:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Thursday, May 15, 2008 ::

Spoem

Lovely example of spam poetry just received:
good uih f Girls die knowledge move quotient confess beautiful learning brush blackboard snail memory job stay summer.
[url removed] whistle such flame answer began

Labels: Literature

:: Dan 15.5.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"A little piece of trivia I didn't know, apparently Stanley Kubrick asked Roger Waters if he could use music from Pink Floyd's 'Atom Heart Mother' for Clockwork Orange. Someone's re-imagined what the opening sequence would have looked like if he'd said yes and this is the result." [via grom]

Labels: Art, Film, Literature, Music

:: Dan 12.5.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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A CAPTCHA (IPA: /?kæpt??/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine that the response is not generated by a computer. The process involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

Those things piss me off. I fail them far too often. If I were a character in a Philip K. Dick story it would be the first sign I'm not actually human, as I believe I am, but either an automaton, simulacrum, or a figment of my own or someone else's imagination. I'm pretty sure I'm not a character in a book but can't rule out the other four.

Labels: IT, Literature, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 12.5.08 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Arthur Clarke's 2001 Diary
"Excerpted from Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke,
New American Library (New York), 1972."
[via lmg]

Labels: Literature, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 2.5.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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The Penguin Blog on book blurbs and the new issues of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm with cover art by Shepard Fairey
[via natali]

Labels: Art, graffiti, Literature

:: Dan 24.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Jesus Could Have Walked on Ice

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.

The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.

Looking at temperature records of the Mediterranean Sea surface and using analytical ice and statistical models, scientists considered a small section of the cold freshwater surface of the lake.

The results suggest temperatures dropped to [-4 degrees C] during one of the two cold periods 2,500 –1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.

Labels: Environment, Literature, Religion, science

:: Dan 22.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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The Guardian, the newspaper that loves The Fall more than any other, prints extracts from Mark E. Smith's autobiography Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith, to be published by Viking on April 24
Part 1 and part 2

Labels: Literature, Music

:: Dan 16.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I guess this is a meme in the original sense of the word. It shows how an idea has started in one place and been built on, developed and evolved by others. Traditionalists would call it a conversation.

From Octopus99

Dominic Zero says:
"I actually lost interest in Alias after Season 1 largely because for a hard-nosed uber-agent working undercover she seemed to spend an awful lot of the time crying and getting upset. Either that or she was in jeans and a tee shirt the whole time once her contract had been renewed and I no was longer fished in. Everyone knows female undercover agents have to dress up as either prostitutes or pole dancers or goths at least half the time. Just ask Heather Locklear."

El Duderino says:
"Actually if I ran an undercover espionage agency I would only hire hot chicks and dress them in rubber and lingerie. I mean it makes fucking sense, innit? Then I'd pray to god all the targets hung out at fetish parties. They'd really stand out in Safeway."

I say:
"Everyone knows they do. It comes with the territory. To end up in that line of work you have to take pleasure in role-play, dressing up in uniforms (sometimes cross-dressing), and knowing there is a serious threat of torture around every corner. How could you end up in that career if you weren't a fetishist? It just make sense."

Labels: blogs, Fetish, Literature, meme, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 14.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Couple of interesting posts over on Null Device.

Can India's most powerful black magician follow through with his assertion that he can kill a person within three-minutes using powerful black magic? An atheist volunteer proved otherwise.

Sounds like something that the US Military psy-corp should be considering.

Meanwhile the 'US Department of Homeland Security convenes a group of science fiction writers, dubbed "SIGMA", to brainstorm ideas for defending the nation; writers, instead, go off on bizarre tangents.'

Labels: Goats, Literature, Magic, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 27.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Conversations with a science visionary
Clarke's three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
   
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Labels: Literature, RIP, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 20.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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As spotted by Bristle in the comments of the last post:

[amazon]

I'm also intrigued by this:


[amazon]

"Thanks for your reviews of our book,"A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits." This introduction to some of the world's most enchanting, weird and powerful spirits is intended to observe them in action in their natural habitats. Rather than separate the species by religious tradition, ethnicity, national boundaries or time, we opted to place them side-by-side and see how similar their fangs, talons, lore, and bad habits might be when in Forest, Mountain or Domicile anywhere in the history of humankind. We are a mother and daughter team, both writers, who share a love of mythology and who hold graduate degrees in Religious Studies and in Cultural Anthropology respectively. We hope that the readers of this work find these creatures as fabulous and informative as we did. For each entry, there is a "Dispelling and Disarming" section just in case! The universal cure is this: Hold them up to the light and see them for what they are, then show them Love and Compassion and the'll be blown away."

I don't believe in any of these fairy stories of demons or angles or gods or leprechauns or unicorns - yes, your God is in that list too - and a field guide to studying them seems ridiculous. I'm tempted to buy it for the Ecologists in the office so they can look out for them on site. File it along with all of their bat identification books as so on. Yet this sentence suddenly made it more interesting: "Rather than separate the species by religious tradition, ethnicity, national boundaries or time, we opted to place them side-by-side and see how similar their fangs, talons, lore, and bad habits might be." That's a very telling exercise that may help people see to the root of the psychology that created these theories in the first place.

Labels: Art, Literature, psychology

:: Dan 11.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Free Books On the Internet, Courtesy Freakonomics
[via researchbuzz]

...and...

dipiti - A Search Engine For Message Boards
[also via researchbuzz]

Labels: Literature, Search

:: Dan 2.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Morning. I am offline at the moment. My PC died last Friday (power surge wrote off the power supply and mother-board and due to age rendered processor and RAM useless) so only have internet access in work, which I obviously try to minimise. Webmail is blocked. Should anyone really want to contact me for some reason, I can still pick up Flickr and Murdockspace messages, but not Facebook. I bought a new PC from yoyotech last night. Thanks to Spoksey for specing that up for me. Normal service will resume soon.

News

From Sunday's Independent:
"At present, Britain does not routinely fingerprint airline passengers (see page 3 for the US attitude). But starting two months from tomorrow, several million travellers each year will have their fingerprints, and photograph, taken twice before being allowed aboard a domestic flight."
The referenced article about the US attitude is here.
I mailed this to a security consultant friend to find out how it came about. Apparently it's down to commercial reasons, so every one gets to access one set of shops. Wooo.

Rambert Dance Company's ‘Britney Breakdown’
(I did some acoustic work for Rambert a couple of years ago. Lovely people.)
"Rambert Dance Company's ever-popular Season of New Choreography is an exciting opportunity to see brand new work created by some of Rambert's versatile dancers. The company has a track record of nurturing young choreographers. One of these is Hubert Essakow, who has commissioned a new work from Richard Thomas for Adey to sing live with the dancers. You won't be surprised to know that she gets to sing the word "arse" quite a bit."
(You may remember Richard Thomas from sitting behind the piano on TMWRNJ and as the person who provided the music for and co-wrote Jerry Springer the Opera with Stewart Lee.)

Spotted

Filthy, muck-strewn white van on the M5 on whose back door a mischievous passing finger had scrolled, "Cleaned by the NHS."

Busses

Chatting to "That'll be the Day: The Musical: The Fleece woman" on the bus stop yesterday morning. Tells me about her job then asks what I do. I say I work for an engineering practice in the centre. "Is that an admin role?" she asks. What!? Look at me. Glasses. Beard. Carrying laptop bag. I'm an engineer you cheeky cow.

I sat on the bus today, reading The God Delusion, next to someone reading the Bible. Book II of Psalms to be precise. What a wonderfully secular society we live in.

Labels: Art, Literature, News, Personal, Secuirty, Spotted, Travel

:: Dan 31.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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A recent technical discussion in the office was sidetracked by discussions about the age of parts of the UK motorway network. Google to the rescue, we found ukmotorwayarchive.org, "the online encyclopaedia of UK motorway heritage."

Not only did it answer all of our questions, it even presented an animated time history of network (very slow loading).

Meanwhile, over at Chris's British Road Directory we find the intriguing C-road hunt and the brilliantly annotated work in progress that is the Motorway drive simulator. I recommend the simulation of the M5 Northbound from Exminster in particular, where the petrol is only 85p/ltr and where the first "Tiredness kills Take a break" sign is annotated "Ten miles between junctions here - it's a long way to Bristol and most people are going all the way. Please don't drift off!"

Stupidly geeky as it is, it is still strangely fascinating. I've often wondered if such a map existed as I've been driving, but until now never bothered to look it up. Much as we like to take the piss out of the boring old gits in Civils in the office the engineers' fascination with such systems cannot be denied. In Microserfs Douglas Copland has the computer programmers pouring over 1970s freeway design manuals, quoting aloud from them to each other. There he touched an important part of the engineers psyche that transcends discipline.

Labels: Computing, Engineering, Literature, Maps, Travel

:: Dan 23.1.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Sorry to geek out way beyond my normal bounds by posting about stamps. The quote below shows why I found this interesting.

Bond stamps: From Ruislip with love

"Each stamp offers a potted history of spy-novel iconography. The Pan jackets, with their understated secret codes and visual metaphors (Dr No's spider web, From Russia With Love's Fabergé egg, the Spirit of Ecstasy from Goldfinger's Rolls-Royce) were replaced by crass pictures of the spy hero centre-stage, in action, in the sea, and on a bar stool – themselves to be replaced by the Penguin Viking covers, beautiful retro images of the books' real selling propositions: chicks and baddies."



More images: Ian Fleming photos - Daylife

Labels: Art, Literature

:: Dan 30.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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As usual, here's my end-of-year reading list, of all the books I read this year, in order:

The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
Secret Underground Bristol - Sally Watkins
The Crack in Space - Philip K Dick
Something Like Fire - Lyn Cook et al
Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson
Chocky - John Wyndham
Prelude to Space - Arthur C Clark
An Individual Note of Music Sound and Electronics - Daphne Oram
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
Them: Adventures With Extremists - Jon Ronson
Clans of the Alphane Moon - Philip K Dick
Freakonomics - Levitt & Dubner
Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine - Norbert Wiener
Now Wait For Last Year - Philip K Dick
A Computer Called Leo: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer – Georgina Ferry
The Sleeper Awakes – H.G. Wells
Microserfs – Douglas Coupland
Archispeak: An Illustrated Guide to Architectural Terms – Tom Porter
Confessions of a Crap Artist – Philip K. Dick
No Logo – Naomi Klein
Extreme Ironing – Phil Shaw
Slaughter House Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K Dick
Solar Lottery - Philip K Dick
Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
Martian Time Slip – Philip K Dick (in progress)
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins (in progress)

Labels: Literature, Reading, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 29.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I've just finished reading The Road to Wigan Pier. It contains a selection of derogatory references to stereotypical Socialists and Liberals - who drive others away from their cause with their eccentricity - as 'creeping Jesus, sandal wearing, vegetarians.' These comments culminate in Chapter XI with this brilliant quote:

"Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus form another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity."

Things have changed a bit since the '30s haven't they.

Labels: Food, Humour, Literature

:: Dan 14.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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bldgblog on The future warehouse of unwanted books

Coincidentally I've been thinking about libraries recently. I was back up in Manchester over the weekend. As well as taking some time to do some Christmas shopping I made a point to take the time to wander around and take in the sights again, too see what has changed in the six years since I lived there. In places quite a lot had, in others it was reassuringly familiar. I loved wandering around Vinyl Exchange and Piccadilly Records and Afflecks Palace* again.

* Why is it full of 13 year olds? With their parents. Buying them pink studied off the hip belts. And that's just the boys.

After enjoying the refurbished Art Gallery and some bratwurst from the obligatory German market I found myself wandering into the central library for a look around (and to abuse the toilet facilities). I spent hours here as a student - the library, not the toilets - and love the building. An online student guide tells me it is "the largest local library in Britain, created in 1934 as a circular building based on Rome's Pantheon." So there you go. I'd love to spend a few hours in there with my camera. I'm fascinated by the odd little stairways all over the place, roped around the top as they descend into the floor, ending in a dark oak door marked "staff only" at the bottom.

John Rylands library is even more impressive in its Gothic splendour.

[more on architecture in Manchester]

With this fresh in mind I read the first link above and the related Guardian article - Inside the tomb of tomes

"This warehouse is being built to house the books and journals that no one wants. With the British Library's UK collection growing at a rate of 12.5km of shelf space a year, is the notion of the copyright library really sustainable?" [guardian]

"In other words, a relatively random piece of 100-year old legislation [the 1911 Copyright Act] has begun to exhibit architectural effects. These architectural effects include the production of huge warehouses in the damp commuter belts of outer London. These aren't libraries, of course; they're stockpiles. Text bunkers." [bldg blog]

It's a shame that this is what we have come to. At the exponential rate the data we produce is growing, how are we going to continue to store it? Digital storage seems the obvious answer but brings further problems with it.

"It's been estimated that €3bn are lost across Europe [over an unspecified time period] entirely due to bad management of digital files in libraries ... Would we have enough confidence to throw everything away? Would you?"
Rory McLeod, digital preservation manager at the British Library quoted in The Guardian

The Internet Archive sets about trying to solve the same problem for digital data.
"The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress."

Google Books is trying to get searchable versions of books from many great libraries online.

We are warned that Data growth outruns ability to manage it [Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2002]

Wikipedia: Modelling Wikipedia's growth

And then how do we decide what data to store? Said copyright act states that everything printed should be stored. Do we need to do the same online? Right down to the live journals and the cat photos and the porn? Maybe so.

"The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is, for the first time, opening its extensive collection of pornographic materials to the public. Part of the contents of the forbidden section, officially known as "l'Enfer" (Hell) and consisting of pornography and erotica from the 17th to 19th centuries."
[via null device]

"Only bona fide academic researchers have been allowed access to the "L'Enfer" collection until now. The omnipresence of erotic or pornographic images in the modern world has persuaded the French national library that it is permissible, finally, to open the doors of Hell.

"The exhibition reveals some interesting, historical differences in erotic tastes. The earliest, 17th and 18th century, material dwells on the straightforward pleasures of the flesh. The celebration of the pleasures of pain – imposed or submitted – begins with the Marquis of Sade in the late 18th century. Pornography from the French Revolutionary period is mostly political, especially scurrilous allegations about the sexual appetite and imagination of Marie Antoinette. The 19th century concentrates on the blazing sexuality lying below the stern conservative or domestic exterior of life."
[via the independent]

If this too needs to be saved, then this all has knock on effects on the amount of server space required, which I thought about writing about until bldgblog saved me the effort with this follow-up post - Server Rooms and the Future of Humanism - which likens the environmental impact of server farm to the carbon footprint of an SUV.

"Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?"

This brings me to further musing on the subject of data organisation. I've noticed that the job title Information Architect seems to be growing in popularity. Architects love to describe their discipline as "the most public of all art forms" (I believe this quote is attributable but I can’t remember to whom). It seems obvious that someone involved in designing computer networks would hope some of that glamour would rub off through use of the word.

One day this may not seem as jarring a comparison to the layman as it seems now. I'm sure if I stopped someone on the street outside now and asked them what an architect does the response would be something like, "they designs buildings and stuff, dun 'em?" [can you tell I'm in Bristol as I write?] Yet if I asked what an Information Architect does the responses will probably range from "someone who designs computers?" to "something to do with the internet?" to stunned silence.

As we move towards a future where our virtual existence is increasingly blurred with meat space will we increasingly see the people behind these systems as creating a form of public art? "That GUI is very modernist in style don't you think." "I like the gothic phone system they have in that building." "I though I'd add some Art Deco influences to this database." And so on. I've just re-appropriated existing stylistic names, when logically on new names created from no on will be appropriated in that way, but I hope you see where I'm coming from. This could be a two way flow, ideas from IT could be integrated in architecture too, creating skinable buildings, hyperlinking lifts, rss feeds of the people passing through reception, but I'm sure things like that are being tried already.

Labels: architecture, Literature

:: Dan 4.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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You find some enlightening reading material lying around in the office kitchen. Among the usual quick turnaround dross like a couple of days worth of Metros and my gig flyers there is usually some material with more staying power. The Amnesty magazines I've dropped there have always stayed and I know have lead to at least one sign-up (do I get a commission?). The FT appears from time to time. Strategic Risk magazine is currently liberally littered around the place, displaying headlines like "Kidnap – a booming industry"

My favourite find to date has been Chief Executive Officer magazine. Now, my understating of business organisation is not as clear as it might be - the view is obscured somewhat from my lowly position - but am I not right in thinking most businesses have just the one CEO?

Who left this here and for who to read? Surely it is only of interest to the person who bought (subscribed to?) it and a couple of people who are after their job. You'd think they wouldn't want to give them any pointers. The thing itself is bizarre. It's in the same high gloss finish as in-flight magazines, rather than the matt finish I like and am used to as is the current trend in fashion and graphics magazines. It's full of profiles of up and coming CEOs and statistical breakdowns of average CEO ages by industry (no mention of sex though). My favourite part of all of this though, is the wind down section in the back dedicated to improving your golf swing. No stereotypes reinforced there then. I'm not sure what I can add to that.

Labels: Humour, Literature

:: Dan 3.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I've collected up a lot of links that I have little to add to recently, so here's a link dump of things you might find interesting, useful or humorous:

The definitive Lorem Ipsum resource

Microsoft error messages in haiku form

The blog of "unnecessary" quotation marks

Vector Magic: image to vector converter

The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You
U.S. centric. I've never heard of most of these chains. And wtf is this at #54: "Jack in the Box Sausage Biscuit"? The mind boggles.
[via slashfood]

The Honeypot, West St, Bedminster

[via hijack]

For the musicians:
Octavcat remix competition
Expired Two Loan Swordsmen remix competition, but you can still grab samples if you want them. (Of course, you then shouldn’t use them.)
Virtual cct bent speak & spell

Labels: Electronic Music, Food, graphics, Humour, Literature, Typography

:: Dan 8.11.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Gearing up for the special edition directors cut Wired have this Q&A:
Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined
via null device, who also pulls some pullquotes out of it:

J. Craig Venter
Geneticist
"The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that people want a slave class. As I imagine the potential of engineering the human genome, I think, wouldn't it be nice if we could have 10 times the cognitive capabilities we do have? But people ask me whether I could engineer a stupid person to work as a servant. I've gotten letters from guys in prison asking me to engineer women they could keep in their cell. I don't see us, as a society, doing that."

Doesn't this miss the entire point of the story. I don't think Dick ever intended any of his novels to be accurate representation of the future. He only wrote science-fiction because it was the only medium through which he could get his ideas published. The story is actually about the philosophical arguments about what is human.

From wikipedia:
Dick's inspiration for the central plot point involving androids which are indistinguishable from humans came from specific factors in his own life experience. First and foremost, he could not accept that the people who committed atrocities such as the Holocaust during World War II were truly human. He felt that they must be inhuman monsters who merely appeared to be human. While this was initially a figurative philosophical concept, Dick was a user of amphetamine, which he used to fuel his writing. As a result, he developed a high level of paranoia, and his notion about people appearing to be human when they were not became more literal.[citation needed]

Admittedly this is exactly the type of uncited reference that makes wikipedia unreliable, but having read it matches my understanding of it of the point he was trying to make.

Sci-Fi that tries to accurately predict the future is often boring. [cf. most Arthur C. Clark] Sci-Fi that asks 'what if?' is what is really interesting. The what if doesn’t have to be plausible, it's just a platform. It allows analysis of current thinking, be it scientific, philosophical, political, religious etc, from an outsiders point of view. That’s what makes it interesting as a medium.

Labels: Film, Literature, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 28.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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L.A.Times: Philip K. Dick's children work to ensure the influential author's cinematic legacy
[via lmg]

Labels: Literature, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 19.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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I'm a sucker for anything related to War Of The Worlds, from H.G. Wells ground breaking novel to Jeff Waye's stunning musical interpretation. However, I've never been a 'graphic novel' person and this Dark Horse Comics ecomic version is a little unscrupulous with Well's text. Still worth a look though.
[via grom]

Labels: graphics, Literature

:: Dan 12.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Steampunk
Originally uploaded by pashasha.


dev.null quotes the Boston Globe's article on steampunk. Well worth a read if you're into moddified hardware or any of the science-fiction that inspires it (Verne, Wells, Gibson, Sterling, Stevenson etc.). Make sure you check the pictures, otherwise you'll just get the impression that all these people do it make up ridiculous names for things (eg "The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine") [login required on the BG site, some photos on Flickr here].

Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is also noted as an inspiration and it happens to be on BBC 2 tonight. The film is co-written by Tom Stoppard, which reminds me I meant to link to this story about Stoppard's time working on The Bristol Evening World, published from the very building I'm sat in as I type this.

P.S. Pashasha also has a great set of "Music Things" pictures.

Labels: Cyberpunk, Flickr, IT, Literature, Mods, Sci-Fi

:: Dan 29.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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There is thunder and lighting outside and the rain is so heavy it's setting off car alarms. And I'm off to Glastonbury in the morning. (Via Sheffield.) I won't be back until Monday. I would normally ask Dash / Skip the Budgie to fill in while I'm away but he'll be there too. I know Spokesy and Popcorn are both busy people but maybe if you're lucky maybe they'll pull something out of their asses. In the meantime I recommend you watch the festival coverage on the BBC and remember that they have an editorial policy of only showing the most boring middle-of-the-road tat so as to prevent too many people exploding in a fit of jealously. Or you could just laugh at all of the footage of miserable people trudging though mud. It look like that's the least of my worries.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)	Moderate
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Low
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Moderate
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

Take the Dante's Divine Comedy Inferno Test

Labels: Glastonbury, Literature

:: Dan 19.6.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Andy Farnell recently asked me, "Do you know about the work of the Barrons (Forbidden Planet) I'm trying to get hold of any research material on these kooky pioneers of "snuff audio". If you know of anyone who has schematics of their self-destructing synthesisers please gimme a shout."

If you can jump in here please do so.

Now, my knowledge of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack extended to knowing that it was a pioneering piece of work in electronic music and that it still sounds amazing today. Unfortunately I don't even own a copy, although I do have Jack Dangers brilliant reworking. After an initial google the first place to go looking is of course Wikipedia. Here I find a page about the couple, Louis and Bebe, and their work.

It's a fascinating story and by the time I'd read that I was just as interested to know about how they worked as Andy. I noticed the reference in there to a book Lewis took his circuit building inspiration from; Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). A quick search on this and I found that it is still in print, see Amazon link below. Wanting to keep it authentic (and cheep) I bought a second hand copy of the second edition (1961) and awaited its arrival. (In the mean time the Forbidden Planet DVD and OST CD were added to my wishlist.)




When it arrived I found a book absolutely packed with the level of mathematics I thought I'd left behind at university and nothing in the way of circuit diagrams. I still read it in the hope of finding some insight, and struggled through the maths, which although I could just about follow and found it difficult to derive meaning from. There is still interesting material in there but something aimed at a more novice audience would have been better.

Below I've typed up my notes from reading it. They will probably only be of interest to someone reading a copy of the book themselves, someone who wants to know how much it would tell them about electronics and audio, and myself as there are a few things I wanted to research further. Page numbers refer to the 1961 edition.

Blurb: "...as readable by the layman as the trained scientist..." John B. Thurston, The Saturday Review of Literature.
p72. "We now wish to define [the intergral from minus infinity to infinity of K(tor) d epsilon (t, gamma)] The obvious thing to do would be to define this as a Stieltjes' integral, but [epsilon] is a very irregular fuction of t and does not make such a definition possible." Ha. Of course! Why didn't I see that?
Do you see what I'm up against here?
p86. On electronic circuits: "The details of its construction are more for the specialist in electrical engineering than for the reader of this book. They may be found elsewhere.¹
"1. We refer especially to recent papers by Dr Y.W.Lee."
'Recent' in this case is thought to refer to 1948.
p98 "In this book, we have avoided mathematical symbolism and mathematical technique as far as possible" Lies!
p102. Fig 2 shows a block diagram of a simple feedback circuit, much as you would find in any analogue electronics textbook.
p112. Figs 3 & 4, as above.
p114. Fig 6, as above with addition of interesting filter system. [Will add scan, please check back]
p145. Explanation and definition of a minority report as a fault finding system within parallel computing systems.
p142 a. Reference to correspondence with Bristol University (also on p199)
p142 b. Contains a lobotomy joke! You don't hear those everyday.
p146. Quotes Lewis Carol.
p154. Section about people with red hair and stutters (would this by PC today!?) plus musing on extinction.
pp158-161. Thoughts on free markets and game theory (although it is not referred to as such), and the problem with capitalism.
p162. Refers to Western exploitation of the "flesh-pot of Egypt." Funny how things don't change.
p164 & 171. Notes on chess computers. Predictions seem to have been accurate.

Incidentally, I didn't only start taking notes half way through. There really wasn't anything worth noting in the first half apart from a disparaging remark about scientific fields becoming too specialised and acoustics given as an example.

Frequently used terms I decided I ought to look up:
Gestalt
A priori
A fortiori

And finally, a reference to the Rorschach Ink Blot test inspired me to have a look for the images, as even when studying psychology I can't recall actually seeing them. The disclaimer on the above site explains why (scroll down the images if you're still curious).

Labels: Cybernetics, Electronic Music, Electronics, Literature, psychology, science

:: Dan 12.6.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Flatland [full text] by Edwin Abbott
+ more about it
"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott, still popular among mathematics and computer science students, and considered useful reading for people studying topics such as the concept of other dimensions. As a piece of literature, Flatland is respected for its satire on the social hierarchy of Victorian society."

Labels: Literature, Maths

:: Dan 15.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Popmatters interviews Steven Johnson about his new book The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London [paperback due in Oct]. The interview alone brings up some fascinating ideas and questions. If the book is anywhere near as inspiring as it sounds it'll be a good read. Remember, this is from the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software so it should be good. Taking the "long zoom" look at society and networks. More intriguing in the connections it draws and more robust an approach than lateral thinking will ever get you. The Ghost Map concerns itself with the story of the cholera outbreak in Victorian London, allowing it to analyze that time of amazing flux in the same way Gibson and Sterling attempted (in fiction form) in The Difference Engine, although their attempt failed to pull it all together in the end. Evolving maps have always fascinated me too. The recent exhibition of London maps at the British Museum was mesmerising. I'm going to end this post now before I meander too much.
[via lmg]

Labels: Books, Literature, Maps, science

:: Dan 9.5.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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New York Times article
Wikipedia entry

In These Times - Cold Turkey
'Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: "Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.'
Done.
[via Heartache with Hard Work]

Labels: Literature, RIP

:: Dan 12.4.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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