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.