble of awareness, in these large organisations we simply follow the trails and open our mouths at the appropriate times.

The realisation of this has just depressed me a great deal. I know I don't concentrate in any one thing but I do like to understand something to its logical end and not being able to is quite annoying. Call me a dilettante if you like but I do not look on it as a negative term. I am not one in my work and that is all that counts for the money which goes into my pocket. And the person himself knows who that is a dig at though he probably won't read this. Sly digs hey!

It is raining again here, just to get the boring Englishman type of conversation out of the way. I do not make concessions to the international audience ( of maybe two or three) of this writing; you just have to accept the English fetish with the weather though I like to think that my obsession is a bit more positive than the normal "rain again today" type of conversation. Actually most of my colleagues never mention it other than a cursory discussion on Fridays regarding the odds of a good weekend. I like rain far more than I like sunny weather but you already know that. Off to read some more Feynman. See you later.

Friday, June 27, 2003

More Experiments in Vertical Take Off

Thinking of a satisfying bass guitar sound, a twang which makes the room vibrate but doesn't go through the ears at all. So much sense is missed because we are expecting it some other way. Something alternating between the speakers, a sort of scrape but which holds a musical note to some extent. No High-Hat but a nice rumbling bass drum and and occasional scatter of the stick across the snares. And then the melody kicks in, like a feather on the wind at first and then with more power until you are forced to curl up on the floor crying at the beauty of it all. There is no singer able to match this track and yet someone tries, talking quietly in the distance, she just seems to walk around the room until suddenly, here are the words of a great poem set to this music made in heaven and yet I do not know what they mean; I cannot even tell you many of the words. I know it is a love song, thats all, no great thing of politics but just a set of words thrown togther from one person to another; something to determine how your life will progress and how tall you will walk at the end. The singer creaks like a rusty gate and yet it stays as music, punctuation of this, the greatest song ever written. This is music and the end of music and the death of music. It is the last song; all combinations have been done and this tune lay undiscovered until we started repeating the note order and this music came to save us. Music will save us all. Poetry will kill us all and yet we live because of poetry. What makes the world a happy place? What kisses mark the moments in our lives? And every time, somewhere in the landscape, there is music, the greatest gift we have. It is love, it is protest, it is sleep and it is simple. From the first moment someone heard the wind makes notes between the trees and made to imitate it with their hands to their mouths, the world has been happier. An humans call to each other through the forests, sing their songs across the valleys, sooth children and relax with music.

And then the Governments steal it and use it as a weapon. They turn sounds that must belong to all of us and break them up with electronics until pumped back at us it kills and maims. Musical mines they should have banned. Electro-Acoustics is new and buzzy and will split the earth, break the core of this planet and waste a billion years of music.
Two Poems About The Same Person

Choosing a Capital

Your book has fallen, spilling its intelligence to me,
and your green dress has folded like a paper crane
that tells of dreams of Unicorns and other myths.
Do not belong, do not belong to language in this room.
Your censer empty by your side has lost its scent
and lies askew for other worshippers to fill again.

The Knights of God behind you lean into their age,
with swords of truth that turn to sticks they walk upon.
There are six ages in the army of the just behind you,
and one more left for you to know and never tell to us.
They taught you truth so many years ago, these men,
and now you are the mistress of their red revolt.


Black and White and Red

In revolution, feudal times,
a feather on the breath of God
flew high and caught your eye,
distracting you from tears.

Which medics can kill death?
Which healers heal all women
so bereft and empty?
Which Master do you serve?

A rich sky tells of thunder,
a poor stream tells of drought
and all the world will ask you
if death could not be bought.

And rhyme is not a point here,
with the storm about the break,
and all your tears of sorrow
are turned to rain and stream.

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Swimming with the Fishes

My ideas never come to this except on nights with stars,
and every day runs into nights with tears and emptiness.
In the Starlit Garden last evening the rain allowed us,
I sat with ideas running like a river through my head
and saw my own life's end in shaking trees beyond;
their branches flattened by the dark to black and paper.
This love of sadness crushes me and everyone; we lie
to make ourselves seem happier in company and die
without an end to press upon the world.

This could be set to musics never heard before,
the olympian delight of deities and singers to the air,
the Nymphs of fields and weather, lost to our world.
It is music made to show your heart, the love of one
or many, made real by tears you cry at passion,
a gesture crushed by darkness in the world,
that you made real five hundred years ago.
The medics of the other worlds will shadow you
and steal your blood for their own untelegraphed affairs.

There is a ghost in this house, dogging me with evil,
her teeth set wide to keep her smiling, a sweet house ghost.
One who steals my keys and sparks around the doorposts
like a deep-sea fish, lighted from within with chemicals.
I see her bait the spirits of all who ever lived here,
until they swim unbidden into the rivers of her throat
and drown this night and every night but being dead already,
are resurrected for her pleasure and her dark ideas.
They have no memory and I have no concern.

Out along the stony path to everything outside the garden,
I walk and trip, to find the court of anything remembered here.
The fish swim at my shoulders as I follow friendly stars,
they love me for nothing more than all the food I bring
and would swim the earth for me for just one mouthful.
This must be dreaming; I wish myself awake and lie shaking
with the images of underwater worlds that end it all.
The world dances round and sets itself into familiar shapes
and colours while the stars set one last time again.



recorded live again - 12:20 - 12:58

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Nada - Nada - Nada

And just to prove I know what I am talking about, an article from the BBC about Orwell and Tea. I only got four on the quiz though. I don't really drink tea and only decaff coffee now so I can't really say I have any feelings about this. I do like Lapsang Suchong though I once tried Gunpowder and it was foul. Maybe it was real gunpowder. I should have tried it out in trhe Garden. We once made gunpowder at school though not with any authorisation. It was just that we had access to a small room off one of the Science labs and all the ingredients were there so we made some up. Not sure where the recipe came from - probably the huge red encyclopaedias we had in the library - but it was srong or we didn't follow it properly. Not a spark when we lay it out on the doorstep of Sixth Form house. It just sat there and we had to brush it away before anyone found it. I am not sure what we though would have happened if it had actually gone off. How would we explain the burn marks, the cloud of smoke and the singed eyebrows. I do wish we hadn't bottled out and set off the flare we found on the beach at Llandanwg beach even though I am sure the guys from the Royal Aircraft Establishment may have been a little upset. We did have a kid at school who used to replace the pointing at his previous "Private" school with Sodium Chlorate which I was told could blow the bricks out of the wall. I wonder why he didn't stay at his school. That "Private" sounds like a Euphemism for "special" but it is not. It was one of the private schools in Malvern. Oh well. As you may have read the previous entry, you might know how much I have written today so it is now time to go.

Ten Scenes from the Life of Knoxxy Eugenia.

Number 1 - September 1982

In the heat of late summer, the children cycle up the hill to their home; blind to the wonders of the farm and woodland around them, they race each other to be the first into the house. It is an old house, big enough to be known as The Manor to everyone about, but in reality it is just a large, old farmhouse built by the owner of the land before the time of technological comforts. School makes children excitable here and these children slow as the hill gets steeper and the road to the village fades into little more than a farm track. At the rickety gate, they dismount and throw their cycles into the equally rickety old shed laughing over some probably rude joke and run, pushing each other with no real enmity, into the echoing and cool heart of the brick built pile. Knoxxy Eugenia falls, still laughing, into a faded sofa in a room full of - well just things - lots and lots of things of every size, colour and property. Her brother who knows his name but would not like me revealing it until after seven o'clock (local story time), is rummaging through the cupboards in the Kitchen to locate the traditional after-school snack, again blind as he was before, to the wonders outside the window. Below the house, stretching into the far and hazy distance, lie fields and woods almost totally unpunctuated by the developments of man. It is as if the world has lost all of man's constructions save for this happy house and its occupants.

Knoxxy Eugenia reaches for a book from the nearest pile of things; it is an old book with no dust-jacket, dark green and with the title "A Life of Paracelsus". This is to be distinguished from the book next to it in the pile - "The life of Paracelsus". Knoxxy Eugenia blows the dust from it and opens it to what she guesses is the page she was last at, checks the text and backs up, checks again and turns over one page until she locates where she fell asleep last night. Her brother wanders in with a large slice of bread at his mouth and mumbles something which Knoxxy cannot understand but guesses is probably a request about what she would like to eat. And so the tiny details of life in this empty corner of England continue.

Knoxxy Eugenia is 12 years old and her Father says "she pushes the envelope". Her brother says something similar though less euphemistic but loves her just the same. She is of a type you probably know if you are reading this but if you do not then do not worry as you will do one day. Her name is not that important to this story and she could have been Knoxxy Euphonious but that would have been too much self reference for a first draft and so she is Knoxxy Eugenia and will stay so until I say otherwise. She lives with her brother and a few people who look after her, though not her parents as they live and work on the other side of the world; something to do with the Government, though which Government, both she and I are not sure. It does allow for some very wonderful holidays, though these are becoming less frequent as exams, SATS and various other nastily ubiquitous intrusions intrude and often reduces Knoxxy's reading time to under three hours a day. Knoxxy cannot play Chess and is annoyed by the other children at school who do. She likes to think that her flounces out of the indoor break time room make an impression of those she calls "The Sweats" (having misheard the word "swot" some years ago and maintaining the mistake as she will throughout her life). The Sweats like chess and play it obsessively every break time. Knoxxy is not in the gang and likes it that way. Knoxxy has red hair and plays up to the image of "Copper tops" as fiery characters. Knoxxy swears as much as she can but knows nothing worse than "Damn" at the moment. I like Knoxxy Eugenia because I have to. She is the heroine, protagonist and every other Yin side descriptor you can think of. I like her as much as I have to dislike "The Sweats" because they are the enemy (antagonists, Yangs etc). I know no more than this chapter because I do not know what happens to Knoxxy Eugenia later in her life. I have not made it up yet.

"What shall we do this evening?" asks Knoxxy's brother as he finishes his bread.

"You mean when we have finished two hours of homework?". Knoxxy looks downcast as this is the first time she has remembered that homework has been set for this evening.

"Yeah! We can stay up late." Despite the happy attitude it is still a school day tomorrow. Knoxxy searches for a reply. In her head there is battle between doing right for her teachers and following her brother who she calls delinquent.

"What for? Some late night Apple Scrumping? They won't be any more than crabs at the moment. How about jumping out on the lushes coming out of the pub? Is that fun enough for you?" Sarcasm is of course, Knoxxy's strong point at this age. Her brother knows that all Knoxxy wants to do is read her dusty books. Every night it seems he has to close some old volume for her when he returns from his excursions and carry her up to bed. He does not know to bend his knees and not his back as he does this and in later years will suffer for it. Long nights of study which come to him when Knoxxy's own enthusiasm for knowledge makes a late appearance in his mind, mean he will slump across high desks in low chairs and render him invalid before the Millennium is out. Or should that be AN Invalid?

"Suit yourself!" he says. "Don't say I didn't ask."

"I won't" and he knows that is true. Though he is her friend - no! Her best friend - their respective ages are, to me, the ones where there is most difference. Work out for yourself how old he is. And of course he is a boy and she is a girl, which, in this country, is always grounds for misunderstanding. Forget literacy hour. Teach girls about boys and boys about girls.

He has left the house - probably for the pub, as he seems to be able to convince the landlord to sell him alcohol. Knoxxy is on her own and sitting at the Kitchen table concentrating on the books in front of her. This time they are school books though for this subject, she enjoys then as much as her own private library. Every so often she is distracted by the silence of the world outside the window. While she looks down, birds fly between the patches of woodland; occasionally an Owl will join them silently but Knoxxy does not see them. Sometimes she can appreciate the beauty of this land and never more so than when she is on her own. She works for an hour on-and-off not the three hours she claimed; exaggeration has not yet totally yielded to teenage sarcasm. Knoxxy is not yet a teenager but she is working on it. Knoxxy decides to "Push the Envelope" by not reading for a while.

Knoxxy and her brother are lucky to have a large garden nestled in the woods against a mysterious hill. They always lose the Sun before official sunset and the garden gets cool on the hottest of days. The garden is not kept immaculate though the lawns are mown sometimes by Knoxxy's brother though Knoxxy used to fight him for the job when they first moved here. Koxxy's mind fills with thoughts of every type. She sits down right in the centre of the lawn, feeling lost for a reason she cannot pin down (though I know that it is because she has no book to read). She thinks first of her parents who she has learnt not to miss and still love. It is difficult for her to be without them but they are away so that I do not have to write about them; after all this is about the life Of Knoxxy and not her parents. I could have removed everyone from this and we would have ended up with a story like Ten thoughts from the mind of Knoxxy Eugenia. Maybe this is what this really is. I have to split the paragraphs because you would not read them if I didn't but this one should have no breaks; like an innocent Molly Bloom. Knoxxy thinks of her parents who are at this moment getting up and going to work in their paradise. She thinks of them in terms of people she sees going to work every day, so in her mind they are sitting in the kitchen of this house. But Knoxxy knows that it is late winter where they are so she sees a dark morning and hears rain on the window. They commute through wintry roads to an office building where they push paper and drink foul coffee. She knows of course that really they wake to the sound of the sea and work in their breezy, papery house living happily with no phone and no television. She loves them for a few minutes more, trying to hear the sounds of their voices and then is distracted by the wind. She wonders where the wind comes from. Her first memories, when she and her brother were with their parents, was of wind lifting gauzy curtains over her cot. She wonders if she wondered then what this was or if she just slept and ate. Wind comes from somewhere and though she knows all about isobars and cyclones, she still thinks that it must have some divine source.

The world has a divine source as well. We know all about the very large and the very small; we know about how far back in time, the very large and the very small meet at a single point and the Universe was created. Fred Hoyle would argue with me if he was still alive but as he invented the phrase "Big Bang" he has argued himself out of the picture. He would however, be happy to know that it is now likely that there is stuff beyond this Big Bang, that the Big Bang is just the result of interaction between things in other dimensions. Knoxxy does not know this but at this time no-one knows this. It is thought that there is nothing beyond the Big Bang; the Universe is, in the words of some anonymous cosmologist who I cannot be bothered to look up, The ultimate Free Lunch. God created it if you are religious and it came from nothing if you are not. The worlds of the very large and the very small retreat as you define them until as God hides the smallest workings behind our own minds. Knoxxy does not know this though she has read about the Big Bang. The equations behind it are beyond her as they are beyond me but she again recognises the beauty in the concept.

Why does the world look as it does? Knoxxy has read somewhere that the world only appears to us as it does because we are here to see it like this. If the world were any different then we would not have evolved to see it in this state. We created the Universe within our heads. It expands in complexity as our minds reach into it. The wind gets stronger and this train of thought is turned around by the breezes. Knoxxy wants to go inside and read but she is in one of those states where thought seems to be the only option. Standing up would be an effort not worth anything at present. It is a sort of mental crick, one that sticks you to the ground following ideas and visions. Some people would call it a property of those they call adepts but this is just an elitist illusion. We are all like this; it is just that the real world gets in the way of just sitting and thinking. Do you have visions of Knoxxy's house in your head? How much of this world have I created for you? There is of course nothing outside the text and I think I may have mistaken the philosophy on that but for these people to become real and for their thoughts to seem real, you have to create this world inside your head. I cannot see what you see when you read what I have written but Knoxxy is real to me. I have written just a fraction of her thoughts here and I have done no more than describe sketchily, Knoxxy's house and garden. But you see enough to have an idea of whether you like this enough to carry on and find out who Knoxxy becomes. It looks likely that she will be a Cosmologist, though remember the title of the book she is reading. Or will you give up and read something else?

She thinks of everything and nothing. It is difficult to think of either in real terms but you can think of the idea of everything and the idea of nothing. She switches between the two and it seems that her mind is turning into treacle. If you read about the Universe then these thoughts are common and Knoxxy often goes to sleep thinking of the whole universe.
War Blog

Stand by to repel all boarders. Help desk beckons and I stuck here for the morning. They have to end this soon; it is disheartening. Brain the size of a Planet and all that - again. It is like being a Carpenter and having to clean out stables. Does this count as reasonable comment as I have made the comment to the relevant authorities and been brick-walled? What to write about now?

Did you know that George Orwell was obsessed with the perfect cup of tea? Read this on how to make it. There was a radio play on the other week in which a couple of modern sound-engineers eavesdropped on George Orwell and Louis MacNeice by way of a clandestine tape made of them while they were working for the BBC. A Large portion of the tape was taken up with Orwell discussing how to make tea so his obsession is well known. They gave Orwell a wheezing and consumptive voice which I am not sure he really had. It was a nice touch to have one of the Sound Engineers played by the actor playing Orwell (Jon Glover) though of course Chris Langham is now the definitive Orwell.

The Emotional Range of a Teaspoon

Soundtrack - Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - Aphex Twin

This is the stand-out in Ambient Albums. I'm not sure how much I believe about the instruments being homemade; they sound too much like other things I have heard but that may be the "sound of electronics". I did once try to link an Oric computer to a very early (and cheap) BOSS drum Machine - a DR-110 which had a terrible sound when untreated but became quite "ambient" if you used a bit of reverb. I was quite pleased that I could string a number of user-defined fixed length, 8 beat bars together to make a 5/4 time pattern so I could do a techno version of Take Five which is probably not very credible in any musical community these days. I gave all my drum-machines and keyboards away when we moved house but I aim to get one keyboard and link it to the computer. One day I may get a second-hand computer and have it set up permanently with an amp and a keyboard. After all I did manage to get the Playable Pi music working and something like Change Ringing. I must try and understand "hunting" and get a proper plain bob going. How did we get from the Aphex Twin to Bell Ringing?

It still amazes me, that all this information travels back and forth along the tiniest of connections to this laptop. I basically have the whole world accessible from this keyboard. Anything I want to find out about, any opinion any picture. So much of the internet is taken for granted just like all the techno toys which have come before it. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'' indeed. I like to be able to understand the technology I use. We seem to be becoming so distanced from how things actually work, that we are in danger of falling into a totalitarian state by default. Most people don't understand how Government works and therefore accept its pronouncements in all cases except where it has a major impact on their wallet. "It is fine for the Government to read my email as long as they don't tax me too much". Moral considerations don't seem to make it onto most people's radar these days. I should stop this. I berate my wife for Luddism (Not Laddism which is prejudice against small boys with Jumpers for Goalposts) but I suppose I am just as guilty with all this rant about lack of morals. Oh no! Where is the address for the telegraph and how can I find an Anger Management course in Tunbridge Wells. Why Are so many people angry in Tunbridge Wells? I have just seen the picture and it is in danger of going "bland" like all the other market towns - see BBC article about ... er ... bland market towns. Anyway, I am not that angry all the time.

Go see some pictures of Malvern to offset the blandness of Tunbridge Wells. All complains from Tunbridge Wellites to rdeweyden@hotmail.com.


Monday, June 23, 2003

Real-Live recordings

Wow! Where did that come from? No clues as to the soundtrack as that is the quiz for today. What was I listening to while I wrote it? Soundtrack now has changed to :-

Radioaxiom by Jah Wobble and Bill Laswell.

And no more time or energy for any real writing. Phew again!
Thou art villains, much alike.

In stages such as these, we walk un-tethered
through the debris of the world we killed.
It is the play we know, just written and first performed
to all the European Royalty who fall as supplicants
at feet of peoples crushed and broken by the earth
they thought would feed them for eternity.

Two houses such alike in weaponry, united through
the mind of one to hate the other and destroy and
nothing more. It is the Sun and in the East, the enemy
falls red through sky unarmed to sink and lie forever
in those revolutionary seas. The sneaker dancing girls
have lost their way and end the putsch with kisses.

We write our way into the world, unknown like minefields,
un-mapped in crops to separate the minds of soldiers
from their bodies and yet left to die, a half-life demon
hiding in the rice and water, waiting for the feet of children
to lift them to the sky and heaven. They give them brains
to terminate, decay in days, a-literate technology.

The peaceniks could invent a weapon, a missile,
filled with the minds of lovers, high-explosive music and
the sounds of Earth, to turn the enemy around
to thoughts of green and grey and music from their childhood.
In the woods, the history of men is found, a wargame
pounding in the ears of huntsmen and of spies.

Verona falls, crushed by love and poetry;
blank verse to capture once the cries of high-born,
loving daughters as they fall into the arms of sons
their kin will hate until the birds do not sing or nest.
The chemicals flow through the air and blood
and we die thirsty smiling at the feet of all.

The desperate strength of Paris calls for execution,
the armies gather for the love of just a single woman,
at the gates of all the ancient cities. We sink, sink
our despair made real by conflict and the love of all.
We reach the sea-bed and swim with things that
humans never see; strange deeps and water-angels.

We trespass sweetly in this world and steal everything
we need. We do not own ourselves or others.
Kiss death and die, you empty-headed singers.
We breed a new race in this hell, a race of mystery
and emptiness where love and life are less than all
the things we buy to make us happy.

This is void happiness, grey comfort missing love,
where angels sit or lie, head in hands,
where science kills the rainbow and unpicks the
beauty of the Universe; it is ours for all time,
ours to break and ours to kill. Fair Juliet
is never Science, always love. Love for all time.

Recorded "Live" as it were.
62442

I finally finished another scrap-book this weekend. I am trying to persuade my daughter to think up a theme for the next one. This one was "Nothing - A Special Report" from a special issue of New Scientist.

Reading the New Scientist Web Site I have found this article about Beagle 2 which has just sent a strange message back to Earth from one of the Instruments. They need to be sure of what this means before they carry on and boot the rest of the spacecraft up but the makers in Germany are on holiday so things are being delayed. I wonder what the message is? "I can see the pub from here." doesn't seem likely. For a full rundown on this mission go here. Oh well! More later.

Friday, June 20, 2003

Denis papin was right

The Hubble Telescope has taken a picture of deep space where the light from the pictured objects started out 12 billion years ago giving us an insight into what the early universe looked like. I always used to worry about why Galaxies looked un-distorted as they were thousands of light years across and the light from the far side would therefore take thousands of years more to reach us than the light from near side. Of course Galaxies revolve which adds in a further complication. I wanted to work out what difference this would make to the appearance of the galaxy compared to what we would see if the light travelled instantly. I suspect that all the factors end up cancelling each other out so we see an un-distorted picture. It is a bit like the puzzle about the rower who is moving upstream on a fast flowing river when he loses his hat. He does not notice the absence of headgear for ten minutes during which he rows further up stream at 5 km per hour. He then turns round and rows back after his hat. If the river is flowing at 10 km per hour, how long will it take him to reach his hat? The answer is quite simply 10 minutes. The moving river is irrelevant. The rower is moving relative to the water. Imagine the river was frozen solid and the rower was instead a skater. If there is no wind, it would obviously take him the same time to re-trace his steps. I am sorry to say that this fooled me the first time I read it but it was solved instantly by Richard Feynman. I am getting quite good at solving this sort of puzzle but that is only because I know what to expect in such riddles. I suppose that this show up how physical, Newtonian stuff can lead you quite logically to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of relativity and quantum physics. It takes genius to ask the question what would the world look like if I rode on a beam of light.

If you want to understand Relativity (Special and General) then read this book. I understood how the Lorentz Transformation equations are derived after reading this, something which is usually skirted in even quite weighty tomes. All they need is one on Heisenberg and Schroedinger and that is the whole of the Cosmos covered. Once everybody understands it then the Universe will vanish and be replaced by something more difficult. Science seems to work on the premise that everything can be known. I have mentioned this before (too often) but it seems that reality always retreats into further complexity. There is no end-solution. The anthropic principle suggests that the Universe is only the way it is because we are here to observe it. It almost seems to say that while mankind lived only on the Earth and that the heavens were just a few pinpoints of light, then that was the way the Universe actually was. Similarly, while the existence of sub-atomic particles was not known, then they did not really exist. I sometime lie awake imagining other places in the world. My favourite at the moment is to think of the other side of the Earth at the exact antipodes and at the exact same time; this somehow makes the world more real. Go back to pre-history. Because there was no-one imagining the galaxies, maybe they did not exist. As man, created by God, becomes inquisitive as he released from the continuous daily drudge, he imagines and experiments and finds out more about very large things and vert small things. Did those things exist before they were looked for or imagined or did God increase the complexity of the world so that there was always something more to discover. It is dangerous to think you have got to the end of things. There will always be something more to find. Can we ever know the limits of the Universe in space and time and any other dimensions that exist out there? Find Top Quark and then split it down in to what it is made of. Can we ever be sure we have found everything. This is a bit like G?del's Incompleteness Theorem. Does this aqpply to the universe as well as mathematics? The universe is defined by mathematics so maybe this is true. Is the unknowable bit God? God, not the devil is in the details.

That is more like it. I am sure my Wife will think that this is a random Friday but it is not. I know that the above is not rigorous science or theology but it is a reasoned discussion and in no way mentions Bandicoots, Bananas or anything else of a suitably random nature. I still have my Andy Warhol time before I have to start work so what to write about? Not the weather even if it is the Solstice tomorrow. I wonder how many people go to Callanish for the Solstice? Not as many as go to Stonehenge I would say. There, imagine Callanish tonight. It won't be dark, even in the middle of the night. If you imagine a bit further and go to Shetland then it will be lighter still.

Happy Solstice.

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Big Brother was watching him

He did not look at the Camera so we cannot say we were watching him watching big brother watching him. If only the cameraman had been in the picture.

It appears that some film of George Orwell has come to light, all two seconds of it. As usual the BBC has the gen. on this momentous occasion. Of course I will succumb and but this book; as usual the cover is the deciding factor which just shows what hidden shallows I actually possess. Irritainment and car crash TV are nothing to a Hulton/Deutsch style black and white photo. I now have to remind myself that I have another book arriving on Saturday that will take up my time reading. There may be a fight over possession though it will only be a two-way conflict at present. I am not going to mention what this is as I am trying to create the only web page, which does not refer to this book by name. I will have to try and finish the Bill Bryson before then. Did you know by the way that ..... Oh you probably did.

I was inspired to write a poem by this morning's drizzly, humid weather but the ambience has gone and we are back to the "No Weather" day (© D.O. deBorde - 1989). I am rapidly proving the stereotypical Englishman by talking about the weather all the time. Still, like trees we seem not to notice what the weather actually looks or feels like and instead just talk about how it affects us. I love the feel of weather, especially rain. Rain seems to make a days seem level; rain falls on everyone and wets them equally.

Soundtrack is Symphony Number 2 by Philip Glass.

Oh the babbling is too much. We are trying to develop systems here and there is a continuous inane babble so distracting. Actually I am writing this blog as it is lunchtime to I shouldn't really get upset about it. If it continues beyond our allowed 48 minutes then I could get annoyed. I have just excised a three-line rant about this, which I thought inappropriate for a family blog.

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Absolutely Immune

There is a mass of grey cloud across the view from the window this lunchtime. It is moving roughly Northwards but it is easy to think that t s the Earth moving underneath it which gives a weird and quite scary feel instability. My brother and I used to hang upside down on the railings of the bridge over the stream by our house on the common looking at the clouds streaming by. It was easy to imagine that it was you moving rather than the sky. I have written about that before so that is the end of that little reminisence.

Soundtrack is the new version of the planets with the addition of Pluto by Colin Matthews.

Image for the day

And as I can't be bothered to write anything else here is a site to read and something else which I have just read and you must.
Stories which matter

Maybe these should be from the "and finally" section of the news as there seems to be no place for such stuff in the headlines.

Liberia cease-fire in effect.
DR Congo town faces 'disaster'.
Asean calls for Suu Kyi release

These and many other headlines are obviously of so little importance in the face of the world shattering news that some celebrity and his wife are moving house. Maybe we could create a special new section of the news called "real stories" or "stories which matter - but not much".

Seriously, ALL news seems to have reversed its importance - Big Brother is more reported than Zimbabwe - The Beckhams' move to the scorching heart of Spain. I am always telling my wife that it is not necessary to worry about everything in the world. You would go mad if you did but I consider it censorship to ignore the suffering and injustice in the world at all costs. We seem to be going the way of the US. When I was there on holiday in 1988, the only mention of Europe I saw on the news was something about Ian Paisley saying "NO" and walking out of the European parliament. The main story seemed to be about the Whales trapped in the Ice in Alaska laudable though such a story is (and topical as well - see Japan's threat to leave the IWC). My point is that it appears dangerously insular to ignore the rest of the world especially in these days of mass and instant communication. An off-the-cuff remark by a US politician can cause riots in the Middle East that same afternoon. Having seen the dismal performance of our own politicians on University Challenge the other week I begin to wonder how intelligent our Governors actually are. It seems that desire for power does not always (or even often) go hand-in-hand with a basic level of knowledge and awareness of the world. I know all this sounds stupid and arrogant but I don't pretend at any level to be able to govern anyone. I would not want to. But is it not annoying to be governed (and to have been governed over the last 30 years) by politicians who, when you examine their records closely are not as bright as one would hope? All this may of course just be the avoidance of cliché. Politicians will always rely on glib statements which make good soundbites but which are the public-speaking equivalent of the verses inside greeting cards. Unfortunately, these soundbites are often peppered with newspeak - words which are designed to lead you down a particular path with no way to voice dissent in any meaningful way. Maybe they are not so stupid after all. It seems that acts and pronouncements, which make me, balk, go unnoticed by everyone else. I get the feeling that I am increasingly at odds with "normal" attitudes. I mentioned this to my wife yesterday and she said I was basically conventional which riled for a few minutes but now I don't know whether I am reactionary of dangerously conventional. Secular Humanism is not exactly a hotbed of radical thought is it but now that it seems normal to accept a certain level of cheating in society, am I not the radical for thinking otherwise? Cheat at a low level and you turn a blind eye to cheating by public figures and whole Governments. Governments and in this country it seems, especially LOCAL government is a storm of bed-feathering. Maybe it is just that Central Government people have learnt how to cover all that up. At least it seems that our esteemed leader is just after his place in history rather than his place in the Sun. After all, we always seem to hate our current leaders more than the 'statesmen' from the past.

Of course, none of this applies to the daughters of certain Lincolnshire grocers.






Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Segway Segue

I hope the National Guard never actually flew any of those planes.

Soundtrack - Koyaanisqatsi - Philip Glass

Again! I know!

Well where do I want to go today? Am I even allowed to say that? How about Rarotonga? I don't often post links to other blogs but this one sounds like a pipe-dream I have. There is no chance of ever going to these islands; too many ties here and anyway aren't they about due for the massive collapse of Hawaii some time soon which will create a tidal wave big enough to wash over these islands? Ever the pessimist and now we even have our own entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Soundsw like they are trying to lump pessimism together with Secular Humanism. Anyway, I would prefer Bali to Rarotonga. A more pronounced culture. It is almost exactly 10 years since I was there so a few accounts of the time might be appropriate even if they are flawed by my irrational fear of flying since I went there. My excuses are that there was a lot of turbulence on the way back, that there was an alarm going off for about an hour after take-off from Jakarta and that the very plane I flew back on, crashed later in Sumatra. And here is a revelation for you. All the way back I invoked the name of Dewi Sri, the Hindu Goddess of rice, as a sort of verbal Talisman to keep the plane in the air. Sometimes, I still say the name in my head at difficult times but this is more of a Pavlovian reaction. It is very easy to believe in the Gods, Goddesses and local animist spirits in Bali. Even the European guides and Hotel owners seem to take part in the rituals and offerings. This can be anything from a bottle of soda to a huge pyramid of every type of food. It is quite acceptable to take the food from these piles while they are still being blessed, acttive you might say. One of the Balinese drivers took me to his family's six-monthly celebration and here the whole of the family temple was heaving with a multicoloured pile of every possible type of food. Snake fruit or Salak is particularly nice, like a cross between a large nut and an Apple, a sort of tangy Brazil. The of course there is the notorious Durian which smells horrible and tastes like sweet snot, something I had to look up because I am sorry to say I could not bring myself to eat one. It was bad enough being in a car with one. The link page about the Durian actually has some poems about this schizoid fruit which means that some passions are certainly aroused here. I can't get Salak in this country and I am certain that local councils would ban Durian in built up areas so no chance of redeeming myself on that score. If anyone in the UK has seen Salak for sale then please let me know at rdeweyden@hotmail.com.

Monday, June 16, 2003

Lazy Days (complete this line to your own satisfaction)

Don't like it here any more. I want to go away and laze. There is no future for all this. We will end in a mess of despair and never achieve anything. Listen to some Dub reggae and lie on the Beach. Wait for the Black Star Line and live for ever.

At last I have found a CD which real-player does not recognise. The Roots of Dub Vol 1 - a tribute to the works of Marcus Garvey. Unfortunately the only website which does mention it credits it to Gravey which seems like an enourmous snub to someone who should deserve more respect. (pause while I check my own atrocious spelling). Although the CD seems to suggest that it is true to the roots of dub-reggae, it could all be a modern techno scam, which is more of a snub than spelling the man's name wrong. It does sound as though it uses just the traditional dub techniques rather than the dub #1 setting on some japanese Multi-Timbral Sound module. Very cool unless of course it isn't.

There has been no poetry here for ages (unless you count that attempt at pathetic fallacy which turned out to be just pathetic without being fallacious at all). I keep ideas bubbling under all the time but never sit down with a nice clean fountain pen to record the ideas. Blank look from author as all ideas for this entry fly into the distance silently pursued by the moths of indecision and the Daleks of inevitability. Samantha tells me that the score is 17 to nothing and that I have lost all credibility in this contest.

I am a Camera. There I have said it. This Reggae seems to fit very well with reading about George Orwell.

I am so glad that this book was called "The day OUR world changed"; for it to have been "The day THE world changed" would have been an insult. What about the tragedies on a far greater scale? If it happens vertically in a city under the glare of TV cameras it is a world changing event but if it happens horizontally across rural Africa then it is everyday life. We spend so much trying to stop people carrying out these atrocities with no absolute guarantee of success and yet with a few thousand Dollars we can stop as many people (A day and every day) from dying. Interesting to note Private Eye's observation that many thousands of pounds were spent removing Clare Short's name from Government reports. Would it not have been cheaper to have printed a few thousand errata slips and note her departure rather than re-edit/print etc? I know it is never as simple as save the money here - spend it here. That is like the old argument about not eating your greens as a kid when your parents say how terrible it is when there are people starving. So you reply "so send my greens to them". It is also like my argument about a sea-change in the way energy is produced. It is not a simple thing but then again with so many things within the ability of mankind, a new worldwide energy poilicy is not impossible or even in the realms of the most difficult things we could do. International Devlopment seems to be a fig-leaf for our foreign policy so we can say we are sending a few-thousand pounds out to an Earthquake zone rather than setting up an infrastructure to support people long term.

What happend to all those essays of light and time travel and the existence of God. The real world seems to be forcing its way through the door and pushing everything else aside. More on something else tomorrow. Maybe Quantum theory or The philosophical implications of The Matrix.
Some thoughts on the Common Toad

Views of Animal Farm/nineteen-eighty-four

"Orwell in Pictures" was very good. My wife said she thought the inserts with an actor playing Orwell inserted into various real situations were unnecessary but I felt it gave a real link between a man who was after all a man with great feeling for real people and the people he spoke up for. It is all too easy to see his privileged background as a barrier to real understanding of what he thought. The show was funny as well as clever. As Orwell addressed the home guard via a wartime public information film, he casually tossed a grenade from one hand to the other, saying that the one thing that deters German soldiers is being shot at. I have too many books to read so I resisted starting on the Orwell Biography. There are two supposedly definitive new biographies of Orwell just out so there are those to wait for. I only read nineteen-eighty-four last year but I have an inkling to read it again though I suppose I should dig out Animal Farm first. For years I could see the point of nineteen-eighty-four - it was set in this country and provided a possible future with a horrendously believable situation but Animal Farm was purely a satire on the Soviet Union and despite any black and white pronouncements by the Right during the 70s and 80s, a Soviet society was never likely in this country. Maybe it was just a good yarn with a moral against a distant possibility but now with the events of nineteen-eighty-four likely to occur by stealth rather than war, it is a good time to resurrect the moral and warning tone of what is after all a very good story. I see Newspeak everywhere and no-one seems to care; never use "difficult" always "not easy". ("Good" "Double-plus Ungood"). It is not the Government who have taken over the role of language-mangler but the newspapers and advertisers. The Health Secretary resigned last week, it appears simply so that he could spend more time with his family and not in any traditionally euphemistic sense either. A brave move in a time when families are losing their importance and structure. How did the Daily Star report this? "It's not about sex says the minister for nurses." You can of course try and find a link to this travesty of a newspaper/comic/toilet requisite but I am not going to provide it for you and by the way apologies to James Whittaker regarding the use of the word "Toilet" - and I would look on the use of the word - "sic" after anything in a letter of mine as a badge of honour. I would deliberately misspell something to get that. Who said you don't have to do it deliberately. By the way James Whittaker writes for the Mirror and not the Star but hey - same difference these days ... almost.

Big Brother (non-Orwellian) Mania is with us again. No links as that just encourages them but just a thought how can the man who created one of the engineering marvels of the Millenium - the London Sewer system, have a descendent who produces such a shallow, cheap, demeaning show? The only link between the two is that the creations of both men are full of the same substance (verbally anyway). Does anybody actually log in and watch the stuff live? We are all so sad in every sense of the word. I don't feel that much in the media represents me anymore. Sometimes there is a gem like the Orwell things but so much is now irritainment. The mids shows my Daughter watches are often more in depth than a lot of mainstream TV. There used to be some great drama but now it seems that the saddest moments which before relied on good writing have to use some music to drag every last ounce of emotion out of the viewer. A few months there was an updated version of Wuthering heights called Sparkhouse. We have stopped watching any soaps now - even Coronation street - but if they made a soap with the .. er spark .. or Sparkhouse then I might be tempted back. Maybe not the full on tragedy but just some more meaningful events which rely on writing rather than attitude. Coronation Street used to be a well-written comedy-drama which never took you outside of the believable. I know a soap has to maintain interest and like a lot of people I was caught up in the whole tricky Dicky muder and mayhem but it left me feeling that it was time to stop watching. Like I only finished American Psycho to make sure Bateman got caught, I only watched Coronation street to make sure Richard Hillman got caught and when he died it was time to stop watching. Sometime I catch my wife watching it and she looks at me guiltily as if she has been discovered with a banned cake while dieting. Makes me sound like an Ogre. It is suprising how free not being tied to a five times weekly soap makes you. Not that I read any more or make music of write - I just vegetate in front of the myriad digital channels we now have. If I can give up a soap then I should be able to make a resolution to read more or do something equally as improving.

Talking about improving. Time to start work.

Friday, June 13, 2003

Commander Walker and the Edge of Reason

Back to normality now. Commander Walker has returned and is scanning the horizon for signs of life. Will Ulysses ever play the harp again or is he doomed to an unmusical existence? Out in the bay the sun flickers on the gently lapping water as the scents of the offerings waft out to sea from the little lanterns and house doors. The world could end now and no-one would mind. This is how we all want to end our days, relaxing by the sea with a drink in one hand and a book in the other. My life has never been as simple as this. My soul aches for rest and how could anything as nice as this ever be my lot? Here the sun falls on the paving slabs, storing up heat for the day so that at night we will lie, young urban professionals, out for dancing and the end to a great weekend. The rain will fall and turn this dark city to a cage of lights and spray, cool water in the hot town. The cars will send the refelections of this civilization high into the air, night clouds and laid-back music filling all the spaces. We will relax and curl up in the windows of the bars and clubs, eyes fixed in the distance where nothing lives, where the ships lie at anchor crewless and lit like a far-eastern holiday. It is Christmas every day in this lighted night. We buy each presents and know our own minds, waiting for the best of us to become famous while all around the music slips into the water pipes and storm drains until all the blocks for miles around are as happy as we are. In the distant windows of the old but refurbished warehouses, the music is made by man and machine. It is free to us all and known to no-one. Unknown to no-one? A slacker magic show. Sleight of hand is everything. The man has done this act for years and knows every trick in the book ( a book he keeps under his pillow lest it should be stolen by the young assistant that he knows is out to get him). We all love this act and could probably do all the tricks without looking. We could die on this day and he could bring us back. Technology will bring us back. We will live in the wires, permanent, immortal minds saved and uploaded for ever to a web which links the stars for ever. We will store a human mind and transmit it across space long before a machine ever gets to send our real bodies anywhere other than here. I have fifteen minutes to re-invent the world - to send it spinning with me through the gold wires to the outer edge of the balloon that is the Universe. We ARE all made of stars. My God! We're full of Stars and they takes us to our end. Capitalise this sentence and you know which set to which you belong. I am self-swallowing like a set of catalogues - logs. Plastic Bertrand Russell know what I mean. That shouty French Philosopher who knows everything there is about maths and can prove it. I am Godel and I say he can't. I can prove that nothing can prove itself other than a baker. My Aunt went to School with Bertrand's Children. How spoiled were they. My Dad's a mathematician and you all think he's a philosopher. I think so I am his. Ergo Ergot. Tarantula. The Spider Dance. Rotten bread. That is what made us dance. It made us knock over that bridge at Avignon. It leans like a pier into the river and there we dance every May until we drop exhausted over the end and into the water never tgo be seen again. They find us know, frozen in the glaciers high up in the Alps, stuffed with seeds that were our last meal. We are the Icemen and we are the future. The rising water will wash us from our icy beds, send us like old tree-trunks tunbling down the rivers until we wash up alive on the beaches of your island. I empty my mind and dare to eat lots of peaches. I talk of Van-Eyck and see I can spell his name unlike that of Michelangelo which is such a strange word, that only people trained in the art of deception ever realise that there are exactly 2 to the power of 345 ways to spell that name and still understand who you are talking about. There are infinite ways to put together so many words. Thinking about it, there are not infinite ways. Just lots. There must be a limit. If the book is endless then just the length is infinite but say the book is a million words long, then there is a limited number of ways you can put that many words together. Even if you allow nonsense words, then there is still a limit. It is just a lot. Otherwise, people would stop writing books, even good ones. They have chemicals for that. We saw them and we cried. You must have extra-terrestrial DNA to be able to do that. What morals will space travellers have? Will they believe in the same things we do or will they want to eat us, or use us for fuel? We will never know because we will be machines by then and able to change our own minds with programming. This sequence is especially beautiful. It is pulses of the most evocative music ever written. It is the sound of life happening, the music of planets and of stars and of us and all our religions. We have won the world and we must live with it forever. Lift the trees and give the world a good dusting. I have just knocked a fly from my head. That was the end trigger for today. Goodbye everybody.

Music for one-hundred-and-eighty-three Musicians

You really expect more after this-mornings rant? It seems to be publishing in the wrong order with later posts coming further down the page now. We shall see. I will post this and return with Random Friday.

Dialectic Monologue

Buses explode and Families are attacked with missiles.

And from one Domino the world explodes. We cannot just shrug our shoulders. Sat here safe in our Sunny Northern Towns with the weekend coming up and our friends happy and in love. Religion is an excuse maybe but while you are passionate about one over another how can you not feel that you are right and everyone else is wrong. Richard Dawkins is a cultured and intelligent man who absolutely believes in the correctness of his disbelief in any form of religion and yet I do not seem any form of Existentialistic Nihilistic Pronouncements from him. He appreciates the infinite beauty that is present in this Cosmos, this world, even in the religious creations of man, the music and the architecture, which of course you have to look on as the positive aspects of belief but then you get into "My Cathedral is bigger than yours." and we are back to blowing up people you never know or care about just because they are different. It is hard, after an upbringing where every section of society to which you belong has some form of religious component, school especially, to say to yourself "I don't believe in anything you could call religious". From recent polls in this country 45% of people don't believe (whatever that may mean) and I am afraid that this is not because of any committment; it is simply that they do not care. Now the question is how many of those who do not believe do have the morals to back up the lack of believe. "I don't believe so I don't care about anyone other than myself and my family". I care about the world. I cannot care about all the world all of the time otherwise I would go mad but I can keep in the back of my mind that I have to care sometime about something or I have lost my humanity. It is a battle to keep sane in the face of bus bombs, massacres and the fact that somewhere there is a Helicopter pilot who fires missles knowing that he will kill a two year old girl. This sounds unbalanced. The other week I read an interview with the Loyalist who I will not dignify with a name who was jailed for killing a number of people at a republican Funeral. He was released as part of the Good Friday Agreement (something which should not get worked up about - a small price to pay to stop more killing). He was interviewed in London and be bemoaned the fact that in mainland UK he was "just another Paddy terrorist". Too right he is. I do not distinguish between terrorists; Republican, Loyalist, Government or otherwise. I know the situation and the history in more detail than a lot of people; I know of the hatred that goes back years, the atrocities on both sides. Most people from either side, don't want to fight. They want to live happily, most of them do. Catholics and Repuplicans are friends, they drink in the same pubs and they die together at the hands of the mobsters. So what happens if Northern Ireland becomes part of the Republic? How many of the "brave warriors" who fought for it will then campaign for Ireland to leave the European Union? Or is it just a religious thing? Those great European countries France and Germany, what religions are they? I can see the sad Tank-topped anti-Europeans from the UK becoming so insensed that they will start an escalating campaign of resistance. Where will we be then? Independence for Manchester? for Salford? for Timperley? Where does it end? We have the intelligence as a species, to use the old cliche, to send people to the Moon and create technology of breathtaking complexity and yet the only social engineering we have is left to the Media, the Church and advertising. We should be able to nourish intellect to recognise what is positive. Are we not living in a huge and complex version of the Prisoner's dilemma? Given the choice, we always defect and maybe sometimes we are better off but in the long run co-operation is the only option. This sounds so much like the line from the Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy :-


...And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.


I know I cannot do anything but I can let people know how I feel and it makes me feel a little bit better. There is no point in worrying about all this if you are safe and happy. You will probably be safe and happy (All things are relative remember) for your whole life.

Finally, to end this rant, something to make you feel a little better. Read this and be a little happier.

Keep happy.

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Radio Free Europe



(From the Toronto Star)

How soon will Free Europe arrive. I don't feel free.

There is what promises to be a great programme on the BBC this Saturday - George Orwell: A Life In Pictures which is a set of re-constructed home movies. There is no recording of Orwell's voice and no moving images so they have recruited Chris "The Mallard" Langham (!!!) to play him. So two weekends in a row with great BBC 2 programmes on the Saturday. Dan Cruickshank last week and George Orwell this week. I read "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" simply because they were Orwell and they were readable but no-one could have guessed at the complexity and pure inventiveness of "nineteen-eighty-four" or "Animal Farm" and I feel even they are a tiny part of the ideas going on in Orwell's mind. Are we Proles? Who's side is Orwell on? Not worked it out yet? Neither have I despite all the indoctrination of my lefty teachers. Each side claims Orwell as their own. He belongs to no-one - but feels for us all. Airstrip one is open for business. That was never more true of the Cruise era in the 80's. I was a very militaristic little sunbeam then but how arrogant it is of the US to assume that we will take their missiles so that they can be closer to the enemy. (Who do they need to be closer to now. The enemy is being very obliging by saving them the journey and coming to them now.) Is the state of England in nineteen-eighty-four the result of a slow drip of reduction in freedom, so subtle that you don't notice it? Like the movement of the hands of a clock; you only notice the difference by comparing now to history. In order to muddy the waters of re-collection, you re-invent the past and undo history. Introduce Newspeak so that un-welcome concepts like disquiet and other "bad-think" become impossible to comprehend. Every so often something uncontrolled comes along and everybody notices so back-pedal slowly and remove the memory of it. It is only by being aware of the possibility of these things before they occur that you can be aware of them as they happen. Everyone seems to want to roll over and die. The left and the right both seem adept at this.

Soundtrack is more Julian Cope and strangely gives me a slight sense of Animal Farm if that can be grammatical. Just thought about that for a second and I know why. He has a song called Reynard the Fox which has some sort of blasted rural background to it. Read his biography - Head-on/Repossessed and be amazed (disgusted - nauseated and one-or-two other things). Its just like Sleeping gas now its so ethereal. I just Wander around don't I?

We have had wonderful skies this week. It seems to rain out of the blue (well yes!) and then we get really well-defined white clouds but in interesting patterns at different levels. Having said that it is a flat 80% coverage at the moment but still clear in the sky. I must admit is getting a bit annoying just being able to see some of the tops of the buildings in Liverpool but having most of them obscured by nearer edifices. I have been up to the top (5th floor UK - 6th US) and you can see all of the city and far into Wales and Lancashire. Fantastic. How do I get a desk up there? Calling Julian. How do I get a desk up there, in amongst the stones Drude?

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

The Endangered Music Project - The Moogy Trumpet



Soundtrack - Music for the Gods - The Fahnestock South Sea Expedition: Indonesia

Try hard not to freak out listening to this music. I heard music played on the same instruments live in Bali. That is quite an honour. For the story of how this music was recorded go here. All musical sterility has been banished. I am only listening to 'real' instruments today thought that does include such devices as The Interactive Phase Synthesiser, the Ring Modulated Trumpet and the Putney. The slapback bass approximator and the odd note hi-hat are not allowed which excludes Kylie etc. This reminds me of last Night's University Challenge when a team of Times Journalists trounced a team of Cross party MPs 215 to 25 points. Could have guessed who would win but not by that margin. Says a lot about our governors. Though the Times Journalists were obviously a team in a way that the MPs could never be. Anyway one of the questions was working out which Kylie song had been translated into Old English. The starter for ten on this round was easy because the sentence had the last word repeated four times which meant it could only be "I should be so Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, Lucky". I couldn't get the others though. Last week a team of Lawyers were thrashed by four vicars including one who Paxo was flirting with quite outrageously. How about a team from Have I got News for you against one from Just a Minute. try for a game of Cheddar Gorge? I am now listening to Julian Cope and he seems to be joining in with the utterances of the JAM team and sounds strangely like Graeme Garden (just a few seconds delay while I found out how to spell Graeme's name. Why do they never repeat The Goodies. Maybe I will get the video. I am sure my daughter will love it. From Balinese music to the Goodies in one paragraph - Ecky Thump.

Monday, June 09, 2003

Monochrome Minds

Can't think why I bother. Can't think of anything to write about. Oh yes I can. I saw Dan Cruickshank's two programmes about Israel/Palestine and Iraq over the weekend. Always interesting is our Dan with his grown-up version of Louis Theroux's naive interview technique and his stiff-upper-lip-yet-about-to-cry demeanour at the injustice of what we have done to our history. Do you remember the story of the two groups of monks fighting at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Well Dan visited them and got caught up in what seems like a very unholy rivalry. He went to the Eithiopian Orthodox chapel on the roof but was asked to leave by the Police (whoever they are in such a fractured state) after the Egyptian Coptic Monks objected. Inside the Church itself (on a Sunday) there were many Christian Denominations vying for control with what seemed to be a competition to sing the loudest. A sort of sideshow to the main event of Jew vs Muslim. We need more of the co-operation and brotherhood shown in the recent visit by a group of Jewish and Arab Israelis to Auschwitz but of course the people who really need to go on this sort of visit are the sort who shout "no surrender" and refuse to bend. A sort of version of the only people fit to govern are the ones who do not want to govern. The best Government is that which Governs least. I can't find out who said that because it seems Thoreau said it at the start of an important pamphlet but it was originally said by Thomas Jefferson. I seem to recall from Bill Bryson's "Made in America" that Thomas Paine had something to do with it. I hesitate to admit it but I think that Thomas Paine is a very distant relative of mine. My Grandmother's maiden name was Lois Paine though our Family tree which goes back along the Paine line has a number of different spellings. I should check it up one day to be certain.

It manus in gyrum; Paullatin singula vires. Depedunt proplas; color est E pluribus unum.

An old, old question

I heard a rather distressing news story while driving to work this-morning; it does not matter what it was but it did the usual thing and made me think of all the depressing things happening to people around the world. The story itself was of a tragic accident but so many people are bereaved through the deliberate behaviour of other people. I used to lump all these people together as suffering from various forms of mental illness and of course I have not studied this in any detail, but now it just seems that notcaring about other people and laughing at the severest misfortune of others is a normal trait. Even in the advertising industry, it seems that you have to show small-minded, petty acts of vandalism to get noticed. I'm All Right Jack. For every Guinness advert there is a Vodka one, for every Ronseal (Does exactly what it says on the tin) there is a lager commercial that if it had the Genders swapped would fall foul of so many equality laws. I am getting away from the point. I am getting depressed about everything that it wrong about the world and of course I am in no position to fix it; my solutions are along the lines of the Spoof Blue Peter Presenters on Monty Python's Flying Circusssssss. Idealism is a dangerous thing. Even just acknowledging that there are these problem seems somehow naive and is enough to make anyone curl up in a corner and hum gentle melodies just to shut out all the bad stuff like junk email and pop-ups from seemingly respectable companies. Sorry! Personal preferences were breached there.

The soundtrack is The Acadamy of Ancient Music's Four Seasons which is the first CD I ever bought way back in 1987. It sounds strangely antiseptic probably because it was an early transfer of a full digital recording. I tried to select a calming set of stuff for today which is why I have La Roque 'n' Roll and Concierto de Aranjuez. However, at times like this, everything just sounds sterile so maybe I need a good punky workout instead.

Did Bateman do it? Saw the film on Saturday but could not decide whether he actually did it or just thought about doing it. The reviewers say he did but I read the book by mistake because I mistook it for another (better) book which someone recommended to me and I had to finish it to see him get caught. When he was still free at the end I was quite disturbed. The reviewers also said that there is no message other than emptiness but could it not be a metaphor for what the west does to the world and gets away with it? Reagan "lying" in it at the end was a clue I thought. I shouldn't watch these films though I have to say I was not scared by it; It was just too funny to be really scary. If it hadn't been for the sex scene, I am sure it would have only got a 15 - "contains mild butchery". The danger is all in your head - just like it may all be in Bateman's.

On to the Concerto de Orange Juice and how nice to find that it retains the beauty which I was hoping for. There is so little difference between a life of horror and upset and one of beauty and relaxation. The latter is so easy to achieve but it requires Governments to facilitate it and they seem only to facilitate what they want to and generally for themselves. Local Government especially.

Friday, June 06, 2003

Zeno for Managers

Remember Zeno's Paradox? The one where Achilles can never catch the Tortoise which has been given a head start because every time Achilles covers half the distance between himself and the Tortoise, the Tortoise has moved just a little bit further and so-on? This is of course flawed in reality because the sum of all the successively smaller parts is 1 and not infinity. Well I have a modern example. If you have to record your time doing something and also have to include a record of the time you take recording the time, then do you not end up never actually finishing filling in your record because of the meta-recording and meta-meta recording? I can't be bothered to work out the maths to find out where the flaw is but I just want to draw attention to the analogy. So much of management is swamped by things which, if not exactly like this Zeno for managers paradox, are just as ludicrous and un-productive. At least Achilles and the Tortoise got to the pub afterwards. I am a liar. Sorry! Wrong paradox.

To be Random or not to be Random. Is that a question? That is isn't it? Soundtrack is the lovely floaty 18 minutes bit of the first disk of Music in 12 parts and its beautiful and instant transition to part 2. How random is that? Commander Walker is on Holiday.

As I did two random bits last week, I am going to leave it for this week. Still the Soundtrack is the same.

I was completing a couple of pages in my current scrapbook this week but when I turned over to the next set of pages, I discovered an artwork I had completed some years before and well out of the sequence. I used to fill in two or three double page spreads each week until about 5 years ago when I almost stopped altogether. It is only now I have started doing the pages more regularly. Anyway, this artwork is loads of Oil Pastel in various blurred aquare shapes, read and blue mostly but inside the frame, there is a cut-out which must be a technology advert because it shows a sketch of a worldwide network, very back-of-an-envelope. I seem to have called this Chromatography. Maybe a scan will materialise in the next week or so if I get time. I only have four spreads to finish this book and so I am thinking occaisionally about a theme for the next book. This one is called "NOTHING A Special Report" after a specal edition of New Scientist. An Oblique Strategy for the next one would be helpful and that strategy is - wait for it - The most easily forgotten thing is the most important. This makes me think I should theme the next book using my first ever memory. This was running around a great grass field by the sea though I seem to remember that it was a cliff edge rather than a beach. Strangely this has just reminded me of a dream I had last night about dropping my wallet on a beach and being under fire as I tried to get it back. This probably comes from this article which I read yesterday and of course the Robert Capa photos. So the theme is Invasion - I don't know what form but Invasion is the theme. Positive or Negative - Oh and A Midsummer Night's Dream - the world's first one episode sitcom. We Love You. That's why we're here.

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Proust and Saturday Afternoons

Soundtrack - Loveless - My Bloody Valentine Oh what lovely shoes I have.
- Vol1 - Sound Magic - Afro celt Sound System

The smell of floor cleaner in the corridor here at the office has just brought back a wave of memories about school from the late sixties and a strange memory of a place I know I have never been. How can you have a memory of a place you know you have never been? Deja-Vu I suppose; just a dog-leg in the brain which means you remember one thing without another, the actual trigger memory which confirms you have experienced something is absent but is contradicted by the presence of various other stimuli which overall can have a quite powerful effect. This place is some form of Nature reserve, a little like the Attenborough reserve in Nottingham which I have visited albeit at least 35 years ago. I suppose this is the memory really; it is just distorted because I was so young. I must have been only four or five because we moved from Nottingham when I was five (yes I am a native of Nottingham - a Snot being the proper and unfortunate name). I had been given my Mother's binoculars and I think I dropped them to much anger from tall people. I must tell myself that these sorts of accidents should not be met with anger by parents. In the scheme of things they do not matter. Memory is so important because of the reaction it brought out in my parents. Talking about it has made me recall that this was probably my first telling off though so things were not that bad. Parenting is hard work, which lots of people don't seem to want to do. I am sure it has always been like this. Society is getting better despite all these Crime/Vandalism/bad behaviour articles in various tabloid newspapers. I won't name any but one is the only one to have any stuff about the 50th anniversary of the Coronation in it (and a complaint that the BBC put that story underneath stuff about the G8 summit - what is more important for today? - somebody please tell me). My Dad designed the road bridge across the railway outside the Marconi works there (maybe Siemens now - I am not entirely sure as I have not visted there for ages). I was really impressed by this when I was five and I still am. One of the workmen on the site gave me my first piece of chewing gum though I think I can say that I have not had more than ten pieces in my whole life. The bridge piers (The things which hold it up) were described on Tomorrow's World I think because they were innovative designs but I don't think the idea was my Dad's. Should this be called WDIAGR moment or an Andrew Collins moment? Off to look for the Tomorrow's world theme. See you later.

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

The Return of Ranty Bob

Soundtrack - Music From Twin Peaks - Angelo Badalamenti - Watch out for that swinging door!

All of my colleagues (Native Scousers) are telling me I should not get so worked up about the abuse against Liverpool.

It is only because he didn't have his surname on the BBC site that I have not named and shamed "Duncan" who wrote to "Have your Say" to observe "About the only thing that could be cultured in Liverpool is mould." which is of course probably the most cultured thing he could ever say. Reverse self-reference you see. Bertrand Russell could turn him into Meta-language and the whole cosmos would be better off. Does "Duncan" belong to the set of Self-Swallowing sets? Can't decide? Then he does not exist and therefore we can all get on with our lives. The very culture which the "anti" respondents seem to attach solely to Liverpool (ie Shell Suits and Perms etc) is one which pervades all of Society in this country. Choose any big city in the UK as a capital of culture and you will have someone point out the wide-boys and the Scallies along with the cities need for cash to shake of the ills of the industrial path. Blackbird Leys? Southmead? You can drag out any area from any City and show how deprived it is. Maybe I should go along to the poetry readings at the cafe along the road. Of course I would just be listening. No bottle at all me. Excuse me now. I have to go and examine all my old poems for Pathetic Fallacy.
I am not a Scouser but I play one on TV

Liverpool is City of Culture 2008

At the highest level, this is very good. However, nothing is going to be that wonderful.

I have been using a page from a pad of recycled old Ordnance Survey Maps as a book mark. I was wondering yesterday what the village marked on the 8 cm square section of the map was actually like. Click here to see the map. It is in all that lowland just South of The Wash and near King's Lynn. There are no images of the village Tilney All Saints so my idea of creating a sort of random scrapbook of images is flawed. Pathetic and Fallacious possibly. Maybe I should write a poem which is made up completely of Pathetic Fallacy

The Mists and Fogs of Mind

This water is my mind, curtailed spirits
of all the thoughts I ever had,
rising from the marshes of the memory
and layed as drizzle on the vision of this day.

Back to City of culture I think. Look at all this abuse. An argument that Liverpool is only famous for Football and the Beatles could be countered with the argument that Oxford is only famous for colleges. Culture is much more than Shakespeare and stuffy old academia. You could say that Liverpool's decline has been due to the mistakes or greed of people in control of government and industry many of whom were educated at Oxford. Culture emcompasses food, sport, theatre, comedy and all the rest. Culture is not just rake-thin Home-Counties girls up on points or Fat Ladies singing which is what so many of the middle classes imagine it to be. No offence Darcy. Hope the foot gets better soon. I would imagine everything from Irvine Welsh to Irving Berlin via Derry Irvine's wallpaper (at £350 pounds a bloody roll so he comes under Comedy). Derry Irvine? The most contrived link I have ever done. Oh well no censorship. As I was reading those Talking Point messages, it struck me that the view out of my window is of the Liverpool skyline. I do not need to argue with anyone about Liverpool deserving it's City of Culture status. There is no point. It is a case of me (and all the people of Liverpool) being right and all the snobbish detractors being wrong. If there is any political element to the choice then who cares. I know this sounds like "we won and you didn't" but it is more complex than that. Liverpool gets a more-than-deserved amount of abuse, down to the extent of showing the Surgeon in Holby City almost as a caricature scally but what do you expect of a programme with a depth of writing akin to a puddle on the Dock road. Want a thug in a TV show? Write in a Scouser (with a very bad accent).

Oh Ranty Bob today heh? Is it only Wednesday?

Polishing off the Economics

Well I did just that so I have finished the little knowledge book. Some books you read and devour - dreading the last page (a phrase pinched from a review of something else this week) and some you trudge through as a chore always on the brink of giving up but realising that it is important to finish it, maybe to gain an appreciation of other more readable books. This one was weird. Neither case applied. It was as if it was just nourishment for the brain without any taste or excitement. I am glad I finished it anyway. I can now go back and examine my poetry for pathetic fallacy or decide whether Western Civilization has actually reached the synthesis between the thesis of capitalism and the antithesis of an empowered proletariat. I think Tony Blair thinks we have but he hasn't read any books more complicated than this one. At least I do now know what all this actually means. Quantum Theory, via Archimedes to Dialectical Materialism.

Spin and re-writing history. Now there is an important subject. For some words and a very good example go here. Pakistan - 1942 - er yes well.

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

The consolations of Philosophy

I am onto the Economics section now so why the title here is Consolations of Philosophy I don't know. To be honest once past the science, I was a little bored as in my opinion, economics is only a step up from sociology and only a few clicks higher than quackery. All you business-suited MBAs out there are probably gearing up for a bout of apoplexy but tough. Business seems to make a mess of things when we could be so much better. I know that my Sociology lecturer (a nice American by the name of Tom Manual if he is out there anywhere) would say that a deep understanding of how people behave in organisations helps business to adapt and react to situations in a sort of cybernetic feedback loop but I think so much of organisational activity is so beset by personal axe-grinding, that sociology must give way to a need for a psychological understanding at a level not beloved of sociologists. Too much sentence there I think. Anyway, I did learn all about Maslow and Taylor and many other people who generalised about the way the world works. We spend too much time deciding on how bad things are rather than trying to make things better. What colour should fire be?

It is very quiet in here at the moment. I am on help desk but it is not evening. I am afraid I have two consecutive half-day stints at this because I swopped with Martin some months ago and only now has he got his time. There is a general working day ambience because the windows are open and we can hear some of the traffic and some of the aircraft outside. And now I want to talk to you all about trees. I love trees. They are the most important form of life on the planet and very important more locally because they make this country so wonderful to be in. Call me a tree-hugger if you like but being in woodland and forest is one of the most relaxing things you can do. I don't get to do this very often. Take away all the trees and see what the world will be like. Some people seem to be making a start on this already. I have news! We will all SUFFOCATE! Stop it NOW or we are all going to DIE. Sorry. Next time I won't be so nice about it. The wind outside has started howling now.

I have just found this Ladybird Book site and consequently this one. Browse and go back to your childhood. Don't the children in the Junior Science section look happy and well cared for? A pleae for private education if ever there was one. How radical are you. Putting a ring through your nose does not make you a dangerous individual worthy of special branch investigation but neither does it make you a free-thinker - more of a sheep if you ask me. Ubermensch anybody? I would think of myself one if it were not for the requirement that you crave the exact repetition of your life. Nietzsche, Smietzsche - of sorry I have done that some time ago.

Someone called Andrew Collins has just called our help desk. I don't think it was THE Andrew Collins as I am sure he will be on his way to work for this show. Notice that a guy called Adam Smith is in the studio today. So the economics section did leave some impression on my brain. Actually, I already knew of Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations and all that. We used to have a site in Kircaldy where he was born. That is of course all I can tell you except that Margaret Thatcher probably has a shrine to him in her bedroom and sacrifces small animals to his memory. Oh! Quite Charming. It makes me want to dance. (Amarok by the way)

Monday, June 02, 2003

Meanings of Systems

Be bold and behold the new world that stretches out at your feet.

The The The Ph-Ph-Philipipip Glassssss BlBlBlog Blog The Philip Glass Blog. All music is a drone you know. Just stick with it and the whole world will become music before we are even aware of it.

How would someone else do it? Obliquely of course. This is the textual equivalent of something but I forget what in the split second between writing the beginning and end of the sentence. Enough leaning.

I tried to use an oblique strategy to kick-start today's entry but it backfired (The TT races must be on at the moment in order for there to be so many motorbike references). I have nearly finished reading A Little Knowledge and have got beyond the Philosophy and into the hard science. This is not to have a go at philosophy; it can be far more interesting than the nuts and bolts of the world; but some philosophy is just obvious and worse some is just long words to make the author or speaker sound clever. Sartre taking up Marxism not beacuse of its politics but because of its philosophical implications seems to me just an insult to all the poor people who suffered under that the flawed Soviet version. Sartre never had to work in a tractor factory or trudge the Steppes with heavy loads. Celebrity Communism! Still real science can segue into airy metaphysics at any point (unless you are Richard Dawkins) and without warning. The Big Bang used to be the beginning (and end) of time but now all this membrane theory has opened up the possibiloity of things beyond. Is it just that not even the Scientists could comtemplate there being nothing else without them actually having some equations to stuff some numbers. Do cosmologists only ever bother if they can plug some numbers in? I bet Steven Hawking thinks outside of numbers and has a damn good imagine now and then. It would be sad if physicists only ever programmed the world rather than imagining it. I could certainly think of something on the 'other side' of the Big bang. I was pretty certain that what I imagined was never going to be correct but the idea was there. Can a machine say there is no way of describing this concept therefore it definitely does NOT exist. The machine would not even begin to think about these things unless of course it was programmed as a Devil's advocate and would always question conventional wisdom or the hard and fast rules of science. Always start from the view that something IS possible because even if that thing you imagine is later found out to be NOT possible, you will at least get some interesting arguments and maybe some useful insight into the real case. Is this everything and nothing again? Question everything and assume everything IS possible before you start.

All this reminds me very slightly of Arthur C Clarkes three laws so it is apt that Mr Clarke has an interview with the BBC to celebrate his 85th birthday. Which, in turn reminds me that I saw Rendezvous with Rama - the book - in the Garage. I should read it again. There is no film as yet and just looking around I have found that David Fincher and Morgan Freeman are aiming to make a film of it -release 2004 but don't hold your breath.

I would be a serious mistake ... to juggle with live scorpions. Apparently, Saddam Hussein is in league with Aliens who have genetically enginneered giant scorpions to be used as guards around secret desert hideouts in Iraq. Even those wacky people at Fortean Times said that this was unlikely. But for the source to be Pravda. You remember what they used to say; there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestiya. I could not find a link to Izvestiya in English
so brush up your Cyrillic which was named after Saint Cyril the Obese. I made that up for comic effect but I find that it really is named after Saint Cyril though he was not Obese. Maybe that was sub-concious. I did do a lot of typsetting in Cyrillic a few years ago so I suppose I must have found that out. O life is just a great big Pomegranate for me to feed my face.