Taking things to their illogical conclusions

clearing my phone

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:00:53 GMT

humid evening
i read by lamplight
on the pages
a shadow flutters
the lone moth

not noticed:
my carefully casual attempts
to ignore you

A love poem in 15 words or less

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:52:36 GMT

in the corner of my eye
at the centre of my attention
you
in my book
words losing their order

So now I'm back from outer space

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:08:59 GMT

For the first time in 5 years I don't live in Southampton.

Days like this I can't begin to explain, or even work out how I feel. I've been too busy to process anything, and there are so many things to think through. I am glad to back in London, a city I love which not-coincidentally happens to contain many people I love, even if I'm not so thrilled about moving back in with my parents.

I should blog or write about the events of the last few days or they'll evaporate from my mind.

Dreamwidth

Tue, 19 May 2009 22:00:07 GMT

I've got a code going spare, anyone want it, or know anyone who does?

I've not done anything other than sign up, because I don't want to spend time setting it up properly yet.

Prague!

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 04:53:59 GMT

The lovely wildeabandon took me to Prague! This was 27th-30th March, but I've been busy doing nothing.

Mostly I played the dazzled innocent, as Sebastian guided me through streets filled with buildings all in exquisite pastel colours like cakes in a patisserie. He bought me a single red rose: the first time anyone's ever thought to buy me flowers. When wandering aimlessly we found a building that looked like a fairytale castle in one of the squares.
"Are you the prince that does the saving, or the prince that needs saving?" he asked me. After some consideration I decided I was the dragon, and the prince who needed saving.

Happy just to be with each other we didn't try to rush around filling each moment with something touristy. Unfortunately this meant we failed to get to the Town Hall, the site of The First Defenestration of Prague and so I guess the birthplace of the awesome word defenestration (which is so not made up) as the OED says:

defenestration: The action of throwing out of a window

Defenestration of Prague, the action of the Bohemian insurgents who, on the 21st of May 1618, broke up a meeting of Imperial commissioners and deputies of the States, held in the castle of the Hradshin, and threw two of the commissioners and their secretary out of the window; this formed the prelude to the Thirty Years' War.

We did make it to the Sex Toy Museum. The exhibits were interesting, but outside of the context of flesh they seemed cold, uninviting, and occasionally scary.

After that we had a bit of a wait till the showing of Aspects of Alice started at the Black Light Theatre. I was tired and frankly would have rather just gone back to hotel with Sebastian. So while we waited I think I got a touch cranky, despite the fact the bar we were at playing an brilliant live The Clash album, with this performance of The Guns of Brixton a song which I'd previously felt was a dull point in an otherwise brilliant album.

But Aspects of Alice really was worth the wait. Before it started I sat nibbling a rose petal into the shape of a heart and offered it to Sebastian. He carefully put it away, and my silly gesture became suddenly serious.
I'd never been to a Black Light Theatre before (apparently it's a speciality of Prague so, robert_jones, we did do something typical of Prague). It combines the kind of puppetry where the background is black and the puppeteers dress in black (they did a good job with the light so there was only one or two disappointingly visible puppeteers), black light (UV), and some gimmick I didn't understand which let Alice fly and twirl in the air seemingly without effort.
I'm sort of wary of physical theatre because I'm worried it'll all be nonsense I won't understand, or be able to get anything from. But the images felt genuinely surreal and compelling: there always seemed to be some kind of hard to articulate meaning lurking beneath the bizarre images.
It was a (rather loose) adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; I think I wouldn't have noticed many of the connections without Sebastian. During the first half of the performance I drifted in and out of sleep (I'm blaming the wonderfully dream-like music), but I think it didn't matter too much because the narrative was pretty fractured already.
In the second half, before Alice came on stage, two of the women were on stage, arranged so their legs seemed to be flowers. It seemed odd, but since I thought it was a children's play I assumed it was innocent. I find what happened next quite difficult to describe, it was erotic, sexy, and had lesbians in the Garden of Eden, and yet somehow also quite innocent, and was quite sweet and really rather moving.
The whole performance was magical, in both senses, and I'd definitely recommend going to a Black Light Theatre if you're ever in Prague. This video of a slightly different production doesn't do the show justice, but then neither do my words.

mirrored elevator
an infinity of you
kissing me

We didn't get to sleep till quite late, and so on Sunday we woke up really quite late. So we had to rush around the Kafka Museum. Despite being essentially linear, the curators clearly made an effort to make it feel labyrinthine, and the music they played wouldn't have been out of place in a David Lynch film. So the experience did feel somewhat Kafkaesque but, and I feel like a horrible philistine for writing this, but I don't really understand what I'm supposed to get from Museums like that that I can't get from books. We ended up leaving before we'd made it all the way round, because the place was closing. Possibly if we ate before we could have rather than after, then we could have made it all the way round.
But I didn't mind at all, because the restuarant we went to before was really quite divine. I'm not going to try to describe the food (hopefully wildeabandon will do that - hint hint), but sitting there with the view of the bridge and the lovely buildings, and of Sebastian is one my best memories of Prague.

What superpower would you choose?

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:03:32 GMT

Someone was talking about driving through fog, and either I misheard them or they misspoke, but I heard them talk about "invisibility of one metre". At first it sounded like a superuseless superpower. But after a while it seemed that being able to hide yourself from those you're closest to would be quite useful.

Anti-trans politics from Oxfordshire PCT - request for action

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:33:04 GMT

Cut and pasted from the lovely wildeabandon:

So Oxfordshire PCT have a policy that being diagnosed with gender identity disorder isn't sufficient to qualify for a funding for treatment - there have to be "extreme circumstances", like, say, being suicidally depressed. Unfortunately, being suicidally depressed is a state of mental health which renders one ineligable for treatment. You can see why this might be a problem.

There's a report here which talks about it in more detail. The policy is shortly coming up for review, and there's a petition here asking the PCT to change it so that it is no longer an effective blanket ban on treatment. I'd appreciate it if those of you who agree that it's an unfair and discriminatory policy could go and sign the petition, and if possible propogate in your own journals.

Revolutionary Road

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:07:47 GMT

Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty; I watched those films back in '99, and fell in love with cinema. I feel somewhat shamed by inclusion of The Matrix being in that list of formative films. Any pleasure I get from watching scenes I loved in The Matrix is now tainted by the knowledge that what I thought was great in them, grew into something so, so terribly awful in the sequels. Revolutionary Road isn't Sam Mendes’ first film since American Beauty, but the themes seem so close, and its reviews have been decidedly mixed. So going to see it I was dreading not only being disappointed, but finding myself having to be ashamed of American Beauty meaning so much to me.

Revolutionary Road is an adaptation of Richard Yates' book, which I'm afraid I haven't read, but Vonnegut describes it as "The Great Gatsby of my time... one of the best books by a member of my generation". Having read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge on his recommendation, I trust his opinion. Apparently the book is one of the first to tackle the angst of suburbia head on.

The film centres on April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio), and on April's plan to rescue the two of them from the hopeless emptiness of suburbia by escaping to Paris. April has never been to Paris, but it represents the freedom that she felt in the first flush of their love, when Frank wooed her with stories of his time there and of the life they could live there.

Some reviewers have described the belief that these characters have that they are special, and that they are being dragged down by the dull people around them as being juvenile and solipsistic. I must agree. But I think at times that people do feel juvenile and are, if not solipsistic, then are unable to feel beyond their own bodies, are unable to make real contact with another human - and this is a large part of what suburban angst is. It's debatable whether their dream to go to Paris is childish and irresponsible, or a brave attempt to break free from the life that everyone has said should satisfy them, and find out what really works for them. But you don't need to think they're right to sympathise with them.

A first in a genre can seem tired and clichéd to those familiar with what comes later, and being an adaptation of a classic the film runs the risk of being tired and clichéd. Several reviewers have complained about having heard all they need about suburban angst, and being tired of the 1950s always being characterised as being beautifully mannered with unspeakable things concealed beneath, and personally, I do wonder why mathematicians in film always have to be mad. Viewing the 50s with their modern perspective films like Todd Hayne's Far From Heaven and the TV series Mad Men, give us something fresher, more obviously relevant than Revolutionary Road is capable of providing.

The film is unbearably predictable: whether this is the predictability of a story told too often, or the inevitability of tragedy is something I'm still debating with myself. If one wanted to be harsh, in addition to saying there is very little new in the plot, one could also say there aren't any characters beyond the Wheelers. Not characters that go far beyond caricature. Even the children are barely there; little more than must-have accessories of suburban life.

But the lack of development of the other characters makes sense when you see the film as a character study of Frank and April, neither of whom can really see beyond themselves. Seeing things through their perspective, we only see the surface of the other characters, we never connect. This focus on the Wheelers provides Winslet and DiCaprio the space to give the performances that richly deserve all the nominations and awards they’ve got.

Despite the themes Revolutionary Road is very different from American Beauty. The story of American Beauty is multi-threaded; following the different threads we can both sympathise with the characters, and also see how ridiculous they seem to the other characters. In American Beauty Mendes alloys the drama with humour. In Revolutionary Road there’s not one laugh to break the tension, and the focus is almost claustrophobic. This doesn’t make it fun viewing, but it’s like that for good reason.

But like American Beauty the cinematography is superb. The scenes of beautifully composed domesticity that would look completely wrong if April stepped just an inch out of place, convey her situation simply and clearly. They're pure cinema, things that only cinema does, and they remind me why Mendes is responsible for making me love cinema.

Revolutionary Road isn’t new in any respect, but it’s damn fine art.

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 03:19:48 GMT

There was a two part radio programme on Radio 4 called PC RIP? about the history of political correctness. It didn't have that much that was new to me, but it did structure the ideas well, and was engaging - which usually enough to make a radio programme worth listening to.

One of the things it reminded me about was the rant Stewart Lee gave on Heresy ages ago. When I first heard it there was something so satisfying about him departing from the show's usual tone of playful devil's advocacy that allows unpopular perspectives to be put forth, but simultaneously allows them to be dismissed as a mere jokes. And to realise that his decision to depart from that tone was because what he wanted to say was important. But while it made me me love him forever, I don't think it was really that effective.

This bit of his stand up is essentially based on that rant, but it's not so angry that it dispels any humour, it's more considered and developed, and I feel it works better.

Note: the last bit of the second video is NSFW.

science fiction question

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:20:03 GMT

I'm not reading much at the moment, because I'm being several kinds of rubbish, but amongst the reading that I am doing is a little H. P. Lovecraft. Whenever I read science fiction, and some of Lovecraft clearly is that, I'm always struck by the Zeerust (the way that the futuristic view of the world is incredibly dated and based on science or concepts that have become discredited) and the way that science fiction, almost always, says more about the time it was written than about the future. The fact that things happen that we know shouldn't happen because of the scientific theories we know now doesn't seem to matter to ~~the reader~~ me, because it makes sense in the context of the story.

One of the things I always think about is how charming zeerust is, and how someone really ought to use it in a story consciously. One use would just the nostalgia factor it would give a story, but you could also use it for social commentary (the author could talk about a period of history through that time's view of the future, historical fiction through science fiction), and I'm sure there would be other uses I can't think of at this moment.

Surely someone has had this idea before, and I don't have to implement it myself to read something doing it. But, f-list, please tell me who has done it and where?

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:48:59 GMT

I'm reading Popper's Conjectures and Refutations at the moment, looking for the quote about science and magic that I read ages ago and have since lost. In the section where he's discussing epistemology and the sources of knowledge I found this:

So my answer to the questions "How do you know? What is the source or basis of your assertion? What observations have led you to it?" would be: "I do not know: my assertion was merely a guess. Nevermind the source, or the sources, from which it may spring - there are many possible sources, and I may not be aware of half of them; and origins and pedigrees have in any case little bearing on the truth. But if you are interested in the problem which I tried to solve by my tentative assertion, you may help me by criticizing it as severely as you can; and if you design some experimental test which you think might refute my assertion, I shall gladly and to the best of my powers, help you to refute it.

It reminds me of another quote of his that roughly says "The basis of Democracy is being able to say I may be wrong, and you may be right, but by some reasonable means we can get through this disagreement together."

The spirit of those things quotes are something I try to live by, but too often I let myself get emotionally committed to an argument, and try to win. If winning was what these things were about then there's something odd about how, at least for me, playing to win seems to be the surest way to lose.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:46:25 GMT

I just walked into the office and an officemate was on the phone, speaking in a clear monotone with with slightly-too-long spaces between each word.

You know the way that people tend to take on speech patterns, phrases, and mannerisms of people they're talking to? I hadn't consciously realised till right now that we do the same when talking to robots.

Graduation

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:29:22 GMT

There is a certain class of man who feels that when they put on a dinner jacket that they are, in fact, James Bond. Not being a fan of 007 I've never quite felt the same, however when I put my robes on a few minutes ago I did feel as if I ought to be able to throw fireballs.

Hyperbolic crocheted coral reef!

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:09:55 GMT

Just listened to last Friday's Front Row, and have found out that the institute of figuring have produced a model of the Great Barrier Reef and it's on display at the Hayward! Apparently the Great Barrier Reef is a hyperbolic surface.

Someone on Front Row (I think someone from the institute of figuring) said that a female lecturer (who wiki tells me is Daina Taimina) invented hyperbolic crocheting when her husband said to her that one couldn't produce physical models of hyperbolic surfaces, and hyperbolic crocheting gave the first physical models of hyperbolic surfaces. Which makes me wonder what M. C. Escher's picture of Angel's and Demons is other than a model of the hyperbolic plane, tessellated by roughly triangular shaped angels and demons. But, even if they were slightly off factually, hyperbolic crocheting is damn cool, and it was cool to hear them talk about it on Front Row. Here is a gallery of crocheted hyperbolic spaces at the institute of figuring.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:26:58 GMT

I'm back in Southampton and starting to get back down to work, but I think I'll write this first. It's been such a lovely few weeks. When I started my break I made a list of things to do, and have largely done none of them, but as Jerome K Jerome says:

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.

So I'm not too annoyed at myself for not getting much of it done. Things I did instead:

Caught up with lots of people in London.
Saw the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.
Saw From Russia at the Royal Academy.
Saw Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia at the Tate.
Read lots and lots.

Apparently, in some people's opinion, going home and reading lots doesn't constitute a holiday - I say "B'ah!" to them

The wildlife photography exhibition is something I've gone to for most of the last few years. It's something I go to because my friends are really interested in animals, and because I've been often so it's good to make comparisons. Animals can be interesting, and I appreciate the unsentimentality of it. But in previous years I've been most interested when the photos were more abstract or emulated other kinds of art and unfortunately this has been one of the most literal years yet.

In From Russia I didn't really pay enough attention to what was Russian and what was French but influenced the Russian, but I did enjoy the later rooms throughly. I'd sort of forgotten how much pleasure I get from seeing real paintings. I almost laughed when I saw Promenade by Marc Chagall, and a lady there said she was glad it made someone else as happy as her. I also discovered Cubo-futurism there, I don't understand how the pictures combine different viewpoints in space or time as the name would suggest, but the pictures do look really fantastic.

Again I wasn't totally on the ball when I went to see Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia. With it's attacks on meaning and aesthetics I ought not to have liked it, and often I felt as if I wasn't getting the jokes, or that they jokes were directed at people like me, but some how the art won me over. The rayographs were beautiful, and the spinny wheel things were really ace.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:52:48 GMT

It was my flatmate Marty's birthday yesterday. We made her guess what her present was:

Marty: Is it bigger than a bread box?
Me: <pause> No, it isn't bigger than a bread box.
Marty: <pause> Is it smaller than a bread box?
Me: No, it isn't smaller than a bread box.

more like a week actually

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:20:14 GMT

ed_fortune directed me to the flickr group Song Chart, where pop songs of varying degrees of popularity are represented in graph form.

There are some really witty, pithy, graphs even if they are sometimes quite obscure.

Unfortunately like indexed the ideas are often spoilt by the execution.

It's depressing how many don't understand graphs.

Running with an idea of bob's I posted this.

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 23:55:55 GMT

Had intended to get work sorted this weekend, and while I have done some, I have inadvertently just ended up having a good time.

Yesterday I saw an Ideal Husband at the Nuffield. The best part had to be the end of Act 1, which the text describes as follows:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Put out the lights, Mason, put out the lights!

[The servant puts out the lights. The room becomes almost dark. The only light there is comes from the great chandelier that hangs over the staircase and illumines the tapestry of the Triumph of Love.]

Rather than with the servant walking to the light switch, and waiting for half a minute, while the person who does the lighting realises that perhaps they ought to turn the lights off.

Today I mostly spent it with Helena F-W and some other maths people celebrating her birthday. Dan came up with the word

applet n. a baby apple

Example use: The way you grow an apple-in-a-bottle is by putting a bottle over an applet while it's still on the branch and letting it grow inside.

Having heard of this Mr. Ben asks what chicklet means. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it's either an egg, or a much derided form of literature. And Gemma asked what a Hamlet is. Other than possibly my second favourite character in literature is, I have no idea!

scrabble doughnuts

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:58:40 GMT

Today my officemate bob raised the idea of playing scrabble on a torus, i.e. so the words could go off one edge and wrap-around the board. A bit like cyclinder chess, but allowing wrap-arounds in both directions (bottom to top, and also right to left). Torus chess doesn't work, because the kings would begin in check at the start of the game. Of course other variants like Möbius strip and Klein bottle scrabble were mentioned, but let's not complicate things too much for the moment.

Playing over two triple word scores should be a rare occurrence. But in cylinder/torus scrabble the triple word tiles on opposite sides of the board would be next to each other, so it would be very easy to get triple triples. And playing over two double word scores would also be easier. This might make cylinder/torus scrabble quite dissatisfying, unless the board was modified slightly. I can think of a sensible way to avoid the triple-triple problem, but it would reduce the total amount of triple word scores in the game.

Has anyone played torus or cylinder scrabble already? And would anyone be up for a game?

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:56:08 GMT

Radio 4 turned my favourite Kurt Vonnegut short story Who Am I This Time? into a radio play, I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but hopefully they've done a decent job with it.

Problem suggested at dinner last night

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:10:11 GMT

Each of the seven pieces in tetris are composed of four squares. So is it possible to fit one of each into a seven by four rectangle?

"What are you drawing?"

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:42:11 GMT

So Ligers were pretty much my favourite animals, but my friend just sent me a link to the Top 10 of Hybrid animals, and I was shocked at first to find them languishing at number 10, but as I read on it seemed quite fair. I think squirmelia's picture of a zeedonk is better than the one they have.

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:53:52 GMT

Rafioso, n pl Rafiosi
1. one of the blue rinse brigade who go round to each stall at a fête threatening to pelt them with coconuts unless they are paid off in Victoria sponge cakes, and always fix the raffle nepotistically
2. one of a syndicate of gentleman thieves who engage in all manner of pulp adventures

Two Weddings

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:59:26 GMT

Two weddings in two days. Much too much to much to say, so I'll just leave you with an equation from the second r = 1-sinθ and a poem from the first:

Love

I love you
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;

I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there,

And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple.

Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good.
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.

You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.

You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.

by Roy Croft

I appreciate the sentiment, but I feel the poet really didn't need to go three stanzas without putting in a full stop, I do need to breathe at some point.

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 18:40:05 GMT

Most of what I do day-to-day involves algebraic manipulation, which is a glorified way of saying shuffling symbols round till they say what you want them to. Everyone who's remotely numerate knows that you can rearrange sums with finitely many terms any way you want:

   1+2+3 = 2+1+3 = 1+3+2 = 2+3+1 = 3+1+2 = 3+1+2.

I knew that problems could occur if you tried to do the same with sums with infinitely many terms, but until last week I didn't realise how badly wrong things could go. Riemann's Series Theorem states that (under certain conditions) you can rearrange the terms in an infinite sum so that, not only does the value of the sum change, but if you rearrange the terms carefully enough you can make it have any value you like. It's one of those counter-intuitive results that that show you how different the infinite is to the familiar realm of the finite, and how careful you need to be with your manipulations if you don't want to risk changing or destroying meaning.

    "When I was little, I didn't realise that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different... Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears became pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar... When you wanted someone to say "I love you" approximate assemblages - igloo, eyelid glue, isle of ewe - however lovely, didn't quite make it."
    Lorrie Moore, Anagrams pp129-130.

In this interview Daniel Handler mentions how much he's borrowed from Lorrie Moore. I finished Anagrams late last night, and I saw a lot Handler had stolen. I think I like Lorrie Moore for the same kinds of reasons as I love Handler. They've both got a similar sense of humour, mostly based around playing with words, though the humour in Anagrams is bitterer than most of Handler's and less likely to make me laugh out loud, but I think her writing in general is less likely to be described as "language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind".
Anagrams is an odd novel (I think it's a novel) and I'm not quite sure what I think of it, but thought I should mention it to any Handler fans reading this. Oh, and I imagine that he's been sighted in a Lorrie Moore's Paper Losses would be of interest.