Adverb Blues

Sealing the romantic view of youth is a function of desire and slack magic. Looking back I sometimes wonder how we managed to cobble together a whole song. We were trying to be romantic poets without the access to opium and all I can remember is tramping the moors in daylight and lying around on sofas with the legs cut off at night. I suppose sometimes we must have picked up the instruments and managed to get them all to play the same rhythm and melody at the same time but none of that comes back in any clear sense. Don't ask me to tell you how any of our songs were constructed because they weren't - they seemed to arrive complete and without provenance as a sort of telepathic agreement between friends. We were slack and magic - it was a magical time without having any specific event that any of us could point at and say "that is what started it for us". We just came together and that I imagine, is the best ay that these things happen.

Of course these days, with babies and second-wives, writing songs is difficult - a solo process with solo ideas and arguments all leading to the "not as good as they used to be" lines that haunt us and turn us to prescription drugs for anxiety and depression. Not that we really need them because we could all live six lives each on the money we made from those fuzzy days but like in everything there is pressure to be good and better. We are pretentious and pompous, just like any band of our age should be. That is why we have agreed, maybe telepathically, maybe in some hazy band meeting, that we should split. None of us have any ideas of what to do next and none of us have anything other than a few laptop sequences to put towards future projects. I realise that the last picture of all of us together at some poorly-attended press-conference will be how we are remembered - sucking in our cheeks and stomachs, wondering what's for lunch and whether this is big news or just us living on past glories. Or maybe one of us will not turn up, claiming a hangover when really it is purely "new baby" lack of sleep.

And through this, Mary will walk like she is on wheels, looking the same as she did when we first got together, on a damp day, with rain and low sun, shining it's storm-filtered light through the windows into her eyes, sending the coolest shadow of her against the wall. Mary with that Epiphone semi-acoustic three sizes too big, liberated from her famous dad, and because of him the only one of us actually able to play an instrument. Here is me, plucking away at four different bass notes, not caring whether I match the key exactly as long as I hit the four beats that come from the rickety drums behind me. Over this some thin and reedy programmed organ that we like to think gives us a bluesy edge but in fact just makes us sound like kids messing about. Which is what we were. We had nothing to write about, no experiences - maybe a few hangovers or anxiety about school. And that way lies pretension, rubbish songs about how the world is a mess or how everybody hates us (when really no one cares). We might as well have sung about split-infinitives or acne and so we did. And it seemed wonderful at the time.

We did not want anything different because we did it for fun. We did not ask for bad things to happen - they just did. And from these came our best songs. I do not exaggerate that the subject of some of them could really have changed the world. It made us targets for shady branches of government - it sent Mary's mother mad and bad, raging against us and anyone else into a storm of paranoia so bad that it nearly killed her. It left me home alone, under the radar of social workers, and drove us all into bad crowds, the people who our parents warned us about, with real drugs and parties attracting the low-life and scum of the entire county. It is a tale of physics and chemistry, of glittering prizes turned down and of men with guns who were really not pretending when they threatened us. And yet for most of this we lived low and happy.

......
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Doctor Strangelet or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Large Hadron Collider.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, I installed an operating system and it went like a dream so I am feeling smug even if it is on the back of the skill of some anonymous Microsoft team. Today's pages of the notebook have many different things so there may be no connection between paragraphs.

First up is this article about Art and Accessibility which I think is related to an earlier announcement that The Government wants to expose children to more high culture. I passed this article about whether Bonekickers will be recommissioned as well. And now hopefully the last in found articles - this one about the prospect of an atheist Prime Minister. Tomorrow will all be from the Telegraph - I promise.

Next on the page is a random doodle which is my idea of what a strangelet will look like when it eventually screeches to a halt in front of the detectors at CERN and poses for Torchwood. Following this is a linked note which states that using the number of stars in the universe as a measure of how many addresses the next generation of Internet protocols will be able to handle is flawed as most people have no idea of what order of magnitude that number lies in. I know I don't. And then my daughter phoned me to ask how old the sun was and whether that meant it was still young or getting on a bit. She did say she would accept an estimate which was quite lucky as we have forgotten to buy a birthday card. Anyway - the answer is 4-and-a-half billion years old which is about half-way through its main sequence life cycle.

I have to mention Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery which yesterday examined the development of brain surgery, including some eye-opening (literally eye-opening for the victims) photographs of the madman Doctor Freeman, in the middle of Transorbital lobotomies. I'm not really sure that pushing an ice-pick through an eye socket and waggling it about a bit should actually be considered surgery but it was a major part of 20th century brain medicine and had to be included. The rest of the programme was about much more measured procedures from the early experiments using many artery clamps to stop bleeding to the almost bloodless implantation of electrodes to counteract the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The running theme was an operation on a young woman with a vascular abnormality in her brain which caused epileptic fits. The removal of the affected part of the brain had to be done with the patient fully conscious in order to check that no important sections were damaged. In another section of the programme, the presenter - Michael Mosley - was challenged to perform simple motor tasks while his motor cortex was interfered with by heavy-duty magnets. While the startling affect on his movements was the main payoff for this, I was intrigued by the thin metal probe which produced detailed MRI-like pictures of the brain when placed near his head. I think the word he used was "cool".

Next is this from The Daily WTF which sums up several systems I have been involved in.

And finally we have this story about the attempt on the wind land speed record. I was struggling to understand how a sail-powered vehicle could manage to travel at several times the real wind speed. I did have some idea that it would be The Bernoulli Effect but I struggle to reconcile a wind speed of 40 kmh giving a forward "lift" of 120 kmh. I tried to imagine a jet fighter travelling at high speed managing to get a lift rate of twice it's own forward speed. Of course Greenbird is designed to produce this speed but it all sounds a little counter-intuitive to me.
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The Sudbury Hum and Other Tales

Listening to Abronecronedrone 7 by Sheila Chandra



(not quite Abonecronedrone I know)

A friend of a friend tells me how the the friend was at a religious conference after hours with a number of the press secretaries. He said he knew it was going to be a long night when one of them pulled the cork from a second bottle of whisky and spat it into the fire.

Not sure why I start with this but it may be vaguely related to the rubbish that follows. I was getting a little daunted by the The 'Information Challenge' in A Devil's Chaplain - the chapters in this section - 'Light will be Thrown' - are longer than the previous section and more in-depth. The 'Information Challenge' relates to a question beloved of Creationists which is "give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome." Basically it is a complex way of wording the question of how complex organs such as the eye can evolve purely through natural selection. While the article does a nice job of explaining this (though I'm not sure I was entirely up to the final section), it does have a neat summing up of Information Theory, something which I really should know about.

And what else today? We read of a strange hum that is heard between 6pm and 5am and is keeping some of the residents of Sudbury awake. I think this is one for an already-fat file at The Fortean Times though there is also The Hum Conspiracy Page. I suspect that the assertion that the hum is due to gravity waves is not ultimately going to be the answer. I think that we can all identify a hum if we go outside in the evening and at night - this is obviously when the normal noises of the day fade out and we are left with a grand sum of all the sound left over, like the echoing sound attributed to the sea in shells held to the ear - a sort of small-scale version of the big-bang radiation , only in sound rather than electro-magnetic waves. I can remember the distant sound of the city when I was about four and playing in Wollaton Park in Nottingham. Of course we might be able to pin it on Gordon I suppose - everything else seems to lead back to him in the message boards at the moment. If you like Sudbury so much why don't you go and live there.
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Oh Mr. Wallace

I am working my way through A Devil's Chaplain quite well. The first section had shorter pieces of general interest while the second section which I am currently deep into, contains longer essays on various big-issues with Darwinism which of course means I have to concentrate. I suppose that being a collection of various pieces I could just skip the more tortuous ones but after the "discussion" prompted in our house by Dawkins' programme on Channel 4 last night, I should at least try to understand these issues. I have to say that I was quite annoyed by the fading out of various interviewees (however nutty they might appear) just as they appeared to me about to say something relevant. It might me the case that they were talking rubbish of the highest order but in that case just sum up their arguments and let them stand for themselves. Fading out seems to just be an elegant way of talking someone down. The main point of discussion at home last night was not my own level of agreement with Dawkins but rather whether you expect the world's most high-profile atheist to accept any sort of compromise from religion. Obviously he will say in public that he has no truck with any level of belief in God/Gods/Supernatural phenomena. What did you expect. "Oh yes! I've written a book denying the existence of God but I think for the sake of a quiet life I can accept a woolly compromise which leaves my ideas out in the cold.

My tiny contribution to this is that the 39 percent of people (in the UK) who believe in Creationism or Intelligent design as a better explanation for life on earth (or even the 52 percent who don't believe in evolution) are just plain wrong. They don't understand the concept of evolution and that is because it is not taught properly - mainly I have to say because it takes up a tiny proportion of the curriculum but also because some teachers are failing to teach it to the standard required for fear of upsetting parents who would take offence at the subject. Science and Religion cannot be taught in Science classes just as Science and Religion cannot be taught in pure religious classes. To teach them together needs metaphysics or philosophy and see how many schools offer those in the ever-more-crowded curriculum however much "experts" urge.

For years I have stuck my neck out and said that computer packages with a decent link to the API can allow developers to do anything to any bit in a system; it's just a matter of how complicated you want to make things. I have not yet been proved wrong (though I personally may not have had the nouse to accomplish something). The same thing applies to evolution. Enough thought given to working out how something could possibly arise through natural selection will find a method. Where something in life cannot yet be explained, further investigation and some appliance of intellect will always find the solution. Finding few and small examples where you have to posit intelligent design is "God of the Gaps". Occam's Razor applies to this in what I imagine is it's purest form. Evolution is a single entity however complicated and to suggest that just because we cannot explain something using evolution, we must invoke God to give us a nudge is at best adding complexity to an already-complex system and at worst requiring a meta-complexity to explain ALL LIFE. God Over Djinn etc.
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Not a Sonnet

Just after lunchtime,
in the blank sum of average summer,
the mean free path of wet and dry,
lighting only memory,
that's me, my job defined,
but seeming fuzzy
to the well-defined elite,
who rise at six
and work for eight-to-ten
or more if asked or needed.
They seem to make things,
taking thesauri to specs
to break a simple phrase
to split and tick of darker daylight.

Tell me what you make
and how what you make
makes us better.
It's like trying to explain
a bolted-on dimension,
one more than three that bind us
to this universe.

You switch and jump through space,
become me in this poet's chair,
working through his fun at lunch
to spit crumbs at the keyboard,
to laugh at office drones
yet knowing how they work,
the files and fax and email,
meetings made for sleeping.

Your notes are love and fun
and death and tears,
of babies gurgling happily
with syllables they practise,
how that girl once smiled at you,
and glanced sideways through her bangs
her face glowing with the irony.
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Dawkins' Dyslexic Dog

There is simply a shape, just the edges of the trees that lie beyond the end of the long lawn that stretches away from the house. The sky, somewhere between black and just not black is a tiny wavelength away from these silhouettes, a final gasp of the day that has gone, indicator of the heat seeping away from the ground, up into space and out beyond the sky to travel forever. And it has always been this way, day following day following day, in a line that has no variation back to the days of common ancestors, and further back to when our lifeline began. For we are all related, all animals and plants and the exotic inbetweeners, the fungi, the viruses, linked by a code written in the same programming language, interchangeable in ways that we cannot yet understand. All those trees at the bottom of the garden are merely cousins, in the same way that your walking, talking cousins are, just with a many-greats grandmother a long way back in the graph of our family. If that does not excite you then you are blind to the real magic that exists in this world, magic that does not need conjecture and "perhaps" to be real and true in absolute scientific ways. Maintain your wonder at even the simplest triumphs of science.

Some of Your English Pounds

I found myself dragged into some dark areas of the internet this morning, though it wasn't anything illegal and I suppose that the average teenager wouldn't even have realised why it was dark. What struck me was how close any website is to something that your mother might have warned you about all those years ago. Anyway, it started with this Stephen Fry entry about The BBC and the Future of Broadcasting which, I was pleased to see, mentioned The Men From the Ministry, which has happily gained a Wikipedia entry since I last wrote about it. I certainly recognise the gradual seepage of Radio 4 programmes into my memory as I was occupied with other things. Radio 4 is obviously middle-class but with a strange, radical edge which almost makes its fans into Heroes of the Revolution in a sort of tweedy way. It is rare that something on Radio 4 will not hold my attention for at least a little while; even if the subject is not entirely interesting, the general ambience of the way the sound is produced on every show from the Archers to Gardener's Question Time has a comforting affect, a link back to the carefree days of playing under the kitchen table with the radio on and the rain pouring down outside.

And it did rain a lot. So many people have remarked casually, without expecting any rebuff, about how Summer never used to be like this. They are wrong! Go out in a thunderstorm at night and what you remember most are the memories created by the dominant sense - sight - so you recall only the flashes of illumination created by the intermittent lightning. And with longer memories, you remember more of the hot and sunny days than the manky, grey ones. Most of the memories of our lives are interpolated from the short flashes of what we really do remember. And of course we remember what we want to remember. Seems I am right.

I am trying to write by these rules from a certain Mr Blair.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These come from this essay on Politics and the English Language. I'm not sure he followed his own rules for writing the last one unless it is meant to be a self-referential joke. I was going to say 'witticism' but that would be against the rules. The trouble is that most of what I write here is just wittering anyway and therefore in some meta-sense, ignores most of the rules. Just had to decide whether "therefore" should remain in that sentence.

So much of what I have been reading recently, reminds me of how much I write is in note form, with personal pronouns missing etc. I need to do some stuff which follows the rules and actually means something. I keep returning to a paragraph of Mrs Dalloway which is perfectly written :

There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank of windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frank daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; huddled together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls white and grey, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again. I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent’s Park (staring at the Indian and his cross), as perhaps at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where—such was her darkness; when suddenly, as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it, she said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife, and would never, never tell that he was mad! Turning, the shelf fell; down, down she dropped. For he was gone, she thought—gone, as he threatened, to kill himself—to throw himself under a cart! But no; there he was; still sitting alone on the seat, in his shabby overcoat, his legs crossed, staring, talking aloud.

I have blockquoted it before but it is always worth reading again, historical, affecting and evocative and as far as I can tell, sticking pretty much to Orwell's rules. Argue with me if you like but it will not make me think any less of the piece. I've often said that good cliché, carried through robustly is sometimes very powerful. And of course I would suspect that the majority of people don't recognise cliché as being anything to suspect. We are stifled by our desire not to appear uncool though what the definition of uncool actually is varies and in fact switches between extremes in the same way that U and non-U word use switches as various classes adopt what they see as aspirational values and others abandon the use as... I was going to write passé but that is an unnecessary foreign phrase and I should expand the term. ... as attached to a class which they do not wish to be associated with. Oh dear - I think that sentence counts as barbarous. I thought of this today when I saw a picture attached to the web page of a developer. It could be seen either as a naff attempt to look cool - rugged pose, sunglasses, delicately poised guitar in the background or a joke.

I leave you with a phrase which hopefully* I will expand in another post and that is :

Imagining the exotic; a sort of paranoia.

* There is nothing in the rules about split infinitives.

It's Grim up the LSE!

I retreat from my ranting about the soullessness of this city to defend it against the chinless prat wot wrote this report about abandoning Northern conurbations - I may be paraphrasing - deal with it! The report starts off by stating that increasing the size of London so that it takes an extra minute to reach the edge would make room for a million more people. I am reminded of the wonderful success that Lord Abercrombie had with such plans (Thank you to Andrew Marr for pointing it out). You might accuse me of not reading the report in full and you would be right - I don't need to - David Cameron has read it for me - I think. What I am here to do is link to these articles in defence of The North. Intro by that nice but apparently outraged Stuart Maconie.

The issues which Policy Exchange (who they? ed.) raise, apply to ALL cities these days - I wonder how much time the authors have actually spent up here. Is this a case of Everything I Know I Learned from TV? Not sure that the CV makes me feel any differently. I'm not sure of the value of information regarding the height of seamen in days gone by is that important unless you have a research budget to justify.

Currently reading A Devil's Chaplain by Prof. Dawkins. I'm not at the chapter yet but I am looking forward to this which of course points to this - a spoof of the highest order and an almost perfect cure for insomnia. Now I like a bit of Postmodernism - I couldn't tell you what it means but I know what it is - I think - maybe - well maybe not. Alright then - it's rubbish.

Well I must go - the whippets need feeding and it's Giro day.

Etruscan Spears 101

For the purposes of maintaining tension, today's post may or may not contain elements of Marxist Theory and/or fluffy kittens.

Very fine Bonekickers last week - though it was actually dangerously plausible which is not what we want at all. It was raised above the normal "Tosh - Level 1" by some fine quotes from a WWI soldier and some nicely tense flashbacks to the trenches. Of course by the end it had all returned to something close to "The Chuckle Brothers do Archaeology" which is I am sure all that anyone watches it for; I know I do. Last episode on PVR.

Well all is right with world - the rains have stopped and Stereolab have a new album out next week. I'm not sure they will ever get back to being as good as in the era of Jenny Ondioline or French Disko but it sounds alright. I don't actually have JO here with me but Peng! is a suitable alternative. They always make me think of simplicity despite the strange time signatures and the random use of language. They are like Ladytron in that the basic idea of a track is established in the introduction and stuck to until the end. Even with the long version of Jenny Ondioline which seemed to have about 4 sections with changes like those between the sections of Music for Eighteen Musicians, the "feel" of each section is similar to the previous one. OK - so I like repetition - get over it. I have always maintained that there is far more variation in three minutes of a Steve Reich track than there is in the majority of airhead pop tunes. Play Jenny Ondioline very loud and you will know what I mean.

Art and Drama

(From wikipedia)

Bold Thunder in the Sky, beware,
Victoria Falls to earth, a simple trip,
some fault with ground that catches ragged edges.
And she stands, and checks for injury,
with sun behind her, gold and silver sky-seen,
through the trees that makes the land which makes us.
Rearranged by solar wind, she walks in time-lapse,
dragged across the green land,
the wet land, the rain-and-wind-punched rock,
of airstrips moored in oceans,
ellipsis green and white and black,
upon the sward between us and the sea.

A wood, a copse, small forest hiding game and outlaws,
here marks all invasions with concealing archaeology,
with trees for couples holding tight to night time,
with greenery that swallows all ejections,
washed inland by walking crowds of blind humanity,
dropped for ease and out-of-sight forgetting.
And bodies, forgotten humans, lost like paper,
jettisoned and buried, mean it never happened,
that two-seconds' anger pushing blood,
from heart to brain to arms to death; cries death
and resurrection in a memory of one you loved
so little time ago and how now they never were.

Eve of Destruction

Wonderful picture this. It looks like an antique photograph with all the artifice suggesting that maybe someone actually found a living Neanderthal and was able to photograph it. Now if they are completing a DNA sequence does this mean that as the technology progresses, there is a chance that we will bring them back? And what ethical considerations will that raise? Will Neanderthals have human rights? It may be a joke at the moment but it will happen. I suppose that fact that it was possible though uncommon for Neanderthals to breed with Humans is the deciding factor in what rights should be given to any such creature that we produce. Maybe we should sort out ensuring that all Humans get those rights first. PC rant over.

Currently listening to something which the NME once described as a record which if bought would effectively mean the end of the purchaser as a questioning human being. It was nice knowing you. I know I'm not cool anyway so who cares. And I can't be bothered to write any more today anyway.

I'm Having Dreams About This Not Going Right

I went to the doctor the other week. I told him I'd been having dreams about my mother having eight legs. He told me I had an Octopus Complex.

Sorry!

On Watching the World go by

I am first into this office on most mornings and because of low sun behind me I lower four of the blinds so that the light does not fall on my (3) screens. This morning, the position of the sun and the small gap between two of the blinds meant that a thin sliver of light fell on my left-most screen and gradually worked its way rightwards until it faded out. The strange thing was that the movement of this beam was clearly visible, the rotation of The Earth projected visibly in front of me. I suddenly became aware of the huge mass of the planet beneath me spinning at high speed and it made me dizzy.

A related feeling is lying in bed imagining the whole of the planet beneath me , through the bed, through the floor of the bedroom, through the room below into the crust-mantle-core-mantle-crust and up into what must be water on the other side. What is the exact nature of the antipodean sea-bed? ... I've just been off to Google Earth to see where this place is and it is indeed sea but I have discovered that there is actually a place called The Antipodes Islands which is the nearest land to my surfacing point as far as I can see. They were originally called the Penantipodes but this has been shortened. Close enough for me. Anyway, lie back and think the world spinning.

While we are on big concepts being made visible in down-to-earth ways, what about the super-helix of the phone chord twisting on itself as you use the phone throughout the day? This is a visible demonstration of the structure of DNA. So just sitting at this desk has shown me to contrasting, scientific concepts, one telescopic and one microscopic.

The final paragraph in my notebook is as follows :-

The sound of rain does not give the full experience - the temperature, the wind,
the negative ions and the plain dampness of the stuff - General Wittering.

Which is obviously a sign that I should finish for the day.

The Sum of All Offices

I was on a phone conference this morning - with 20 other people - all at their own desks so that background hum was the sum of all those various locations. I suspect that there was some delay between various participants meaning that there was a slight reverb as well which meant the whole thing sounded a bit other-worldly. As the conversation was quite technical it sounded like the chatter over the wires that backed the TV broadcasts of the moon landings, an ambient sound beloved by mid-90s techno-lite. I just about remember the moon landings, thinking that each one was a year apart and being surprised that time was passing so quickly.

Of course today must have a link to DT's Hamlet but for the sake of balance go and find other reviews because there is a range - more emotional depth please being the most common request. Never been a fan of Hamlet or indeed any of the tragedies but this may change my mind.

My Mr Turing - How Proprioceptive Of You!

Two minutes ago I had a wonderful idea for something to write and now it's gone. Aha! It was actually something related to a complete lack of short-term memory as suffered by the poor man in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. But not that. This book has the attention-grabbing title of a Channel 5 documentary - I Am Turning Into a Pork Pie or I Married a Newt. but is in fact a rich investigation into the more interesting issues around various neurological conditions. All this does not help me with my beautiful idea for a post and so you will have to put up with the normal rubbish. I think is was something to do with not being able to sense where parts of you were in relation to other parts. Personally I'm currently all over the place.

Daughter wants to see David Tennant in Hamlet, thinking that all Shakespeare is as accessible as her kids' version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is true that I would like to see it myself but then again I would also like to see Tate Modern .. and Cragside and Bletchley Park ... again. Butterfly minds runs in our family I think. I never finish anyth...

Lunchtime seems to speeding away from me with the promise of yet another day finishing before it even starts which has made me think of this book about why our perception of time seems to vary. I always used to notice that Mondays and Tuesdays seemed to fly by after the weekend but this seems to have stopped and now most working days flow at the same rate. However, the two short days of the weekend seem to occupy almost as much time as the five days of the working week. This is something where observing interferes with actuality - which I apparently have to call The Observer Effect rather than The Uncertainty Principle. I think I knew that already. I try to think of the relative psychological appearance of the weekend compared with the working week and though clear in my mind when I don't think about it, it retreats into a place where any attempt to quantify it results in meaningless diversion onto some other topic. This ease with which I am diverted from things makes me amazed that I can ever manage to finish some of the more complex pieces of work that I have to do. I've just realised that thinking about something which involves thought is difficult to define in relation to the observer effect despite being the epitome of it. It goes in my box of fault lines in the universe, the collection of things that go against the generally-defined nature of existence. (This is closely related to my collection of peculiar and coincidental phrases like Three-piece Suit and Three-piece Suite.) Philosophy should be about thinking about thinking in ways that anyone can understand. Fault lines in the mind. They prove the reality of existence. Or maybe they just prove that the universe is badly coded.

Anyone for Rickets?

Finally got this at the weekend. Recognisably Ladytron and yet varied and satisfying. Their first album (LP/CD/Whatever) was the sound of eighties synths and drum machines squeezed into a bathroom by the ghost of Joe Meek. Later LPs have gradually expanded the reverb to the size of an elephant, making Ladytron into the techno Cocteaus. There is very little straying from the musical path set by the first few bars of each track but that may just be the manifestation of the desire to get away from the techno/dub tricks that made early synth bands so varied (See

Love and Dancing). It needs to be played loud. Any band that gets reviews in both Wire and Word is fine by me. In fact maybe I will live for a year using that as the criterion for buying records. Or maybe not.

Interesting article here echoing my own rants about the nostalgic desire for the return of the old days. I suppose this is really the wish to return to youth where the carefree life was nothing to do with the fact that we had less things to worry about but more because our parents did all the worrying for us. Now I am a parent, I do the worrying for my children. And just last night I was moaning about having to go into work while the kids got to lie in and then play for at least a-further four weeks. Having said that, I suppose that there has been a real increase in the complexity of life but I put that down to corporate obfuscation, the desire to attach a financial aspect to almost everything that in years gone by would have been almost a human right and just plain incompetence and blindness to the simplicity of things. I was watching a short programme about the Tube Map yesterday. This icon is an pure example of where ignoring a huge amount of complexity produces something both beautiful and practical. There was also mention of the two sides of good design being technical ability and intuition. Conspiracy nuts would like us to think that the complexity is a planned thing - designed to obscure the real way of the truth and the light. For a long time I have thought that complexity is mostly due to plain lack of talent. Further discussion is outside the scope of this entry - partly because I am not clever enough to carry on any analysis and partly because I am bored.

I like well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty just as I like well-defined complexity - what I can't stand is chaos - unless of course it is defined by an equation. It may be for this reason that early mornings seem to depress me at the moment. I am trying (and succeeding) to keep my work and home lives separate at the moment which means not thinking about work when out of hours. This seems to leave me not sure of what I am actually going to do until I have reached my desk and got hold of the directories/programs/emails which define all office life these days. I pick up quickly though, leaving me happy on the way home. The rain CD helps as well. I often find myself looking up with a hope that it really is raining. It was this morning but just drizzle.

The Battle of Nantlle Ridge

Late September 1985 and parts of Britain are burning in the remaining heat of a long and very hot summer but you find my dad and me on a birding expedition to remote valleys in North Wales. These are uninhabited places, haunted only by the ghosts of people who claim Lloyd George as acquaintances and the strange sound of tumbling streams. The picture above shows Nantlle Ridge at the end of one of these valleys, a name which always suggests a WWI battle in my mind but is instead, in the absence of wilder weather at least, a place of almost absolute silence with little chance of seeing more than a few other people in any one day.

And this is where my dad fell and broke his leg and the place where I first cursed my inability to drive. As he fell I heard a loud crack which luckily was just his leg breaking rather than contact between his very expensive camera and his extortionately expensive Zeiss binoculars. As it was my suggestion of walking to the nearest farmhouse - an unknown distance away - was overruled and my dad drove back ten miles - in barely concealed agony - to Porthmadog hospital only to find it almost empty and without any X-ray facilities at all. We were transferred by Taxi to Bangor Hospital A&E where the leg was X-rayed and plastered while we sorted out the cancellation of various visits and arranged insurance to allow my sister to drive the car back. The wait was notable for my dad's conversation with a farmer in the waiting room, whose daughter was unable to speak any English, something I found romantic and almost unreal. Late that night, an ambulance on some tour of various locations gave us a lift back to the cottage where we staying. None of this stopped my dad enjoying the next day's birding with his plaster wrapped in a plastic bag, though he had to restrict himself to the estuary around Ynys where we were staying.

It still took me several years for me to pass my driving test and I have always been ashamed of that drive which probably made my dad's injury worse. However, I don't remember any panic on my part, which would surely accompany any accident of that severity that should befall my family these days. The sudden switch from the absolute serenity of the lower slopes of Nantlle Ridge to the racing choosing of options was quite memorable and looking back on it seems to have been the point which defines where I started beginning to recall things with greater clarity. Before then I only remember strange and dream-like whooshes of things, maybe enough to get me by in any conversation about the past but nothing close to the clarity of my memories of things since then. Sometimes at my most irrational, I wonder about planted memories and whether my recollections of things before this time are actually real. I would expect a gradual focusing of the clarity of memory as I look back on it rather than a sudden big bang. I could start the old rabbiting about Catastrophe Theory and then I remember than I like to think of myself as scientific and all of this is just rubbish. My dad really did break his leg and most of the stuff from my first memories up to that point happened as well. And in an alternative universe, Nantlle Ridge is a WWI battle at which my grandfather fought and won the Military Medal.

A Distant Apology

The new look is quite inspiring. All the little niggles about the difficulties of posting as well as all the strange display options have been removed leaving me with something which is both easy to use and quite slick-looking at the same time. This picture was an attempt at something like the wonderful shots on the Cloud Appreciation Society website but my photos never come out with any of the contrast and interest that are required. Anyway, this is looking down our street this morning towards what looked like the first of the various thunderheads waiting to ruin the day. I am of course only mentioning the weather because the current reading has a chapter on the mostly-amateur recorders of sun, rain, wind and temperature who built up the modern science of meteorology. However, the more I read about these obsessive collectors, the less I am inclined to break out the clipboard and thermometer, not that I was going to anyway. Och a vay.

The Official Website of the Flower Liberation Front

A gem in the local paper this week. After vandalism against the Diana memorial gardens a local resident commented that "they never seem to attack things that fight back". Up there with "Rat catcher gets new van" if you ask me. Anyway - enough of this rubbish - and all that rubbish from yesterday as well I suppose.

Like the new look? I am afraid it is my own iplementation of The Gramophone Mind in that the format is just a standard one rather than anything of my own devising but I think it has resolved some formatting issues I was having. Anyway ease of use and all that.