Robert Silverberg wrote this:

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

David Selig
Selig Studies 101, Prof. Selig
November 10, 1976

Entropy as a Factor in Everyday Life

Entropy is defined in physics as a mathematical expression of the degree to which the energy of a thermodynamic system is so distributed as to be unavailable for conversion into work. In more general metaphorical terms, entropy may be seen as the irresistible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness. That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.
The great American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics – the law that defines the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system – to chemistry. It was Gibbs who most firmly enunciated the principle that disorder spontaneously increases as the universe grows older. Among those who extended Gibbs' insights into the realm of philosophy was the brilliant mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who declared, in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, 'As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.
Thus Wiener hails living things in general and human beings in particular as heroes in the war against entropy – which he equates in another passage with the war against evil: 'This random element, this organic incompleteness (that is, the fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe), is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil.' Human beings, says Wiener, carry on anti-entropic processes. We have sensory receptors. We communicate with one another. We make use of what we learn from one another. Therefore we are something more than mere victims of the spontaneous spread of universal chaos. 'We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of the larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information recieved.' There is feedback, in other words. Through communication we learn to control our environment, and, he says, 'In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency … for entropy to increase.' In the very long run entropy must inevitably nail us all; in the short run we can fight back. 'We are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world's death.'
But what if a human being turns himself, inadvertently or by choice, into an isolated system?
A hermit, say. He lives in a dark cave. No information penetrates. He eats mushrooms. They give him just enough energy to keep going, but otherwise he lacks inputs. He's forced back on his own spiritual and mental resources, which he eventually exhausts. Gradually the chaos expands in him, gradually the forces of entropy seize possession of this ganglion, that synapse. He takes in a decreasing amount of sensory data until his surrender to entropy is complete. He ceases to move, to grow, to respire, to function in any way. This condition is known as death.
One doesn't have to hide in a cave. One can make an interior migration, locking oneself away from the life-giving energy sources. Often this is done because it appears that the energy sources are threats to the stability of the self. Indeed, inputs do threaten the self: a push usually will upset equilibrium. However, equilibrium itself is a threat to the self, though this is frequently overlooked. There are married people who strive fiercely to reach equilibrium. They seal themselves off, clinging to one another and shutting out the rest of the universe, making themselves into a two-person closed system from which all vitality is steadily and inexorably expelled by the deadly equilibrium they have established. Two can perish as well as one, if they are sufficiently isolated from everything else. I call this the monogamous fallacy. My sister Judith said she left her husband because she felt herself dying, day by day, while she was living with him. Of course, Judith's a slut.
The sensory shutdown is not always a willed event, naturally. It happens to us whether we like it or not. If we don't climb into the box ourselves, we'll get shoved in anyway. That's what I mean about entropy inevitably nailing us all in the long run. No matter how vital, how vigorous, how world-devouring we are, the inputs dwindle as time goes by. Sight, hearing, touch, smell – everything goes, as good old Will S. said, and we end up sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Sans everything. Or, as the same clever man put it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.
I offer myself as a case in point. What does this man's sad history reveal? An inexplicable diminution of once-remarkable powers. A shrinkage of the inputs. A small death, endured while he still lives. Am I not a casualty of the entropic wars? Do I not now dwindle into stasis and silence before your very eyes? Is my distress not evident and poignant? Who will I be, when I have ceased to be myself? I am dying the heat death. A spontaneous decay. A random twitch of probability undoes me. And I am made into nothingness. I am becoming cinders and ash. I will wait here for the broom to gather me up.

* * *

That's very eloguent, Selig. Take an A. Your writing is clear and forceful and you show an excellent grasp of the underlying philosophical issues. You may go to the head of the class. Do you feel better now?

The North Sea Circle, in 7 parts:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Click here to enter a world of wonder and delight
Note that each picture leads to a photo album, and the "File1, File2..." bits lead you to more albums.

And in the early evening, when it's cold and the sun is low in the sky, and you can see the tops of the buildings outlined sharply in silhouette against it as it changes colour slowly...

I do my duty to posterity
today I kept a diary for the History Matters project. however, the (incidentally very annoying and buggy) site does not allow diaries to be longer than 4,000 characters, and since I've written it, and my florid prose extended to closer to 6,000 characters, and I think it may be of interest, here follows the diary reproduced in full.

I was gradually woken up by my radio alarm clock, but lay in bed listening to it for a while.
I slept through the news, but the next programme was about how Iraq was escalating into civil war. There was also an announcement about HistoryMatters, which is why I am writing this now.

Being a quite idle person, I stayed in bed with my iBook propped on my chest, and watched the rest of a video demonstrating the NeXTSTEP operating system from 1992 that I'd begun watching the previous night. Commented to my friend E on MSN Messenger about how it exhibits how little operating systems have come on in the last fifteen years.
I also talked to her about a girl we both knew well at my university, and how she won't stop worrying about getting a decent job after graduating, about having enough money to put the deposit down for a house's mortgage, about having enough money to retire, even about having enough money to send her children to university. We think that this worry finds its origin in her parents. She's an only child. E said that she was glad of her parents, who wished her only to end up doing what made her happy. She is currently studying a taught MSc with no funding grant.

I had missed college breakfast by now, and finally got out of bed and went to wash in my bathroom. After this I spent a while reading about this and that on the internet: NeXTSTEP, the hardware it was built to run on, etc. until it was time for me to head off to my 11 o'clock lecture on quantum field theory.

The lecture was fairly slow-going; discussing the properties of Lorentz transformations and the Lorentz group. The only lecture course not to have got off to a slow start so far this year has been Solitons, which has been lurching real horror show through solution methods to various wave systems: the d'Alembertian and Korteweg-de Vries wave solutions, sine-Gordon kink solutions... and all in the first few lectures.

Just before going for lunch, I received an email circulated to all colleges, asking if whoever stole the dummy heron from the science site's pond could please return it. This put me in doubt as to whether i saw it standing at the edge of our college lake, but half-way to the dining hall I remembered that, no, the one I saw was a real one, because it flew away.
In the lunch queue I was approached by a member of the students' union, and signed a petition to freeze the college accommodation fees, as they have gone up 50% over the last five years, whilst student loans have themselves gone up by only 15% in the last ten. It is now the general consensus that it is cheaper to live in a privately rented house in the city and buy your own food than to live within the colleges.

The next lecture after lunch was on quantum optics, and writing this now, at 7:30 in the evening, I can't remember what it was about. Oh yes, at the start of the lecture he gave us a handout on the polarisation of light.

I felt a tiredness come upon me during the lecture, and thought that if I went back to my room and lay down, I would go to sleep, and so that is what I did. I slept for about half an hour, drifting into wakefulness occasionally and checking the time, as I had another lecture, on quantum computing, at 4:15.

So, then, I went back down the road to the science site for the third time that day. I noticed that the road markings had recently been repainted, and the leaves were now beginning to fall from the trees in earnest. I also noticed, to my amusement, that the gnome that had been sitting on a little swing in the middle of the science site pond had been removed and the metal frame of the swing left forlorn and vacant; removed, one might infer, by the same vandals who stole the dummy heron.

I am afraid I can't remember much of what was in that lecture, either, except that it was about the interaction of a two-state quantum system with a light field, and oscillations called Rabi oscillations.

After that lecture it was nearly time for college dinner, so back to college I went, and wondered if perhaps I hadn't fully woken up from that nap I had earlier: thoughts, mostly of a vague and thematic nature, floated through my mind that were associated with dreams I'd had quite a while ago, and I could remember aspects of dreams which I thought I'd forgotten quite clearly.

The steps up to the dining hall were in the process of having the ends repainted white, the better to see them in the dark, presumably for health-and-safety reasons. My meal was slightly odd - noodles and sundry stir-fry vegetables, beans and mushrooms, all an unappetising brown colour which the menu assured was soy sauce; it appeared to be an unpopular choice of main course but I chose it because I had a hunch that it might actually taste pretty good, and so it did.

After that meal, which I ate alone as I couldn't spot any of the few people I know or have struck up a friendship with at college since the start of this, my fourth year at university, I wandered back to my room and all structure faded from my day; I sat in my room idly reading internet sites about the DarwinPorts project, OpenBSD, etc. etc. and not really talking to anyone over MSN Messenger.

I have some reading to do, for my MSci project, but I have yet to get down to it. I read a few sentences but they didn't sink in. Now it is 8:00; I can hear my corridor-mates getting ready to go out to somewhere. The bar, I suppose. I don't know; the other five people on my corridor are all one group of friends that appear to go everywhere together. I have ended up not having much to do with them.

I have several hours before i should go to bed. I could fill them with reading for my project, or socialising, but I am worried that I will do neither.


Postscript: Just to make this post not wholly depressing, as it turned out I ended up listening to music for a while then reading a fair few pages of the text, and then going out with the intention of getting a pint before last orders from the bar. Unfortunately I'd forgotten that tonight was the livers-out formal dinner, so the bar was packed to the rafters with lots of drunk people whom I'd never met in my life, so I bought some pear juice from the new "healthy" vending machine instead.

i was there when they were building it...
(unfinished)

i was there when they were building it, watching under uncomfortable grey skies as the tower was constructed; watching the hunks of grey metal hoisted into place and bolted together with a pneumatic hammering fit to wake the dead.
the building which, we know, was to become the tower of the exaltation of evil, housing on its lower floors the labyrinth of madness, and above, what no mortal may wot of and retain his wits...
and at the opening, as the smiling vice-chancellor cut the ribbon before the flicker-flicker of the newspaper photographers, it is said that a darkness fell over the city, and scores of miles around: that the doors of the tower had opened but a crack and palpably sucked something from the world, and down, down, where it was lost;
and since then, the men and women of science, hiding fitfully in the buildings round about, did never again utter truth to one another, and all further attempts to make sense of their world were confounded, and ruined, until every one of them became quite mad, and as the students and townspeople began to keep away from the site, seldom was anything heard of them again...

one early story to survive was that of the doom of professor dick abram, who entered the labyrinth after damian hampshire, carrying a ball of string. but it was found that even string did turn against him, tricking him into walking round in circles until he finally succumbed: the string was pulled out of the labyrinth in an attempt, far too late, to save the professor; what was found attached to the end, it is said, was a severed hand, clutched tight around it so that no man could prise his fingers away.

but of the fate of damian hampshire less is known. there were accounts of him being seen stalking the roof of the tower, and of his appearance having changed but subtly: a black circle of darkness about his head, and great shadows sprouting from his back, that looked a bit like wings... but who could trust such stories? for atop the tower was a ring of black flame, burning colder than the icy blasts of the ninth circle of hell, which chilled the very souls of men who walked near: and robbed them of all hope, and of their sight, and finally their wits; so that they crawled on their bellies, not uttering a sound, their breath ragged, their hands and knees raw, and bleeding...

The sentence "Keep it under your hat, old man." is not on the internet; I think it ought to be.

Things I didn't take pictures of recently:
> "GORTON GIRLS KNOW ALL THE WORDS TO CHAKA KHAN SONGS" - grafitti near manchester piccadilly station
> A chinese restaurant in maidenhead called "Wu-Tang"
> I remember thinking, "Murder," in the car. Watching dogs somersault through sprinklers on tiny lawns.
> Conkers in suburban Maidenhead lying unclaimed on the grass.
> She says there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters...
> A pub, visible from the the train near Birmingham New Street station, whose upper floors have fallen in, and have become home to some little birch trees.
> The striking depth and symmetry in the vista of Stockport from the viaduct

The Sandman: I got hooked. Bought volumes 2 and 3 today at the Leeds Corn Exchange. It's great, but i get through them far, far too quickly

Leeds Corn Exchange: a very different shopping centre. Very intense- so much colour and vibrancy in a small, oval-shaped building. Narrow raised walkways and steep steps. The roof is dizzing and disorienting: criss-crossing geodesic ironwork coming to two points at each end.

Leeds: I've never seen the city centre before: the wide streets, the harmony of victorian and modern architecture, the street entertainers. It is quite beautiful.

Leaping on a train bound for Manchester Victoria at Leeds Station: won't get you back to Huddersfield. You wanted Manchester Piccadilly.

X6: a limited-stop bus service between Bradford Interchange and Huddersfield.

"Guided bus" lanes coming out of Bradford: not quite as cool to ride down them as you'd expect, but still

Some things-

Topological solitons in a swimming pool

Short article on the puritan work ethic
A book that I need to finish reading, about the life of a Yorkshire farm worker

Today, in a manner to which I am, worryingly, becoming accustomed, I managed to slip unchallenged onto this project on cosmic strings. I am going to be spending one-third of my time next year working with two women who I am terrified are going to find me out straight away.

Hopefully it'll be fun and rewarding though!

When entering random text into somewhere

Emma: "apple banana hopscotch"
Katherine: "Quack rainbow, pineapple"
Jimmy: "Lemon juice is like snot but acidic"

I consider this to be worth recording, and this list might grow. It's taken several years to gather the information recorded so far.

[[The Oracle would like to know what you think of the color Blue.]]

Five pounds fifty in change, exactly,
a library card on its date of expiry.

A postcard stamped,
unwritten, but franked,

a pocket size diary slashed with a pencil
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.

A brace of keys for a mortise lock,
an analogue watch, self winding, stopped.

A final demand
in his own hand,

a rolled up note of explanation
planted there like a spray carnation

but beheaded, in his fist.
A shopping list.

A giveaway photograph stashed in his wallet,
a keepsake banked in the heart of a locket.

no gold or silver,
but crowning one finger

a ring of white unweathered skin.
That was everything.


Exams soon

analysis is love

http://212.78.76.244/dayvancowboy/boc-dayvancowboy.mov

tell application "ColorSyncScripting"
set display profile of display 1 to profile "Color LCD"
end tell

I will say something on this blog, eventually. I just haven't had anything to say, for ages...

A quick and easy way to have your environment variables set up properly in Mac OS X's X11- create a file in your home called .xinitrc with the following lines:

source ~/.profile
source /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

EDIT: That doesn't work properly at all.
The problem is that apple's X11 launches your shell as a non-login shell, which inherits a different $PATH variable. Personally i've just symlinked ~/.bashrc to ~/.profile . If you've got more complicated stuff than say paths in your .profile you'll probably need two separate files.

Waitrose

Bread same.
Milk same
Tall orange similar- £1.15/litre
Appears not to be brick orange.
Bigger choice of brand stuff which costs
  roughly the same
Lots of beer.
No cheap stuff
cheapest cheese £5.49/kg
Bagged-up salad is expensive.

SCOTCH EGGS £1.35 for TWO!
Meat in general costs a
    fucking fortune
HARDLY ANY QUORN -
 small bags of chichen-style pieces, and sausages.
beef & chicken-style burgers. That's it.

Lots of British produce.
Vegetables appear more
  expensive (don't know for sure)
Tomatoes       £1.09/kg
Onions             59p/kg
New Potatoes    95p/kg
Peppers (Bag)   £2.66/kg
          loose    £3.89/kg

Sushi- free samples

Cheapest ice cream £2.99
              for 2l tub

You can get sushi in ready-to-eat
  servings like sandwiches.
Costs a fortune.

10. The Earth quakes and the heavens rattle;
the beasts of nature flock together and the
nations of men flock apart; volcanoes usher up
heat while elsewhere water becomes ice and
melts; and then on other days it just rains.
11. Indeed do many things come to pass.
      HBT; The Book of Predictions, Chap. 19

Not wanting to awkwardly collapse into political opinions here, but i think that this article is worth reading and neatly describes the way I've been thinking education will go for a while now. Ultimately a bad direction, because the whole state school system is in danger of collapse.

In other news, there have been freak quantities of bilberries this year. I think the birds aren't eating them, or something, but we've managed to easily collect several times the usual harvest, without even going beyond the track up from our house. I don't know why things like this simultaneously unnerve me and give me a strange thrill of adventure.
A week or so ago i was up on the moors somewhere in Derbyshire, and noticed in an old quarry that you wouldn't know was there from the road was a congregation of african-looking people, male and female, some mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all in brilliant white robes. They started walking in single file out of the quarry, singing quietly, and their robes billowed in the wind, with the grassy wilderness stretching out behind them as far as I could see. I've got no pictures, I'm afraid: the battery in my camera ran out at just the wrong time. Which makes too much sense.

not again.

Bill Bryson > Patrick Stewart. Discuss.

Interesting things that happened on this day:

• Sophie Germain, a notable female mathematician who made important advancements in number theory (in particular, proving Fermat's last theorem in the case where n=5) and mathematical physics, despite being repeatedly forced out of formal education, was born


• Sergei Rachmaninov was born


• Hannah out of S Club 7 was born


• Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his father in 1984


• The symbol "$" was invented by a New Orleans businessman in 1778.


• In 1952, the Alpher, Bethe (in absentia) and Gamov paper on the big bang theory was published


• The RAF was formed in 1918 with the merging of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy Air Service, which were branches of the army and navy respectively; thereby creating a third military service in its own right, with its own ministry.

On the way home I pulled the last dead leaf off an oak tree.

You just had a shower...

Well, it's taken you nearly 20 years to understand how wonderful a shower can be.
Think back over the last, oh, I can't even remember how many minutes. The soap trickling down from your hair, caressing your skin more gently than any human hand could, utterly disregarding your body's ugly shape, and quite forgiving the over-long period since your last visit.
Think of the soap building up in your ears, and your long hair clinging to the side of your face like a cocoon, smothering your hearing. Your eyes closed, so there is nothing between you and the soap.
You could feel it carrying all the filth from your body as it rinsed down into the bath; to you it was an absolution.

Robert Moss recommends LYNX® masculine hygiene products.

The following post is very boring, and is prime evidence for why I should not be allowed to write about computers, ever.
To shield your virginal eyes from my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, the text has been given an extra degree of separation from its meaning.

vObbx T4

Zl Gbfuvon Fngryyvgr yncgbc fgnegrq fybjyl snyyvat gb ovgf n juvyr ntb. Gur pnfr unq fgnegrq penpxvat arne gur uvatr, naq zl nggrzcgf gb tyhr vg hc gb fgbc gur penpxf sebz cebcntngvat nyy snvyrq. Vg jnf bzvabhf, ohg qvqa'g npghnyyl pnhfr nal gebhoyr, hagvy bar qnl jura pybfvat vg gur penpxf fhqqrayl yhepurq sbegu naq gur pnfr arneyl pnzr va unys. Vg jnf gura V ernyvfrq gung V jnf snfg urnqvat sbe gebhoyr, nf V pbhyq frr gung bar fvqr bs gur fperra unq pybfrq shegure guna gur bgure. V pbhyq nyfb frr va guebhtu gur uhtr naq tncvat penpxf naq frr gung gurer jnf ab fhcrefgehpgher va gur fperra frpgvba, whfg gjb zrgny fhccbegf ubyqvat gur fperra frpgvba va gur evtug funcr.
Vg frrzrq gung gur fperra'f bhgre cynfgvp pnfr jnf gnxvat nyy gur grafvyr fgerff bs chyyvat gur uvatr gb rirel gvzr V pybfrq gur yncgbc yvq, juvpu jnf pyrneyl n qrfvta snhyg, naq va nabgure lrne naq n unys V pbhyq rkcrpg guvf gb unccra ntnva.

Ng gur fnzr gvzr, gur QP va fbpxrg unq znantrq gb pbzr ybbfr sebz gur zbgureobneq, naq abg fhecevfvatyl guvf jnf pnhfvat hggre punbf jvgu gur cbjre znantrzrag pvephvgel- gur onggrel jnfa'g punetvat cebcreyl, naq gur pbzchgre jnf vapbeerpgyl ercbegvat vgf punetr, naq va snpg ercbegvat gung gur onggrel jnf orvat punetrq ol gur znvaf nqncgbe jura vg jnf, va snpg, qvfpunetvat, rgp.

Fb, fbzrguvat unq gb or qbar, naq gur znpuvar orvat 6 zbaguf be fb bhg bs jneenagl, V'q unir gb cnl sbe vg.
Gur dhbgr pnzr onpx sebz gur freivpr prager- £860, sbe cnegf naq 2 ubhef' ynobhe.

Gb juvpu V fnvq, "fbq gung" naq cebabhaprq vg jevggra-bss, naq ybbxrq sbe n arj znpuvar.

(Vg ghearq bhg yngre gung gur rkprffvir cevpr sbe freivpvat jnf qhr gb gur freivpr prager jnagvat gb ercynpr gur ybtvp obneq ba zl znpuvar, fvzcyl qhr gb gur bar snhygl fbyqre wbvag ba gur QP va fbpxrg. V gura unq gur dhbgr "erivfrq qbja" gb £170, ba gur tebhaqf gung v'z cebonoyl dhvgr pncnoyr bs fbyqrevat gung wbvag hc zlfrys, be ng yrnfg V xabj fbzr crbcyr jub'q or vagrerfgrq va qbvat vg sbe zr. V'yy tvir gur yncgbc gb zl fvfgre jura vg'f svkrq; fur'f tbvat gb havirefvgl, naq jvyy cebonoyl hfr vg yrff guna zr, naq jvyy xabj gb nibvq bcravat naq pybfvat gur yvq jurer cbffvoyr.)



Fb V raqrq hc trggvat n 14-vapu vObbx T4 sebz gur Nccyr Fgber. V jrag sbe gur zbqry jvgu gur "Pbzob qevir", v.r. n PQ-EJ naq QIQ qevir, jvgu gur fgnaqneq 256ZO bs ENZ naq ab oyhrgbbgu, univat urneq sebz zl ubhfrzngr jvgu n oyhrgbbgu yncgbc gung nyy ur qbrf jvgu vg vf fraqf zrffntrf fnlvat, "ner lbh oberq?" gb crbcyr'f zbovyr cubarf va yrpgherf.

V nyfb tbg gur fgnaqneq nccyr bcgvpny zbhfr, naq na vapnfr "fyrrir" yncgbc ont. Gur cevpr pnzr gb nebhaq £860... shaal ubj gurfr guvatf tb.

Qryvirel
Gur yncgbc pnzr jvguva nobhg n jrrx naq n unys bs beqrevat vg. Vg jnf rkpvgvat va n trrxl jnl, nf jura gur cnpxntr pnzr vagb gur unaqf bs gur servtug pbzcnal, V pbhyq jngpu vgf cebterff npebff rhebcr. Ng bar fgntr vg tbg fb onq gung V jnf npghnyyl ernqvat hc ba gur gbja vg jnf pheeragyl va- sbe rknzcyr, gur Vagreangvbany Ebnq Rkcerff Prager, va Neaurz (juvpu unaqyrf 5700 gbaarf bs servtug cre jrrx)... Neaurz vf gur fvgr bs gur "oevqtr gbb sne" bs bcrengvba Znexrg Tneqra va Jbeyq Jne VV, juvpu unf orra pnyyrq gur ynfg terng nyyvrq qrsrng bs gur jne.

Gur yncgbc pnzr va n obzonfgvp pneqobneq obk glcvpny bs Nccyr'f tencuvp fglyr, naq jura V bcrarq vg V jnf terrgrq ol n cynva juvgr furrg bs pneqobneq jvgu "Qrfvtarq ol Nccyr va Pnyvsbeavn" cevagrq ba vg.

Vafvqr gur obk jrer gur yncgbc vgfrys, vgf NP nqncgbe juvpu pbafvfgf bs n juvgr phobvqny genafsbezre jvgu n cnve bs arng yrtf gung pna or bcrarq bhg naq gur QP pnoyr jenccrq nebhaq, naq obgu n znvaf cyht pbaarpgbe gung cyhtf fgenvtug vagb gur genafsbezre frpgvba, naq n 2-zrger ybat rkgrafvba pnoyr gung vagrepunatrf jvgu vg, n gryrcubar pnoyr, naq na nqncgbe sbe gur "zvav-ITN" fbpxrg ba gur yncgbc, gung pbairegf vg gb n shyy ITN fbpxrg.

Gur pnfr vf avpryl qrfvtarq, jvgu cebgrpgvir cnqqvat vafvqr, naq juvyfg pyrneyl qrfvtarq gb svg n 15-vapu CbjreObbx cresrpgyl, vg cbfrf ab ceboyrzf sbe gur aneebjre vObbx. Gurer vf n cbpxrg ba gur sebag sbe gur NP nqncgbe, ohg vg qbrfa'g jbex nf jryy jvgu gur ovt oevgvfu cyht nf vg cerfhznoyl qbrf jvgu na nzrevpna bar- vg fgvpxf bhg n snve ovg.

Gur zbhfr vf avpryl ohvyg, jvgu na vagrerfgvat bcgvpny vyyhfvba rssrpg pnhfrq ol gur ubyybj, genafcnerag hccre frpgvba (juvpu nyfb npgf nf n fvatyr, ovt zbhfr ohggba). Ubjrire gur pnoyr vf irel fubeg- bayl nobhg 2 srrg ybat. Vg'f pyrneyl qrfvtarq gb or cyhttrq vagb gur shyy-fvmr nccyr xrlobneq (juvpu unf n HFO cbeg ng rnpu raq) naq juvyfg vg pna or hfrq ba gur evtug unaq fvqr bs gur znpuvar (gur cbegf ner nyy ba gur yrsg fvqr) vg pna'g or zbirq irel sne, juvpu pna trg fyvtugyl veevgngvat. Ubjrire vg qbrf ryvzvangr gur zbhfr-pnoyr-pngpuvat-ba-fubr guvat jvgu zl ynfg zbhfr gung jnf pbafvqrenoyl zber veevgngvat jura vg unccrarq.

Gur yncgbc vgfrys vf 13 vapurf jvqr, ohg srryf pbafvqrenoyl ovttre sbe fbzr ernfba. Vg vf fuval juvgr cbylpneobangr ba gur bhgfvqr, jvgu whfg na nccyr ybtb (vyyhzvangrq ol gur YPQ fperra'f onpxyvtug) ba gur gbc. Gur vafvqr vf yvtug znggr terl, naq vf dhvgr n cyrnfnag grkgher gb or erfgvat lbhe unaqf ba sbe ybat crevbqf. Gur xrlobneq vf avpr, gubhtu qvssreragyl ynvq bhg gb gur nirentr yncgbc xrlobneq, naq gur genpxcnq vf fgenatryl dhvgr ynetr, jvgu n ovt fvatyr ohggba ba gur obggbz.

Znp BF K vf na bqq bcrengvat flfgrz. Vg'f irel rnfl gb hfr, fbzrgvzrf qrcerffvatyl fb, (V npghnyyl zvffrq gur svqqyvat nobhg gb trg guvatf jbexvat vaibyirq va trggvat fbzrguvat jbexvat ba bgure bcrengvat flfgrzf), ohg vg frrzrq irel nyvra ng svefg. Nccyr cebqhpr gurve bja jro oebjfre naq znvy pyvrag, juvpu ner obgu tbbq rabhtu abg gb rire pbafvqre ercynpvat (V'q tehqtvatyl nterr jvgu nccyr'f obzonfgvp pynvz ba gurve jrofvgr gung gur Fnsnev oebjfre vf "gur orfg oebjfre ba nal cyngsbez"). Gurersber, abguvat vf snzvyvne, naq lbh svaq jrveq pbairagvbaf gung qba'g rkvfg ba bgure cyngsbezf, yvxr qbjaybnqrq fbsgjner cnpxntrf orvat va qvfx vzntrf gung lbh zbhag nf qvfx ibyhzrf naq vafgnyy sebz gurer, glcvpnyyl ol whfg qenttvat gurz vagb n qverpgbel pnyyrq "Nccyvpngvbaf" ba gur uneq qevir.
Gurer'f nyfb gur hafrggyvat fvzcyvpvgl naq dhvrgarff nobhg vg nf jryy. Gur yncgbc bayl unf 4 yvtugf ba vg (abg pbhagvat gur onggrel yvsr vaqvpngbe ba gur onggrel) - ahz naq pncf ybpx, n pbyyne nebhaq gur QP pnoyr vaqvpngvat gur onggrel'f punetr fgnghf, naq n fznyy qvfp bs juvgr yvtug ba gur sebag gung chyfngrf jura gur znpuvar vf va fhfcraq-gb-enz. Gurer vf n sna vafvqr, ohg vg'f arire orra ba fvapr v'ir unq vg, naq gur uneq qevir vf fb dhvrg gung lbh unir gb chg lbhe rne ntnvafg vg gb urne nalguvat.
Gur ynpx bs n uneq qevir be PQ npgvivgl yvtug sryg irel bqq gb ortva jvgu, ohg nsgre n juvyr v qvqa'g zvff gurz ng nyy, orpnhfr jura lbh guvax nobhg vg, gurl qba'g npghnyyl freir zhpu bs n checbfr.

Naljnl, gung'f dhvgr rabhtu.

Arthur Miller 1915-2005

I was initially going to quote something out of Death of a Salesman as a tribute, but then I realised that such a thing could not be a fitting tribute to this man.


Yeah, my English teacher at high school had us study Death of a Salesman, along with Of Mice and Men, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Blade Runner and The Terminator.

...An interesting guy, then, and incidentally he's probably the reason I'm at university now. Severely kicked me up the arse in year 10, when i sorely needed it.

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/Picture3.jpg
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/cassini_huygens/huygens_land/Picture2.jpg

What you are seeing is an alien landscape viewed from a probe that was launched from earth seven years ago

A white Christmas





I did go walking on Christmas day as well (Not in a bid to escape my family, but quite the opposite: it's a tradition that my father and I go for as long a walk as we can manage before Christmas dinner in order to work up an appetite for the vast array of food we are faced with when we get back. However, I forgot to take my camera, which is a shame. Oh well, these things happen.

Well, that's that.

Term is over, essays are in, presentations are presented, programming projects are handed in, and we can finally rest for a while.
The last of my housemates went this afternoon, and i'm home alone until tomorrow lunchtime.

It's odd how, in the absence of pressing summative work, boredom can set in.

Though to be fair i did find an interesting maths website today, and that's work, of a kind.

This morning i finally had what i think is the most brilliant idea for a computer game man has ever concieved.

DELIVERANCE DELIVERANCE REVOLUTION.

Think about it! there are so many aspects of the story - playing the banjo, firing the bow at the hillbilly, burying his body in a shallow unmarked grave, navigating down the rapids, climbing up the cliff face - the list goes on, all requiring some sort of frantic mental effort and concentration to accomplish.
So what better way to represent this than by hitting the right moves on the DDR dance pad!??

I envisage a final battle during the dream sequence where the hillbilly's bloated, festering body floats to the top of the surface of the reservoir, his stiffened hand still pointing accusingly.

OUCH.

Well, that was an improvement; it looks like i'm now capable of writing a lab report.
However, spending 16 hours solid (11 AM through to 3AM) writing the thing using L_YX, and then getting up at 7:30 the following morning to finish it, does bad things to one's brain.
I think i need to avoid computers altogether this weekend, for the good of my sanity.

apparently they've had an election in the colonies.

TTTEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLL ME HONEY WHAT THE HELL AM I S'POSED TO DO?

I thought it'd be funny to have this printed on a t-shirt:



But then i had it pointed out to me that it would effectively be a tautology of "I AM PRAT", so became rather less enthusiastic.

I have just slept through 90 minutes of terry wogan and come downstairs to find the house empty.

There is much about my personality that I dislike.
I try to view myself with a mixture of tolerance and a will to improve myself, but recently I have been reminded of a part of my personality that I cannot stand. In fact, i am rather worried about it.

It manifests itself in quite particular circumstances. To wit; when I am playing the team-based online shoot-'em-up, Natural Selection.

Now I have played this game alone, and felt that it has sent my personality in interesting directions, due to it involving team politics, complicated strategy, and a quite significant quantity of testosterone.

But nothing could prepare me for playing it with someone else in a room.
I was sitting on the sofa with Emma (my housemate), and we were having a kind of bored gaming session on our laptops (like you do). I decided to load up Natural Selection because I hadn't played it for a while.

After a while, I made a vague comment aloud to myself (something on the lines of, "Shit, how can they have HA already when we've only just managed a second hive?"), and Emma made the understandable but fatal mistake of expressing interest.
The drawling, obsessive tirade, detailing the intricacies of the game, &c., that came tumbling out of my mouth for the next hour felt liberating at the time, but afterwards I felt a festering horror at what had come over me. This has happened before, you see, but only when I was much younger. I would manage to steer the conversation crudely towards some subject I was obsessed with (generally related to computers; I was a very obsessive child) and do what I might describe as dump all my thoughts on the subject onto them, regardless of whether they were interested in or could understand what I was talking about, or indeed whether they were listening at all.

I'm not sure what's to be done.

Well i'm not sure how better to articulate it, so i'll simply quote in full some SMS correspondence between me and several recipients from earlier today:

"Wwrraaaarrggghh i've passsed! *collapses*"

Note for those who don't know me and are somehow reading this:
The exam i took was the summer resit of Core Mathematics B1 (Real Analysis). The reason i had to do this resit was because i failed the exam in the May examination period, and the consequences of me having failed it would be
(a) I wouldn't have been able to carry on studying analysis of any kind at Durham which would for all intents and purposes mean I wouldn't be able to carry on studying maths at all;
(b) I would have been moved down from a BSc Honours degree to a rather shit Ordinary degree in Natural Sciences.

So, a good job i passed it then.

News Just In

Yay. We've got another unidentified feline beast roaming the moors...

...But now it's time for me to go;
the autumn moon lights my way...

Well, that's it. My stint at the sports shop is over, and next wednesday i'm off up to Durham again.
The swallows are massed in the sky like specks of ash.

I still haven't got the results of that maths exam yet.

I went up to durham this weekend to do a maths exam, and also to poke around the new house we've rented.
I took lots of pictures, mostly for the benefit of housemates that couldn't come up, and they are here.

They won't catch me with my pants down.

Something happened the other day that reminded me of just how little knowledge, never mind control, we have over our minds. N.B. By "we", i mean "me". And thinking about it, it's preobably irresponsible to make such a generalisation.

Well i'd got off the bus in holmfirth, and had started walking between the bus stop and the large hill that i live half-way up. "Left outside alone" by Anastasia drifted into my head, and i didn't really question it because it happens all the time. (Not with that particular song. With a song...)
And after walking for about 100 yards in a busy, noisy town centre, I walked past a pub from which emanated the same song, and in exact synchronisation with the version in my head.
Assuming (and i hold this to be a fair assumption) that it wasn't just a coincidence, this means that my subconscious mind is in the habit of spending its energies filtering out pop songs from the surrounding noise, at a level of effectiveness that far, far exceeds any conscious ability of mine.

I wonder if it can be made to practice maths problems while i sleep...

In the basement of the sportswear shop i work in is a fire exit. It opens out onto a network of tunnels that extends all the way along the street. Every shop basement opens out onto the tunnels.. When we go on our twice-weekly expedition to empty the dustbins of discarded paper and plastic bags, it's almost like another, hidden city. Music seeps through the doors. Hip-hop, clattering pans and steam waft from the kitchens of the bar next door. Radio 2 from the charity shop further along.

Also, there are doors that lead to nowhere but a wall of concrete, because this small underworld is slowly shrinking.
The council have taken up the pavement outside and have prized the ceiling from some old rooms in front of the shop. Today i could see down there. There are tiled walls, there are wooden doors with paint peeling from them. There are old metal light switches, and plug sockets with round holes instead of square.
They were blocking the locked doorways between the living and dead cellar-spaces with breezeblocks today. Tomorrow the dead cellar spaces will be filled with concrete.

It gave me an odd idea. There's a church across the road. The churchyard is in places paved with old, evicted gravestones.

"Soil is for pussies. I want to get buried in concrete, like a gangsta!"

Storms.

I like how you get a unique sky, which looks mostly like there's something not quite right going on up there. (Probably caused by the thick but localised cumulonimbus clouds, which block out the light in a manner more often seen of huge dreary stratus coverings...)
I like the atmosphere, where you can almost feel that something's building up and is going to return to equilibrium in a violent way sometime soon.

What i like most about a storm is the aftermath. Immediately afterwards, you get the faint smell of ozone in the air, and the world just seems bruised, like it's withstood something.
I like how in the wide open space of morning afterwards, you find piles of gravel and rocks scattered around on the road under an empty, blown-out sky.

I've seen it now. And, worse, I can't mend a broken door, so they'll know it's got out, and they'll suspect the newest employee. Me.

It started a few days ago when i heard thudding, lop-sided footsteps on the ceiling of the top floor of the sportswear shop. I remarked to the fellow staff members who happened to be there, "Oh, didn't know there was a floor above this one!"

They immediately looked away from me and struck up a conversation about the weather between themselves.
I kept quiet that time, and did nothing.

The second time it happened was this morning. I was alone on the second floor, and lumbering footsteps again made themselves heard above me.

There was one door on the second floor I hadn't been through; the fire escape. I had been told that all the fire exits were automatically wired to an alarm, but i had also seen one of my colleagues open the fire escape in the basement which opened onto the city's labyrinthine underbelly, in order to dispose of some bags of packaging that were blocking the exit.

"It must just be a deterrent," I thought to myself, and opened the door. No alarm.
I found myself in a stairwell. The stairs going down were sure-looking concrete ones, designed to conduct people away from an emergency quickly and safely, but the stairs also led upwards. I began to climb, and as i ascended, dusty concrete gave way to creaking wood.

I came to a door, which had a rusted padlock below the handle, but was made of very old, woodworm-ridden pine.
"End of the line," I thought, "get back to work..."
Then I heard the noise. A rasping growl, very faint, followed by shuffling, thudding noises. About 10 feet, i thought, from where i was standing, on the other side of the door.
I still have no idea what possessed me, but my desire to see what was inside that room suspended all my reason, and I shoved hard against the door. The old wood splintered around the lock, releasing a burst of dust and spores, and the door opened, creaking violently.

For a few moments I could see nothing; my view was obscured by dust. As it cleared I began to make out the shape of a hulking contraption occupying most of the room. It looked like some kind of wire-drawing machine - an arrangement of wheels and pulleys with a kind of white residue all over them. The machine's workings were rusted and covered with oily black dust; it looked like it hadn't been working for some years. As my eye followed the mechanism, I suppressed a scream of horror as i found another pair of eyes staring right back at me.
They gazed balefully from a cage in the corner, and belonged to the most hideous thing I ever hope to see. It looked like a human being, but one of its legs was irregularly twisted and bloated, with things that looked like they could have been toes massing down one side of it. Its other leg was thin, hairless and wasted, and its hands bore thin, spidery digits; six on one, four on the other. In one of its armpits were two glands, like nipples, or earthworms' mouths, which dribbled a thin yellow fluid down the creature's side, forming a puddle on the sandy floor of the cage.
Its face was too horrific to begin to describe. I could look as far as yellow, decaying, drooping jowls before i had to avert my eyes.

The face spoke. Its voice was like the sound of sandpaper on dusty cloth, and as it breathed one word of explanation to me:
"Polyester."

You might find it hard to believe that i have nothing against Dr. M. R. C. Hunt, lecturer in first-year electromagnetism at Durham university.
Especially when you discover that prior to surreal personal attacks distributed in lecture theatres (it was all in good fun) I was already producing such things as this...



...in my lecture notes. Be afraid.

I started my new job at a sportswear shop today. It's interesting enough, but very solitary. My duties have so far included sorting boxes of trainers into piles of separate products in ascending order of size, applying barcode labels to football shirts and attaching security tags to football shorts and swimsuits.

I went to the art gallery in my lunch hour, and saw an exhibition and short film by Richard Coldman and Alexander Gorlizki, called The North Sea Circle.

It is a beautiful exhibition: the film is a fictionalised documentary with a narrator reminiscing on seven friends who lived in a small town, and is really a collection of beautiful ideas strung together into a narrative of the relationships between the seven friends.

An example: Wool-boy was a man who was very, very normal, except for the fact that he was always dressed from head to foot in wool, including a knitted face-mask that looked like a human face, and a pair of knitted glasses. And he steadily started to replace all his possessions with knitted ones, so at first he was like king Midas, as everything he touched turned to wool; but later on, with his knitted chair and bicycle around him, he looked almost like a being made out of wool.

He walked very slowly and delicately.

His friend, the Engineer, was a worry to him. She always seemed so cold, but he couldn't do anything to make her warm. This troubled him for some time, until eventually he embarked on the greatest project of his life: a blanket for the north sea.

The engineer, meanwhile, had designed a bridge. It took her 22 years, and when it was finished, unfortunately, nobody wanted to build it, and eventually the design was destroyed by sabotage.

The bridge was designed to vibrate at a very specific frequency, so that anyone who walked across it would have the molecular structure of their body changed by the resonance, and by the time they reached the other side they would have become a different person.

I could continue and discuss the Anthemist (a composer who composed only anthems, on an upright piano that was only two octaves wide, and therefore was quite short of work because very few new countries are being created nowadays) and the rest of them, but this is beginning to look more and more like theft of the artists' ideas, so i'll stop.

If you can, go and see it yourself.

And therein lies the advantage of a digital camera. I remember in geology when i used to take all my field photos with my dad's SLR... and watching the kids with digital cameras smugly disregard the position of the sun :P

There were stacks of burning manure on the hills today, and the smell carried for miles. You wouldn't know it was manure that was on fire if you didn't know that was what it smelled like.
It is a beautiful smell, and to me evokes very old memories of very dark nights, silhouetted figures in front of a bonfire, walking through woods, and the promise of an icy, smothering winter.

I archived my old website, the link is on the sidebar.
Bear in mind that it'll be mostly out of date.
Except the bit about Laura Oh, and there's this as well, which isn't linked from anywhere because it's not finished, and probably won't be. Having said that you'll be able to tell what happens in the end..
No, it doesn't involve violence, in fact.

See that antenna on top of the council flats? It wasn't there last time i was in town.
Another one's appeared next to a chicken farm in the next valley.
You wanna know what I think? I think Majestic-12 still exist, and they're putting those towers up all over britain to listen for UFOs.

I'm gonna stay away from those towers. They're probably watching me already.

It's summer, and the birds are shitting purple.
Oddly enough, the first time i correlated the colour of the bird droppings with the colour of the bilberries swarming on the bushes near my house was less than a fornight ago.
Oh well, these things happen.

Hello...
Welcome to the new orchestra of crap.

The site is still without form, or much of a purpose, but i expect it'll evolve quickly enough.. :)