Thursday, May 28, 2009

I Ride the Squirrel

Do you surrender? The whole family went to see Night at the Museum 2 and while the story was a bit scrappy, the attention to detail and the obvious attempt to spark an interest in history filled the film with funny and interesting moments. There is a Jackson Pollock in the background for what must be a few seconds and even that was animated. The jokes were good but no one else in the cinema seemed to laugh at anything. I don't think they listen; they just sit there dribbling into their popcorn and waiting for the flashing lights to keep their attention. Never mind hey!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Alice in Wonderland



We were watching The Incredible Human Journey last night (delayed by the wrong kind of snow from Sunday or something like that). At one point the discussion turned to the first encounters between modern humans and the incumbent European humans - the Neanderthals. The learned professor who Double Doctor Alice was talking to, suggested that the meeting would have been an profoundly interesting moment and this got me wondering if it will ever be possible to re-construct the exact moment that it occurred. There is a device in Stephen Fry's book, Making History, which allows the viewing of places in past time but the mechanics are never really explained.

I also remember a letter that was published in a list of various "would-be-usefuls" that members of the public had sent to Tomorrow's World, which said that as energy was never destroyed, just converted why couldn't we work backwards to discover what exactly had happened in the past. The correspondent suggested that they would love to learn what Henry V had really said just before Agincourt. The letter was illustrated with a cartoon with the suggestion that the answer was "Good luck lads! Wish I was coming with you." This is sort of like the idea of a Newtonian computer that calculates the motions and masses of all particles and can therefore work out the future of everything. If it works forwards it just as easily works backwards. Anyway we all know that those pesky little Quanta put paid to that idea but I still wonder if we could pick up something from somewhere.

Genetics already has something akin to this idea in the ability to work backwards to determine single ancestors of entire populations but I cannot see of any scientific discipline which would be able to reconstruct moments like this. It would be the ultimate in forensics.

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about the creation of a time machine and how its inventor tried to keep it secret simply because he realised that rather than using the device to view the great moments in history it would be used as a shabby reason to determine the truth behind trifling domestic incidents which is of course the truth. I'm currently reading How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker which starts with a loose discussion of robots and general intelligence. Pinker makes a good argument against the necessity of Asimov's laws, saying that no machine really needs to be instructed against evil because it is only humans who have the ability to program evil in to things which is a nice lead-in to the truth that human minds are still many thousands of times more complex than even the best-performing artificial mind. I'm not entirely sure of the argument against the laws of robotics - it must be relatively for a machine to accidentally injure or kill a human and putting some simple overriding fail-safes into the system would guard against this. Maybe Pinker says this later or maybe I fell asleep.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Yet More Sheep

Daughter was away with the school, canoeing, rafting and general outdoorsy type stuff. And while she was away having fun we were at home discovering exactly how much difference one child makes to the general dynamics of a home. Youngest was quieter as well proving the equation that the product of two children is different from the sum.

To add to this general air of melancholy was the fact that China Crisis quietly moved their appearance at the local village festival to Saturday without anyone actually finding out until after they had been and gone. My wife was most upset and is considering a stiff letter to be despatched to Crisis Central - somewhere in the middle of the Gobi Desert I believe it is.

So just exactly what do we do about the MPs and their expenses? Maybe we should exchange the process by which parliamentary expenses are dished out with the one which supplies the army with essential equipment like boots and stuff. Seems that both are in need of a shake up.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Cloud Sequence



Nimbostratus

Over the far bridge,
seconded to the guardian of flood and field,
leans my ghost,
the white blur of my own mind,
escaped and lost to me,
brought into the real world with language,
so detached from the wordlessness,
that came to me on previous nights,

A damp and oil-skinned invention,
sharp and fluent, higher than the sun, the stars,
and all astronomy.
Joined to the sky and clouds,
with understanding,
bringing rain with her unknowing,
a coincidental god of rainfall,
a one-way function of the turning world.

No dead and empty space,
marks random pointing of the skies,
It is a filled void,
a climb defined with homogeneous flow,
and dank un-hindered cataracts,
in slow-pans to the ground,
that catch the petty ends of us,
and small complaint.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Something Terrible Detected


And now for my sad git moment for the weekend. We have been very taken with Inspector George Gently - a gritty and resolutely gloomy detective show set in Northumberland in 1964. In this week's episode a man was taken from his flat and beaten up. The obligatory sidekick (a flawed but likable man in need of a good ethical education it has to be said) visits the man's home where the TV is showing the above test card with the 625 lines statement. Of course rather than the complexities of the plot my mind raced over whether the BBC was broadcasting 625 lines in 1964. I thought that 625 lines came in with PAL and colour in 1967 but the test card gallery website (click on the image to get there if you lean that way) says that it was broadcast from the birth of BBC2 in 1964 so move along people - nothing to see here. Isn't it lucky that they didn't get anything really important wrong like hanging the murderers at the end of the show. Oh sorry! My mistake - the death penalty didn't end until 1965 though there were actually only two people hanged in 1964 - one just down the road from here.

Do not let your children watch Tronji - you will go mad. It is like someone gave The Teletubbies something pharmaceutical and then said the result wasn't mad enough. Unfortunately the children love both the programme and ALL the catchphrases. They also like the Tronjiworld song but luckily the lyrics are so obscure as to be impossible to memorise - like a sort of children's version of La Bamba. Remember - Mind the gap. How long is a piece of string? Exactly twice as long a half a piece of string.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Savage Saville


I'm not sure how I feel about this cover being censored by various supermarkets. I suspect that like the vitriol aimed at one of the CBeebies presenters who is in possession of fewer than the average number of arms, it will probably affect more parents than children. It might not even be blood on the child's face after all - maybe it's impressionistic. While I can't say it's beautiful, it is strangely hypnotic which goes well with the strange lyrics from the album that I heard when The Manics were on Later. It is brave of the remaining crew to use Richey's lyrics when they have no possibility of going to him for clarification but it does have a situationist charm. I am sure that Sylvia Plath had some influence on it, though nothing of hers was ever as unstructured.

The Poet's Guide To Britain about her poem Wuthering Heights was suitably atmospheric though I do wonder how long the crew had to wait around to get the wind and the rain exactly right for the backing shots to the readings. I suspect that Owen Sheers being the talent was allowed to saunter back to Heptonstall to nurse a pint in the shelter of the pub while the poor, bloody infantry of the BBC (or whatever independent production company made the programme) hung around the moor tops waiting for a particularly attractive huddling of the sheep. All those years I lived in proximity to many woolly ones and I never noticed that sheep's eyes have horizontal slots for pupils. It takes a proper poet to notice stuff like that.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Submarine - one - for the maintenance of

I wonder how long it has taken the board/bean counters/shadowy group of public schoolboys at the BBC to realise that hiring a helicopter to fly between the country piles of various Tory MPs in order to expose their profligate and slightly unethical claims on expenses seems slightly hypocritical when you realise that both the chopper and the swimming pools are paid for by us poor taxpayers? Of course it may be that the BBC actually have a helicopter of their own and I suppose it might actually be cost-effective to keep it in the air in pursuit of the national interest instead of flying execs between cocktail parties - but I doubt it. The recent BBC coverage of the pigs in troughs has seemed slightly over-zealous in light of the corp's own drains on the public purse. Not biased perhaps but certainly worth a raised eyebrow.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Tom Has Seen Her. Sept. I Must!


(From Chris L. Harris on Flickr)

I should read more plays - I've been trying to get through Taming of the Shrew for years but I eventually located a copy of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard at the library and it's a hoot - deep and interesting, about science, history, literature and sex - stuff about chaos theory and thermodynamics and a tortoise. I'm not sure I'm quite up to understanding all of it and I'm sure that much is lost because I don't read the required nuances into the performance. I was annoyed at missing it on the Radio some months back and this is unfortunately the only way I can experience it. Of course it will be repeated at some point in the future. No links just in case the wiki article gives away the plot, though it's so rich I'm not sure it would matter that you did know what happened - it would just raise your anticipation of a meaty bit of dialogue at the point of revelation. And it has old mad/bad/dangerous-to-know Byron in it as well. Well sort of in it.

And so to poetry - Sylvia Plath is the subject of tonight's Poet's Guide to Britain, specifically her poem Wuthering Heights which was not one I'd remembered in any real depth but which is actually one of her best. Ted Hughes also wrote one with that title - every person with any poetic leanings who walks those moors must feel like doing so but I think his is in Birthday Letters and therefore more likely to be a response to Plath's poem. Birthday Letters is up there with Arcadia as a piece of real depth and importance - so much more that some of Hughes' ramblings about gutting rabbits, the cleansing flow of Devon rivers and how we are all in thrall to the White Goddess.

Good luck to Carol Ann Duffy. I wasn't being entirely serious the other week and I'm actually quite looking forward to something from her. It was ironic that many people knee-jerked about how poetry had gone downhill since Wordsworth, who I seem to recall only took the job of laureate if he didn't have to write anything official - and he didn't. I suppose the argument will then be extended to the idea that CAD has not actually written anything worthy of comparison to Wordsworth even before getting the gig. My reply to that would be that poetry moves on and anything striking a mad-keen Wordsworth fan as wonderful these days would look like parody. Stuff 'em I say. Write what you want Carol.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Welcome to the Madness

... and welcome to all of you who read that post after I posted it with just the title. Not sure how that happened. Here is a little something to wind you up - frighten you even. I'm not sure how either Mr or Mrs Myerson write for the Guardian - they seem like your average conservative like-to-think-they're-intellectuals. Maybe I just can't tell. I did read Living With Teenagers and the whole thing struck me as rather sad. Maybe I have all that to come with my own little darlings but I would hope with a little less swearing.

All this has reminded me of the section of Michael Rosen's Radio 4 show - Word of Mouth - which yesterday talked about Snark - from SNide remARK - and how these days anyone in a blog can be really nasty about someone because it's all anonymous and all at a distance. I try not to be snarky but it is very easy to be so, knowing that the one man and his dog who usually read this blog have lately got bored and gone down the pub. I can be as nasty as I like. That Gordon Brown - useless I tell you. I suppose for the sake of balance I should really be snarky about David Cameron, that nice Nick Clegg and all the other little party leaders out there but I can't really be bothered to find out anything factual to be nasty about. I do hope the wilder speculation about Patsy becoming PM (seems to have taken over from Jezzer as the People's PM of popular choice) is not true as I just couldn't say anything horrible about her at all- not when she's carrying that Kukri anyway.

Friday, May 01, 2009

Wolfram Alpha



She's been in the job for hours now and not one poem has surfaced. I'm really quite disappointed.

Anyway, the really exciting news for the week is the imminent enabling of Wolfram Alpha which, while I cannot define what it actually does is surely going to be really fun. We shall see. How long will it be before it has deduced the existence of Income Tax and Rice Pudding?

I have nothing in the notebook other than drawings of the Apollo command and Service modules and a robot which I have decided must be called Wolfram Alpha.

That was nearly all for today but I have since discovered that a film loosely based on RUR is due out soon. Worth a look I think.