miriam english

crumpled paper, switches, and the end of the world

2009-06-13T22:32:36Z

I woke this morning trying to understand how crumpled paper works. Crumpled paper is really interesting stuff. When you are trying to gently crumple or uncrumple it, it makes those rustling sounds. It seems the complex 3d shape of the folds cause parts of the paper to snap into new positions suddenly. This is why you hear all those tiny click sounds -- they are switches. What I was trying to visualise this morning is how the folds make these switches. They must be really common and easy to make, because any time you crumple paper it creates lots of them. I'd love to understand their mechanics. Unfortunately I can't afford the time to investigate it. I have set myself a task to complete and I am far too easily distracted by these kinds of things.

Switches are marvellous things. Our computers are made almost entirely of billions of microscopic switches. Our brains consist of billions of tiny living animals (neurons) that interact as switches. There is some evidence now that our planet's climate may act as a switch, so that if we push it far enough it will flip into an entirely different mode, utterly hostile to human life. If that is the case we need to stop dithering around giving government subsidies of billions of dollars to the most polluting corporations and fix the climate. If it does get to the point where the climate switches then we can try to backpedal afterwards all we want and it won't make the slightest bit of difference. It will take far more work to switch it back than we could have access to... even with all our amazing technology. And what is the likelihood that we could do much at all if our life support systems were collapsing?

There have been a number of times before when the Earth's climate became extremely hostile to its dominant lifeforms. Some time ago I was reading about how incredibly efficient birds' breathing is. They are up to 200 times better at extracting oxygen from the air than mammals are. It was noted in the article that there have been several periods in the past where Earth's oxygen levels plummetted to very low levels bringing about major extinctions, and that this may be one of the reasons why birds are so good at getting oxygen out of air -- the ancestors of modern birds survived such an event. Our oxygen is manufactured by land plants and marine algae. We have been clearing the land of its vegetation since our ancestors first mutated into our current, giant-brained form, but luckily for us there have still been plenty of algae in the oceans. However if the Earth's climate does switch drastically into a new mode I wonder if that will continue to be true. I really don't want us to gamble on this.

slime mold

2009-06-01T13:00:51Z

When I was a kid I used to love reading C. L. Stong's column, The Amateur Scientist, in Scientific American each month. One of my all-time favorites was the one about slime molds. I'd told my nephew about them a short time ago, and realised that these things are so damn weird that my explanation sounded fictional. They have features of animals and of plants. Sometimes they act like single-celled organisms, and other times like multicellular ones. They are very common, but hardly anyone knows about them.

Then the other day, after a short search through my stacks I found the issue of Scientific American containing the article -- January 1966. What surprised me was how much I'd forgotten; slime molds are even more bizarre than I remembered.

Nowadays you can't see this wonderful information for love or money anymore, so I lovingly converted it and present it here for your viewing pleasure.

Probably the weirdest living things you'll ever encounter: slime molds.

names shouldn't matter, but...

2009-05-27T23:33:58Z

I got a really uplifting mailout from NASA today. It made me grin and swell with optimism about our species.
_______

Alan Buis/Carolina Martinez 1-818-354-0474/9382
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov/carolina.martinez@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2009-089 May 27, 2009

NASA Selects Student's Entry as New Mars Rover Name

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled for launch in 2011, has a new name, thanks to a sixth-grade student from Kansas. Twelve-year-old Clara Ma from the Sunflower Elementary school in Lenexa submitted the winning entry, "Curiosity." As her prize, Ma wins a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where she will be invited to sign her name directly onto the rover as it is being assembled.

A NASA panel selected the name following a nationwide student contest that attracted more than 9,000 proposals via the Internet and mail. The panel primarily took into account the quality of submitted essays. Name suggestions from the Mars Science Laboratory project leaders and a non-binding public poll also were considered.

"Students from every state suggested names for this rover. That's testimony to the excitement Mars missions spark in our next generation of explorers," said Mark Dahl, the mission's program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Many of the nominating essays were excellent and several of the names would have fit well. I am especially pleased with the choice, which recognizes something universally human and essential to science."

Ma decided to enter the rover-naming contest after she heard about it at her school.

"I was really interested in space, but I thought space was something I could only read about in books and look at during the night from so far away," Ma said. "I thought that I would never be able to get close to it, so for me, naming the Mars rover would at least be one step closer."

"Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone's mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day," Ma wrote in her winning essay. "Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn't be who we are today. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder."

The naming contest was conducted in partnership with Disney-Pixar's animated film "WALL-E." The activity invited ideas from students 5 - 18 years old enrolled in a U.S. school. The contest started in November 2008. Entries were accepted until midnight Jan. 25.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures supplied the prizes for the contest, including 30 for semifinalists related to "WALL-E." Nine finalists have been invited to provide messages to be placed on a microchip mounted on Curiosity. The microchip also will contain the names of thousands of people around the world who have "signed" their names electronically via the Internet. Additional electronic signatures still are being accepted via the Internet.

"We have been eager to call the rover by name," said Pete Theisinger, who manages the JPL team building and testing Curiosity. "Giving it a name worthy of this mission's quest means a lot to the people working on it."

Curiosity will be larger and more capable than any craft previously sent to land on the Red Planet. It will check to see whether the environment in a selected landing region ever has been favorable for supporting microbial life and preserving evidence of life. The rover also will search for minerals that formed in the presence of water and look for several chemical building blocks of life.

The Mars Science Laboratory project is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the mission and the contest winner, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl .

To send your name on the rover microchip, visit: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname .

free!

2009-05-11T09:26:47Z

I've finished my course of medical treatment! Yay!

For 2 years I've dealt with being constantly tired and out of breath, having most of my hair fall out, losing dangerous amounts of body weight (I'm naturally skinny), and trying to think with a fuzzed-out brain. Now my mind is already starting to speed up again and I don't need to sleep as much. The doctor tells me it will take about a month to really come good again, my hair will probably grow back (gulp), and I should start looking less like a walking stick-insect soon. :)

Over the coming weeks expect more posts from me. Yay!

global warming

2009-04-09T23:42:12Z

When I mention global warming and sea levels rising tens of meters many people cease to listen, oddly preferring to insulate themselves from reality by belief. But all you need do is look at the Seychelle Islands to see that we are already in the midst of a massive period of global warming since end of the last great glaciation. All we need is a little more melting and these islands (the tiny spots in the middle of the little rectangles) will simply disappear under the waves.

Look how big that place once was. The last great melting sent the waters hundreds of meters higher, covering most of a massive system of islands, leaving only a few bits of high ground showing.

Unfortunately people always see their own time as "normal", when a glance at such pictures shows how unusual our time is. Do we really want to shrink our lands even further when our population continues to expand and remaining land degrades under mismanagement?

Dammit! Another food goes off the menu

2009-03-21T06:34:16Z

Nestle has bought Uncle Toby's. For the last few decades I've enjoyed eating oats every morning. Lately I'd become a little puzzled at the crappy quality of Uncle Toby's Oats. They have always been reliably the best. However now they taste bitter instead of creamy and have adulterants in them -- little bits of round, black stuff, and bits of what look like mould. Well, I've found the reason. Uncle Toby's has been taken over by the biggest vampire of them all: Nestle.

No more oats from them.

It is no suprise that a high quality company gets swallowed up by one of the biggest collectives of immorality and then the quality drops through the floor. I mean, after all, they have no problem killing thousands of little children who are their customers (earlier in Africa, more recently in Bangladesh). They do everything they can to ram as much sugar, coloring and flavoring down Western kids' throats, helping to build a generation addicted to the stuff and in line for terrible health problems. Have you ever noticed how hard it is becoming to buy food that isn't sold to you by Nestle? They are clearly aiming at controlling as much of the food market as they can. They are definitely not the sort of organisation that you want controlling your food supply.

I wonder what it is in the oats that makes them taste bitter now. Probably pesticides. I don't think they are deliberately poisoning us -- I think they just don't care.

hotmail

2008-12-28T23:40:13Z

A friend, whose computer is not working, asked me to log in to one of his accounts on hotmail to keep it going. It seems that Microsoft drop hotmail accounts that haven't been accessed for a while -- he thought the limit was about 40 days.

I logged in today. I don't like being forced to enable cookies (they are supposed to be a feature, not a requirement), but I enabled them. Then my machine sat there for about 20 minutes on my slow dial-up connection logging in. After a few minutes of this I became curious as to what was happening so I started up my netload tool and watched an exchange going flat out.

A little over 20 minutes on, I closed the browser, cancelling the connection with hotmail. At that point more than 1.5MB of data had been sent from my machine to Microsoft (they own hotmail). Why? Was this normal or had their hopelessly complex system got stuck in a loop, to continue doing this forever? To put the amount of data in perspective, a paperback novel is around 0.3MB to 0.4MB. So was enough data to fill 3 or 4 novels sent from my machine? Or was it the same little chunk over and over again? I will probably never know.

I don't trust Microsoft, given their history of spying on their users (for example, Microsoft's MediaPlayer sends details back to them of whatever movies or audio files you play, and registering Microsoft products you've bought sends them a list of all the software installed on your machine).

We all use it... how many of us contribute?

2008-12-28T11:14:04Z

I've added information to pages on Wikipedia and have donated money. I just donated again.

Please support Wikipedia. It depends upon its users and is not supported by advertising -- that would risk corrupting its aim. And what is that aim? In the words of Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

Why are my web pages so simple?

2008-12-25T08:02:03Z

I added this to my website recently because I keep having to answer this question.

I am an artist who has been using html since before there were any GUI editors or converters. This makes some people wonder, when they see my pages, why I make such simple, uncomplicated pages. Why don't I use the slick, glamorous, design techniques that are so common nowadays?

The answer is that I want my pages to do what html was developed to be able to do: show itself nicely on any display device.

Most web pages try to imitate magazine pages. But the web is not paper -- they are entirely different technologies. The most common mistake this leads people to is to design for a particular screen size. I've had people tell me (as if they knew) that the "standard" screen size now is 1024x764 and it is not worth programming for lower resolutions. This is unbelievably dumb. The main two groups of computer users today are young people and old folk. Youths tend to use as high a resolution display as they can force on the system (1024x768 doesn't suit them). Older people often have failing eyesight which requires lower resolutions like 800x600, or even 640x480. And there is an entirely different class of user as well: those who access the web using the very low resolution screens of mobile phones or handheld computers. People who make webpages targeted at any one of these groups will miss all the others. My web pages work on any screen resolution.

Another reason my pages look simple is that I keep image use to a bare minimum. This is a courtesy to people who are using dial-up access, or even worse, pay-per-minute mobile phones. For them every minute wasted waiting for unnecessary images is an exasperating inconvenience. Most people still don't have broadband internet. Designing for broadband excludes the bulk of your audience.

I don't use javascript in my pages because many people leave it turned off, and the scripts on such pages easily grow far beyond what is reasonable. I have had jobs where I was required to add all kinds of javascript-mediated functionality to pages, but I couldn't help noticing that those pages tended to take a long time to load and slowed the computer down. Years back it also sometimes crashed web browsers. For all those reasons I don't use Java either. It is a terrible language that needlessly complicates things and has a very bad habit of crashing unpredictably. Also it is a proprietary language. Flash is proprietary too and crashes some browsers. Worst of all, flash's secret plugin gets upgraded in ways that make old flash plugins useless, meaning a new plugin needs to be downloaded regularly... mostly so you can play stupid advertisements.

People have a terrible habit of overusing tables and frames. They are mostly not needed. Tables won't display their contents till the entire table is loaded, so for complex pages users are left looking at a blank screen for ages, waiting for all that data. Frames are commonly used for navigation, but if they are being viewed on a mobile phone or a handheld or one of the older browsers that doesn't show frames then they just make your pages difficult or impossible to use.

Many people have set up their web browser to display the way they like, with their favored fonts at a font size and color that suits them. Web page designers that force particular fonts, colors, and sizes on their audience are missing the point. People often use large fonts because their eyesight is poor, or use high contrast colors for the same reason. While on the topic of fonts, it has become fashionable to overuse sans serif fonts these days, despite the fact that it has been shown that serifs make text easier to read. This can be crucial for some people and can be the difference between making your website enjoyable or a major headache.

When making a web page you really should free yourself from the mindless dictates of fashion and ask yourself what you want to give the user in your pages. In most cases you'll find simple, easy to use, fast-loading pages flow naturally from that.

the only democracy without human rights

2008-12-10T08:09:38Z

Australia is the only democracy in the world without human rights protection.

Here we don't have the right to express our opinions, the right to privacy, children's rights, the right to be free from physical and psychological torture or discrimination. Most of us also don't realise that a lot of our everyday concerns like education, health and housing, are actually human rights issues.

That's how our governments have got away with keeping children in detention, with leaving indigenous people without adequate housing, health and education services, and with everyday human rights abuses that take the form of bureaucratic bungles and discrimination. In recent years some states in Australia have given police legal protection to torture us to death.

The good news is that the Government has decided to ask us whether we think human rights are worth protecting. So this is our chance -- the only chance we're likely to get in our lifetime.

Make history. Be a part of GetUp's campaign to protect human rights in Australia.

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/YourRights

BANG!!

2008-12-09T06:18:04Z

It sounded like someone threw a ball against my window. I knew what it was and went out to investigate. There, on the ground below the window, looking very zonked out, was a gorgeous little kingfisher. It would have fit in the palm of my hand.

The eyes are almost completely closed. The white patch where the eye would be is the eyelid. You can see the barest gleam of shiny black eye at the top of the white eyelid. The eyelid closes upwards, it seems.

I took a bunch of pictures without approaching too closely, then left the poor little guy to itself. It would be safe there. About an hour later I went out and peeked around the corner. The kingfisher was still there, but now had sufficient wits to fly away as if fired from a gun. These little guys move like they are rocket-assisted... hence the loud bang when this poor thing hit the window. I hope it recovers well. At least with all the rains lately it should have no problem catching food.

censoring the net

2008-11-26T11:36:25Z

The Australian government now wants to bring in the most draconian censorship laws of any western country. To what end? They say it is about child p*rn, but it seems to be largely driven by the entertainment giants and their obsession for monopoly and total control of their customers.

Sign the GetUp petition at
http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442
to stop the suckup politicians from *really* screwing things up.

The censorship scheme will make the internet up to 87% slower, more expensive, accidentally block up to one in 12 legitimate sites, will miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and is very easily sidestepped. The government of the day may add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist under the scheme.

Our Government should be doing all in its power to take Australia into the 21st century economy, and to protect our children. This proposed internet censorship does neither while throwing away any pretense to freedom.

I've noticed something already blocks me from sending certain addresses in my email. Today I was telling a friend about a site called "A Brief History of the Apocalypse" at http://www.abhota.info and I suspect the abbreviation for the site's title A B H O T A, which also forms the site address possibly coincidentally means something that someone somewhere doesn't like, so suddenly I can't write about an entirely different thing. Eventually I sidestepped the issue by simply adding spaces between the letters. See? This illustrates why censorship is so stupid. It interferes with normal legitimate traffic and anybody can get around it if they really need to. It is subversive, dangerous and a giant waste of time and money.

Miriam launched into space - almost dies there

2008-11-07T01:12:35Z

German Mars Society's MIRIAM Partially Successful in Oct. 22 Launch

MIRIAM was launched to a 175km peak altitude from the SSC ESRANGE rocket test site near Kiruna, North Sweden on October 22nd, 2008. It rode on top of the REXUS4 sounding rocket managed and built by the EuroLaunch Consortium of the DLR Moraba group of Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany and ESA.

Unfortunately, after a trouble-free testing period leading up to a picture perfect launch, one of MIRIAM's main interlock bolts jammed upon release. Miriam therefore got stuck on the rocket, which subsequently led to the balloon's clamp ring sticking as well. With the stuck clamp ring, the inflation systems deck started to pressurize a still packed balloon, until overpressure pushed the inflation hose off the hose clamp assembly.

The flight system finally released from the rocket, but far too late. And with the deployment coil springs almost fully extended, it also came off far too slowly, eventually colliding with the rocket's payload section. Unintentionally positive however, the collision caused the stuck clamp ring to come off, causing a rapid deployment of our partly pressurized balloon. Because the balloon is only attached to the inflation systems deck at the inflation hose clamp assembly, the balloon was immediately set free, but with little over 10% of its intended amount of filling gas.

All other subsystems functioned nominally and behaved just like they did during tests.

Despite the balloon being deployed and released, the mission was deemed only partly successful, as the deployment came unintentional and uncontrolled, and because the balloon did not carry its intended amount of inflation gas.

The reason why one of the main interlocks failed is a matter of investigation. This behavior was never observed during tests.

All subsystems of the REXUS-4 rocket have worked beautifully, exactly as predicted and right on time. We therefore owe EuroLaunch as well as the entire crew on ESRANGE great thanks for a beautiful flight, their outstanding technical support and a rocket as precise as clockwork.

While at it, we would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this mission, no matter how small the contribution was, since every contribution helped us getting off the pad!

ARCHIMEDES is an effort to probe the atmosphere of planet Mars by means of a hypersonic drag balloon, a device known as a "ballute". The project is currently under study, proposed and supported by the Mars Society Germany, the Universität der Bundeswehr München, the AMSAT-DL .e.V. organization, the DLR, and several other research institutions and industrial companies. The probe is planned to be integrated into the AMSAT's P5-A Mars satellite, and to be released from the spacecraft when in orbit around the planet.

To obtain more information please feel free to direct inquiries to the German Mars Society - an independent organization affiliated with the International Mars Society - at either hg@marssociety.de or hannes.griebel@unibw.de. More information and pictures also available at the German Mars Society's web site. http://www.marssociety.de/html/

NaNoWriMo 2008 - chapter 1

2008-10-31T22:17:04Z

I have begun my story for NaNoWriMo 2008. It is called Critically Damaged and you can find it at
http://miriam-english.org/stories/critically-damaged/index.html

It is not a science fiction story in the normal sense. It does contain some elements you'd normally think of as science fiction, but it is set in the current day, the technology is not central to the story, and I believe the things mentioned could be built now anyway. Certainly I know a number of groups are working on it.

My description may be too vague, but I'm loathe to give too much away:

It can take years to create an intricate masterwork.
When it is done, what is its value? And who can say?

So far only the short prologue is up there.
1 - prologue

I hope to post another chapter every 3 or 4 days.

I'd appreciate any comments.

irreducible randomness

2008-10-24T01:59:58Z

Any natural stream of random numbers will have occasional patterns appear randomly within it. These patters can be encoded for with compression software rules -- they are then, to some degree reducible. However at some point you might have an unpatterned stream. Is that irreducible?

Imagine some way of producing completely patternless random numbers was found. Such numbers use as many combinations of the digit "1" followed by one of the other nine digits as possible, so can't be compressed by finding runs of duplicated digits. However there are other kinds of patterns, beyond simple runs of digits and these other patterns lend themselves to compression schemes too. Half of any random numbers will be divisible by 2 and the factor might open itself to further compression because of patterns in the digit stream. Even looking only at prime numbers there may still be patters, for instance 1231 is prime, so is 2131 and the patterns in those numbers are obvious... and that is just in base 10. Using other number bases could turn up further patterns.

Only a small proportion of all thousand-digit numbers would be incompressibly random. Might there be some simple way to characterise them? If we simply listed all such numbers then we would necessarily use less than a thousand digits to indicate any of the numbers on the list, thus reducing the irreducibly random still further.

Is there any limit to this? Surely there would be. Perhaps when the information required to describe the rules for compression equalled the numbers being examined.

In fact, is the lack of pattern a pattern itself? Gah!!!

Interesting stuff.

NaNoWriMo jitters

2008-10-18T09:38:59Z

NaNoWriMo begins in 2 weeks. For the last several months I've been assembling notes for the story I wanted to write this year. But I'm having serious second thoughts. Quite by accident I came up with another, completely different idea some months ago and it has been running around in my head a lot lately. Tonight I suddenly realised that it could be merged with another, much older story idea to make a pretty good tale... if handled well.

I start thinking this with only 2 weeks to go???? Am I nuts?!

But it is a rather neat idea...

women should run the stock market

2008-10-18T09:33:40Z

Anybody hear the Science Show today?
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/default.htm
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ssw_20081018.mp3

There were a lot of interesting segments, but the final one really caught my attention.
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ssw_20081018_1252.mp3

Researchers have been analysing the behavior and homonal balance of stock market traders. It seems the old boys network is seriously damaging capitalism, as many of us have long suspected, but the mode of damage is really interesting.

When they compete on the trading floor men act the same way males in many other social species do -- competition raises their testosterone levels. This beefs them up and makes them indulge in more risky behavior. This is a vicious cycle where testosterone levels and risky behavior spiral upward out of control, till they are making completely stupid decisions because they are utterly unable to see with any kind of perspective. When the inevitable crash comes testosterone levels drop and cortisone levels rise, which alters their behavior again, making them more scared and cautious, but now out of synch with reality in the opposite direction, considerably worsening the effects of a financial crash.

There is no way to stop this. It is how males have evolved to act back in the day when it seemed to be a good idea to beat your opponent with a rock when he competed with you.

Women don't appear to be affected by this competition the same way. It makes sense that women should run the stock market and probably other financial institutions if we are to survive these crashes. Eunuchs and male-to-female transexuals would be safe too, I imagine.

copyright screws business

2008-10-08T09:34:35Z

I've been trying to buy an mp3 copy of Carl Sagan's Contact as narrated by Jodie Foster. I love this audiobook. Years ago I downloaded it via the peer-to-peer networks. I just got paid and decided I'd buy it finally like I always wanted to. However after a couple of hours online trying to buy it I have given up. Not only are most of the shopping websites so badly designed that buying stuff is a royal pain, when I finally found a place I could get it from they have paranoid software to "manage" the files for you. This software is designed for MSWindows or Mac... nothing for Linux, but even if they did offer Linux software I wouldn't want it. From what I gather, the software is not there for the convenience of the user, but to make life harder for the user. As seems to be the case so often now in the United States of Paranoia the customer is treated as the enemy.

So I won't buy it after all. I'll have to settle for the p2p copy I have. It's a pity. I'd like to pay for it. I deeply admire Carl Sagan, his wife Ann Druyan (who adapted the book for audio), and Jodie Foster who narrates it.

Bloody copyright paranoia. Whatever happened to delivering a service to your customers?

final chapter of Selena City

2008-09-30T13:14:59Z

Not sure about this. It was the second thing I mapped out when I came up with the story more than a year ago. In writing this today from those old notes I found a lot of things had changed, though mostly it flowed pretty-much as I'd originally intended. My initial wish was to have the ending paragraphs as I've written them here, but I'm finding it hard to get perspective. Does it work? Or is the end stupid? Is the whole final chapter a mistake? I have no idea.

There were a couple of other things I wanted to put in, but they got squeezed out... oh well... maybe they'll make it into the rewrites.

I'm exhausted. I should have spent a couple of days on this instead of pushing it all into today. Doesn't bode well for next NaNo. [gulp]

Anyway... this final chapter:
http://miriam-english.org/stories/selena/18-solution.html

The index page for the whole thing:
http://miriam-english.org/stories/selena/index.html

Let me know what you think.

Selena City

2008-09-29T10:29:40Z

Finally! Another chapter in my story. Please let me know what you think of it.
http://miriam-english.org/stories/selena/17-hit.html

The index page for the whole thing:
http://miriam-english.org/stories/selena/index.html

Only one more to wrap it up.

I found I'd forgotten a lot of the story and had to re-read the whole thing. I was surprised that it seems better than I remember it being, but perhaps I am over-critical of my own writing. Or perhaps I'm simply too close and can't see it properly. I notice I find it difficult to have an opinion of this latest chapter.

I'll have to write a lot faster than this for my next NaNoWriMo piece if I want to complete it in the month.

The ending very soon. Stay tuned...

financial meltdown

2008-09-26T01:50:24Z

I hope all my friends in USA manage to weather this financial storm safely.

I've long disliked the insane dependence upon money these days and felt it to be exceedingly dangerous. Instead of feeling victorious at seeing the proof I can only shudder with horror and wish I'd been wrong.

Hopefully this period passes without too much damage to the ordinary folk. It would be nice, though, if this focusses attention on how much more of a threat the "greed is good" slogan is to life than terrorists. Terrorists never stood a hope of doing much damage, but obscenely wealthy corporate executives running scams could bring the entire country undone.

burning off

2008-09-20T00:13:04Z

Recently the farmer who owns the paddocks surrounding my little oasis visited to notify me that he would be burning the grass, but that he'd ensure it kept well away from the house. That evening I watched as the hillside lit up in death. It was pretty... in a horrible kind of way.

I should have asked the farmer why he wanted to burn the paddock. Though, I think I know why. The grasses seem to protect themselves from the harshness of full sunlight by producing a layer of dead, dry stuff. The grazers don't particularly like this so he burns it off, forcing the grass to sprout tender new green shoots in a desperate effort to survive. These juicy greens are much preferred by the grazing animals. The weird thing is that very soon the grass goes back to the same strategy and he hasn't gained anything really. In fact he has lost. Much of his soil's fertility literally went up in smoke. Any composting material was burned. The top centimeter or two of soil (where the real fertilising work is done by bacteria) was sterilised. What little ground cover there was is lost and the ground dries out and gets baked by the sun so that future rains tend to run straight off instead of soaking in.

I wonder if the farmer has noticed how much time his cattle spend in my place, dining on the permanently tender, green grass under the trees. The soil here tends to keep some moisture, as it gradually builds a fertile layer of humus, and the trees shield the grasses from the worst weather. The cattle understand and take refuge in here on excessively hot days, windy days, cold days, and rainy days. When it rains here the trees shield the ground from the pounding drops and continue to sprinkle water on the ground for some time after rain has ceased. I notice that most nights the trees pull moisture out of foggy air and deliver it to the plants beneath as a gentle shower too.

Is it any wonder that the grass really is greener on this side of the fence?

How many farmers must look at their land and never really see it? I guess they have been blindly destroying land for tens of thousands of years. Odds are not good that they will change their ways any time soon.

Our Friend the Dog

2008-09-12T23:00:30Z

I read a beautiful, short, illustrated book last night. It was written almost a hundred years ago, in 1913, by Maurice Maeterlinck and translated into English by Alexander Teixeira De Mattos. The gorgeous illustrations are by Cecil Alden. It amazes me how many talented people this world produces. Most of them drift inexorably into obscurity. I hadn't heard of any of these people before (though I should have known about Alexander Teixeira De Mattos -- the person who translated a number of Jean-Henri Fabre's works).

Back to that lovely book "Our Friend the Dog". It brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat in its description of the bond between human and dog. Some passages were slightly wrong of course, being colored by the time in which they were written, but on the whole I have to say it is one of the sweetest things I've read.

You can download the book from Project Gutenberg for free.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18214
Make sure you get the illustrated copy (the html version), not the purely text version.

did Henry Neville write Shakespeare's plays?

2008-09-11T01:22:08Z

Did anybody else hear the middle section of Artworks recently where the question was asked, "Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?". I've heard the old theories that the real author might have been Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, or someone else. I'd never been particularly interested in the theories. I mean, honestly, who cares, right? Well there is a couple of very puzzling things about Shakespeare himself. His parents were illiterate, his children were illiterate, he had no education, and is not known to have ever written any letters. A number of people in his day actually doubted that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him.

Enter Brenda James in England. She became fascinated by the enigmatic dedication at the head of Shakespeare's Sonnets and set about trying to understand it, in the hope of uncovering who they were dedicated to. The odd layout led her to suspect that the dedication was actually a cryptogram. When she decoded it the name Henry Neville "popped out". She hadn't heard of him before. He was an extremely well-read, highly educated, widely travelled man who spoke several languages and was a relative of William Shakespeare. Fascinatingly, the the plays tend to reflect the nature of Neville's own life in ways that they don't relate to the ups and downs of Shakespeare's. Neville had good reasons for wanting to be anonymous. He was already extremely well off and the slightly dangerous political sentiments expressed in some of the plays, particularly after he was imprisoned by the Queen, would have meant a quick death for him. Brenda James has now written a couple of books on the topic.

Two Australians, James Goding and Bruce Leyland have written more about the decoding of the dedication. They worked independently of Brenda James after hearing of her theory. There are a couple of [shudder] powerpoint files on their website that explain their decoding.

Additional: Oh dear. I've finally managed to download the large powerpoint files on my very slow dialup and I have to say I'm seriously underwhelmed. The name "Henry Neville" doesn't obviously appear. The laborious and unlikely steps taken in order to make something from the sea of gibberish render this "decoding" extremely unlikely, in my view. How disappointing. It doesn't make it impossible that Neville wrote the plays, but it does seem to show that the dedication is probably just a dedication and that particular link to Neville is just a mirage.

soulless

2008-09-09T08:29:02Z

Sorry it has taken me a while to post this. I spent the last few days mostly sleeping. I didn't realise how tired I'd let myself become. What follows is a slightly improved version of my old "Soulless" post. Hopefully it is easier to read and understand.

What do people think of when the soul is mentioned? Most would say that it is your essence -- this consciousness, this feeling of "I", that feels emotions, understands the world, the one who makes moral decisions and accumulates or loses karma.

If that is what the soul is then the soul dies with your body, because it is fairly easy to show that those things are a function of that wonderfully complex organ, the brain. Alter the brain and you alter your consciousness, your emotions, your understanding, your moral sense. Stop the brain's action that is consciousness and naturally your conscious self disappears.

There is the case of the French businessman who woke up one morning to find that he could no longer read -- he could still write, and although he could remember what he had just written, he was unable to make sense of what was on the page. During the night a blood clot had jammed in a blood vessel feeding the part of his brain that understood writing, and starved of oxygen and food, it had died. A central part of his understanding of the world had vanished from his conscious reality.

The construction worker who was a pleasant guy, happily married, and liked by all others. One day, at the worksite, he was standing over a crowbar in a hole packed with explosive. The explosive went off and fired the crowbar through his head, under one cheekbone and out the top of his head. Amazingly, he survived, but it radically altered his personality. He was not the congenial person of before and was now given to fits of rage. His morality and personality had been altered by changing the architecture of the brain.

Split-brain surgery, done many years ago in an attempt to control awful attacks of epilepsy, worked by cutting the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that let the two halves of the brain communicate with each other. It resulted in two separate consciousnesses inside the one skull -- where there was one, there were now two. If the soul is something insubstantial, then how does a knife create two souls from one?

Every time you go to sleep at night your brain goes through cycles roughly every 20 minutes or so where consciousness actually disappears for a while, then reappears in the weird, internally stimulated state of dreaming. On waking, normal consciousness restarts, the memories stored from the previous day providing the illusion of continuous existence. If the soul is this feeling of personal existence then this stops every night as the brain alters its own operation.

A bad blow to the head stuns the nerves which make up the brain, causing consciousness to stop till they recover. (I wish movies wouldn't show this as a common way to put someone out of action -- in actual fact a blow that causes such a blackout has almost certainly caused brain damage and is extremely dangerous.) Consciousness is incredibly fragile.

Anesthetic chemicals administered during surgery alter a patient's brain function causing their consciousness to cease for a while. The person administering the anesthetic has to be very careful because it brings you close to death.

When you take various psychoactive drugs your brain's function is altered which changes your consciousness and quite often your personality and your ability to make moral judgements. Morality is not only affected directly by drugs, but also indirectly through lack of them. Withdrawal from some drugs can cause shortness of temper, vindictiveness, and depression.

Clearly your conscious, moral, emotional self is really an action that your brain performs. It can no more survive your death than a horse's gallop can continue after the horse dies. If consciousness, understanding, morality, and this "I" are the soul is, then it dies with your brain and your body.

Wait! you say. The soul doesn't have to be consciousness. It could be something less tangible; something not related to our feelings or brain actions; something far more ethereal.

Yes, but that now becomes a waste of time. If I told you that I could keep one of your fingers alive after you died, you would wonder what was the point. Of what use is a finger without the consciousness to operate it? It is this feeling that is important -- it is what we are. Such an unconscious soul, even if it did continue beyond our death is irrelevant.

Without a soul, all gods and all religions become unnecessary. Their very reason for existing evaporates.

*poof*