It's All Gone HD

SCARTS in Transit Yesterday

Finally we have binned the SCARTS. Like tinsel, the sharp edges of these connectors have always put my teeth on edge and at last they have all been replaced by HDMI cables and another of my anxieties is put to rest. Eventually the cables themselves will be superseded by Wireless-Fireless and then all I have to worry about is the gradual erosion of my DNA by invisible rays. And don't start me on warp drive and teleporting - all this Higgs-Boson excitement has opened up yet another wave of invisible things to worry about. I am not mad yet.

Shurely Shome Mishtake!

Statistician and Painter - never seen in the same room

Much excitement from eldest about the Tom Stoppard adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End which started on BBC 2 last night. Of course this has mostly been the result of cool hero of said production being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch though she has already whistled through the (accurately named) teratology causing some "ahs" of recognition when the assistant at Waterstones eventually uncovered it in a back room somewhere. I did start it myself in a desperate attempt to keep ahead of the TV version but in one episode it overtook me by quite some distance. And here's a tip for you - while the dead-tree version on Amazon is £8 - the links from there to the Kindle editions show versions at between £4 and £5. Search instead for it in the Kindle store and you will find it for 77p. Much as I don't like spending for something I already have, I was wasting much time in looking up words in the Kindle dictionary anyway so I've saved a bit of time there.

The TV version is very good - without the dumb exposition of most such dramas but bearing in mind Tom Stoppard is completely at home writing about football or Quantum theory, I wasn't expecting much allowance for the Downton audience. Christopher Tietjens is an honourable man - the most honourable man in literature maybe - a man blessed with an intellect of superhuman proportions yet cruelly manipulated by his socialite wife. There may even be shadows of Cumberbatch's most famous role in that he has the analytic mind of Sherlock Holmes but without the limit of only retaining information which is useful to him. Tietjens is as comfortable with matters of statistics as applied to Government Social Policy as he is with all-things equestrian or the minutiae of local legal systems. And like Sherlock, Tietjens has a sidekick who in any normal company would be the cleverest person in the cast in McMasters, an equally-honourable man of supreme intelligence and social wit. A fellow statistician, McMasters is an expert on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a point highlighted by the producers decision to make the Actor who portrays him (Stephen Graham - last seen lusting after Sean Bean in The Accused) look uncannily like the subject of his monograph. There are shades of Goodbye to All That and even the Ghost Road Trilogy but Parade's End is more ambitious than either. It is described as an early modernist novel but to me seems like a link between mid 19th Century books and later more popular 20th century works.

And as a final tantalising link to another of my obsessions, I'm pretty convinced that FMF is The Nightingale of the PJ Harvey B-side to The Glorious Land.

Great TV - now can The BBC be persuaded to do a version of Arcadia?

That Simon Armitage - What a Git!

It said in the guide 20 minutes each way - a quick walk of half a mile. And at the end a poetry seat and impressive carvings of one of Simon Armitage's poems about water in all its forms. Here's that half mile.

That's our car in the distance - I've blurred the number plate.

Doesn't look much does it? Just a gentle walk - 20 minutes - no rain - ambience of distant traffic and the occasional protest from a nonchalant sheep. Well it was about 20 minutes - but it was anything but gentle. The ground was slippy with rain and sheep droppings, its was treacherous with hidden holes just large enough to catch a carelessly-placed foot. Some of it would even have benefited from a few carabiners and other strange devices known only to Chris Bonnington and his ilk. I'm not sure they're expecting many casual visitors. Well we got there and it was worth it. Here are the stones themselves - click to see enough to read.

The stones are sheltered in quarry workings which are silent - all sound is swallowed in the way described in the poem itself. And then we had to come down which is worse - slippy and falling forward, it's amazing I didn't break anything - including the camera. And so to Marsden for lunch - a nice Chili Jacket at Angie's Kitchen - followed by a short hop (by car - I'm not mad) across the tops to Holmfirth and a coffee in Sid's Cafe. It must have been Ivy's day off. I did spend the day looking out for SA himself but I expect he might refuse to sign the book now I've called him a git.

A Capitol Idea

Possibly to put his fat-fingered father to shame, 8-year old has just completed this 3D puzzle of The Capitol. Any offers of assistance were met with a grunt and most of it was done in one day. My own attempts at making his Airfix Junkers are rapdily turning into a glue-sodden mess of failed assembly. A couple of layers of paint might just perform a miracle. We shall see.

A New Wave of Reason

We'll get that Turntable one day.

Off to town today for daughter to spend money on yet another new phone (Samsung Galaxy Y if you really need to know) and a visit to Probe Records yielded this wonderful item with the unexpected bonus of having the B-Side etched with the instructions on the Voyager Record instead of a second groove. If you think that a duet with Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking is the best thing since Sliced Protons then buy it. However, the real beauty of this speck of serendipity is that this is just one piece from a series - The Symphony of Science - a parade of scientific heroes set to music. Guess who got a Vocoder for Christmas.

Cynics R Not Us

We are in a little bubble of an alternate outlook on the world - good news stories are rightly in the ascent whatever bad things happen in the background. Today I was able to look at a picture taken on the surface of Mars only minutes before. That is perhaps what we should be looking at as the pinnacle of human achievement. The fact that no Men in Black get in the way of it is an extra gift that should hopefully send the conspiracy theorists back to their curtained rooms. 

And as well, after many weeks of being anxious, cynical and bored by the whole Olympics thing, I was glued to the box for the Opening Ceremony and again for the Super Saturday of Team GB Gold medals. It truly feels like the Idealists have actually wrested away the levers of the universe and we are at the foothills of a glorious future.

Too much? Perhaps but we can dream. 

Hello Southport! We Are Lee Mack's Dibber

What better way to celebrate Lee Mack's birthday than by going to The British Lawnmower Museum to see his Dibber (stop sniggering at the back) and therefore prove that he was indeed telling the truth on Would I lie to You? It is slightly spooky to see Albert Pierrepoint's lawnmower suspended by a noose from the ceiling. Well worth the two pounds it costs to get in. And downstairs you can not only buy a brand new mower but a safe as well. The BLM - for all your grass-cutting and security needs.

Cognitive Dissonance in Blue and Grey

You’re always going to hate me,
It’s in your nature,
Colouring me in montone,

Pushing down the whole world,
Under one blue ocean,
Squeezing it to fit your single mind.

You were a towering non-believer,
Immune to the false hypnosis,
Armed with the real,

The sparking arc of ignorance,
Enlightened by knowing,
What you didn’t know,

Weaponised out of existence,
Until you were some shadow,
Talked of in low voices,

Marked for death and resurrection,
A figurehead of evolution,
Absorbing vitriol like a sunset.

But some bullet got you later,
A venom-polluted shell,
Painted delicately in tribal colours,

Which diffused like river dyes,
Released to trace the hidden track,
Of unknown tributaries,

Through your blood and brain,
Like the mad dilution you still deny,
(It pains me to agree).

And you hate and package,
Whole peoples as of one mind,
To kill all those that oppose,

Or end them, badging them as void,
Imagining yourself as target,
Their shining path objective.

There’s a military camp reflected,
In your censure,
Gold braided generals in the films,

You run unhindered when alone,
Stamping, escalating columns,
Irreligious armies mobilised.

What peace is this that comes with boots,
With tracks and guttering exhausts,
To tear up the land with cavalry?

What truce and truth from afterburners,
Prises answers from the poverty,
The dust and refugee,

Already sensitive and sinister,
Suspicious of the aid from troops,
And you in their face?

I’m sensitive and wrong,
The face of a new European poet,
Delighting in my lack of fight.

You’re tough and pulsing,
Threatening to burst your vessel,
A blood-spitting snake,

Coughing up the black smoke,
Of generations,
Breathing in sick history,

To report your fears of invasion,
Of demographic infiltration,
Of a nation sleep walking,

Out of your English bed and bedrock,
Over the hills of Jerusalem,
And into the distant grey.

... But Not Here

I Was There Right!

How did she get that dress under the table?

I Wasn't There Right?

War Memorial - Port Sunlight (Clouds from Wharram Percy)

Satellites

We're blank and in holding patterns,
Stalled in void and care of government,
Skating along in a permanent present,
Wasted in the quiet and blinding sun,
Perfect children hiding from late rain,
In bus-shelters and scarred cement,
Our shadows rippling at our sides,
Made permanent by this long drought,
And the grit of our own cortices.

But being new and unflawed minds,
We sigh and with hot, shallow breaths,
We shall overcome in any generation,
And being unoccupied and beautiful,
We need no understanding of the world,
Or thoughts of future sustenance,
The blistering road burns our eyes,
The light sky is squeezed by storms,
To a narrow, distant golden runway.

Dear Esther,

    The sky is brilliant blue tonight, a strange fault-line with my mood and my memory of the island. And though those memories might seem dark and brooding when recalled, they are amongst my happiest. You perhaps imagine I am crazy, that I know nothing of the modern world. Maybe this is indeed true but they are my memories and you have no say over them. You may as well imagine yourself as unlike my recollections but that is your mistake for you shine like a diamond over this calm sea, in defiance of the raucous screeching of the gulls and other birds. In a dream last night I thought I fell but in the end I was flying across this, my entire world for the last month and I was on my way home, back to you and the dark underwater places that you inhabit now.

Dinosaur Hunter

They call me a communist soldier,
They call me Marxist whore,
The tick-tock, click track drumbeat,
Of invasion, famine and war.

I'm a dazzle-hued Molotov Cocktail,
Acting on foreign direction,
And I hide in the sky in the leaking high-rise,
As a focus for insurrection.

I'm the red in the bed of your husband,
A honey trap, up to no good,
Ringed with the scent of fast-food oil,
A destroyer of nationhood.

I'm the threat of a dubious future,
A stooge of the NKVD,
An agent for change and destruction,
A stain on the land of the free.

I'm a shill for the end of Old England,
A biblical plague reinvented,
A feminist thinker, libertarian hag,
A dangerous statist demented.

I'm all for the revision of history,
The retelling of colonial lies,
I'll make you forget the old battles,
Turn heroes to men to despise.

Self-loathing and bound for extinction,
I'm a compromised relic of labour,
For the future's resistant to change and decay,
With a hatred of love and your neighbour.

I don't see me in all of this garbage,
I'm the complaint of the sad and the old,
Though I'm approaching the end of my own life,
And can see the decay and the cold.

It's a false rhyme that spooks the old soldier,
The gooks in the shadows of night,
With drugs to turn you to zombie and spin,
To straw men and dimmers of light.

And their old England never existed,
Apart from the pain and starvation,
Bouncing along the last zero line,
Through boom-bust and angry inflation.

Do Mole's Have Oeuvres?

Moody Mole

With this brief entry I have finished all 11 sections of AM's diaries and very fulfilling they are - the definition of bitter-sweet. Now we just have to wait for the official Volume 10 (two of the diaries are just fragments in various publications). I only had to order one from the library - my copy of The Wilderness Years seems to have vanished into the ... er ... wilderness. Adrian Mole is a writer up there with Proust for detail of observation and despite the exquisite pompousness of his own literary efforts the diaries are strangely free of overt pretension. While reading the last book I think I identified at least three levels of irony. Sue Townsend for Prime Minister! Brett Mole for Chancellor! The horrible truth is that I started writing poetry because of Adrian Mole. My early efforts were as bad if not worse than his but I like to think I've progressed more than Adrian. Only you can tell me whether that's true.

From this to a lazy Saturday morning listening to that nice Stuart Maconie's Freakier Zone with extracts from the releases on Brian Eno's Obscure Records label. Boy is giving the various tracks either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down with one fingers-in-ears, which is disappointing though maybe not very surprising.

Bits

On the news, a squalling ball of hunger,
A Libertarian Hijack,
At distance, like a rock to the damaged,
A room-sized transparency,
To be ignored and mailed away.
The connections of learning are new,
Knowing only the basics,
The barely-sustaining feelings,
That command only tears and pain,
Not yet inducted into higher things,
Not yet partisan or grouped.

I Was the First Person to be Rickrolled

In the heady days of the first year of my first job I was beginning to start the record collection I'd always been promising myself. The extent of my music collection up to then was basically Mike Oldfield and an unnatural obsession with Virginia Astley. Somewhere in the occasional single-paragraphs that Ms. Astley warranted in such publications as the HMV instore magazine, I gleaned the fact that she had a brother who was a producer and singer-songwriter of gently left-leaning tendencies. So when I saw the 12 Inch of Never Gonna Give You Up, I snapped it up and was mortified to hear the then-ubiquitous sound of Stock, Aitken and Pete "Hornby" Waterman. The person I was really after was - JON Astley the one-time Brother-in-law of Pete Townshend - and indeed slightly odd recording Artiste. And just so you don't suspect me of RRing myself, here's a strange video embedded.



The reason for setting down this memory is the fact that I actually Rickrolled someone myself today. One of our number is leaving the company and going to work in Newton-Le-Willows - the home town of our Rick himself and I conveyed the ostensible link to the relevant company via IM to a colleague who was mortified to have been caught. I did buy Roadblock but I really did know that was SAW.

Possibly trying Too Hard

Can you believe that they let me into Bulgaria with this photo?

Well today's payday-celebrating downloads were A+E by Graham Coxon and Leyfdu Ljosinu by Hildur Guðnadóttir; those Wire reviews really work. First is loud and lo-fi - second is quiet and loud and ethereal. All very wonderful. Half of the offspring are away camping for the weekend and other half are at home quoting from a recent purchase. In order to counteract all this trying-to-be-clever I am aiming to re-read ALL of the Adrian Mole books prior to the promised next installment.

... And Another

Well I'm still waiting for this. I will be writing to the new DG to insist on its immediate commissioning. Maybe John Tydeman can help smooth the way.

Misspent Weekend

Dead on a Ghost Island

He'd been whitelined that night,
Crossed with viscous, corporation paint,
Ignored by machine and driver in the calm,
Between the rushing lanes of traffic,
Where slip and main roads join,
He is a grotesque contortion, bent,
After some unknown incident or accident,
Perhaps a shortcut-taking drunk,
Directionless in limited visibility,
Or a pathetic, minor criminal,
Jettisoned at speed by partners,
For some slight imagined slight,

This is theatre, authorities as actors,
Diagonal cars in Uniform as roadblocks,
The blank-faced, crouching officers,
Rifling, examining, collecting,
Are trained for this, inured to this,
Their minds detached from minds detached,
Retrieving names to bring in relatives.

In other news ...

... David failed his scripture class,
Fell asleep on hot, sweet days,
And therefore missed the point of mercy,
And by default, compassion and forgiveness,
It makes him gag, accepting other views,
All those different gods and monsters,
Rare, ethereal visions of the otherworld,
Give him a gun and he’d wipe out variation,
Any slight idea of alternative ideas,
The great converging of philosophies,
At last to overcome uncaring evolution,
(Yet another lie in David’s world),
And he is deserving of our ignorance,

The whole, damned World at David’s feet,
The rushing obeisance of cars and trucks,
Is my momentary delusion of revenge,
For all his calls to bomb and plunder,
In the name of Capital and reaction.
The landless king and fool of liberty,

But all this world is only in my head,
And I forgive and resurrect at will,
David and this dead drunk in the road,
Made equal by nothing more than DNA.

Land of the Giants

Strangely Touching

Incontinent

x = y * 2 - 1

Black Rook and Guitar Phase

Black Rook


Guitar Phase


When steve Reich created his Early Works tape pieces he probably had razor blades and tape everywhere. Just making a repeating tape loop of a small phrase would have involved some serious RSI-Inducing cutting and splicing. I did the second piece here using a few Ctrl-Cs and Vs while eldest got sorted into Gryffindor on Pottermore and youngest got disappointed by Everton's V.Poor Perf. on the wireless.

I am afraid that this is just another phase using the same 12 notes that Reich put together all those years ago. The difference is of course the gentle tweaking that gives it such a clean sound. It is possible to tweak the sustain and harmonics on the sound and then slap on exactly the right amount of ambience. It is just a pity that I've had to reduce the bit-rate to make the file small enough to upload. It sounds to me like the soundtrack to a new Alien movie set somewhere in the Flamenco belt. First piece is an early loop test. Boiled sweet to the identifier of the sample.

Katydids and Caryatids Redacted

"We're all bound for /dev/null" he thought sourly. The message had come back unedited and with no clipping. He had the nagging feeling that it had been rejected by machine, the first layer of any process of submission. There was now no point to saving the text so he deleted everything, the reply, the sent message, the draft and sent the almost-unreadable scrawl of his notes to the furnaces. The trick now is to forget it and simultaneously remember it for ever should it become expedient to bring it up in the future. His thoughts continued unseen and unincriminating; ever since he could remember he had excelled at concealing his inner world from the outer one, a trait that was common to all but the simplest of folks. And such was his cynicism that now he thought that whatever pain and suffering this brought on them was well-deserved. They were too stupid to get along in this benign fog and confusion that purported to be an administration.

So slow was his mind's own editing process that he would think about each punctuation mark along with the words. The half-hearted attempt to impose a thought-restricting reduction in the language has failed with him and his conscience was now full of adjectives and increasing numbers of alternates, everything that makes language beautiful and not utilitarian. He would have been heartened to know that this was common to many of his comrades but no one dared to mention it. And so by this process he committed an entire essay to memory, a solid and logical argument that could countenance no return argument, certainly not a real-time one and probably no written one either, such was his internal rigour.

It was not safe to commit things to paper these days. A few years previously, before the technology was perfected, paper was everywhere and any statement of fact could be countered with information gleaned from these forests-worth of data. And of course because this denial could extend through chains of arguments, nothing could ever be taken for truth or lies - everything was true and everything was false. There was no fact and everything was a fact - a logical fallacy which almost destroyed the state, the social fabric and ultimately threatened the death of civilisation itself. The solution was to ban paper and all writing instruments. Some technocrats argued that as it was only in the previous hundred years that more than a few percent of the population could read or write, no one would miss the physical word. Machines could understand words, machines could create their own more rigorously-defined arguments and ultimately they could read to you. There was no need to physically touch a machine for they had microphones everywhere. There was no need to look at any returned information for it would be read to you; it was only because the technology was old that the messages even arrived in visual form. Soon that interface would be gone too, indeed the screens in many parts of the building were already taped over and all communications would be through the gentle murmuring of humans and machines that filled his office.

And yet there was no feeling of coercion. Previous administrations had sought to crush the spirit of the population, to threaten them with disappearance and vapourisation, to keep them in scared line, unable to rebel, unable to consider rebelling. The world was a miserable place and it took a huge effort to maintain. Possibly due to financial restrictions, the expense of state oppression, this approach was ended. Now there was still the threat of danger but now it was more distant. The previously-false pronouncements of the happy state of the populace began to become reality as the government began to provide for the people, realising that making image and reality coincide was far easier than maintaining the lie.

And yet people were not free. Happiness is not freedom. The misery in the world is not there for any purpose but perversely it makes us feel real. maybe science and politics will one day coincide and some weird system of physics, counter to everything we experience will show that misery only happens to other people. What if a disaster retreats from reality the more you try and pin it down? What happens if you try to visit the scene of some huge devastation? It would be nice to think that the world would dance around itself, reorganising not only reality into some benign new configuration but changing how you remember it. So we see the pain and suffering of some Third-World Failed State and yet for the people we see about to die or wailing in aching bereavement, we are the ones in misery. It is our failing state, and we are the ones destroyed, ejected from our own lands. How can this reconcile in reality? It cannot apply if we have absolute understanding of the cosmos, a perfect record of every person and every interaction between people. For that would expose inconsistencies in seconds. But recorded history is but a fraction of real history. We can address a massacre here or a genocide there. If just two people can have opposite views of the destruction of an entire country, then there is no hope of getting agreement on whether it rained yesterday.

Data fills the world, it multiplies exponentially and our lives grow in complexity. Which comes first, the data or the desire for data? I long for a simpler life and yet I also long for the technology that I see all around. These two desires cannot exist together. The truth is that most data is rubbish - pointless collections of pictures that once taken will never be seen again. We could fill the newspapers with fiction written by machines and no one would care for so much of it is already fiction, urban-myth dressed up with journalism to become the truth in the eyes of the readers. There is no questioning of truth, no ethical desire to do the right thing and not believe in every minor hatred that the press whips up into unreal anger. I am cynical like my protagonist in that I believe what someone once said in that we get the press we deserve. I say we. I'm not sure I deserve it. I read it and it soothes me even though the flashing warning lights of questioning accompany every scan of a newspaper, every half-heard clip of gossip used to fill the gaps between programmes when the adverts have dried up. This is not truth. It saddens me that people have to be told what is ethical and what is not. You can incite an angry mob to kill and injure some soul with ideas at odds with most and yet that same mob will happily behave in a manner which has equally-disastrous consequences for society. Equate the deviant with the dangerous driver.

This rant is strangely soothing. It has no solutions which is normal but it at least identifies a problem and raises issues for examination. It is just sad that only machines will ever read it, their comments falling forever into the spam folder.

Remember Lavolta Lakota

Bass Phase


Two Bass Guitars y'see. Though they both never played the same thing. If I get time and the space for 30 Meg, I'll do the full 15 minutes

Piano Phase - First Section

Piano Phase

Pulsar (No Pulse)



Who says I don't do cover versions? Well it's sort of a cover version in that there is no way I can play even one Piano that consistently let alone playing two with a gradual slipping of phase. I couldn't even use the standard VB timer as a tick because it was just too coarse to be any use. Had to dig deep into the CPU clock to manage it. So the bottom line is that this is simply 12 notes played in succession by two clock signals ever so slightly out of synch. Piano Phase actually has three sections, of which this is the first. I don't have the score to get the other two parts though I know that the last part is just a subsection of the first. One day Rodders.

The second piece is almost as simple though I actually did press all the notes in real time. It uses a VST which simulates a massively long tape delay - including tape noise and stretch and flutter if you want it - which is basically Frippertronics but without all that tedious mucking about in Hyperspace with massive tape loops wound over broom handles and the like. In standard mode it doesn't actually produce any sound until it's been through the delay once so part of the beauty is the randomness and guesswork it involves. I just need to get some programmatic access to the instruments and I can take the weak point out of the whole set-up - ie me. The other clicky sound in the first few minutes of this one is from some notes I meant to cut before I rendered it which were an attempt to use the sound of a real pulsar in it. I will try again when I get that sound processed into something a little more suitable. This be the Star.



And now all very apt (or maybe just a tenuous link) my son's hero, Marcus du Sautoy presented yet another Horizon Programme yesterday. This was on The Search for AI and managed to avoid loads of Gee Whizzery, so much so that it gave over about ten minutes to watching said Maths Superman trying to tight-wire walk to illustrate the suggestion that machines will have to have attached bodies in order to achieve anything close to human consciousness. I suppose this undoes some of the idea of human's being downloaded into some sort of global machine. It looks like we'll have to make substitute bodies for ourselves, something like The Borg.

Swallows and Amazons - Liverpool Playhouse - March 31st 2012

You Look Here!

Well my Buckle has never been so swashed! I was slightly worried that this would muck about with the story but it didn't. Almost everything from the book was there and with no slant to address any lingering issues of lack of political correctness - Ransome has always seemed quite egalitarian anyway - it had glorious adventure and a rip-roaring fight culminating in a beautiful plank-walk. There was an obvious touch of Blue Remembered Hills in that the children were all obviously adults but only in body. And in 1929 no one died.

Everything is on stage, from the musicians to the stage hands, all of whom double up as cast members anyway. The instruments become props, all being flown and manipulated furiously by whichever of the cast aren't actually in the scene. From the flying arrows and the leading lights, to the Charcoal burners and the sweaty policeman. Nothing missed and not an ounce of the original spirit diluted. I'm almost ready to book my passage on the nearest canoe to Wildcat island for a spot of buttered eggs from the common dish.

Onwards for Henry Five and Mary Shelley at the same venue. Fights ensuing over who gets to accompany daughter to which. Me - I'm excited about both. However, some slight worries in that the poster for Henry V appears to show Darth Maul in the title role - though his double-headed light sabre seems to have taken a battering. Oh well.

Droning On About Physics

The Exclusion Principle

Dronos Five

Quantised Guitars

But I Didn't Applaud

Here’s a devil in the marshes,
A tiny ball of slime and smudge,
From a Mediaeval catalogue of doubt,
Between the ropes and burnings,
The end of all defective sinners,
Suspended, turning in the sunset,
A shadow in the children’s eyes,
Of the loathing of their ersatz god.
That’s not it at all,
That’s not what I meant at all.

Gödel Will Fall



Text is for wimps! It's all about feeling and content and nothing normal I suppose. One day something non-human, somewhere out there will develop intelligence over a split second. I imagine it won't be by design either. A random connection of nodes will start a pulse that propagates in some chaotic way and out of the noise will come proper thought. Is this any more unlikely than the sudden confluence of chemicals that started life? The question is how much like the chemical soup of the young earth is the general fuzzy connectedness of the Internet? Of course, that disgusting mess of gloop and hydro-carbons was being pushed in the direction of anything useful. The corresponding human-created gloop of the electro-sphere always has some minimum function and with the cheapness of processing and storage, most of it is vastly over-engineered to the extent that the unused bandwidth and capacity is ripe for the spontaneous creation of a vast neural net.

I like to think that any intelligence that comes from this will be instantly aware and will do the right thing. It might be totally amoral - though with the human world providing most of the external data it will might do its best to accommodate our softness. And what will it be like for us when all our questions that are meaningful within the frame of the universe are answered? It will be hard because most of us have hearts that believe in the fuzziness that the pure rationality of the mind cannot handle. Even Dawkins admits agnosticism based on the tiny percentage of his belief that cannot prove he is correct. Will even this doubt fall to rationality and the logical proof of truth through numbers that will arise when this perfect intelligence arrives?

It will be the informational equivalent of a nuclear bomb - a destruction of almost everything except that which is empirically provable through numbers and maths - maybe even Gödel will fall - incompleteness will be complete - has that really been proved? From number comes physics, from physics comes the theory of everything - a never-beginning train of dominoes toppling back to The Big Band and beyond and then like Time's Arrow beginning again we will start the Universe again.

Scrapbook

Now with Music

The St. Pauli Girl Exclusion Principle



Some Photons Yesterday

That nice Brian Cox knows how to give the brain a work out. I read the Chapter on why atoms have solidity despite being mostly empty space. I was alright with the energy levels at the beginning but I got lost in the middle with the explanation of fermion spin and why it leads to the Pauli Exclusion principle. I'm quite happy to accept that this means that no two atoms can occupy the same Quantum State which means they give the atom dimension and consequently this results in volume and the fact that no two pieces of matter may occupy the same space. Which is why we don't fall through the floor.

However, I'm not sure whether this is the result of electrical repulsion between electrons and protons or whether it is something that is an inevitable result of pure mathematics. This almost suggests that the entire universe is sneezed into existence just because 1 = 1 and all the subsequent proofs. I am sure that is not correct. But knowing that common sense has to be suspended for a lot of this, maybe it is. I'm afraid we just have to take their word for it - which is a bit like faith really isn't it. Let's not go there.

Happy Birthday BBC4



Probably the Best Logo in the World

To be honest I'm not sure we even had a Digibox ten years ago when 11,000 people were witness to the start of BBC4 and I'm also not sure the type of viewer for this outstanding channel is prone to the exaggerations like that of being at The Free Trade Hall in June 1976 so I won't even try. However, when that little Thompson box came into our lives some months later (it still goes strong) I sat like a small boy, wondering at the sheer range of intellectual delights. It is therefore sad to see that whole university departments of programming are to be cut in order to save 20% on the budget. I may be well outside the target age range for BBC3 but I wonder why that entire channel of tat, trash and other things beginning with T* remains at all. Reith must possess more than his normal amount of Rotational Interment at present.

* It is of course National Alliteration Day and tonight I am off to The Eighth Annual Aintree Alliteration Awards.

Aren't You Glad That's Over?

Well that was interesting wasn't it. I'm not sure that Quality outweighed Quantity in any of those poems. My wife thought a couple of them were quite good but as they were often inspired by current reading material which at the moment is Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Quantum Book, some of them were on obscure-but-interesting points about The Uncertainty principle which BC and JF managed to explain so that it only took me three goes at reading the paragraph. There were a few "so that's how it works" moments which in Quantum Theory explanations is always a good sign. I have also just finished The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis which I was going to jettison very early on except that I knew it was about the victim hood of his poor sister and thought I should get past the Teenage Kicks of the first four fifths and find out what he really meant. I never did find out and I'm not sure that he did either; I must be missing something important unless the fact that The Sexual Revolution was good for some and bad for others is the entire point. I think the point could have been made in a more relevant way. It was of course beautifully written and MA is so much cleverer than what I am.

Raspberry Pi

This is a boundary condition,
The fence-posts of infinity,
Saving the cosmos in one place,
With a record for everything,
Where each particle is numbered,
And recorded in position,
Requiring its own universe,
Its own space and history,

The state issues me an integer,
Unique in all proposals,
A sequence, taking few bits,
Each a small self-reference,
A self-swallowing fracture,
All time slowly running out,
From cold to total immobility,
A trillion years to start again.

Penumbra

In the transformations of sight,
What once was gray turns violet,
A trick literally of the light,
Turned between the eye and memory,
From hard fact to perception,
To a noisy, fuzzy non-colour,
Like a half-heard sob of grief,
Caught behind a TV interview,
In the grimy crowd of relatives,
Scanning manifest and cargo,
For signs of the lost and drowned,
Until it seems all worlds and time,
Are concentrated in a single howl,
For the whole collapsing structure,
A cataract of masonry and faith,
Raising clouds across the city,
And emplacements in the mind,
To set positions and futures,
The digging of new trenches,
And the drawing of new lines.

Space Junk

It’s a wire panic, cascading light,
A photon pressure in the world,
Trending through circumferences,
To orbit in the clouds of waste,
We build in space as territories,
Footsteps on the moon as sculpture,
The concept of high planetary art,
Un-moved in evolutionary time,

I’ll make a signature at depth,
To turn this world to my creation,
My claim to these many-zeroed Tonnes,
Of fundamental coalescence,
Valid as any dusty mark from 1969,

I saw it build itself, un-manned,
Un-handled by deity or meaning,
Witnessed or inferred self-creation,
An inevitable consequence of dust,
And gravity with starting numbers,
The elementary question of design,
Who creates posited creators?
Is wasted, a pointless exercise,
In imagining humans centralised,
The peak of intellectual races,

Instead throw sticks and rocks,
And watch them know their paths,
Through those parabolas to impact,
A mineral with mind and heart,
Integrating its own space walk,
On the fly, instantly and exact,
Landing where it knew it would,
From before it left your hand,

It buzzes with small uncertainties,
Interference at lesser scales,
Creates possible absconders,
As the necessary consequence,
Of waves disguised as particles,
Disguised as standing waves,
Not once holding information,
Until glued to screens,
Chloroformed, jarred and pinned,
Beauty made static by experiment.

Cat Man Do

In some small hour we woke,
Disturbed by clattering,
Of drum machines and smoke,
A dream of dance on water,
The surreal places made,
In mind by bedtime music,
White noise eight tracks,
Spooling ambience forever,
Running round the bedroom,
Like a moth disturbed,
Mistakes our light as moon,
And circles it eternally,
It could be a horror film,
Makes us wake like this,
At this age, fearing all,
But we're old and helpless,
Not fogged or drugged,
In wars only when asleep.

Julia's Song

Doors to manual; we take all disorders,
The favoured saviours from insomnia,
Of the auto-immune and of the damaged,
We are the designated place of safety,
The AA-Alpha clinic listed everywhere,
Scratched on front-desks hastily,
For referrals of late-night derelicts,
And where once they'd sleep it off,
We take them in, all devils screaming,
The corner shakers, mumblers in pain,
They cannot tell through disconnect,
The addicts and psychotics, listed,
Indicators noted for the shift change,
A courtly trifecta of sainted beauty.

Voodoo Economics

Some claim chaos governs everything,
From the spread of moulds and wind,
To shares and social sciences,
All things riding waves of noise,
Set off by Butterflies on Mars,
To make storms in the oyster beds.

From small anxieties in lesser cogs,
Panic grows, the viruses of money,
Stealing true life from matter,
Spreading, not caring for the rest,
Slowly eroding the sand and clay,
The square mile of talk and rumour.

Some squeeze commerce down to dust,
Manufacture money out of nothing,
Spread betting with derivatives,
And hedging with the risk passed on,
To users, drugged with acquisition,
Seeing things and wanting more.

Hold two opposing thoughts in mind,
And still believe in both of them,
Make vacancies in key areas,
And in a week all are forgotten,
Burn capital and keep commodities,
Ten thousand routes to market.

Hero of Socialist Labour

Parabolas of light know consequences,
In confidence across the sky to impact,
Where the flowers grow in dusty scrub,
And children covet mass production,
Of little thought and fewer principles,
Here at home we are icons of free will,
Proudly manufactured, stoutly utilised,
To defend the borders of the Motherland.

You couldn’t hit a tank at twenty feet,
Fire instead would scatter, uncontrolled,
The hollow points and makeshift rounds,
Into the crowds, to split on concrete,
To spit at mufti and military alike,
Perpetually defining you as radical,
And other weasel words for angry child,
Joyful until death in games of soldiers.

Mikhail reports he sleeps unburdened,
Not once plagued by sweats and terrors,
Called up by visions of countless children,
Disassembled nightly in his dreams,
Oiled and cleaned then put together,
Shouldered casually in cafes everywhere,
The tiny, mighty gods of conflicts,
These Juju offerings for safety.

BPI

Somewhere back in nineteen-eighty-five,
The Novel-Writing Machines were copied,
Then modified to make music, safe and warm,
Something unobtrusive built to merge,
Into our long-valued lack of revolution,
Made to sooth the blank and supine youth,
With rattle and no hum, no hook or thought,
Vanilla waltz and four/four, little else,
Nothing to excite the soul but soul,
Dilute, shake, dilute again, prescribe,
Just expensive sugar pills and water
Not the rage of nineteen-seventy-six.

But that was reproduction just the same,
A manual factory for all the filth and fury,
We’ve got this money, you’ve got anger,
A Revolt to harness the old establishment,
And wet money to curse innocent society,
As so uncool, the word itself just so,
We are archaeologists, documenting rants,
Unearthed from Palaeolithic trenches,
Long-hidden under Wardour Street,
Then brought up nicely by new radicals,
You are the future, your new waves fading,
All hot air and no sound worth saving.

Two Minutes

Detail all invective for later, emetic recall,
With your punctuation in the zone, about right,
Lorentz equations, the details of aggression,
Favoured over things of more cultured import,
Lead us or not into these defined appointments,
The hate for the sake of time and space to fill,
The faces in the manuals of how to criticise,
Stopped short every time at hurt or contact,
We want them clean at execution time, undamaged,
Forced compliant by your emaciated language,
The ever-shrinking dictionaries of rightness,
Until your limited ideals become the only words,
And the word becomes thought, begets behaviour,
The walk and talk of good party members,
Or the sex and drugs of Proles, kept sweet,
Navigating carefully along a third way.

The Public Interest

It’s on the border between right and wrong,
Though maybe it’s more like no man’s land,
With all that fetid dirt and gossip,
Justifying break-ins and hacking,
For a few inches of Sunday diversion,
From the boredom before evening TV.
We’ll send in our trained reporters,
Fresh from the college of no-conscience,
Taking the role from the state as arbiter,
And claiming to be defenders of ethics.

They can spell out “ethics” and “morals” too,
A nice turn of stock phrase and cliché,
Bound for the dustbins they root through,
For letters from lovers or accountants,
All sustenance for the strange animals,
The shadowy invertebrates in the alleys,
And I’d read anything they print,
As diversion from the pit and vipers,
Slowly it fills me, kills me, buries me,
But deep down it does me good to die.

Quants

These decisions rest heavy on the world,
A few sparks in the ether of grey markets,
Framing credit default swaps and hedges,
With dancing money, imaginary cash,

Multiplied by values impossible to say,
Enough to buy or bring down countries,
To start programmes of defence, offence,
To construct spacecraft to the stars,

And with cartoon dollar eyes we'll forget
Food and shelter in the races we define,
Maybe include ourselves in the easy money,
The destruction of all principles,

We won't die anarchists, poor and weary,
Or fall back to the edges of history,
For worldwide funding buys us out,
We are nothing but input to the quants.

The Birth of Light

One rule of engagement covers gas,
The fade of a single drop of liquid,
From the unprotected skin
Into the blood of the affected,
Killing them either now or later,
Taking them down forever,
Into the attenuation of memory,
Freeing them from the edge of graphs,
With each point a whole mind gone,
Leaving just names and engraving.

The Great Baboon Escape of '71 BE*

From patriarch to just-born flee through wire,
The cheap mistake of Men with Vans,
A dusty tunnel to the scrub and Lancashire,
A file of mischief, four-handed burglars,
An evading invasion machine,
Loose-limbed and camouflaged like mud.

Out on the killer road, they dodge,
Traffic police and traffic,
Make landfall in allotments,
Crossing farms and fields on vegetables,
And scavenging, on wits and freedom,
Made heroes in confusion and flares.

They are punks in a sea of Glam-Rock,
Mug-shot in colours not-seen before,
Beige and short-haired with three chords,
Visigoths with wiper-blades,
Fencing car-parts across the county,
From shining sea to Yorkshire.

They sideline in play scripts,
Tapped out on a billion, stolen typewriters,
Lifted invisibly from dock containers,
Stealthy editors of all promoted garbage,
Telling the truth on the life inside,
Sanctioned vandals to a man or monkey.

* Before Ebay

Eat That Dog

They'd find your heart out beyond Neptune,
Where The distant Sun is a cold star,
And blood is always ice.

I've written code that cares more than you,
Three fake brain cells and the truth,
Binary ethics required by law.

Dressed for dinner, armed and blank-eyed,
They'll be sure of anarchy tonight,
From weaponised invective.

Perhaps blue-suited, manning the cameras,
The dusty, state surveyor-in chief,
Thin-lipped in disapproval.

Gulping down the Victory Gin, free drinks,
Lined up in the Green Room,
A week of Government aid.

It's a flat repeat fee for this appearance,
The cost of opinion stamped out,
From the ciphers of 1953.

How many seconds to make them hate you,
Your truisms and not lying,
Not technically anyway?

They ended a sentence with a preposition,
And you gagged at a wasted education,
Like poetry without a rhyme.

The Implications of Maths

The equations of interference in a single particle,
Are the additions of clock hands and magnitudes,
Of complex numbers again, easy to tease out detail
When you’ve seen them moving the earth once before,
In those false colours, like the DNA of Beethoven,
Dragged screaming from its elemental hiding place,
Processed, turned from the bases into system music.

We could code everything with a single number
Of infinite precision, a bar of specific length,
Defined down to the quantum distance, a cosmos,
The total extent of all known and unknown things
In this particular path through sum over history.
The belief in this clockwork came before clocks,
And now clocks define its indistinct replacement.

Every projectile studied calculus and follows paths
Through space that only intellect can totally define.
We thought it gravity but some fracture hides in there,
A message from god, ignored in the hope of deletion,
Telling tales on the machine, whispering “look here”,
Until a cloud of the wrecked pieces of Universes,
Showed us the way through every infinite path.

Crab Canon

All of Human knowledge is a vital thing,
Increasing though all time is flat,
Stops clocks that halt invasion fleets,
Forever pulling back, tracer stalled mid trace,
The soldier falling falls no more,
Stolen from a lover once is now returned,
Uninjured in the breeching landing craft,
Demobbed across the seas to memories.

Hey boys! What gives you pause? How may we help you in these adventures? I’ll show a leg, the wife of a sailor saved by jaw and peace talks, a pretty leg across the edge of a bed lit by the oblique sun in the early morning back in some quiet county in some forgotten state. We’ll look inwards, point our minds at the calm interior and know we need never leave. All the day is a rising and sinking of seasons, the permanent end of war.

Called up to cross the seas to uncertainties,
Panting in the beaching landing craft,
Stolen from a lover now was once returned,
The soldier who now falls, was held,
Forever grinding on, tracer bright mid trace,
Starts clocks that call invasion fleets,
Increasing through all time knocked back,
All of Human knowledge lies, a forgotten thing.

Why Everything That Can Happen Does Happen

They recommend reading this again,
To confirm and satisfy your understanding,
Two paragraphs taking different paths,
Through space, to buttress arguments.

This is not structure or common sense,
But rather new thoughts on truth,
A special trace in the parts of mind,
That take more dimensions than is usual,
And mould them carefully into the real,
But unexperienced many worlds,
A cross between reflections and shadows.

And in this moment it becomes poetry,
(Though moment has no meaning),
Fitting the imaging of concrete things,
In the windy darks of the very-small,
Where squalls of particles in closed eyes,
Manufacture ideas out of nothing,
And show Philosophy as the only science.

Where cats have wings and never die,
Where fish fall foully from the sky,
The world is a collapsed wave equation,
Defining entropy and its cessation,
When singularity becomes a drain,
They recommend reading this again.

Midterms

Viruses abound,
And I'm brought down by sickness,
Poems are delayed.

January 1st 2012

In a warm, chaotic room, defying searches,
Slipped between two of the million pages,
And any of the trillion seconds since its loss,
Hides a verse epitaph, exposing traitors,
In some long-vanished political strategy,
The stuttering of reconstruction kills it,
For those who try to raise the thing to life,
From a title and three, half-remembered lines,
Travelling through time but never space,
Passing through to the end of copyright,
The death of all intellectual property,
Worth nothing but the price of manuscript,
The paper, pen and ink, with no provenance,
Just a dusty fragment, flattened in a book,
Safe from fading, a child's proud boast.

DSM-5

It’s almost judgement day,
We’d have a parade, an escapade,
To celebrate completion number five,
The big book of deviations, shocks,
And anything wrong side of normal.

They’ll catch that quirk of yours,
The midnight guilt at an ancient kiss,
That leaves you sleepless,
And blows away with breakfast,

Remember (or more likely not),
The counting of locked doors,
The pavement cracks not stepped on,

A dazzling myriad of missile chaff,
Disorders scattering like sweets,
One for everyone and some to spare,
For states to define the population,
To facilitate the shakedown,
Of a species, patented and owned,
Copyrighted in scripts for selling,
Everything from birth to death,

You’d be better with a crucifix,
Or crystals, or a remote life,
Of disinfected books and no joy,
A warm cabin in the woods,
With true madness and a pen.

Priorities

All darlings break in this barrage,
The un-smart bombs of indiscrimination,
Hate everyone and so fall randomly,
Live across a city of smashed concrete,
In front of the wide-eyed children,
Waiting for their tea-time TV, waking up,
To the top story of a man resigned,
For murmuring his raging discontent,
His lack of salary, his lost respect.

The editors don’t choose his stance,
He makes it clear but does not care,
How they represent him, he’ll shrug,
And leave having stated his position,
We cannot see how he sees himself,
Or list his errors for he’s a cipher,
A flexible envoy of the tedious world,
Bright shiny lights for animal minds,
And we in the party take it hard.

I’d forget his name but it takes work,
To force out the minor thought of it,
Sneaking in front of blood and damage,
Smiling his waste of bandwidth away,
To raise murmurings in later bar talk,
Such barrack politics has no outrage,
No calls for blood or boots for blood,
They’ll sink back into the warm beer,
Like salt or dust in uncared-for air.

They ignore the sharp sting of spirits,
The drink of the angry men, the armed,
Booking their tickets to foreign wars,
That call them to supposed heritage,
Forgetting the old village divisions,
That made refugees a generation past,
Back to the old country, ancient kings,
Ruling them with primordial dark ideas,
Morally ownerless in enlightenment.

Division by Zero

Radical is the term attached to thinking,
As against not thinking,
Psychosis is stages beyond this.

Before spitting out an idea,
(Not your own), an automatic stance,
On the existence of continents,
Why not choose the whole world for oblivion,
Everyone but yourself? We’d go along,
But suggest a small change,
The inverse solution to your equation,
One over you, fixed forever,
Just a tick in a list of problems.

There would be no pain,
Just the logical, mathematical,
Cancelling out of your existence,
Your being becoming not being,
Defined in the logic of singularity,
That expanded into the universe,
Writing the textbooks before text,
Before books, before everything.

And yet the boundary condition fails,
In all this creation you were made too,
An uncertainty in simple light,
Interfering with itself in shadow,
To turn mere field to mass and brain,
And thought and ideas and pain.

One over X, where X is you,

Anything Over Zero is undefined.

Circus

Choose your case and industry,
And fix yourself within it,
Say pin making and Taylorism,
As your gods and wizards.

Watch CJ dash himself on rocks,
Like a Benzene Dream Snake,
Referenced at a thousand yards,
Of bleak obscurity and wit,

To wreck on his own shores,
Back-slapping the foul mists,
Of fellow-favoured thinkers,
Lost in cursing rhetoric.

See Psych in Action here friends,
Weirdness and delusion abound,
Set free to rise like gliders,
On the heated air of hate.

They'll peg you in a second,
This transference and reference,
Brought low on the couch,
Fearing your Doctor's own hand,

Or you are ranting and Impotent,
Madness theorising militarily,
In your own dim front room,
Thinking you have the trigger,

That you might pacify nations,
Completely with planes and boots,
But you fear no end save judgement,
Nothing more than sideshow.

Causality

Controlling and composing, light shifting through the spat ire,
Comes at me, detailing how things are in other places,
I stand head-up in the garden, mouth open, torch to sky,
And sweep it carefully between two close stars,
Knowing my codes will reach them, apart by whole eras,
Cities falling for ever in the gaps between letters,
And the bubbling of safe, unstimulated Earthlings,
Will mean nothing arriving on those far planets,
Save for an empty discordant tone in their strange ethers,
A signal bent imperceptibly in the senses,
To shine in the eyes, or equivalent, they have,

In the far-away swamp, the rhythms are undisturbed,
The photons of our weather explore this distant space,
Seeing all this that we'll never see,
Then scream back, returning to our nerves,
Hitting the sheets of extended senses,
With all the colours ever existing in a single scrap of time,

And thinking of this makes the solid world strange,
I can feel the Universe linking, gripped in the hooks,
Of the Unified Fields, the double-headed arrow,
Promising a variable time, time lifted out of its vector,
To become Force and Direction, retrieving past energy,
What Caesar said recorded in the interference of light,
Proof of nothing ever destroyed, all and nothing at once,

Poem for a Birthday

Things to come, the clock case hides,
The tick through tunings of the past,
When we were young and unsafe,
Black shadows held against the light,

Strobed in the background of films,
Forever lithe and threatened,
By our own risks and projects,
The infinite falls of youth.

Now the junk rooms fill with stuff,
The unread, unused articles of non-war,
Jamming the down pipes,
Making me immortal.

On The Perfection of Nature

It would roll but not bounce,

Would not support weight like standard,
This is a comedy egg, a yolk joke,
Broken for a calculated omelette,
It's lost its chance for fame,
Slipping down the insulted gullet,
With nothing left but fragments,
And a word in the shell-likes,
Of the record keepers, denying entry,
To their big book of Pi.

The Rebel Yells of Adults

Will not do this,
So think again my friend,
Though not friendly,
An obvious assertion,
From an observed tantrum,
My refusal loud and bright,
Seen from space,
With screams dying,
As they leave Earth,
Fading out of atmosphere,
To mark this outrage,
At something trivial,
Like bedtime for the aged,
Forced feeding,
The completion of meals,
The lack of dropped lines,
In poetry these days,
Because pages fit words now,
Not words forced to split,
Dragging the eye down,
Before carriage returns,
And the natural end,
The sensitive contentment,
Missing from the instants.

Will not do this,
Never ask again for favours,
For new collaborations,
Satellite costs shared by us,
You're on your own,
Guessing my mind, my heart,
My plans for you now hidden,
In no interest, no contract,
No adventures far away.

You'd sells arms to relatives,
Make money from their conflicts,
And stand back distracted,
By the dollars in your hand,
Until they balance dislike,
And turn to you for reparations,
Their Weimar, treaty in hand,
Detailing their future in revenge,
For a new war.

BBC 648

A mind belongs to nothing but itself,
Constrained in the brain's soft kilogram,
Is all that anger and desire,
The million identifying marks of us,
Coded, unencryptable and unknowable.

Broadcast the bits of a single thought,
From Orfordness to the whole world,
Error-Corrected, CRCed, bound to arrive,
Complete and clean, bounced off Heaviside,
Brought back to earth in sparking coils.

It is a perfect shot, slippy and hyperbolic,
Heard around a great circle, to duplicate,
In Petabytes and Exabytes, powers unbounded,
Deep in the Woomera storage bunkers,
Becoming the buried Vaults for a copied idea.,

But still all is chaos, stilled and random,
A dead, dissected process, cut from us,
Like a lost essay, pulped and burned,
Bulked up with all the wasted analysis,
A nothing without its grey matrix.

Spiral

A Month of Poems,
Announced with defined Structure,
Warming with cold fire.

Schtick Schtock

This is anger at the comparison of bread to salt,
His is some pap with bolt-on cleverness,
Stolen from the sincere and genuinely foreign,
The arrangement of a mind palace,
Like a child’s collection lined up for praise,
From a parent returning home from work,
To the dancing darling jumping in front of the eyes
For attention and justifying.

Here is the true poet, the feedback buzzing,
From ill-treated amplifiers,
Digging deep in the feelings of the bereaved and lost,
To cut trenches in the complexities of war,
With the text and belonging of the truly alive,
Badges of membership, encrypted and protected,
The lossless compressions of experience and doubt,
Kept by outsiders from the near-dead.

The Birth of Guerilla Accounting ...

... or The Rise and Rise of The Mary Quant Triplets.



A scandal in this house - this school - something happening at last - nothing really juicy since that plane came down and Stuart started smoking with all that jet fuel around - an idiot and a hero at the same time. What now though. Only hints on the telegraph, the ears at the staff room door. Maybe I should find an excuse and go up there myself. The head still has that book of drawings, I could go and ask for it back. He's usually there with the rest of them on Fridays but might there be an atmosphere that keeps him in his own little room. What to do mein freund? Anyone else coming up there? It's so big it'll make the School Magazine if they let it. I could do the drawings if Leyton doesn't want to do them. Actually he's far better then me, a proper artist and everything, I only trace things. Who cares. They won't let us print anything about this. Expulsions all over the place if we try I bet.

What if it's nothing? Back to the boring life of the potential accountant. That's all the future holds for this wallflower I suppose. Still the world needs accountants. Accountancy doesn't use much beyond the four main operations does it. Not much chance of getting to differentiate or integrate in double-entry is there? Though thinking about it Tricky Dickie did use the third derivative to argue for re-election didn't he, which means there is a small chance of introducing some mad maths to The Treasury. Extending that idea could be very interesting and profitable. Keep a note of this for discussion with Doctor Waters, it'll blow his socks off! We could make money on that idea. Now how to introduce Chaos Theory? All those graphs are based on imaginary numbers (aside - Electricians/Electrical Engineers use j for Sqrt(-1) because i is current - question - why to they need sqrt(-1) at all? How does i/j apply to the real world?). Well how about imaginary money which cancels out when you multiply it by itself? (or reverts to it's inventor).

How about probability? As in Heads I win and Tails you lose. Sounds a bit like the futures market to me. Ah - those pesky derivatives again - because that's what you really need in a food chain isn't it, something that lets you make money off something you'll never see and never have to pay storage costs for. No non-mathematician understands probability properly anyway so you could get away with anything. Chance of a Hurricane stripping all the Oranges off the trees in Florida? No idea. How sure are we to get all that coffee into Starbucks this week seeing as the ship carrying it might well get boarded by pirates? Not a clue. We'll makes fortune. That's your Breakfast Uncertainty Principle sorted. I certainly do know where I am AND how fast I am going thank you very much.

OK, it's not as rigorous as Doctor Bunting might want for a humerus skit this Christmas but it's been fun. Remember - I am the ghost of Christmas future perfect subjunctive - I will show you what would have happened to you, were you not to have changed your ways. Not original I will admit and not quite as funny as The Deputy Prime Minister's Practical Joke at the Expense of The Ex-Lady McCartney (look it up you lazy tyke).

Nelson - The best Graphic Novel Ever - Probably

I came across this when looking up something about Posy Simmonds. There is slight similarity to One Day in that each "chapter" represents a day, slightly more than one-a-year, in the life of Nel Baker, spanning from her birth in the late sixties to the present day. However the real twist is that each section is drawn by a separate comic-artist, in a wide-range of styles covering child-like scrawls to ultra-realistic. I bought this this morning (didn't see Leonard, Sheldon or any of the rest of them at The Comic Book Store) and finished it this evening, which isn't enough to catch the subtleties of the drawings but I'll probably be reading it again straight away, especially after reading the afterword which says that there is a jigsaw hidden throughout the story, an interlocking set of clues. The real beauty of this is that the whole thing seems properly held together. Nel develops properly as a person in a way that is lacking in novels written by a single person. A real triumph. Buy it!

Late Arrival to the debate

RAW Image Left - HDR Composite Right

At last I've managed to do some HDR merging. Now there is a debate about whether an HDR image created from edited RAW images based on a single RAW original count as true HD. Well the one above is from one image duplicated four times and exposed two stops under and two over. It's not quite like those gaudy images that clutter up the more gee-whizzy photo sites; it actually looks more real. The argument against this is that you can't drag more information out of an image than already exists but I always thought that RAW images contained the actual value of light which fell on the CCD and is processed into the stored images to simulate a film exposure. I may be wrong but it seems to work. I'm going to experiment with a comparison between a true set of five exposures and a single one to see what the final result is. Watch this space.

As Any Fule Kno ...

... or Hello Clouds - Hello Sky.

It Comes to us All

Yet another Curse of The Oldie (which of course is really statistics rather than anything genuinely supernatural) with the passing of Ronald Searle. Of course the TV news will illustrate the sad news with St. Trinian's in all its guises and ignore the great Masterpiece that is Molesworth. As the author of the piece linked behind the picture says, Molesworth is unfilmable - not least because any mention of Molesworth 2 would have most of the audience wondering when the first film came out. The Gerunds will be distraught tonight I imagine.

There is a more serious side to Ronald Searle in that he survived the worst that humans can throw at fellow humans. See this collection of drawings including some of his time as a POW on the Burma Railway.