Yesterday I had a day out at the Natural History Museum, including one of the most quietly thrilling exhibitions I've ever seen. But I know better than to try to compete with Toast in the telling of a story.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Arctic wonders
Yesterday I had a day out at the Natural History Museum, including one of the most quietly thrilling exhibitions I've ever seen. But I know better than to try to compete with Toast in the telling of a story.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Songs of the Planets
If you haven't yet had the pleasure of hearing sounds from other planets - such as the dawn chorus on Jupiter - then have a listen here.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Cube, Part the First
Today: something cubish. Bear with me on this one.
1D: If you have a little line, you can use it to represent any 'bipolar' situation, like the potential outcomes of tossing a coin. You could label the ends H and T, or, if you like a spot of binary, 0 and 1.
2D: If you have a square, the four corners could represent the possible outcomes of tossing two coins (HH, HT, TH, TT). You might label them 00, 01, 10, and 11.
3D: A cube has eight corners (000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111). Looked at in a certain way, it's a map of the eight possible states of a three-bit computer. You could use this computer to store the result of three coin tosses, or perhaps a letter from a to h. At any one time, your computer would inhabit one corner of the cube. The cube is its little world of potential: if you give it a different letter to store, or a different set of coin toss results, it moves to a different corner of its world.
4D: A 'hypercube', has 16 corners. (If you're curious about cubes in four dimensions, there's a lovely explanation here - scroll down to 'Analogies to Lower Dimensions' and enjoy.) A computer living here would have four bits - a semibyte.
The laptop I'm typing into has a modest 80GB of storage, which is about 687 billion bits. It lives in a 687 billion-dimensional cube, flitting from corner to corner like a fly in a box. Every stroke of the key sends it to another corner. Even when I stop, it flits through dimensions I'm not aware of. I can hear it. Flitting.
One can't help feeling pity for the poor thing...
And it was between such bouts of pity that I took to wondering what it might be like in 687 billion dimensions (invariably a good move if at any time you find yourself fed up of any form of compassionate state).
A spot of Pythagoras (or a quick sketch with a ruler) will tell you that the diagonal of a 1cm square is about 1.4cm long. The equivalent distance for a 1cm cube - in a straight line between opposite corners - just over 1.7cm.
If you're ever trapped inside a 1cm crouton, or a sugar cube, you'll always be able to stretch out to 1.7cm long if you need to.
Picture now a sugar cube in 687 billion dimensions, still just 1cm across. The distance between opposite corners? A little over 5 miles.
This exercise has helped me come to terms with the plight of my flitting friend; and maybe it can help you too. No more fly in a box visions for me. I see my sweet laptop soar on snow-white wings through miles of sparkling space, to liquid crystal heights and diaphanous digital depths, and I am at peace.
1D: If you have a little line, you can use it to represent any 'bipolar' situation, like the potential outcomes of tossing a coin. You could label the ends H and T, or, if you like a spot of binary, 0 and 1.
2D: If you have a square, the four corners could represent the possible outcomes of tossing two coins (HH, HT, TH, TT). You might label them 00, 01, 10, and 11.
3D: A cube has eight corners (000,001,010,011,100,101,110,111). Looked at in a certain way, it's a map of the eight possible states of a three-bit computer. You could use this computer to store the result of three coin tosses, or perhaps a letter from a to h. At any one time, your computer would inhabit one corner of the cube. The cube is its little world of potential: if you give it a different letter to store, or a different set of coin toss results, it moves to a different corner of its world.
4D: A 'hypercube', has 16 corners. (If you're curious about cubes in four dimensions, there's a lovely explanation here - scroll down to 'Analogies to Lower Dimensions' and enjoy.) A computer living here would have four bits - a semibyte.The laptop I'm typing into has a modest 80GB of storage, which is about 687 billion bits. It lives in a 687 billion-dimensional cube, flitting from corner to corner like a fly in a box. Every stroke of the key sends it to another corner. Even when I stop, it flits through dimensions I'm not aware of. I can hear it. Flitting.
One can't help feeling pity for the poor thing...
And it was between such bouts of pity that I took to wondering what it might be like in 687 billion dimensions (invariably a good move if at any time you find yourself fed up of any form of compassionate state).
A spot of Pythagoras (or a quick sketch with a ruler) will tell you that the diagonal of a 1cm square is about 1.4cm long. The equivalent distance for a 1cm cube - in a straight line between opposite corners - just over 1.7cm.
If you're ever trapped inside a 1cm crouton, or a sugar cube, you'll always be able to stretch out to 1.7cm long if you need to.
Picture now a sugar cube in 687 billion dimensions, still just 1cm across. The distance between opposite corners? A little over 5 miles.
This exercise has helped me come to terms with the plight of my flitting friend; and maybe it can help you too. No more fly in a box visions for me. I see my sweet laptop soar on snow-white wings through miles of sparkling space, to liquid crystal heights and diaphanous digital depths, and I am at peace.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Life of an ageing star
Click picture for detail.
They have complex lives.
Sometimes I think I liked them better when they were just white dots and they all looked the same.
(Sometimes I think that about people too.)
Other times I marvel. And I do like a good marvel.
Here's the current extent of my understanding:
It starts at the bottom-left and follows the wiggly path. If it goes right, it's getting redder; if it goes left, it's getting bluer; if it goes up, it's getting brighter. When it gets to the top it goes boom.
From star evolution lectures.
They have complex lives. Sometimes I think I liked them better when they were just white dots and they all looked the same.
(Sometimes I think that about people too.)
Other times I marvel. And I do like a good marvel.
Here's the current extent of my understanding:
It starts at the bottom-left and follows the wiggly path. If it goes right, it's getting redder; if it goes left, it's getting bluer; if it goes up, it's getting brighter. When it gets to the top it goes boom.
From star evolution lectures.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Upon going to sleep
Made tired by the day now,
my passionate longing
shall welcome the starry night
like a tired child.
Hands, leave all your activity,
brow, forget all thought,
for all my senses
are about to go to sleep.
And my soul, unguarded,
will float freely
into the magic circle of the night -
deeply and a thousand times alive.
The third of Strauss's Four Last Songs: one of the most emotionally powerful - and yet peaceful - pieces of music I have ever heard. And I have heard it a lot of times. The poem ('Beim Schlafengehen') is by Herman Hesse. Strauss's setting is certainly not a numbing drift into sleep: nope, we're talking serious yearning and ecstatic flight of the soul treatment here.
This is my favourite translation - I'm afraid I don't know who it's by. I've adulterated it a little at the end (before I messed with it, the above translation ended in order to live in the magic circle of the night/ deep and a thousand fold.) because I wanted to accommodate a different version of the last, ecstatic line that thrilled me in a subtitled performance on the tv several years ago. Apologies to those with a better grasp of poetic coherence than me.
my passionate longing
shall welcome the starry night
like a tired child.
Hands, leave all your activity,
brow, forget all thought,
for all my senses
are about to go to sleep.
And my soul, unguarded,
will float freely
into the magic circle of the night -
deeply and a thousand times alive.
The third of Strauss's Four Last Songs: one of the most emotionally powerful - and yet peaceful - pieces of music I have ever heard. And I have heard it a lot of times. The poem ('Beim Schlafengehen') is by Herman Hesse. Strauss's setting is certainly not a numbing drift into sleep: nope, we're talking serious yearning and ecstatic flight of the soul treatment here.
This is my favourite translation - I'm afraid I don't know who it's by. I've adulterated it a little at the end (before I messed with it, the above translation ended in order to live in the magic circle of the night/ deep and a thousand fold.) because I wanted to accommodate a different version of the last, ecstatic line that thrilled me in a subtitled performance on the tv several years ago. Apologies to those with a better grasp of poetic coherence than me.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
From 'Killing Time' by Simon Armitage
Meanwhile, hot air rises.
And the two men held for twenty-one days in living conditions
decidedly worse
than those in most high-security prisons
are not the victims
of some hard-line oppressive regime, or political refugees,
or eco-warriors
digging in on the side of rare toads and ancient trees,
or dumbstruck hostages,
or Western tourists kidnapped by gun-toting terrorists,
or moon-eyed murderers
on death row, or self-captivated Turner Prize exhibitionists,
but balloonists, actually,
jet-streaming the globe, riding the one, continuous corner
of the world's orb.
In a picnic basket swinging from a Bunsen burner
suspended beneath
a tuppenny rain-hood filled with nothing but ether,
Messrs Piccard and Jones
hitched a ride on a current of air and lapped the equator
in less time than it takes the moon
to go through its snowball cycle of freezing and thawing.
Think of all the mental energy
and tax dollars pumped into that Stealth Bomber thing
with its invisible paint
and silent engines and non-reflective angles;
all that fuss
when all along we could have sided with the angels.
All we have to do,
apparently, is catch the breeze and hold our breath,
strike a match,
and watch the planet going round and round beneath.
All right, in practice
it wasn't a cake-walk. Stowed away within the microclimate
of the capsule
was at least one mosquito that drew blood from both pilot
and co-pilot.
And one of the two had to space-walk the outside of the canopy
snapping off icicles,
and not for Scotch on the rocks but as a matter of buoyancy.
Nevertheless, could those men
who emerged, stunned and smelly, who were hoping to land,
touchingly, in the lap
of the Sphinx rather than being dragged through sand
to the back of beyond;
could they be representative of some higher and finer ideal?
We could do worse,
couldn't we, than balloon? Could do worse than peel
the skin from the soul
and dither and drift in the miles of airspace between heaven
and Earth, could do worse
than quit the sink estates and the island tax-havens,
look down cartographically
on town and country, golf blight and deforestation,
the veins and arteries of roads,
the blood-clots of traffic lights and service stations.
Could do worse, surely,
than clink glasses, balloonist to balloonist, mid-air,
over invisible borders,
over East Timor, Rwanda, Eritrea,
catch the breeze
and exchange personal gifts as tokens of good fortune,
thrown basket to basket.
Forget flags on sticks, dolls in national costume.
We could do worse
than idle, unprotestingly, where jets might otherwise fly,
lounge on the flightpaths,
occupy no more than one balloons-worth of sky, and not be tied
to any plot of land.
We could do worse, could we not, than only cool and drop
for supplies and fuel,
scoop snow with bare hands from mountain tops,
make finger-tip friends
in passing, occasionally jump ship to have sex or make love
and generally
rise like thought bubbles without words into worlds above,
be aerial and detached
over Kosovo, Pristina, let the wind be the driving force,
let each bauble and blimp
be free and ethereal, find its own way, follow its own course,
could do worse
than tilt in the frozen light above the weather
and every night
be part of the solar system, blissfully clear-headed, whatever
the state of play on the ground.
Be quiet and listen. From up there in the gods
a person can hear
a nightjar winding its watch for morning, contented bullfrogs
farting and snoring.
Balloons, like kindly fat maiden aunts in their new frocks,
walking home from a wedding,
like the cows coming in, the sighting of slow, gentle yachts.
We could do worse
than hang around up there, thoughtful and vacant at once,
while all unstable elements lapse
to a steady state, while gaps and partitions are given the chance
to meet and mend,
While wounds heal, battlefields go to pot, weapons to rust.
Impossible of course,
but couldn't we just, couldn't we just?
And the two men held for twenty-one days in living conditions
decidedly worse
than those in most high-security prisons
are not the victims
of some hard-line oppressive regime, or political refugees,
or eco-warriors
digging in on the side of rare toads and ancient trees,
or dumbstruck hostages,
or Western tourists kidnapped by gun-toting terrorists,
or moon-eyed murderers
on death row, or self-captivated Turner Prize exhibitionists,
but balloonists, actually,
jet-streaming the globe, riding the one, continuous corner
of the world's orb.
In a picnic basket swinging from a Bunsen burner
suspended beneath
a tuppenny rain-hood filled with nothing but ether,
Messrs Piccard and Jones
hitched a ride on a current of air and lapped the equator
in less time than it takes the moon
to go through its snowball cycle of freezing and thawing.
Think of all the mental energy
and tax dollars pumped into that Stealth Bomber thing
with its invisible paint
and silent engines and non-reflective angles;
all that fuss
when all along we could have sided with the angels.
All we have to do,
apparently, is catch the breeze and hold our breath,
strike a match,
and watch the planet going round and round beneath.
All right, in practice
it wasn't a cake-walk. Stowed away within the microclimate
of the capsule
was at least one mosquito that drew blood from both pilot
and co-pilot.
And one of the two had to space-walk the outside of the canopy
snapping off icicles,
and not for Scotch on the rocks but as a matter of buoyancy.
Nevertheless, could those men
who emerged, stunned and smelly, who were hoping to land,
touchingly, in the lap
of the Sphinx rather than being dragged through sand
to the back of beyond;
could they be representative of some higher and finer ideal?
We could do worse,
couldn't we, than balloon? Could do worse than peel
the skin from the soul
and dither and drift in the miles of airspace between heaven
and Earth, could do worse
than quit the sink estates and the island tax-havens,
look down cartographically
on town and country, golf blight and deforestation,
the veins and arteries of roads,
the blood-clots of traffic lights and service stations.
Could do worse, surely,
than clink glasses, balloonist to balloonist, mid-air,
over invisible borders,
over East Timor, Rwanda, Eritrea,
catch the breeze
and exchange personal gifts as tokens of good fortune,
thrown basket to basket.
Forget flags on sticks, dolls in national costume.
We could do worse
than idle, unprotestingly, where jets might otherwise fly,
lounge on the flightpaths,
occupy no more than one balloons-worth of sky, and not be tied
to any plot of land.
We could do worse, could we not, than only cool and drop
for supplies and fuel,
scoop snow with bare hands from mountain tops,
make finger-tip friends
in passing, occasionally jump ship to have sex or make love
and generally
rise like thought bubbles without words into worlds above,
be aerial and detached
over Kosovo, Pristina, let the wind be the driving force,
let each bauble and blimp
be free and ethereal, find its own way, follow its own course,
could do worse
than tilt in the frozen light above the weather
and every night
be part of the solar system, blissfully clear-headed, whatever
the state of play on the ground.
Be quiet and listen. From up there in the gods
a person can hear
a nightjar winding its watch for morning, contented bullfrogs
farting and snoring.
Balloons, like kindly fat maiden aunts in their new frocks,
walking home from a wedding,
like the cows coming in, the sighting of slow, gentle yachts.
We could do worse
than hang around up there, thoughtful and vacant at once,
while all unstable elements lapse
to a steady state, while gaps and partitions are given the chance
to meet and mend,
While wounds heal, battlefields go to pot, weapons to rust.
Impossible of course,
but couldn't we just, couldn't we just?
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