... And The Titanic - Which Did Not Sink ...

Turkey dead and eaten - Quality Street wrappers everywhere - negatory replies to requests regarding more food all made .. time to swing the sofa round, shush the smallest member of the family and turf out any stray neighbours. Cometh the hour - cometh the Doctor and the best (and strangely in our house nearly the only*) bit of Xmas Telly. We laughed at Allon zi Alonzo - we hid behind our hands when The Host attacked (no sofa-sheltering wusses in this house) and we cried when Kylie floated off to go travelling. The Golden Compass board game ( Ages 27 and Masters in The Monte Carlo Method and above only) was nowhere near as exciting as this.

Now where is that tangerine? **

* Brenda at Three - disappointingly corgieless this year.

** Daughter informs me it was a satsuma.

The Asinine Comedy

Listening to Hunkpapa by Throwing Muses

... despite the untrueness

Either in the middle of or just finished many books at the moment. Daughter's bedtime read of Peter Duck was completed last night though I think that it having real pirates and a proper sea voyage makes it one of the least enjoyable of the AR books. There is actually some reference to this at the end when, after being beaten up and shot at before witnessing the drowning of the responsible crew in a waterspout, Titty (no sniggering at the back there) remarks that nothing exciting happens to them. May leave the next one for a while.

My own reading includes Saturday by Ian McEwan which as well as having one of the most atmospheric covers of any book I know, leaves me breathless at how real the story seems. I think I once mentioned the idea of a machine/program which could take real life with all its requirements to document events and internal feelings and produce a narrative version of the world as seen and imagined by one person. Saturday seems to do just that. It is rare that absolutely everything in a narrative leaves the reader feeling happy with the way it has been described but Saturday steers a careful path between all possible absurdities. It has little dialogue and is otherwise a taught description of events and feelings exactly in the way that my wonderful little life-recording device would do it if I really wanted it to work. Strangely, despite being one of those books you just have to pick up in any spare moments it didn't leave me with that "sorry to be finished" feeling which is probably because of it being a day's worth of an open doorway on the events and mind of one person - it has the premise of being a day long and the end of it seems exactly the right point to leave it. The events are interesting and despite the fact that I am sure the whole thing is structured down to the last press of the mute button, it never seems forced. I suppose I can see some personal McEwan stuff in there somewhere but I wouldn't be surprised if he had managed the whole thing without ever dragging in any his own experience. Read this and live someone else's life for a while.

Currently reading Watching the English by Kate Fox which is a proper anthropologist's investigation into the norms of English behaviour. As the author mentions, this book is definitely an attempt to get under the skin of English stereotypes and so you will often find yourself saying "but I don't do that" but more often it will be "I do exactly that" which probably says something about how much of a rebel I am not. Weather comments are a form of coded message for "I want to talk to you" a sort of non-romantic chat-up line. More secrets about myself will be uncovered later.

Other things on the bedside table (alright piled up on the floor) are Your Own Sylvia, Eye Rhymes and The Golden Notebook which might be a girl's (girl's? I mean lady's) book. I've only got into the 1971 preface to The Golden Notebook but its already said something relevant to my arguments for moral relativism. Lessing says that things which 50 years before were the desires and wishes of only the far left (for this I think she means radical "lay people" in general rather then politicians- and I may have misremembered anyway) are now the basis of good governance whichever political denomination is in power. The religious arguments against moral relativism break down if you simply imagine what the world would be like if various faiths hadn't changed their outlook over the years. Inquisition anyone? Execution for apostasy? Stoning for adultery? Don't fancy any of those? Is this too simplistic for you. Have I asked too many questions for one day?

At risk of shooting down my own already-un-airworthy views in the above paragraph, I am sure that Christmas will bring more things to read. I wonder what Richard Dawkins gets for Christmas. You might like to ask him here but I suspect they actually want something a little more meaty.

For Emergencies Only

Listening to White Chalk (though not really)

Raceways

Jumping gaps, my view of the world has split,
a rarefied relief at empty, blackened thoughts
that I see dissolved to nothing.

Fear of failure in here, bigger than the actual risk,
captures systolic rhythm and releases it.
Open hands that concealed only air to air.

Exiling the failure, no more than undigested things,
two Lattes, two tablets taken close together,
make all things rational and real.

So Much SMOG!

The onomatopoeia of the aforementioned terpsichorean modelessness, must necessarily lead to historical and wide-ranging failure when compared to the overtly passive professorial readings of experimentation which, possessing similar intentions, could be described in terms of the logical positivism that we all aspire to. This nocturnal indecisiveness (obliquely referenced by many commentators) can almost certainly be described as anti-intellectual or possibly post-intellectual - even futuristic - when polysyllabic imagery is taken fully into account, while hirsute bovine criticism calls us to the archaeological excavations that occur biannually. Poetic readings of the aforementioned documentation are unbecoming to post-European houses that were exploded and scattered during the last war, where they coalesced into a pre-formed Diaspora and consequently became a psuedanonymous indicator of literary mightiness and musical ultra-education in the homogenous condensation in addition to the coincidental referencing utilised in certain extraneous divisions of the modernistic version of Charlemagne's philosophical discussions.

Holy Cow - I Wrote A Villanelle

Meadowsweet

Beware the Seely Court are out tonight,
With Fairy Glamour and with Meadowsweet,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

In dark they see by their own pretty light,
The villagers whose flesh makes fairy treat,
For all the Seely Court are out tonight.

So here they steal their human lovers’ sight,
And with them all-but-blind, lie down to eat,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

With heads thrown back in sated, cruel delight,
And black maws wide with raw and ragged meat,
All of the Seely court are out tonight.

Out for revolt in mornings seeming bright,
We find them dead and smiling to retreat,
From bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

We bear them gleefully as is our rite,
To bury them with fresh-cut Meadowsweet,
And know the Seely Court are out tonight,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

On Topical Posting

Well topical in one respect anyway.

To start - Something interesting from the giant that is Paxman.

All this and much Poliakoff as well. My DG - with all this drama you are really spoiling us. Joe's Palace was as good as TV drama can possibly get - rich, inventive, unpredictable, rooted in the real world and yet with a spiritual depth, all conveyed in simple dialogue and perfectly-framed camera work. On saturday there is a pivotal monologue (dialogue with both parts read by one actress - Ruth Wilson) which appears to be the link between Joe's Palace and the next Poliakoff piece - Capturing Mary.

Office Block Persecution Affinity



I do so much want to join the above organisation but I suppose it doesn’t really exist does it. It is simple walk-through ethnography and all that sound of buildings coming down amongst us might just give us permanent tinnitus. It will of course open up the sky but then again no one actually bothers to look at the sky these days. Well these guys do and I have joined them – and bought the book – and started a special folder called “clouds” in my photo directory – and learned to love the rain. I return of course to thoughts of hanging upside down on the railings of the bridge across the common where we used to live, looking at the clouds and imagining them as islands in the pacific. I thought maybe I was a pilot on my way towards Japan. Which reminds me that General Tibbets has just died.

And then this in turn leads me to the following set of pictures (which you may wish to avoid should you be of a delicate constitution – The “Tubed Pedicle” picture gave me a twinge of squeam, which is unusual - you know who you are.)

Click here if you feel up to it.

Friday Randomness

On a rooftop in this city, an early hour, watching the flickering lights down below, the bridges and remaining tall buildings – you become a memory, silhouetted, leaning against the fence, trying to be cool and attractive in your black clothes and handmade shoes. I hear the Cathedral bells and wonder why they ring at this time. Maybe being here is something special and this feeling makes our gods happy, like being in that express lift, going up to the eighth floor for more views and more posing. And all these pictures in my head just can’t be teased out into photographs to keep for ever. All we want is to remember this without having it forced through glass and electronics into some distilled little box of bits on some dusty disk somewhere.

We dart like fluid otters, over the rafters, above the ceilings of the run-down flats, dodging the occasional ambiguous bullet that pin-pointed a love-affair of some sort. And looking down, they are together, entwined in some aquatic, zero-gravity embrace, one arm each around the other, one arm each relaxed and weighted towards the floor, the gun still in one hand, maybe smoking, maybe dripping to lovingly applied oil to the floor. I see the cloth it came from, still on the table, above the open drawer. And the firearms licence .. and more ammunition, falling from it’s box, rolling to the floor, coming together with the oil, to make a sculpture for all of us. We pass on with time, still flowing over the dusty obstacles that hide in these unknown spaces, lit only by gaps between wood or through broken tiles. Up to eighth floor, through the heavy door onto blank concrete, narrowly fenced with brick to take us close to the drop that would obviously kill us should we want it to.

I am back on that high bridge, resisting the pull of the drop to the mud below but drawn to the view of so many houses and so much detail spread out below me. All those lives in those places, shouting and loving and laughing in so many combinations. And just me up here to see it. The city sounds mash together into some sort of deep white noise, the sound of traffic and trees in the wind, ice cracking, the noise of birds. I remember this from years ago, when I was so small and the city seemed so big. And then I moved out of town, out to the silent countryside and yet still there was that white noise, the echo of creation, and English deity, the green man making the fields and hedges from nothing, crying with most of us at the ending of the giant southern woods and the burning of the northern forests. And here is the fog again, covering up this new city and the trees the same, leading us into not knowing where up and down are, taking away our balance and dragging us over the edge to a bitter descent to that layer of dust breeding in the alley-ways below. There is dust everywhere, spreading and mutating into something living and intelligent, something that will take us all over. Dirt and dust will do for us – will have us buried like the ash-corpses of a modern Pompeii, lost until some playing child of another species finds a calcified finger pointing the way to safety to the rest of the human race dead and rigid behind and below.

Trouble and Famine.

Ntaw Ntae - all those meaningless syllables. I wait in the rain, revelling in the local time which makes me happier when I am outside the things that bring me down. I wish I could write what I hear in this place, the conversations about nothing that mean everything but the language of these people just escapes me and becomes my own internal rambling. They are talking about Tsunamis I think - maybe one of them had relative out there when it happened though do they really know what one is.

This is a place I have been back to so often, just to sit with my single, cooling coffee as the night I always see, drags on around us insomniacs. I would love to think of myself as one of those Nighthawks in the Hopper painting but then again they don't look like they would want to speak much at all and conversation - mine or other people's - is all I want in these hours. It burbles in the background over the sound of all-night radio, though that seems dull, and I think that is because it is taped during the day. I can see the studio lit with the grey of winter or maybe the sun of some tropical place where a company offers bespoke pre-recorded radio shows - any genre - for any time of the day. Maybe someday all radio shows will be made in one place when the monopoly of production overcomes the spontaneity of real radio.

A few hours left until the dawn! These are nice people, truckers waiting for an early sailing, travellers saving money by waiting for the early boat as well. Occasionally an insomniac craving speech and company - but that is me. My sleepiness overcomes me and my head is on the table. In the background, the voices and the music turn to gibberish and then reform as bizarre things in my head. Those strange syllables that might be language or could be just irrelevant. Sometimes I think these sounds are genuinely meaningful but deep down even when asleep, I know that they just pass a local test of having meaning. Scrawl and Rawk! The messed up tails of language are like fruit, like bats and fruit, spilling sweetness over the rain-forest floor and turning the day to something stranger, like a third state of time - there is day and night and the new state that is different to both but never comes between them. It is separate and different and yet still a time. Maybe it is space time, maybe it is real time and let's face it, day and night have meaning on only a few planets in the universe. They mean nothing to the gas between the stars, lit uniformly from surrounding suns.

Fruit and sleep. Correlations of drawn out syllables and stretched words. Nothing between us and space but a few kilometres of air and ozone. I can smell it sometimes, brought down to us and poisonous. That smell at the seaside - that was supposed to be ozone but if ta is then we would all be dead - it is rotting seaweed and decomposing gulls, taken out with old age - more victims of time and plague. The world does not seem real though I think I am awake now, where the beauty of the lights on the rain has given way to the syrupy feeling of the early-risers moving through their tasks - picking up the just-delivered bundles of papers, opening the shutters on the cafes either side of this one that cannot cut it through the night. I must leave. I must leave. I would sing sometimes on my way home, the last ear-worm from the radio , but now my head makes up its own sounds, the echoes of my dreams mixed up with the gentle indoor sounds, create a permanent buzz for the first few hours of the day, tinnitus that fades as the nerve memory of those night sounds leaches away into the atmosphere.

I am home and almost silent, despairing because this room is light, grey light, and I want it to be night-lit, subtle greyness mixed with the promise of happy colour from outside, defined yet hiding things with silhouette and edges. Indoor TV studio light. You can always tell the studio from the real but perhaps that is just the type of medium they record it on. We have left those strange ntaw ntae sounds and started up the accelerating sounds of daytime, the urgent rhythm that is supposed to mean so much. Trouble and famine is so untrue. Ask for anyone.

Kate Light



A visit to a relative this weekend has provided this sketch by my Great-grandmother which we think is a self-portrait from about 1890-1900.

Scaremongering

Listening to : You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes) by The Scaremongers




The cover of their CD is a painting which is based on a photograph of Ian and Deborah Curtis though Ian has been removed and the background is taken from another photo of only Ian.

On Missing National Poetry Day

I am an oil tanker,
On fire and sinking,
In the sea,
Burning, sinking,
With all the dreams,
And left alone,
By crew abandoning,
And floating home,
To keep the oil price stable,
High for profit,
Sunk by proxy,
Business wrecked,
To keep some afloat,
And restless,
for a billion more.

The Dread, Municipal

The summer ends in static,
called to judgement
by the shorter days of weather,
clouds that sink to us,
to bring the skies to our place,
fog and chill in endless time,
sketches of the wild, black-coated things,
that are our generations,
flowing to oblivion,
and wished-for history,
class wars in the shrubbery,
the ambience of mild things and songs,
which flow from travelling gods,
bringing our divinity to mundane houses,
the dread, municipal in faded parks,
and murder scenes,
without the bodies hidden,
or locations marked for ever.

Poem For a Found Cigarette Lighter

Amongst the autumn leaves,
I find a cheap lighter,
the colour of barley sugar,
dripping with the strangely thin
and clear fuel,
half-way between two states of matter,
and a dream of manufacture.

I want to stamp on it,
to make it into shards,
to let the fuel flow
into the atmosphere,
across the grain
of this grainless, sooty bench
to lift the mood of birds
in their end-of-day routines.

I play like a kid warned not to,
holding the switch down,
until the cheap flame,
cheap as plastic,
makes the whole thing too hot to hold
and I drop it forever,
into the leaf litter
and conflict of near winter.

Everything's Gone Blue

White Chalk sounds so familiar - it could be no one but PJ Harvey but it is so different from anything else she has done. There must be a sort of idiolect that runs through all her songs that defines her regardless of what she sings. If you are not into 'bleak' then maybe don't get this one. It reminds me so much of my internal images for Victorian Schools - all threat and religion though there is nothing overtly religious about this album other than the tinkling upright piano and the white flouncy dresses. Modern words they are and it does not really matter what they say or even what they mean - that idiolect maintains the importance of the songs without them having to engage you with plot at all. But then isn't that the way with most supposedly intellectual songs. Listen to some of your favourite songs from 16-18 and you'll find that they say nowt and mean less.

The media player has just rolled over into a Wire Tapper CD sampler which has left echoes of White Chalk floating around in my head. It's all so very dreamlike. Something is stealing my ideas, however bad they are.

Holy Cow - I've Gone All Arty.

Listening to White Chalk by PJ Harvey

A good long Interview with Ms Harvey in the pub here.

This CD arrived along with So Percussion's version of Drumming and strangely the two albums convey quite a lot of the same emotions. Drumming always make me think of unpopulated towns in a snowstorm. It has a weird deep level of emotion despite being so scored that there is little scope for adding anything personal to a performance - you have to play it pretty much as it is written. The continuously evolving sequences over the 73 minutes of this version seem to drip sadness in my mind, far more than most songs with lyrics. Quite an achievement for a man who has not exactly had a hard life. He feels for people. What exactly has to be in a tune to make it emotional? Technology is all very well but the ever-moving-forward advances that fill studios with boxes and racks and mixers seem to suck out all the actual point of most music. I know my wife thinks that Steve Reich produces repetitive, emotionless drones but I think they contain some of the deepest meanings possible in music.

My wife and I differ on White Chalk as well. She says that it sounds like a poor night-club singer. I think it probably needs a few listens for me to be able to write anything more about it but the lyrics seem to convey the same sense of mystery that Drumming has always given to me.

Solutions and Mega Noise

Listening to How to Play Your Internal Organs Overnight by Stereolab

I was "offsite" this week - a long way away, North of the Lakes which meant a pleasant and surprisingly short drive. I came back alongside Lake Windermere and was quite shocked to find it busier than when I was last there in the height of summer. I suppose it does rain sometimes which keeps a few people inside. There seemed to be a lot of people wearing face masks - like Doctors wear - not the Halloween/bank robber type. I would assume that it was against traffic fumes rather than any form of Cumbrian Flu. I didn't stop but just driving alongside the lake was nice in a very low-level sort of way. I was tempted to stop at the Dante Rediscovered exhibition in Grasmere but I think maybe I would have been pushing the definition of Company Time. I was once nearly persuaded to visit Alton Towers on the way home from a meeting in Nottingham but reality got the better of us both and we turned back. Oh well. And I still cross out any Alcohol from the receipts I submit for expenses. Sad I am.

Catching Stars.

Listening to 10 by Kate Rusby

I was back with Godel, Escher, Bach last night. This has been neglected for sometime while we plough through various DVDs one of which is the Box Set of Peep Show. However, as a result of watching the latter I can now only hear Mitchell and Webb as Achilles and the Tortoise. I just can’t get away from the required irony that the dialogues have. It didn’t help that last night’s discussion needed absolute concentration. I kept expecting the Tortoise to say “Isn’t that right Supper Hans?” The question now is which is Mitchell and Which is Webb. From appearances Mitchell would be The Tortoise and Webb does have the touch of Greek Hero about him.

I don’t often talk about work stuff but I have to mention something that got me spooked yesterday. I am trying to do some ftp stuff in .net and prior to discovering that my ftp client dll already had a nicely structured put and get I was trying some low-level stuff involving byte arrays about which I have come to the conclusion that they are the .net equivalent of the badly-behaved trucks in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. Despite clearing the array after it’s definition, it would display the bytes I had previously loaded into it. I shut down the environment and whenever I came back the newly defined buffer had the same bytes in it. I suppose I might be showing my lack of knowledge of the low level behaviour of bytes and bits but I am a simple soul and if there is a high-level way of doing something I will do it. It was a bit like And the Cat Came Back.

... If It Works at all

We once ordered a copy of The Ladybird book - How It Works ... The Computer (all the pages are here) and I was going to send it to one of our PM's as he sure needed it. However, I actually learnt something from it myself so we kept it. I may have mentioned this before along with my absolute devotion to the unreal world of the The Ladybird book of the weather which unfortunately seems to have vanished from the Internet. However, my search for it has come up with this site about design which has made me me read something about Bad PowerPoint. I don't actually use PowerPoint very often (at all) but No more than six words per slide seems Spartan indeed. I can agree with no dissolves as they always infuriate me and they infuriate me on the web as well. I love design - I'm just rubbish at it. When I was at college we had no software to allow us to do any design. Sometimes we might get let loose on graphics software but then it was simply for technical stuff like 3d models. I once went out and took measurements of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, stuffed them into a pascal program and actually got out a rotatable wire frame model. I had to cycle half-way across the city to find a site with a plotter to allow me to get a hard copy. First geek-points to me there.

Super Hedges

Listening to World Service by Man Jumping

Try getting hold of this one!

Geograph is an attempt to get at least one photo from every Ordnance Survey Grid Square in the country. This inevitably means that all the interesting ones already have many photographs taken in them but I don’t think that stops you putting more up. Of course if you live in some remote cottage in the mountains of Lewis then feel free to push them towards completeness.

This photo shows the house at Llandanwg we used to stay in for holidays. This was usually October Half-term which means the weather was sometimes pretty appalling but we liked it. The sound of the sea was always present and we had the whole of the northern part of the bay to look at with Criccieth twinkling in the distance.

Moleskinning

Try here for things we can never match up to.

And planner seen – one of them should be, out of its paper case and in the sunlight and air so that it may decay as all paper is designed to. This acid-free life is just killing everything with longevity. 17 Clips on the heavy duty, designed to keep everything together like all this technology cannot. And half-way through everything today is then point of no return – the day, my life if I don’t have anything to do with it, I might make it that far – like my Grandfather or the Marathon woman or every parent throughout the world horrified by everything they read and everything their children tell them. How clever is this to shout down those who think you the cleverest? A drone for backing with history and humid light.

Thanks to Lily Briscoe



Who is thinking of that tip-tap sound that toe-caps make? I hate that sound. It makes me think of stuffy rooms and over-dressing, of over-confidence and arrogance. Never stop around for that will you. Hypothetical questions abound in this arena. Can they see me watching them and analysing? My thoughts might be their thoughts, poetic aspersions as to what they are thinking behind those common, familial eyes. Like cuckoos in the rough trees of this night. I imagine this wood we walk through when none of us are here, silent I think in my interpretation of the old philosophical question because of course the sounds are only sounds when they hit the grey stuff up here behind my own inherited ghosts and empties that will be some time. The rest of the time they are just movements of air in an empty space.

First is Victoria, green haired in these unrevolutionary times, trying to be different and yet attached to some distant past like she will fall off thew world should she let go of her precious records and strange time-stretch that stops her leaving the last decade she felt comfortable in. I can't even work out if she was even born in this decade and did the other things or maybe I just can't be bothered to make that simple addition for after all it it nothing beyond the simple maths of the Kindergarten.

Time passes, sometime with a war in it, a brief explosion of something more horrific that we have ever known, unfilmable because all those who died before, in those wars of horse and arrow and cannon, did so just as terribly but somehow in a place separate from the world - they leave with banners and with flags and either come back with same or just as memory in a piece of paper or maybe never. I hear dreams and folk tales of men gone off to war 700 years ago and just vanished into the tight alleyways of those dusty cities. And each one is a cause and effect made different in the way of this world, a complete reverse of history, of a leaching out if the many worlds. Her Grandfather loses a leg to one of his own guns, a repeater exploding in his trench. It only scrapes him but infection gets him and now back there in memory, she sees him limping heavily on the same prosthetic they gave him back home before shocking him into some sort of sanity. He was no officer though I see this family as from that background. He loved his men and his commanding officer loved him. And now his peace belongs to Victoria, loving him a peaceful man in a peaceful family who loves her despite the green hair and the strange outlook as he sees it.

He left under banners with all his mates and they saw glory in the acres of mud that gradually took over there world as they slowly came to it, on trains and boats and more trains and slow marches to sit down with tea until the time came to either sleep or die. This is war in a muddy garden, pointless and pained, slow and irrelevant against the quick sweep of troops that came later. All they did was create a 20-year-long lull until the horrors of what my grandfathers called "The last lot". And it was the last we hope depite the trenched that still exist around this world. It seems to no longer to matter to us as long as it doesn't happen here. We cannot foil all of our enemies because we created them and they remain in our head until we die at their hands or ours. Maybe we are still in a lull she thinks --- or I think for maybe her thoughts are mine and she is who I wished to be all those years ago, silent while they watched their precious and trashy television and I sat back, bored and yawning until they would talk again, excited about blues or jazz or maybe the drugs they said they took but which I never saw. Sister of the blessed is Lily, jazzy and beautiful, from this age without war and suffering. Even, unwaged, she lives happily and without needs other than envy and laughter. Yes - Sister of the blessed she is.

Chilled Frankincense

In Eyeless sand and heat,
the trashy faith of blinded zeal,
is pressed to immobility,
to give us unplanned words,
that tell of devolution.

The Barefoot Doctor Who

Listening to Uh Huh Her by PJ Harvey



I am obviously not able to wait for White Chalk and will be using my new-found confidence to develop a time machine. Of course it will only be used for retrieving future releases of music and DVD. One of the first sci-fi stories I read was an Asimov tale about the development of a time machine which suggested that people would not use such a device for the big stuff but rather for petty point-scoring, checking up on spouses alibis and that sort of thing. Sad but true. talk of Time Travel reminds me that we eventually got around to listening to the reading of The Stone Rose - it came free with the radio Times. Even the youngest was rapt in the car and David Tennant was great at separating the various characters; it must be difficult to switch between the different voices.

Reading Joy Division Stuff in the Guardian, and Regeneration by Pat Barker.

Silent Spring

Where do you go when you sleep? The other side of the world or just an atom away in all those extra dimension they tell us really exist wrapped up amongst the dancing particles that make us all up? It's the time of year when the cool of the evening brings out the last gasps of the summer insects, battering themselves against the windows in their mistaken flight around the artificial moons we make for them. I see the garden leading down to the stream, dimly lit at the far end but deliciously inviting in the slanted light from our windows and the open door. The ground is littered with apples and we have piled some of them up in an old tin bath by one of the sheds; they fall at random over the days until the pile rots into some sort of equilibrium and the sweet smell of them fills our noses in all parts of the house.

And here is an army of insects, all types and all sizes, battering against us and the light, invading our spaces with no purpose, no direction other than to use our lights as their beacons. They think they are travelling in straight lines because of course the moon has no parallax at this distance. But our lights move and the insects try to keep them on one side and end up confused into flying in circles.

And when does this end of summer turn in to Autumn and then in turn what point defines the start of winter. Looking at the time as one whole thing, they just roll along, with the first ice in the landscape of empty trees, no more than a second away from the first fogs of late August. Because place stays place. The trees don't move, the house stays the same, the changes that the seasons bring simply paint our world with a thin layer of pastel because underneath things change so slowly.

We have so many levels of change around. Deep down all is moving and the instant state of the universe is gone for ever as soon as you begin to try and catch it. Then in the processes that keep us alive, things are spinning and dividing and moving and yet lying here I cannot catch any of it save for a faint pulse of blood in my ear or the rasp of breath through my lungs. Even my brain which has all these processes in its control, cannot let me know of them. I can think about these processes with the help of neurons which are in the same networks that keep all these processes going. A neuron which fires now as I think of these words will an instant later be part of the network that kicks my pituitary gland into some important hormonal task and I will never know. Just 200 years ago, most of this was not known to any human being. The brains which make the music that lives beyond our allotted time, could not think about the processes which they carried out all the time. We were simple machines then, unable to think about the processes which led to thought. Of course we could think about thinking - the philosophers have always done that - but they could not know how they thought about thinking.

I am thinking about everything in the universe and then the nothing that came before it. And then to extend this thought which has come back to me many times over the years, I think about my brain thinking about everything and nothing. It is odd to me that again the neurons that think this do not have defined roles within my head. They are just conduits for electronics and chemicals and yet in an instant I can translate the sounds that hit my ears, process them through countless billions of processes and return with a word to sum up what I have heard. You cannot follow a program through the brain for even a single photon hitting a single receptor in the eye, branches out through some sort of amplification into a cloud of thought that is filtered and distilled through processes which change at each new use to form a defined and pointed response. That is remarkable but it is obviously the product of a heuristic attack on development; it is so obviously right and correct that it must have been created as the result of responses to all the stimuli that have passed through every creature between the first and now.

There is just no way that any entity could design something like this. It is the process of finding the centre of a ruler by balancing it on two fingers in thousands of dimensions. It may take time but it will always succeed. And all of a sudden I know that this proof of life outside our world. But what if our existence became at one with the method of creation? The world is so well defined - we have regulations and just outside the window I see a plane, a complex construction of well-defined and smoothly polished machinery, pointing the way forward from one place to another in as few steps as possible. And that is the way humans go these days. We want these well-defined paths and yet this is at odds with the way we have developed. Mind maps are designed to reflect the way our brains work logically so that there is as much correlation between the way we think and the way we record what we think. What if we extended that to the way we act as well? I would guess that most people feel a deep fracture between the way they have to live their lives and the way they would want to live them. Beyond the basic needs for survival (but even there is potential for change) we could just drift like thoughts, start from the tiny point of our birth and grow like impulses in the cortex, lighting up different parts of the world and then closing them down again, waves of existence across the brain of the world. Maybe this sounds like a plea for anarchy and I know that I am the wrong person to try this. I don't like the unknown. I like things to be certain before they happen.

“Nothing to forgive, Sydney, nothing.”

Over-stretched - the Black Moon Rises
cruelly on the slicker sea,
a hole in iron,
through which the war

has come to us
for rain and food
to keep alive;

for many things
from us who hate her
yet supply the steel

through turning hard
against the view
of burns and scars,

our riots hidden
in the wrinkled cortex
and hypocrisy.

Lie, Fly, Cry, Nighy, Die, Sigh, Dry, My, etc etc.




Big book this!

I have terrible tinnitus at the moment - at first I thought it was a bad disk drive somewhere in the office but as it carries on at home I have decided it must be the Alien implant or the other source of voices inside my head. One of them is whistling - probably.

Actually apart from this, which isn't even keeping me awake, things are quite good at the moment thank you very much. Not sure what else to write about so it's bye for now.

Degrees of Separation.

The day is like syrup, sweet and heavy, with the birds suspended from the thick air. I cannot tell the time – the lights are on but it could just be the afternoon of a thick storm. This is a high street, seemingly busy with activity and commerce but empty of people. I have been searching for someone to whom I am attracted but I have forgotten her phone number - it comes to me in segments which slip away like egg white when I try to pin it down so I have had to actually come out to find her. Now the timing of all this activity is not quite clear in my head. It is possible that what I am describing after now actually happened before I left the house for the search. I do know that my house is a strange balcony around a central room. One part has a tiny arched door which I have to squeeze through sideways and as usual my house has no roof and probably no walls.

The street has a normal mix of shops and businesses, but they all seem vaguely foreign to me, though at the same time I remember them from some time ago. Maybe they are from an alternative world that I have already made up once in my head. I reach the door of the place that I know this woman to be. It is some sort of performance place, with a huge arched front, pierced by dark, stained glass windows, possibly in the form of writing which I cannot remember or might not understand. I knock at the main door which has a large clear glass window and the person I am search for appears behind it and too one side as if she has walked through the front wall to my left from a magic room which exists in a different space to the pavement outside. She is pleased to see me contrary to my normal quests in these circumstances. All things are finished and resolved.

But yet there are events which happen after now, in this place which I remember from before the time I first got there, quantum resolutions perhaps, the door opening and ending the story, is just the collapse of some equation. My new friend and her family perform a stage show for me. It involved real actors and what are obviously robots performing in the pit of the theatre round which the audience sit, though the actors come and go through the audience as if they are not there, walking like ghosts into the scenes. The robots amongst them are marked with a hazy white label that hovers around them – just the writing, no surface onto which it is written, like a computer game to indicate that they are indeed mechanical. I am not aware of a plot or even of dialogue though there is music from films and the whole thing appears to be a choreographed battle, with the ugly robots being easily circled by the beautiful real people who do nothing more than this. There is no contact, just this weird ballet without meaning but it is beautiful and absorbing and makes me love the real people.

And then it hits me that everyone in this act is a robot of some sort. The woman I have come to see, although she seems happy that I am here, does not seem entirely simpatico as she did to my blind eyes earlier. No one tells me this – it just becomes a fact in front of my eyes, the trashing of the brilliant idea of this quest and in its place the knowledge than any affection is the result of a program, a neural net which has been trained using saps like me. And this is the real end – the last event that happens in either my house or the theatre of robots. I am possibly part of an audience, captive or otherwise but drawn into staying here for ever by the discrepancy between the beauty of these people and the simplicity of their behaviour, the trusting affection that now seems abhorrent. There has been no love in this transaction. But maybe some understanding of the world and how we fit into it has made itself clear.

Some dreams like this leave me happy despite the sadness they carry deep down and some with overtly violent or miserable natures, leave me happy simply because I wake up happy that they are over. The description of limbo, which by God will not exist for long in any of my universes, has us all in a quiet, calm place with infinite sadness. I am sure that this creation is designed to justify the glorification of ancient infidels on whose knowledge, the wonders of the renaissance were based. Here is Virgil, the guide, and all those philosophers who were born before the possibility of enlightenment. And here is the link with my dream; if God is all things at all times, can he not lift these clever, laudable people from their heathen times and bring them into the light? Time is only for us humans and outside that we have no understanding.

Venerate Plato and Aristotle.

On the Beauty of WI-FI

I was made to get up last night to find out the age of Fred Talbot, the Map-leaping Meteorologist. My wife is reading Pies and Prejudice and pointed out the factlet that the aforementioned weather enthusiast was once a biology teacher and had taught Mark E Smith. Her assertion that he must be well into his seventies, as at extreme odds with my view that he wasn't yet into his sixties. Feeling comfortable in bed with GEB, I SMSed my brother who refused to get out if his pit to put us out of our misery and so I had to trundle downstairs and switch on the computer to find that Fred Talbot is 58 and Mark E. Smith is 50 making that particular teacher-pupil relationship entirely possible. Now lack of evidence from the Interwebs suggests that it all might be an urban myth but for us, the need for Wireless Internet has been underlined.

VBscript, ftp - no, no, no.

And the Road I’m on is …. Hangar Lane

I wanted to put 2008 in my date heading which I can see up there. I know you can’t see what I type there because I don’t actually copy it from the document but I still wanted to type 2008. I’m not sure why. I am now 7 years past the furthest date I could imagine myself existing in when I was 10. I think there was probably a Blue Peter competition which asked for drawings of the year 2000 and that was about the limit of my imagining of myself. Still it was only a few years after I had discovered with shock that children grow up into adults rather than always staying that way. I’m pretty sure the revelation was a one-off big bang rather than a gradual dawning because I always associate the discovery with a particular room from our house at the time and a definite time of day. Now the question is how much of my life does this explain?

I am back reading GEB now – I finished Dear Robert, Dear Spike and enjoyed the early chapters of the Robert Graves biography but when it went beyond the years covered by his autobiography it seemed to lose something and has therefore been jettisoned without guilt. I am way over half-way through GEB having avoided any real skimming. However, I may try Life Class before I finish GEB – or even the new version of On The Road which I thought at first was a facsimile of the 120 foot long scroll.

The Private Life of the Socialist Walnut

Oh dear! What book shall I read next. I have far too many open at the moment and I should be concentrating on just one. Actually I have just finished the Spike/Robert letters and have started on the proper Robert Graves Biography but so many other things are distracting me. That together with a whirlwind of social engagements this weekend (mostly courtesy of my daughter's friends it must be said) I am quite tired out, and then today I have been driving all over the North West trying to find a decent pie ... er ... actually not a pie but something actually productive in terms of what I am actually employed to do. If I said The Simpsons that might be too much of a clue as to what it was.

A financial advantage again this month so I might perrchayse one of those silvery, music-disk thingies again. I'll et you know when I've worked out how to get the needle on it and there will be a review forthcoming.

Duirt me leat go raibh me breoite

Two more books delivered courtesy of Sefton Library services – Dear Robert, Dear Spike – The Graves-Milligan Correspondence and Robert Graves : Life on the Edge by Miranda Seymour.

I am also most taken with Graves’ poetry collection called Fairies and Fusiliers which in every poem seems to sum-up the default image created in my mind by that title. All the poems are available online at that link.

I also have a poem of my own which came fully-formed in a dream – well maybe not quite fully-formed but it is a Limerick which is very unusual.

I went to sea with Dirk Bogarde,
And a man who looked like Dirk Bogarde,
A girl with a chimp,
A boy with a limp,
And another who looked like Dirk Bogarde.

If you stress it right it’s not nonsense at all. I suppose there aren’t many rhymes for Bogarde and I can only blame myself even if it did come from a dream. I could at least have tried for some assonance – getting the rhyme wrong dear! Spike is safe from any competition from me.

Take That You Evil, Little, Beeping, Circular Thing!

Well I am tired! We got woken up at 4am by an insistent beeping which we eventually decided was outside. So with my wife and youngest child standing inquisitively in the front porch I went outside and up and down the street in the pouring rain trying to work out which house the noise was coming from. I suppose having eliminated any of the immediate neighbours I should have given up but any beeping now matter how quiet keeps me awake so I trudged on through the not-really-that-bad floods until the weird sideways head movement that passes for range-finding, pin-pointed the noise to a pile of debris outside a house that is currently being renovated. There, stuck to a discarded piece of internal wall was a still-functioning smoke alarm which must have been confused by the trauma of being made homeless because it was beeping away under a deluge of rain. I wrenched it off the wall and started to walk home with the intention of disarming it, or at least nicking the battery but despite pulling it apart the thing kept beeping. When I got back to the house, I read “Battery cannot be removed” and so had to ask for a pair of scissors to give it the coup de grace. Of course there was no point going back to sleep though the youngest toddled back upstairs as soon as he knew what was going on and went straight off again. So you can see I managed to avoid resembling Basil Fawlty attacking his car with a tree branch but I am glad I didn’t meet any boys (and I use that word in its truest sense) in blue while I was muttering at the wet indignity of being dragged from my bed and dreams of fame and fortune by a snivelling little piece of technology. The momentary worry that there actually was a fire and I had let the place burn down came to me but vanished after a few days – er… minutes.

I have just discovered that the final ‘c’ of coup de grace should be pronounced, because coup de gras means “blow of fat” rather than “blow of mercy”. That is a hyperforeignism if you wanted to know.

Things of Global Significance

This week I am mostly reading Goodbye To All That …

… and have been interested to read that Robert Graves was based at Litherland barracks which is just down the road from us. I can’t find the exact location so I will have to ask around the local wrinklies to see if they know. It was next to the Brotherton’s ammunition factory which Graves and Siegfried Sassoon thought might take out both Litherland and Bootle should it explode. The book also mentions Sassoon throwing his Military Cross into the sea at Formby and his family believed this was true until very recently when it turned up on Mull. I was about to suggest a treasure hunting expedition to the children but they will have to stand down now. Sorry – the language of the trenches seems to have got to me.

I always thought that Robert Graves survived the war pretty much unscathed but he was severely wounded, so severely that his mother was informed of his death and his obituary published in the times. He returned to France but was sent back as unfit for trench service and despite efforts to return to some sort of active service overseas he spent the rest of the war in Britain. Graves and Sassoon were both affected with what was termed neurasthenia at the time but which is probably PTSD. Graves was so much affected that the shakes would be triggered by any strong and unexpected smell – even that of flowers – as a reminder of the gas which both sides used. The strange thing is that all this horror is written about in such a detached way that you seem to accept it like Graves did – he didn’t agree with the war and still tried desperately to fight in it – possibly because it was all he knew in his working life – it was all he could do. He goes from the severe trauma of the moment of his injury, through the hospitalisation in France to his recuperation at Osborne House on the Isle of White with little change of pace. I suppose this chimes with the title of the book – just a chronological charge through the events in order to put them behind him, though the pace is not really manic or plodding – just matter-of-fact and yet it still seems to draw you in with a sort of hypnotic rhythm. This is the first book in ages I have raced to finish.
GEB is still around though. Finished Ant Fugue and now I am into the juicy chapters about mapping brains structure to brain function at all levels, based on the brain/Ant Colony isomorphisms from Ant Fugue; pictures of neurons and that sort of stuff.

Message To Aunt Hillary - Bang The Rocks Together

I finally downloaded a manual of instruction for PC assembly language. I've set myself the task of understanding how the gates and stuff on the circuit boards inside this very PC relate back to the actual pixels on the screen with all points in between followed. I know that this mapping seems overly complicated and I am not sure that many people in the world can actually say they know exactly the paths involved but I was inspired by the seemingly universe-sized complexity of the mapping between the DNA molecule and our own bodies - Genotype to Phenotype as Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter would put it.

Hofstadter has actually mentioned that computers do have some fuzziness involved and this was in a book written nearly thirty years ago. Imagine the degree of fuzziness that is now involved and how we still expect the machines to get it right. I suppose they do but the scope for unexpected results is now a lot higher than it once was. The secret is to beat the involved systems into submission by making sure that your programs and hardware conform to rigid definitions.

GEB discusses "Chunking", originally using to describe how chess masters see the board in play in chunks of organisation rather than by looking ahead any significant number of moves. This is why up until recently that human players could quite easily beat computers that looked ahead to the end of the universe. This chunking happens when programming as well and I can see myself doing it, realising how to fix an issue without having to follow through every possible route. It often happens that a fault and it's resolution actually cancel out or result in a much more elegant way of doing things. Even just using the word "elegant" in relation to programs may seem odd but elegance is almost like Nirvana - a sense that something will handle most of what can get thrown at it without having to consider all the tiny little possible routes through the system one by one. The big example from history is the resulting elegance of the proper way we describe the solar system. The deferents and epicycles of Ptolemy are like the myriad Boolean variables you might put in a piece of spaghetti programming to catch all the possible situations when in actual fact a look at the bigger picture removes the need for all these. This is why they call me "Mr Rewrite". Thank goodness they don't call me elegance.

Personally I have just been involved in something which did involve lots of deferents and epicycles - sometimes you just have to accept the compromise. You can't have everything.

The Collected Thoughts of Desmond Hamster

I am in the rare state of having two books I want to read equally. Normally either one or other of the top two books on my pile gains full attention until either it is finished or I get bored. However, the two books at the moment have reached a plateau of interestingness (which must only be in the Spelling dictionary because Stephen Fry has lobbied for it to be there) and I am switching between them – reading a chapter from each in turn. One of course is GEB and the other is Goodbye To All That which despite being about the one of the most horrific experiences that man can go through, draws me in like lighter biography never does.

Having said this, the chapter of GEB just read was light in the extreme because it refers to computer programs from nearly 30 years ago and was therefore quite easy to understand, though this was covered in the text by references to what computers will become and have already started to progress towards. On to Ant Fugue.

Statement From a Marine Neurocrustaceologist!

I have my third copy of GEB - no questions asked - so it will be half as battered as it would have been by the time I finish it - sometime in 2017 I think. Well, maybe not then. I am deep into part 2 which seems to have less maths so far but is interesting just the same. I have found myself as interested in the distinctions between machine code, Assembler and compiled languages as I ever was when I first learned about them. I never do any assembler now and I only ever wrote one commercial assembly language program. This was some small portion of the input stream for an ATM deposit system. Knowing the world of technology there is some chance that this code is still in place in a live system. I keep meaning to start on assembler again one day just to say I can still do it but having to bother about carrying puts me off. Pointers I hate!

Random Walk This Way

Well I suppose I have to review Goodbye to all That now don't I? Well as I said above, it is a lot less literary than I was expecting - anecdotal and down-to-earth rather than what you might expect from a poet but then again I suppose that even if you are a poet, living in the mud of the trenches might colour any prose with mundanity no matter how much good whiskey, silver cutlery and tasteful lighting you have in your dugouts. My overriding view of the trenches from the section I have already read is one of soft-lights, an ambience almost like those scenes of Victorians shopping you get on the top of chocolate tins. I know that this is wrong but not even the description of the poor sap who blew his face off with his own grenade gave me anything other than a slight jolt. I suppose that this is the horror – the acceptance of that horror as normal – the slow descent into trauma-causing disaster with out any real awareness that things are as bad as they can get.

Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml yesterday was about Locusts. This together with the new Powergen advert for greener electricity involving millions of helicoptering sycamore seeds gave me a terrible dream of being in a world with thousands of locusts filling every available space and me being unable to avoid stepping on them. Actually there is a third influence for this which is Robert Graves description of stepping on mice and frogs that had fallen in the trenches. All of this dream happened in ten minutes sleep between seeing that it was nearly time to get up and then realising that I was late. I can still hear the crunch of the insects under my feet.

I have always wondered why we do not try and turn all the protein created in a swarm of locusts into something edible? Maybe the problem in locust-affected areas is that eating insects is against some local religious code. Locusts look like prawns anyway. I used to look after the locusts ate school. I had to go and gather grass for them at lunchtime and drop it into the cage through the hole at the top. There was always the thrill that one of them would escape. We made our own fun at that school.

Sniffy, Miffy and Lippy

I am very annoyed today. I just got to Part II of GEB to discover yet another issue with the printing and binding. This time it is whole page spreads which are completely blank every so often. This is not something you could spot before hand because it comes at a point where the book has blank pages anyway. I am beginning to wonder whether every copy has some flaw or other just to make some point regarding the content. They cannot comment that the book is battered through being in my laptop bag because they are GOING TO HAVE TO PULP IT ANYWAY. I am trying to spot some sort of Isomorphism between this and the things the book says and there is indeed a reference to an Author printing blank pages at the end of a book to foil readers who might go there first. However, this concept is extended to printing lots of gibberish to fool the reader as to where the end actually is. Some reviewers even suggest that lots of GEB is actually gibberish anyway though even in the parts which I may have skimmed it all seems to feel right. There was a scientist who once wrote a completely fake essay regarding the sort of philosophy and postmodernism that is beloved of the pseudo-intellectual crowd and they fell for it entirely. I think it was the sort of thing that attempts to quantify concepts that are completely beyond the reach of mathematics - equations regarding sociology and concepts of political correctness which are the epitome of The Emperor’s New clothes.

The upshot of this is that Goodbye to All that is now half-finished.

Blue String Blues



This is a group statue outside the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight.

Finally finished the biggy chapter. Onto A Mu Offering which is fun.

Not sure what else is worth talking about. What about the weather now the threat of flood has passed and the grass can actually be walked on? Too English that isn’t it? I think I’ll just read and reflect on all the big things to talk about which have vanished from my head as usual.

Justified and Ancient or Far From the Sodden Crowd.



I really did skim the last bit of Typographical Number Theory though I could have understood it if I really tried – any time I wanted to – really I could. Honest! I’m into a Mu Offering at the moment which is a Tortoise/Achilles dialog some of which is about Zen Koans but I haven’t got to the bit about breaking a bowl over the student’s head yet - probably because it isn’t actually in this book – it is in The Fountains of Paradise.

Time was when you had to point to Amazon for a link to anything cultural but now Wikipedia is just as good and probably more rigorous with its content. Not sure what else to write about. Hope you like the photo. It’s from the Liverpool Museum Exhibition.

Backyard Orchestra



We make our own music in this house.

I am still doing my two pages each time I pick up GEB. Typographical Number Theory (better not use the acronym there) is quite heavy and I have to admit that I may be skimming some of it and not doing the exercises. Why do I choose to read a book with exercises for pleasure? I am looking forward to the Self-swallowing TVs which is probably linked in my personal "Semantic Network" as the Doctor Who Section. We once set up a video camera to point at its own output and couldn't get it do anything until I pointed the remote at the TV and the Infra-red bouncing off the screen acted like some sort of match and the whole circular feedback thing started from that spark. Fantastic it was. However, that is some chapters away but they are interesting chapters.

ISOmorphism

The strange loop between development and testing is one. I don't often write specifics regarding my work though most of the posts here are done in lunch hours but today I can tell you that I am mostly working in Classic ASP. I will leave you to make up your own mind on that. Statistically I suppose that most people won't know what that is or even be bothered if they do but I have to tell you that nothing is dull today. Read into that what you can because that is all I am going to say about it today.

I think I have reached the age where I need glasses. I am OK in good light but at night I am having to hold the book at a certain distance away and really small text is almost impossible to decipher. I am lucky that my company will pay for the eye test and even a certain amount of the cost of any glasses required. My daughter has also recently taken to wearing glasses though these are only plastic ones which came with one of her many Doctor Who magazines. The trouble is they suit her and also have this magical effect on her demeanour which from the normal "whatever!" level of attitude that seems to start at about 7 years old turns to politeness and deportment. All from a piece of plastic that must have cost whatever sweatshop it was made in about 0.5p in production costs and 20p to ship over here.

The next chapter in GEB is called "The Propositional Calculus" which is filling me with dread. I think I got the dialogue before it but I didn't manage to pick out any Isomorphisms which means that they are either absent or too subtle for my clogged mind to find. I am afraid that it looks like a lot more formal systems - always the most difficult part though I suppose it is no more difficult than some of the complex string manipulations I do in my code. I wrote down a note about the strange loop between development and testing. At the moment I am doing a lot of development and then long test plans in order to cover all issues that might be raised with the new code. It reminded me a bit of the GOD Over Djinn section of the Little Harmonic Labyrynth, with me as the genie and me also as the meta-genie of the testing which must not be good. This crops a lot in coding. I might spend hours poring over a fault somewhere in code and then find that a colleague spots the error in seconds. I have to say that this works both ways before you start thinking I am useless. And of course in ASP, there is always the peculiar nastiness of ASP code which writes out VB or Javascript. Programs writing programs is intellectually fascinating but professionally it makes for lousy bug-fixing. But then again I do it in VB.net client apps and calls to dlls that have changed. I have been toying with the idea of a program which calls a dll which it has just written the binary code for, just to see if it is possible. And for my next trick I will lift the Eiffel tower as high as the International Space Station by pulling on the lift cable from the third platform.

We Now Go Over To Sally Swumpley In Peafog.

Listening to – Instant Message alerts – Almost musical they are today – not like that blinking duck.

Well into GEB now. I have to admit that some of the formal system definitions are quite difficult but I am able to read everything without getting completely lost by it like I was the first time. I also begin to notice many more of what the author calls Isomorphisms between the dialogues, the music, the pictures and the maths. (Word tells me that Isomorphism cannot be plural but like the friends of Blue Cow – we know it can don’t we). This I take as a sign of one of two things – either a gradual increase in formalism in my thought processes which means I am able to look ahead as it were without any of the glossing-over of inconsistencies in understand that is the result of youth or the fact that my brain is slowing down and forcing me to rethink things over in order to understand them. As the development of Automatic and Human intelligence is a main theme of the book then this is quite exciting, being an isomorphism between the book as read at two different times and the capabilities or, more likely, limitations of by mind.

Anyway, having got passed the drier chapters which define the formal systems essential for a full understanding of the book, I am into the wide-open expanses of the stuff that suggests to me the phrase “narrative verdict”. While formal systems give you “Guilty/NotGuilty” or any one of a number of stock phrases, a Narrative verdict might not come out with such a clear-cut result, instead requiring an understanding of the situation without actually laying blame in any definite way. The chapter I am about to start is called “The Location of Meaning” which has a picture of the Rosetta Stone and lots of strange alphabets. When I read the book the first time, these exotic typefaces were very strange but now I regularly see them in web-pages – I’ve even solved coding problems by teasing out the western scripts from pages of Japanese or Korean. I really should keep that notebook by the bed because yesterday I managed to think of huge amounts of things to write about in terms of isomorphisms (Down Bill – Leave that “s” alone) with my own experience but as usual a night’s sleep has rendered these ideas as the lingering scent of Summer in Autumn breezes. Do you like that?

Well goodbye for now and remember :- Meaning is intrinsic if intelligence is natural – whatever that means.

Oh Suzanne!

I was late in this morning meaning that I listened to Woman’s Hour and a small interview with Suzanne Vega who mentioned a story which I was vaguely aware of, namely that Tom’s Diner was used to test the early incarnations of the MP3 format probably because of the a cappella clarity of the song. Well I can add something related from far earlier. When the company I worked for was called GPT, one of the division made payphones, a component of which was an announcement system and in early tests of that they used Tom’s Diner to test to clarity of the recordings. Somewhere I think I dreamt it was my copy of the album that they used but it probably wasn’t. Anyway – beats MP3 testing doesn’t it?

Self-Swallowing Normality.

I tried to check all 700-odd pages of my new copy of GEB for any mis-bindings but it was an impossible task. I will just have to keep an eye out for inconsistencies in the text.

I got to the usual bit in the first chapter where I falter in trying to understand Russell’s Paradox but that Wikipedia article and a bit of circular thinking has got me over it. I now understand it both in my head and deeper down – like duckspeak maybe. I also seem to have a much better understanding of the Godel side of this book whereas before it was the music of Bach and Escher’s engravings that dragged me in. I so much want to write about it but it would just be a summary of the book’s themes which is pointless really. I will just leave you with a pointer to this article about our general ignorance of scientific matters.

Titanardis!

Eye-Stubble from Tennant.

A special Saturday entry for you! You are lucky people! Of course you know why. Martha gone! Jack – the FOB! The Tardis getting its chameleon circuit back in working order and pretending to be an Iceberg! Actually that was my daughter’s idea and she is currently standing behind me to make sure that I don’t steal credit for it. She also made up the title at the top there. And she bawled when the Master died. There was something in my eye too – not quite of the intensity of that created by “Daddy! My Daddy” but something.

But seriously – what a ride that was. No drama has been this compelling since … er… since …. actually I can’t think of anything at all. We are all quite sad at Martha’s departure but maybe it is actually a bit of a trick to build up a legend round her. We shall see.

Anyway – time to detach the baby from the back of the sofa.

Six-Part Rice Pudding? I Was Coming to That.

Congratulations Ed.

Due to some financial advantage I took the plunge and bought a new copy of Godel, Escher, Bach at the weekend and felt heartened that it was worth it just for the preface to the new edition, which I read with increasing excitement at the up-coming delights of the rest of the book. I was then disappointed to discover that the book was misbound with the first 19 pages replaced with ones from somewhere near the back which means that as I bought it in a Bricks-and-mortar outlet I have to wait until the weekend to get a new copy or just get the money back. Well the only reason I got it from a shop was because I felt a bit of a cheat looking at the quality of the pages which had been criticised in the online reviews and then getting it from the internet. Anyway, return it and save 10 quid I think. I am slightly bugged that GEB being a book in part about strange loops, the missing pages might actually be part of the structure and I have kept looking for them elsewhere. I don't remember them missing in my first copy.

I am now reading Goodbye to All That, the autobiography of Robert Graves. I was, like one of the reviewers on Amazon; slightly worried that it might be a bit too literary for me but it is not. Instead it gives an eloquent and funny description of times long gone with a very contemporary feel. So far I have not been able to get a handle on how much of it is irony and how much straight talk. I will let you know if I feel like it. It might have sparked me into actually reading I, Claudius though of course the best thing that Robert Graves ever wrote is Welsh Incident. Though this page to be read in a good, Welsh Accent, I think it should say a good, North welsh accent which makes much more sense that using Richard Burton or Hannibal Hopkins who were suite donly for Under Milk Wood. I Can do a very good North Welsh accent having stayed many times near where Robert Graves used to stay in Harlech. Well it's recognisably Welsh rather than any of the stock accents which Welsh usually becomes. My mother could actually speak Welsh for some strange reason.