Atomic Razor

Bookered Up

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Rushdie wins Best of Booker prize

I can't remember when I read Midnight's Children - I'm pretty sure I must have acquired by copy some time in the early to mid-1990s when I was buying a lot of books through the QPD and TSP bookclubs - so I would guess some time in the mid-1990s. It's one of those books that you imagine is going to be dull and heavy and lugubrious and worthy before one reads it. The first fifty pages are pretty hard going, which might in part help explain its reputation, but once we get towards the birth - at the very stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 - of the book's narrator, the olfactory telepath and convenor of the MCC (Midnight's Children's club) Saleem Sinai himself,  -  - the books becomes an absolute delight - clever, engaging, constantly and wittily surprising. The one thing it is not is boring. There is reason why it is has been the most influential English language novel of the last thirty years - standing as the exemplar of the post-colonial magic realist novel in English and that is because it really is rather wonderful. If you haven't read, do yourself a favour.

My shame is that is the only Rushdie novel that I have read despite the others having the same pattern. That is a shame that I must one day assuage. I did see the RSC's stage version of Midnight's Children at the Barbican in, I was surprised to discover, 2003. Time does play tricks; I'd thought it was longer ago. A book is a capacious thing and a play, no matter how long, is necessarily constructed on a less capacious basis. It is unfortunate that the miniseries of Midnight's Children was too controversial to be made (I have the script at home and I understand that the play was, in large part, derived from it), but we have what matters, the most important thing, the ur-text, like life, simply packed.

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You Don't See That Every Day

Avro Vulcan XH558 that is (photo from Wikipedia). The Weasel and I were engaged in our usual post-prandial stroll around the grounds of Howbery Park, when it flew past, fairly low altitude, fairly low speed. The plane was some distance to the east of us, so it didn't fly directly overhead and it didn't sound particularly loud. I imagine it was buzzing RAF Benson, where it was no doubt rather louder. Great to see unexpectedly such a wonderful piece of British technology doing what it was made to do.

Changing Expectations

Changing Expectations

Wonderful news!!!!  An economist explains why the price elasticity of oil is such that if we can drill for more and increase the supply the price will come down...

I often wonder how some of these economists handle the process of dressing in the morning, nor for that matter, the filtering of actually DATA in order to reach their conclusions.

As I said in the comments section.  This is excellent news.  I think while oil comes down in price I had better stock up on Tulip Bulbs and get the South Sea Company to ship them to me.  I've heard they can be sold for a fortune on this Internet thing with just a "website" - better buy into some radio advertising too...

There are so many books on bubbles and so much data it astounds me that apparently credible economists that people listen to still get taken in by them.

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The Co-Redemptrix of the Human Race

OK, OK. Let's do this.

What do we know? Rusty's got previous. Series One: Bad Wolf turns out to be... Rose. Humh.

Default theory: Donna is... Donna. The only thing special about her is that there is nothing special about her. She's not specially unspecial. But that can't be right. There is something special about her. She has the unconscious ability to manipulate time and probabilities and we know she has been watched from birth by Rose/Bad Wolf. OK, she was chosen at random because she was unspecially unspecial and given her power by... more actor in the Time War: the (future) Doctor/Rose/Bad Wolf/Dalek Caan/Davros or whoever. Her power is going to save the day, but she herself is going to have to do something horribly hard and humanly brave, probably involving self-sacrifice. You see, children, isn't this wonderful? It couldn't have been any of us who were chosen and we all must be prepared to sacrifice ourselves to save those those we love and the universe (no-one said life was easy).

Well, it's a morality tale certainly. But it means that Donna is just another Rose (this time without the squee). It means that all the hints that Donna is something more (but, heh, what could be more than a human...) are red herrings. It seems a deeply lame and disappointing payoff not just to the season, but to Rusty's entire tenure as executive producer of NuHu. Surely, it has to be something more interesting?

Well, OK, the Brave Little Tailor is a perfectly good topos of fantastika (thanks heavens, for The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), but the Hidden Monarch is a equally good and potentially more interesting one. Here we go...

Donna Noble... well "Donna" is an honorific and "Noble" means, well, noble. Which suggests she is some kind of noble and the only nobles who matter in the Whoviverse are the Time Lords. And we know that is possible for Time Lords to pass for human and we know that Donna heard a heartbeat and was wearing a mysteriously large ring at the time. Plus, of course, she keeps telling us she is just a temp - Noble Temp - > Time Lord. But if she is a Time Lord, which one is she?

Well, there are three candidates

1. The Rani. Nah, too obscure. I barely have any idea who is she and no-one who is not a die-hard fanboy is going to remember her from the dying days of Old Who. Also she's a villain and I don't think we are going to get Bad Donna now.
2. Romana. Well, she is certainly a noble. Wasn't she President of Gallifrey during the Time War?  Lalla Ward turning up on Saturday would fit with Dickie Dawkins last week and Great British Public are more likely to remember her. And we know that Donna isn't just a Time Lord (if she's one at all). Perhaps Romana fobwatched herself and some secret weapon back in time during the Time War. And Roman-a fits with "The Fires of Pompeii". Donna doesn't seem very Romana-like though, compared to the fobwatched  Doctor and Master to their Time Lord selves.
3. Susan. Rusty is obsessed by families - and what better way of leaving a mark on the show than by giving the Doctor one. We know he had one before the Time War. (In 1963, you might have been able to get away with "Grandfather" as a euphemism, but it was a more innocent age as anyone who has seen "The Invasion" knows.) Again, Donna doesn't very Susan-like. Donna was "born" around 1968, the peak year for adoption in the UK. That might be a connection to Susan. Donna has a grandfather, but that's only because the actor who played her father in "The Runaway Bride" died in real life. Humh... It would certainly help explain Donna's not being attracted to the Doctor. Susan was presumably involved in the Time War and could have pulled a similar trick to that I've suggested for Romana. Humh... I don't know. This doesn't feel that interesting, but it does feel quite Rusty in a way.       

OK, what else have we got... Donna's mother is called Sylvia. Sylvia was the mother of Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by the Wolf. Remus is killed (possibly by Romulus) some time after the foundation of Rome (there is even a grandfather in the story). The Doctor and Donna are mistaken for brother and sister in Pompeii. Jenny is the Doctor's clone and thus both the Doctor's twin and the Doctor's daughter. Thus the Doctor and Donna could be twins.

But Donna is also "My Donna" -> Madonna. We know that Rusty has a messiah complex. Tennant in "Midnight" could hardly have been more Christ-like. And Dalek Caan has told us that the Threefold Man is coming - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. We know that the Doctor is half-human. We know that Time Lords can temporarily become humans. Could a human temp temporarily become a Time Lord? Is Donna is the most important person in the universe because she gives birth to the saviour of the universe - the Word Become Flesh, the Godhead Become Man? Well, Time Lords probably don't give birth, so we can avoid any ickiness. The Doctor is a clone of Donna (when she is temporally a Time Lord - that's what the Ring enables her to do). She is thus able to mother an entire new race of Time Lords - including the Doctor - the Last and First of the Time Lords - now we know what the Doctor's name means at least - he is the New Adam, that is Christ. Like Mary, Donna is involved in an immaculate conception - where does the other half of his DNA come from? (From Donna and Donna's mother and father and from her grandparents - including Wilf. Unlike Jesus, there is no bilking problem - I once wrote a story about this - no, no, not Jesus! - but come to think of it - for a short story writing class at the City Lit with Leonie Ross and I also recall an article on the Virgin Birth in New Scientist that stared that the problem would be much easier to solve had Jesus be a women). Thus the Doctor can regenerate temporarily into Donna (he is Donna - she is his mother and sister), who can then sacrifice herself before being resurrected, mindwiped and returned to Wilf and Sylvia - she must never be told (possibly because the self-knowledge would unleash her powers - as in that PKD story about the robot bomb). Donna will be not only the Co-Redemptrix of the Human Race, but the Co-Saviour of the Universe(s).

Some of the planets being taken 2,000 years ago is clearly a reference to the Nativity and the beginning of the New Era, just as we are about to witness the birth of a New Era for the Time Lords (and a New Adam). Donna being told that someone is sorry for her loss is a reference to the Sorrowful Mysteries. Note also that Mary was unique as a human because uniquely she did not carry the taint of Original Sin. This might explain why Rose/Bad Wolf detect something different from ordinary humans. She has lost something that all other humans (after Adam and Eve - and Donna is the New Eve of the Time Lords) possess - original sin. Does anyone know if Rusty was a Catholic? An added bonus of the Doctor as the First of the Time Lords is that he gets a new complement of regenerations, so solving that problem.

I don't know how to work in God the Father or God the Holy Spirit into this, much less Rose/Bad Wolf, the Trickster (the Devil? - Bad Doctor? - The Valyard? - David Morrisey?) or the Doctor's Hand (and why are there two?). And I've got to think more carefully about the timeline - we may have both a baby/child and an adult Donna being sent back in time, although she can produce a baby clone of herself - "All You Zombies" and bilking paradoxes seem more Moffat than Davies though).

Just a few ideas. Saturday could be interesting.

Now if only Sylvia were called Anne...

Telling It the Way It Is

After seeing "The Stolen Earth" yesterday, two words sprang to my mind that can be rearranged by astute readers to discover my opinion the episode: "Tosh" and "Utter". Lawrence Miles provides a minute-by-minute account of his reaction to the episode and pretty much nails my feelings:

I told myself I was being silly, but now, time appears to slow down as I try to deal with the feeling that… that… that there might be a flash of light and CGI in the console room, and that when it clears, Ricky Gervais might be standing there. My stomach feels like it's rupturing, and my pulse is quicker than I ever remember it being, but not in a fun "rollercoaster" way. It's the all-devouring fear that in the next few moments, this series may f*** up even worse than it's been f***ing up for the last twelve months.
 

The thing is I liked "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums", but "The Last of the Time Lords" was pretty ghastly. Rusty hasn't managed to pull off a season finale yet and "Turn Left" and "The Stolen Earth" give me little reason to believe that it is going to be fourth time lucky. I think the Giant Reset Button (presumably one or more characters sacrificing themselves (temporarily or not) to munge up the timelines and universes with enough timey-wimey handwaving technobabble to give us a brand new universe and a brand new Doctor (Tennant) and leave Moffat with something worth playing with and get everything on Earth sort of back to normal - there is a Torchwood miniseries to come after all) is going to get pressed next Saturday and that will be Rusty's final insult to the audience (defendable on the grounds that what else can a mainstream audience be expected to deal with?).

And yet... and yet... I have to adnit that I close to obsessed with discovering the secret of just Who or  what Donna is. If Rusty can pull that off, I might (just) be able to forgive him.

And I can only hope that Steven Moffat lets bygones be bygones and brings in Miles to write at least a couple of episodes of NuNuHu.It's clearly what Miles was put on this Earth to do. I can even imagine (OK, only in my most fevered hallucinations) an alternative universe in which it is Miles not Moffat who is going to be at the helm. Of course, it would be a total disaster, but, my word, it would be something worth watching for once. Miles is much sounder as a reviewer than as a commentator. He writes great sentence, even if the arguments in his more discursive pieces do not really hang together for the length of a paragraph, much less the whole article. In this way, he reminds me of Neal Stephenson at the Gresham College symposium a couple of months ago. I would certainly like to take both out for dinner. It will be interesting to see if anything ever comes of the proposed Diamond Age TV series. It is a pity than Miles's DW obsession has stopped him from being what he might have been - the British Neal Stephenson (Miles writes better than Stross and has no concern with playing to peanut gallery - or rather a different kind of concern). But Miles is only 36; there is time and perhaps George Clooney should give Miles a call to carry out a little script doctoring on for The Diamond Age.

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Undarkened Fibre

Technology Review: New Oceans of Data Another Reason to Be Cheerful (and, frankly, after reading Lawrence Miles's latest typically eloquent, if characteristically dubious screed, I need Reasons to Be Cheeful, but luckily, my new washer-dryer is now installed and working, even if I couldn't, frustratingly, get to "Utter last night)? Money quote: "It's a big change from several years ago, when telecom companies were going belly-up from overbuilding their networks. "Essentially, the global telecom bust has become a boom," says Eric Schoonover, senior analyst at TeleGeography Research[.]" It's easy to lose track of time. Neal Stephenson's seminal article  "Mother Earth, Mother Board" was published in the December 1996 issue of Wired, so presumably based on research carried out in 1996 or 1995, but that is not one, but two epochs ago as far as telecommunications is concerned. It seems only the day before yesterday that we reading - and believing - George Gilder's prediction of exponential growth of fibre traffic and only yesterday we were being told of all the dark fibre that had been installed in the dotcom boom and which would never be lit. But now it seems, even as we stand on the brink of a global economic crisis the magnitude of which we have not witnessed since the mid-1970s, perhaps even the early 1930s,  it seems that the exponential growth  has been renewed (driven in large part by the growth of video downloads - "The engines cannae take it, Captain!"). Things do move on when you aren't looking. Encouragingly, significant amounts of the new fibre capacity will be dedicated to providing bandwidth to developing countries in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps the old saw about best sectors to work in being supermarkets and telecommunications because even in a recession people still have to eat and still want to talk to other people is truer than we thought (of course, we should add a third sector, the water industry on the grounds that it doesn't rain less during a recession and people still need to go to the toilet). And if there is hope, it lies in the developing world.

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I'll See You Those and Raise You These...

I might be an archmiserabilist, but I can at least pretend to optimistic at times

• IBM Roadrunner: the first 1 petaflop (10^15 floating point operations per second) computer. Estimates of the computing power of the human brain put it somewhere between 10 and a 1000 petaflops. We are something like 4 to 10 Moore's law cycles (6 to 20 years) away from having a computing capacity of the human brain. The US Department of Energy and the NSA have stated that they will have requirements for 1 exaflop (10^18 flops) by 2018.
• Artificial General Intelligence: the AGIRI (Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute) wiki list 21 projects AGI system-building projects and an additional 2 theoretical projects, including Marcus Hutter's work on AIXL, which by explicitly placing AGI in an formal theoretical computer science framework of computer science can be compared to (at least at some level) to Turing's seminal work in the 1930s extending Goedel's ideas.
• e-book readers: when you read a comprehensive comparative review of the various e-book readers currently available in the UK market in London Lite (London Lite!), something is happening. E-books are a classic disruptive technology and, coupled with Print-on-Demand technology, will transform the publishing landscape over the next few years. I would like to surf that wave of creative destruction. Ten years from now, printed books will have gone the way of vinyl: only for geeks, specialists and the commodity fetishers. And true e-paper is not long off now.
• printed electronics: as Dave pointed out, the possibilities raised by rapid prototypers/3D printers such as the RepRap are close to endless. But the products it would produce would be purely mechanical, very useful, we build a highly sophisticated technological culture on the basis of purely (electro-)mechanical objects, but the smarts would still have to come from the chip fab in Taiwan. Of course. If you want a PS4, you are not going to be printing it out in your utility room any time soon, but printed electronics combined with rapid prototypers are going to make the world a whole lot livelier and wilder over the next decades as we await the real Santa Claus machine: the true Drexlerian molecular nanotechnological Universal Assembler.
• electron turbines: perhaps the Universal Assembler isn't that many decades away after all. Lancaster University(!) has produced a design for a electron turbine capable of printing molecule; the Catalan Institute for Nanotechnology intends to fabricate one soon. I have never expected general purpose NMT until 2025, with 2015-2025 being the decade when special purpose products came onto the market. 2005-2015 was always going to be the decade of foundations and this is exactly the kind of research (the type announced once or twice a week in the KurzweilAI.net newsletter) that one would expect if we are on track. Well, we are on track somewhere. Whatever the next few decades have to offer us, they won't be quiet, they won't be safe and they won't be calm. But I'll tell you what they will be, they will be interesting.

Reasons to be Cheerful...

Given that it currently feels like we're bravely stepping back into the economic turmoil of the 70s and pundits are talking about Stagflation again, I wanted to at least reference some reasons to be cheerful.  I am naturally far more optimistic than the other half of the Razor and while that optimism is really taking a good beating at the moment there are interesting things to share.

We have some seriously cool technologies coming into the main stream which could make for some enormous and dramatic shifts in the world.

Here's a random list:

• 3D Printing.  Reprap is here and just one of the options emerging.  There are already businesses using 3D "injet" style printers and there is a lot more to come with this.  This does raise some rather interesting IPR issues though.
• Super Capacitors: Lots of rumours circulating here about new materials which could give Capacitors charge desnities approximating those of a conventional battery but with the added benefits of induction charging in times approximating those of filling your tank
• Algae BioFuels: While the Razor is a fan of the Hydrogen economy (Honda moving in there too I see) I do tend to think that this is the best bet.  What remains to be seen is if the small scale demo plant can scale up.  Leave the oil for planes where it's still the only practical game in town
  
• Cheap Solar Panels: $1 a Watt and decreasing.  At that to improvements in storage technology and we can move to a less centralised electrical system and even in countries like the UK this works
• SnapDragon:  I mean, seriously, a 1 GHz mobile application processor?  Waayyyy cool...  although they have said they're unlikely to make it go faster because of radiation issues, they might do multi-core devices

So forget the climate and the credit crunch for a while, look at the upside of a bunch of really cool new technologies arriving soon.

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Second City

I don't know about you, but I would love to work in a skyscraper. Is there any greater thrill than going over Waterloo Bridge at night and seeing Tower 42 and the Gherkin lit up with the tower of Canary Wharf in the distance and imagining the Secret Masters of the Universe sweating over financial models lovingly handcrafted in Erlang inside them? Well, perhaps this view of the Chicago skyline. Chicago is the US's Second City, which always makes me think of Birmingham, but I am assured by people who have actually been there that it is nothing at all like Birmingham. I believe that it would meet all of my criteria as a great place to work and live for a year or two as part of LifePlan50(TM). We shall see.

Don't Get Fooled Again

It looks increasingly as though Labour won't run a candidate against Davis. It also looks quite possible that Kelvin Mackenzie might run against him. It is thus all the more imperative than a credible Anti-Tory Civil Libertarian candidate emerges over the next few days.

An interesting question (raised by, for instance,  jackfirecat) is the question of why Davis did what he did. One theory is Early Onset Alzheimer's. Another is that Davis is seeking to position himself as the John McCain of the Tory Party in preparation for a run for the leadership against Hague in 2012 (if a minority Cameron administration fails quickly) or 2015 (when the neoliberal economic dispensation finally implodes under the weight of its internal contradictions after five years of slash’n'burn cost cutting, sacking and outsourcing - in 2019 Davis will still be younger than McCain today or perhaps even 2010 (the election might be closer than we imagine today). Certainly, the Cameronistas were briefing heavily against Davis in the Daily Telegraph yesterday - Cameron studies the focus groups and polls as much as Brown and knows full well that it won't advantage him with Bromsgrove Man and Worcester Woman for The Sun and the Daily Mail (and Labour PEBs) to be able to present Cameron as soft on terror  - and the feeling in the Westminster Village appears to be that, no matter how genuine Davis's personal concerns over forty-two days might be, this more about pique and ambition than principle.

No More Mr Nice Guy

I can only hope that Labour chooses not to dignify David Davis's crass publicity stunt by fielding a candidate in the by-election. What would be gut-bustingly funny though would be if an Anti-Tory independent with an impeccable track record on civil liberties could be found to run against and defeat him. Davis is exactly what one imagine him to be and has got serious previous

Davis is perceived to be socially conservative. He expressed support for the restoration of the death penalty as recently as November 2003. He is highly sceptical of the political expansion of the European Union. He voted against the repeal of Section 28 (which banned local government from promoting homosexual relationships in schools).

The question is who might be such a candidate? Martin Bell? Stephen Fry? Tom Robinson? Billy Bragg? Russell T. Davies? No, I think the perfect candidate would be Roz Kaveney. She in particular her comment on the affair.

Whatever happens in the by-election, It is almost certain now that David Cameron will be Prime Minister in two years' time (quite possibly with Nick Clegg as Foreign Secretary). Anyone who wants a  foreshadowing of what Cameron's Britain is going to be like should check out, Boris Watch. As I won't stop saying for the next two years, a Cameron  government won't be as bad as we fear...

Talking of by-elections and Johnson, a hoarding promoting the Tory candidate in the Henley by-election appeared the other day on the road from Benson to Watlington. Each time I drive past it, I am tempted to put the pedal to the metal and go through that sucker at 120 mph (the speed limit on that stretch is 50 mph).

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Complete and Utter

To DeCongested on Friday evening. I had been for a few months and it was good to see that it is still reasonably well-subscribed. And the red was very potable - a couple of glasses for a £2 supplement, this has to be close to be the best value available in the Metropolis.

The usual mix of good and not so good pieces. Lucy Fry, who was one of the two best writers on the Arvon course I went to at Moniack Mhor in 2006, gave us "Meeting May Mead", an insightful take on the hysteria affecting a fan of an Amy Winehouse-like singer, but the highlight of the evening for me was winning a free pass for three people to the next Utter!, which I think is some kind of poetry/slam fiction event at the Salisbury Hotel in Green Lanes. I am told by Greg that the Salisbury is a pretty neato place. The chap who runs the event, Richard Tyrone Jones, said before he read his story ("The Day Everybody in the World’s Arsehole Disappeared")

" and rather good I thought, partly because it reminded me of the kind of stories I sometimes produce as exercises in creative writing classes) that he would give a free pass to the first person to answer the question "Who wrote my favourite short story collection, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys?" Now, you might expect given an audience consisting of London literati that the question would be answered in a heartbeat. But no-one spoke. I could see the cover of the book in my mind's eye from all those QPD catalogues I perused in another life. I rose my hand, but I just could not summon up the name from the vasty deep that is my memory and I found myself like a fish floundering for breath on the deck of the trawler. Then someone did call out the answer ("Will Self!"), but Richard said that I probably knew the answer anyway and that I should also have a free pass, which was very decent indeed of him. He also said something about Kingsley Amis, which I didn't quite catch, possibly along the lines "You were going to say Kingsley Amis". Whatever he said about the King, it was an odd coincidence in the circumstances (but there are many steps from Kingsley Amis to Will Self, a sort of Martin Amis-lite). What made the whole thing even more embarrassing is that I had been thinking of Will Self only a few minutes earlier during the interval when I had been disappointed not to find him snorting horse in the gent's. The image of Will snorting horse is one that has stuck in my mind for many years. On my one visit to the Groucho (for a dating seminar I hasten to add), I was disappointed not to find Will in the toilets as will be Andrew in British Grove - I was discussing this reference with Steve at Writers' Club drinks in the Ship on Thursday night.

Later, on the way back to the tube, I managed to bag a brace of Barneses (this is the Year of Julian Barnes Completeness) and a book each by Amis pere (I want to get all his books) and fils (I admire him rather than like him, so, at least for the time being, it will just a choice few of his books) from one of the secondhand bookshops on Charing Cross Road, so, overall, a very good evening.

How Soon is Now?

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report: The Singularity

IEEE Spectrum is a pretty mainstream magazine, more mainstream than Wired where Bill Joy's seminal article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" appeared in 2000 and certainly much more mainstream than Whole Earth whose final Singularity issue never appeared (happenstance - or enemy action?). Of course, IEEE Spectrum is a popular magazine and the Singularity is perfect Sunday supplement fodder. Then again the IEEE is intimately connected with the Military-Industrial Complex and wild ideas of every kind are hardly uncommon there (for instance, the nuclear weapons establishments of the United States and other countries are prety wild ideas if you think about it).

Then again perhaps the Singularity is a mainstream idea. Western civilisation is so saturated with notions of both eschatology (nuclear war, global warming to name just two) and the fantasy of history (see, for example, the works of Karl Marx, Henry Adams, Arnold Toynbee, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Neal Stephenson) that the Technological Singularity can seem to be the logical and inevitable apotheosis of human evolution.

We'll see.

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Rand Simberg - Blogger - Swan Dives off the deepend... Blogger Alzheimers??

The Uncle Seems Real - Transterrestrial Musings

Wow...  really... wow...

Rand is a huge proponent of the theory of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) in which people misread and claim George Bush is things he's not.  Meanwhile it seems that Rand might have succumbed to ODS (Obama...) - the thread is fascinating, not for what Rand says.  His grudging, "ok, the didn't actually lie" stuff is pretty pedestrian, but for his utterly clueless defense of a mis-used phrase.

I've known Rand on and off since the late 90s when he was a prickly but at least, generally, competent commentator on space matters.  He's gradually slid into a deep dark hole and I don't think there is any hope for him to return.  In some respects it is sad.  When he avoids discussions of Space Tourism or American Politics I tend to agree with much of what he says.

The trouble is those moments of lucidity are becoming rarer, almost like watching somebody succumb to Alzheimer's...  I wonder if there is a Blogger version of this, where the original personality is slowly lost to something that eats it up and leaves a shell of the former self pandering to the crowd?

Answers on a postcard please...

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If Life Gives You Lemmons

I am currently ploughing (and ploughing is the word - it's over a thousand pages, all told - although, to be fair, I am  quite enjoying it) my way through Zachary Leader's (crazy name, crazy guy)  Life of Kingsley Amis. Of course, when I have finished that I have to plough my way through The Letters of Kingsley Amis (Z. Leader, ed.). Amis at least is considered one of the great letter writers of the C20th, perhaps the last great letter writer and perhaps second only to Evelyn Waugh (this is supposed to the be the Year of Evelyn Waugh Completeness) in the C20th (I know, I know - I did recently come across mention of Humph's dad's correspondence with Rupert Hart-Davis).

But Amis had one more thing in common with Waugh other than being a great correspondent and an epoch-defining novelists (Amis extended Waugh's mode from an exclusive focus on the concerns of upper and upper-middle classes to encompass a much wider angled view of the bourgeoisie - much post-war British fiction is either imitation of Amis or reaction against him, particularly, of course, the novels of Martin Amis, so that today writers inevitably find themselves reacting in some way towards both of the big beasts). Or at least he had one more thing in common with him for eight years. Consider this description of the Lemmons from the Life

It was a late-Georgian mansion fifteen miles from the centre of London, with eight bedrooms, three reception rooms, two staircases, a large, high-ceilinged coach-house kitchen and offices; surrounding property included an ancient barn (a listed building), garages, a detached cottage, a conservatory, an enclosed courtyard at the side, a gravel drive and an enormous sloping garden at the back, including magnificent cedar trees and a meadow. Though within walking distance of the London underground's (sic) Northern Line - only just, and rarely for Amis - it faced directly on to Hadley Common; living there felt like living in the country.

This sounds almost exactly like the kind of house that John Plant was after in Work Suspended (and Waugh in real life). Amis bought it with Elizabeth Jane Howard, his second wife. They got it for £48,000 at auction in 1968 (corresponding to ~£575k with respect to prices and ~£1.1M with respect to wages in 2006) - they were prepared to  pay up to £57,000. Either way it would be a bargain today, but neither Amis nor Howard were that rich and in the high tax days of the 1970s (one of the major differences between now and 1977 - there is so much less Cameron can do - no high taxes to slash, no unions to best - perhaps the problems of Britain in 2008 after 29 years of the Neoliberal Economic Dispensation are - God forbid that one should actually say it - actually the fault of the Neoliberals and not of the Lefties), they did struggle to pay the bills - hence Amis productivity during the Lemmons period.

In another Waughian touch, when they bought the the house it was called Gladsmuir, which both Amis and Howard (understandably) disliked. A quick glance through old documents revealed that it had formerly been known as Lemmons, which is even even better than Gramps.

I'm not sure I'd want to live at Lemmons. High Barnet is a long way out. Then I again I'd like to have the opportunity to try or at least the money to have the opportunity to try. I think I might prefer to live in Gardnor House in Flask Walk, Hampstead where Amis and Howard lived from 1976 to 1981. Whichever way, I had better get writing.      

Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam

As brixtonbrood didn't say a few months ago "If pirates are good and space is good, then space pirates must be better; if dinosaurs are good and zombies are good, then zombie dinosaurs must be better. Which means that zombie dinosaur space pirates must be best of all." Well, perhaps, not quite. Reading Sam Jordison's recent blog entry on James Blish's A Case of Conscience yesterday, it struck me that there is one vital element missing. Consider Kelly Freas's legendary Astounding cover for Murray Leinster's The Pirates of Ersatz. It could be a a zombie dinosaur space pirate coming about to come through the airlock hatch, blaster in hand, slide rule clenched firmly(?) between his undead teeth. But for maximum effect, the zombie dinosaur space pirate should be in clerical garb. Yes, it's Jesuit zombie dinosaur space pirates that the reading/viewing public and merchandisers of the world are demanding. 

If You See Cid, Tell Him

My complimentary copy of the The Poem of the Cid to be review for the Blog a Penguin Classics blog finally arrived yesterday. It The good news is that it turns out to be a bilingual, parallel text edition and my Old Spanish is even more minimal than my modern Spanish, so the book is only about half the length I thought it was, which makes the issue of reviewing rather more tractable than it might have been. Having said that, they say Spanish is easy to learn, but hard to master and  few would deny that in the C20th Spanish produced  a literature of global significance, so perhaps someone or something is trying to tell me that I ought to move straightaway to Buenos Aires and immerse myself in the culture of the Hispanosphere.

Location, Location, Location

House for sale : Combe Florey, Taunton, Somerset - Knight Frank | United Kingdom UK | View details

Evelyn (and Auberon) Waugh's old pile is up for sale. It's on at £2.25M, but I suspect in the current climate you might be able to get it for £1.95M. (I wonder why the Waugh family are selling now? It doesn't seem the best time, which might suggest they've been forced into it, but it is also, I suppose, possible, that recessions don't much affect the price of this kind of property, given the shortage of supply. To be honest though, I'd have thought that it were more likely to be affected as the marginal incomes - the banker's bonuses - of the sorts of people who might buy a house of this type are highly dependent on the state of the global economy.

No mention of whether or not it still has the private chapel, but it does have come with a tennis court and [b]ehind the house is a lovely large walled garden surrounded by open paddocks and woodland extending to just over 35 acres."

"Work Suspended" is a fragment of a novel that Waugh began in the late 1930s and abandoned after the outbreak of war. It concerns a successful popular novelist, John Plant, who, after the death of his artist father, has decided to settle permanently back in England. The narrator describes the kind of house that he is looking for:

"I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place, it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimney-piece in the drawing-room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees - these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire's and the retired admiral's."

This sounds a great deal like Combe Florey. What is particularly striking is that it must cost no "more than £3,000, all told". £3,000 in 1939 corresponds to ~£130k according to prices and ~£500k according to wages in 2008. It is possible that Combe Florey with its 35 acres is somewhat grander than the house Plant is seeking, but the fact that it is on for £2.25M gives an indication of just how property prices have risen over the last 70 years. If only one had a time machine.

Waugh discussed these kinds of houses and the kinds of people who lived in them in several works from the late 1930s (for instance, the short story "An Englishman's Home", which features Much Malcock Hall (formerly and still popularly "Grumps)", Much Malcock House, the Manor and the Old Mill) and early 1940s (for instance, Put Out More Flags). This got me thinking - and looking. There are houses of the type Waugh describes all over the place whether in Lancashire or Oxfordshire (the drive between the M40 junction and Crowmarsh Gifford is thick with them). As a jobbing writer, one may never aspire to live in such a house, but plenty of people do. Who are they (there are surely only so many retired admirals or even colonels)? What do they do for a living? Given house price rises over the last decades, how do they afford them? And why does one never meet these people? (Because I live in the city.)

I'm not sure I'd want to live in Combe Florey, but I'd like to be in a position (I think I'd prefer a three bedroom duplex apartment with a view of the Thames or substantial terraced house in Wingate Road) to be able to afford to. Combe Florey would make the perfect writers' centre. Perhaps some banker could give the Arvon Foundation his bonus so they could buy it for the nation.

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

IEEE Spectrum: Unsafe At Any Airspeed?

Interesting stuff, and not entirely a surprise to me but some of the findings are worse than I would have anticipated.

" In March 2004, acting on a number of reports from general aviation pilots that Samsung SPH-N300 cellphones had caused their GPS receivers to lose satellite lock, NASA issued a technical memorandum that described emissions from this popular phone. It reported that there were emissions in the GPS band capable of causing interference. Disturbingly, though, they were low enough to comply with FCC emissions standards."

I know that we've had engineers invest heavily in potted plants to place between them and working prototype handsets when they saw the radiation and radio output data for them.  I've also seen a theoretically ready to ship 3G handset that could "talk" to its test rig without the cable across the lab.

I've certainly left my phone on a couple of times by accident.

The core issue is that outside of the critical phases this should be less of a problem anyway, (although the input on the effect of the Samsung phones on GPS is interesting, especially as built in GPS becomes a standard in 3G devices).  Part of the problem with spectrum "noise" is an artifact of phones not being designed to (a) move at multiple hundreds of kph and (b) be 5 miles _above_ the radio landscape.  Both of these factors lead to a very unhappy core network on the ground.  Put a normal phone into a landscape like that and it'll crank up the power trying to handshake with a basestation (or in the case of CDMA lots of basestations) and keep doing while moving.  It's a mess.

What will happen in the near future is the plane will have a micro-cell onboard which means the phone will lock onto the local cell a few metres away and broadcast at minimum power.  That shouldn't be a serious problem.

Of course, the more serious problem is passengers fighting their natural urges to beat the leaving hell out of the ass on their phone for an 8 hour transatlantic flight.

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Internal Exile

I was going to say that the election of Boris Johnson is a catastrophe for London and a catastrophe for Britain, but as the Weasel has pointed out, Johnson's election has already generated more hyperbolic comment in the blogosphere than can be possibly be justified or sustained. Which isn't to say that I'm not very angry at the people who should have known better - those who voted for a "progressive" third party candidate as number 1 and Johnson as 2. They are guilty ones and I do and will blame them for inflicting upon us a racist, sexist, homophobic buffoon. But the reeducation camps aren't just around the door and our lives must go on as best they can.

Of course, the real fear now for us anti-Tories is that Johnson will surprise us all and prove competent in the role. There is absolutely nothing in Johnson's own background (other than a modicum of native intelligence) to suggest that he will be competent, but I suspect that a great many people at Central Office, along with their friends, will be really, really, hoping that he doesn't mess and will be prepared to offer Johnson all the support he needs (whether he wants it might be another matter). 

For the foreseeable future, as we career towards an almost certain Cameron victory in 2010 its likely shattering consequences (the end of the United Kingdom for one),  I intend to adopt the attitude of bourgeois intellectuals in the DDR: an attitude of psychic internal exile from the body politic.

Free Neal Stephenson...

...and John Clute at Gresham College next Thursday for the symposium on Science Fiction as a Literary Genre. (Crassly the college's homepage's puffs the event with the tagline "Sci-Fi and Literature" and a picture of the Starship Enterprise, so managing to get three things wrong in one go.) I heard about the symposium a few weeks ago, but only signed up this week - I has assumed that all the places would have gone by now, but I wrong. Of course, I feel ashamed that I didn't sign up as soon as I heard about the symposium. I mean - Neal Stephenson! And for free! I wonder how Gresham managed to bag him? I suppose Gresham College might push some of his baroque buttons. The college is at least aware of what they have got to a certain extent: he is described as the keynote speaker in the letter I received this morning. It doesn't give a name to the title of his talk, but the website does: "The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture", which does sound like a Stephensonian topic - he is certainly a geek (unlike many slipstream writers), indeed he is proud to be a geek, but there is a sense in Stephenson's work that he stands slightly apart from the fetid core of the genre (unlike, say, Charles Stross).

And in the evening I am going to see another literary hero of mine, although this time unfortunately the event isn't free. David Lodge is talking about his new novel Deaf Sentence at the place that filled the void left by the closure of Compendium Books (eternal thanks to the Weasel for introducing me to its wonders) as my spiritual home the London Review (of Books) Bookshop. There appear to be tickets still available, a snip at £6, although that's not quite the same as free - as they say what's not to like about free Neal Stephenson?

Perhaps Lodge and Stephenson should collaborate on a novel. After all Stephenson has written a campus novel (The Big U with several other novels heavily featuring students and universities) and Lodge has written a novel about artificial intelligence (sort of) (Thinks...). As two of my favourite writers it is hardly surprising that they have much more in common that might meet the eye. And I sure that Stephenson would agree with Morris Zapp (or Jacques Derrida) that Every Decoding is Another Encoding. No, they aren't that far apart (I know, I know!).

And afterwards it will be City Lit Writers' Club drinks. Can my brain, stomach and liver cope with so much literary richness in one day?       

Cantar de Mio Cid

Blog A Penguin Classic – Penguin Books Ltd

Thanks to The Magician for the tip: the Blog a Penguin Classic blog is open again to new reviewers, so register now for your free book. I've been assigned The Poem of the Cid. Yesss... OK, I can't say it's the book I would have chosen myself, but it is a work that stand at the very threshold of Spanish literature and thus is, in its way, the perfect introduction to a decade of Borgesian studies. Furthermore, who can forget the ending of the film? And the book is a lot shorter than Don Quixote.

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Vote Early, Vote Often

According to the latest YouGov poll Boris is 11% ahead of Ken. How can this be? Who are these people who are prepared to vote for Boris Johnson (I leave aside discussion of the opinions of certain people)? Boris Johnson! This isn't the OUSU presidency we are talking about here. This is the mayoralty of the most important city in the world. There is no place for an eccentric joke candidate. Ken has many flaws, but he has a proven track of running London, while Boris has a proven track record of running... The Spectator. New Labour might be finally imploding under the combined weight of a global economic slowdown, battle fatigue and its own internal contradictions, but that doesn't mean that we can afford to risk putting the reins of power in London in the hands of an absentee landlord. And does anyone seriously believe that Johnson will be anything other than asleep on the job? Worryingly I haven't received a pollig card, although I am as sure as I can be that I returned the electroral register form months ago and I did get an official pack of electoral material from the Returning Officer yesterday. I will have to head down to Green Dragon Primary School with my passport and hope in my heart tomorrow. I ought to feel a lot more depressed about this than I do. The only explanation I can adduce is that I am suffering from hysterical suppression of the symptoms. Anyway, tomorrow, if you can, vote Ken 1.

Just What I've Been Looking For

LI've long been ashamed of the paucity of my vocabulary. I remember when I was 15 being asked by a fellow pupil at St Cuthbert Mayne RC High School what "imperious" meant. I blustered, but Michelle Ogden came in with a terse and accurate definition. I've carried the scar for nearly a quarter of a century now. I bought the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary on CD-ROM a few years ago (as discussed in these pages in August 2005 - it seems much longer ago), but I found it inadequate to my needs - the C21stD is a mere shadow of my Chambers English Dictionary from ~1990. For Christmas 2006 I received the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, with CD-ROM, a great improvement on C21stD. My appetite was whetted and for Christmas 2007 I received the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ("contains all the vocabulary in general English worldwide from 1700 to the present day, plus vocabulary from the Bible and Shakespeare"). You take things for granted for decades , but when, for whatever reason, you start examining them in detail, you realise that you didn't understand them nearly as well as you thought you did (if it all). Recently I've been become concerned about the exact meanings of various common (and perhaps not so common) prefixes derived from Greek and Latin that are such a useful and ubiquitous element of so many of the words of our language. Condemn, connect, confuse, cislunar, translunar, cryptography, metastable, paranormal, pseudoscientific, quasielastic. I know what the words mean, but what exactly do the elements mean. For instance, the Trans-Siberian Railway goes across Siberia, but translunar space is beyond the Moon just as a transhumanism is beyond a human (in whatever sense). Across/beyond. Yes, there are linked concepts (there we go again!), but it's obvious that they ought to represented by the word (whatever languages are, they are slippery beasts). SOED has helped me with coming to grips with a problem I didn't even know I had, but this site is, I think, going to help even English Language Root Search - PrefixSuffix.com. But the truth is that after four months of using SOED, it's clear to me that it doesn't fully meet all my requirements. I need more words, fuller etymologies, a much wider range of quotations. I think for Christmas 2008 I am going to request for the Oxford English Dictionary itself.

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Now Then! Now Then!

What in the name of living buggeration is Carol Thatcher wearing on The Apprentice: You're Fired!? Not only is she wearing a Jimmy Saville blouson, not only has she got Jimmy Saville hair, she appears to have had plastic surgery to look like Jimmy Saville. I think she is even wearing his jewellery. What's going on? With Sir James pretty much retired these days, has she identified a potential vacancy in the hierarchy of the nation's affection?

Thinking About the Immortality of the Crab

So that's what I've been doing all these years.

I really think I ought to move to Buenos Aires, learn Spanish and pretend to the Twenty-First century Jorge Luis Borges. Well at least I now know what the title of the n