Tuesday, Seeing Maths

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Today, as days go, was a pretty good one. Since I knew I was going out for lunch, and hence didn't have to make one to take with me, I could afford a little bit more time for breakfast. After a look around the fridge decided to make myself a spinach and cheese omelette, which was pretty tasty, and I had that with some small ciabatta rolls that my sister had baked last night.

On the journey in I didn't mysteriously break out in a cold sweat as I did yesterday, which was a bit of a bonus really as I was completely stumped when it happened yesterday morning as the train pulled into James Street. Not a nice feeling at all to suddenly have the world swimming around you and thin layer of sweat covering your body, I really don't recommend it to anyone. Quite disturbing, but yesterday afternoon's headache aside I've felt fine since (and that disappeared as soon as I had something to eat when I got home).

Work has been slow but steady today; I got a few bits and pieces done first thing and then a few more bits and pieces when I got back from lunch. The only articles which really interested me included this over on the BBC about how a maths savant is able to find thirteenth roots of 200 digit numbers; while I would never claim to be able to do anything near as complicated (and in some sense pointless) the description he gave of how he is able to do things, or how he "sees" the information really resonated with me, although whereas he describes feeling numbers as words or movies, I "see" things as strange sensations and structures of colour, impossible objects and patterns.

It's the curse of the knot theorist perhaps... I'm going to a conference in September, I'll ask around.

This evening I'm going to see Goldfinger at FACT - there is something about seeing a classic film, that you've previously only ever seen on the TV, on a cinema screen that is just amazing.

And I've also just heard from a friend in Edinburgh, so my plan of visiting for the Edinburgh International Film Festival is going ahead in a few weeks!

All in all, Tuesday gets two thumbs up.

Furry Friends

So apparently, Animal welfare officials are demanding that cats that have roamed Ernest Hemingway's Florida home for decades be subject to laws that would require them to be locked up at night.

50 "free range" cats, descendants of Hemingway's pets, have lived in the Hemingway home - a popular museum - for decades, and are now considered an essential part of the collection. But two ex-members of the "Florida Keys Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" (FKSPCA, let's call it) have complained that the number of cats is excessive and that they should be 'protected' from the museum's visitors - i. e. locked away in a secure enclosure.

Now, call me judgemental if you will (I know - me, judgemental? crazy) but don't those two people sound like the very thing the phrase "do-gooder" was invented for? Moreover, don't they sound like two people who, out of all the people in the world, would benefit most from a sound spanking? I mean, yeah, let's lock 50 cats away from the public where previously they've been able to roam free in the name of protecting them from cruelty. That makes perfect sense. It's not even as if the cats are mistreated. They appear to live what can only be described as a life of luxury - free to laze in the sunshine, visited regularly by a vet, fed the best food, "fixed" so they can have sex as much as they like without fear of consequences - a veritably cat's Life Of Reilly.

What interests me is that the complaints were made by two people described as 'former members' of the FKSPCA - indicating, to my mind, that they are so do-gooderish, so self-righteous, so downright worthy-of-a-good-spanking, that even their parent organisation has disowned them:

"Ok, Bob, Alice, we bore with you on the old lady who forgot to feed her cat that one time. We bore with you on the chihuahua who wasn't wearing a doggy-coat in winter. We bore with you on the alligator they tranquilized and then forcibly removed from old Mr. Cozaro's living room. But the Hemingway cats? That's it - you're out."

I hope that's what happened. The world is a poorer place if it wasn't.

Multiple Headaches

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I have a banging headache, so I'll be brief.

How can it be so difficult to set up email on my mobile phone? I want to set it up so that in two weeks time, when I am on holiday for a fortnight, I will be able to update the blog from my phone. I look in the manual: it says look on the website. I look on the website, it doesn't have the details for my phone. I go into the shop, they tell me to call 156 from my phone and speak to someone there. After fifteen minutes on hold I hang up, and thus I find myself in my present predicament, still unable to email from my phone.

A friend of mine has just googled some things and found a page which seems to show the instructions on how to set it up - except I need to have an email address to anchor it to (effectively, no need to get all technical). Can't use my uni address, maybe I'll use my Gmail... And on top of all that I have to look into how much sending emails will cost me! My provider offers 4MB a month for £4 if you pay in advance, or £3 per MB if you don't...

So many options and things to sort out! And my head can't deal with them at the moment, banging away as it is. You would think, you would hope, that when you buy something the manual would be complete, would just tell everything that you need to do in a clear and concise manner. Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, time for me to go home and take something for my head. Hopefully I'll contribute something a little more coherent (and frankly better) tomorrow.

Turkey and the Same Old Bollocks

Odd that I should by coincidence be reading a biography of Kemal Ataturk - the founder of the modern Turkish state - at the very time when an election in Turkey has generated a minor fuss among British politicians and foreign-office types (and bloggers, natch).

Simon Scott Plummer in the Telegraph has the right of it: Turkey has recently seen impartial, well-conducted elections and the victory of the moderate Islamic AKP party and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and now is the time for the EU to start seriously talking about Turkish membership. “A democratic Muslim country with a dynamic economy should be welcomed by a continent faced with the threat of Islamic fundamentalism,” he writes, and he could have added that Turkey is a democratic Muslim country with a secular constitution, no less, and a political elite willing to divorce itself from the powerful military. It is also one of the few Muslim countries to have dealt maturely with the creation of the State of Israel, and one of the few in which the government is in some way accountable to its populace. It is a powerful, influential presence in the Middle East, ideally poised to throw its weight behind Israel-Palestine peace talks, a security regime for Iraq, and demonstrate the worth of good governance to its neighbours. The EU should be opening its doors with open arms.

It won’t, though, because in the main members of the EU find it difficult to see the big picture. They hear that the AKP is an Islamic party (never mind that it is a moderate one, and that explicitly Christian parties are the norm in Central and Northern Europe) and they become nervous. Daniel Hannon believes that there is also fear of an energetic, patriotic and populous country coming along and spoiling the EU party, and I’m inclined to agree. The Kurdish problem is something Europeans are also wary of (hypocritically, since it was Europe which originally denied the Kurdish people a State of their own).

But I also have to wonder whether the old spectre of racism isn’t involved too. Europeans still haven’t quite adjusted to the fact that those without white European roots can be economically competitive and politically powerful. It’s never put explicitly, but there is still a marked tendency to patronize and belittle, and it manifests itself most often in attitudes towards Palestinians, Iraqis and Iranians, which persist in seeing them as victims and irrational actors, rather than intellectual equals. (Most Europeans, for example, are incapable of understanding that Palestinian terrorist organizations behave in a rational, intelligent way - we prefer to see them as desperate men driven by fear and powerlessness.) Turkey is another victim of that tendency; whereas European countries are capable of incorporating Christianity into their democratic systems, it is believed that Muslim countries are not - the implication being that Islam is inherently irrational and Muslim peoples are generally not capable of running a country well.

Talking Trailers

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"When all else fails," my old (fictional) blogging mentor used to say, "Talk about some trailers that you have seen recently and why they make you a bit excited." Man I miss ol' Jimmy...

Firstly, I Am Legend, whose trailer debuted a few months ago, gave me mixed feelings when I first saw it. This is mainly due to the fact that I Am Legend is one of my favourite books, a book that I re-read at least once a year and have done since I was 17, a book that I always find something new in when I read it - and I just couldn't picture Will Smith as Robert Neville when the casting was announced. The trailer made me feel hopeful; New York looks incredible as this abandoned place, and despite my initial misgivings Will Smith gives across a great mix of despair and stoicism. However, something noticeably absent in the trailer are vampires - will they even be vampires? Will we have some weak enemies like in The Omega Man? We'll find out at Christmas...

WALL-E just blew me away in terms of its concept: the year is 2700, and WALL-E is the last clean-up robot left on a deserted earth, cleaning up after humanity's mistakes, all alone... Until one day when a female robot turns up from space and it's love at first sight. The trailer is a little lacking, although it does very well in terms of setting the tone of the movie. Apparently the first third of the movie or so is going to just be a silent film, simply observing WALL-E and his life, such as it is. I have high hopes for this film.



I've never read Beowulf, although I feel like I should have. I've never seen The Polar Express, but by all accounts I'm not missing much. I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, and I have to say that that's what has swung the Beowulf film for me, the fact that he has written the screenplay (along with Roger Avary). Also, it looks pretty interesting from the trailer. Things aren't quite photorealistic, but then I don't think that is the intention with the whole performance capture thing at this stage, just to do things that would be incredibly difficult otherwise (i.e., show Ray Winstone at different points in his life from 18 to 70). Technology isn't the be-all and end-all, but it can make some wonderful looking things.

The final trailer is for... Well, no-one's really sure what this film is called. Is it called 01-18-08? Is it called Cloverfield? Well, it's probably called neither of these things, but it has a very interesting trailer... A giant monster, hand-held video cameras with impressive effects in to add to the realism, just regular people... With the way that it is being marketed I'm surprised that someone hasn't started calling this the new Blair Witch or something (although Blair Witch had a budget of $30,000 I think, whereas this has a reported budget of $30,000,000). The trailer definitely makes me want to see the film.



And let's face it, for a trailer that means "job done."

Superman is a Dick

My new favourite thing in the universe is laughing at old comics.

The undisputed master at this is, of course, James Lileks and his Institute of Official Cheer; in it, Lileks expounds the notion of the Violently Ordinary Rejoinder, in which banal quips result in "Flip-takes" of shocking force:


But recently my new love is Superdickery, a site which began when it was noticed that Superheros, well...are complete dicks:


Or do completely ridiculous things:


Or are utter buffoons:


Or just, well....


Nothing, of course, can compete with the sheer snigger-inducing power of these, though:



I shouldn't be laughing. I really shouldn't.

I Need A Hero...

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I had other ideas today for a blog post, but having read noisms earlier post about the series Heroes (which debuted on British TV last night with an impressive 4.3m viewers) I felt like I had to respond.

I have to say, that based on the hype and things I had read about Heroes I had a feeling that I would like it, and I think that noisms could like it too if he had given it more than five minutes - in that time I think only a fraction of the characters had been introduced, how can you get a feel for an ensemble show in five minutes? Granted, the opening of Lost hooked you with the aftermath of the plane crash on the beach, but from the outset we're shown hints that Heroes has a much greater ambition, a cast split all across the world. To say "I don't like this" based on the first character one meets is a little extreme (perhaps noisms just really wanted to watch How To Look Good Naked, and this gives him a reason if pressed for one later).

Despite the first person we meet going on about the magnificence of cockroaches (noisms can pick it apart like a pedant if he wants, but I think the sense was supposed to be "cockroaches are hard bastards"), I'd heard about some other things in the show that kept me watching. Anyway, maybe a university professor of genetics wouldn't say this, but if we're watching this show are we expecting a documentary? Are we expecting to watch a sci-fi/fantasy show and see total realism? Forget that, do we expect to watch any television fiction and expect everything to be in accord with our conception of reality?

I'm watching Heroes because I've been told that there is a good story developing over the series, and I thought that the characters introduced last night were really varied; they were all at different stages in their lives with different dreams and reactions to their manifesting powers - the geek who can't get enough, the cheerleader who doesn't want anyone to know, the desperate mother who doesn't understand what is happening to her - this is not just teenagers coping at some fictional high school with the fact that they are mutants.

I put it to you, noisms, that you didn't give Heroes a real chance, and I put it to you ladies and gentlemen of the jury that while his writing about slugs and evolution has merit, his introduction to the topic was based on a prejudice against genre television in general.

Saying that, if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit.

You've Got to Search for the Hero....

Ok, I admit it. I watched the first five minutes of Heroes last night. But there's still hope. Before it was too late, I realised it was a load of old cobblers and I'd be wasting two hours of my life, and I turned over to watch How to Look Good Naked instead.

What is it about visual sci-fi/fantasy that makes me want to claw out my own eyes? Is it the bad acting? The clunking scripts? The ridiculous stereotypes? The moralising? The idiotic pseudoscience? Yes, it is all of those things, but mostly it's just because I love the genre and what it can do, and I hate to see it brought down by naff things like Heroes.

Anyway. In last night's Heroes, one of the main characters, a professor, made a little speech about cockroaches, in which he outlined the idea that cockroaches are the 'pinnacle of evolution', not humans - because, as we all know, they can live off the back of a postage stamp for ten years and can survive without a head, and other cool stuff like that.

The idea that a university professor - of, apparently, biology, indeed - should spout such drivel is laughable (one of the reasons I switched channels) but it ties neatly in with a Ricky Gervais podcast I was recently re-listening to, in which Ricky made the interesting statement to Karl that "slugs are as evolved as you".

One of the things that people find hardest to understand when it comes to evolution is that everything alive today is as highly evolved as everything else. When it comes to life on earth there is no pinnacle; all species are exactly as 'developed' as they need to be, whether cockroaches, slugs or humans. We've all done what we had to do - we haven't died out yet.

The operative word is 'yet', of course.

Anyway, just think about this next time you step on one of these on a rainy day:

Red Sticks and Jacobites

I've recently become interested in what I've decided to christen the "things that make you go 'hmmm'" school of historical study: the way certain events - often barely noticed ones - from history can conspire odd and unexpected ways; ways that nobody could have predicted and which seem so incongruous and fitting as to have almost been planned by a fiction writer.

An example of this is the curious link between the Jacobite Rebellion of the Scottish Highlands and the Red Stick War of the Creeks against the United States government.

From the late 17th century to the mid-18th, Scottish independence from England took its last throw of the dice, when James VII and later Bonnie Prince Charlie launched insurgencies, with the aid of Highland Scottish clans, against the London government. A century of massacres, battle and guerilla warfare resulted, in which ancient Highland clan rivalries played as much a part as the question of independence, before finally the rebellion was ended at the 1746 Battle of Culloden. (My own genes played something of a role in the story: my grandmother was a member of Clan Campbell, a large and powerful Highland clan which sided with the government in the rebellion in order to settle long-held grudges against Clans Lohan, MacDonald and MacGregor.)



After the Jacobite Rebellion had been stamped out, the British government proceeded with a policy of ethnic cleansing (an anachronistic but appropriate term) in which Scottish Highland society and culture were effectively destroyed and in which large numbers of disposessed clansmen found themselves on ships bound for the New World. It's hard to imagine, these days, the situation of these men, plucked from an insular world of high, wet moorland, narrow valleys and deep dark lochs to the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean; our own experience of overseas travel is utterly alien to it. It must have been terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time.

The place they found themselves in, on the opposite side of the planet, would, I think, have been surprisingly familiar. Native American society, with its tribalism, its clan bonds, and its endemic violence, wouldn't have been dissimilar to Highlands life; it's natural that the Scots would have made their ways to the frontiers, where they were often the vanguard of expansion.

Three of their descendants were to become a coterie of young leaders at the heart of the Creek nation at the turn of the 19th century: Menawa, William Weatherford (Red Eagle) and Peter McQueen, each half-Scottish, born to frontiersmen and Creek women, versed in both cultures, and often posessing startlingly incongruous eccentricities - like the regular playing of bagpipes before a battle. They came to prominence as the central force of the Red Stick movement - a group of young Creeks who believed in violent resistance to white expansion - which in 1812 began an insurgency against settlers, government forces and "civilized Creeks" in the Southern states. Massacre and guerilla warfare continued for some years before the rebellion reached its bloody conclusion at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and its aftermath.



The parallels are obvious - both rebellions were categorised by slaughter of civilians (the Massacre at Glencoe and The Fort Mims Massacre); both were considerably more complicated than "native against government" (some Highlanders, like the men of Clan Campbell, fought for the British, and many Lower Creeks and Cherokees joined the US government against the Red Sticks - not to mention another Scots/Creek, William McIntosh); and, most sadly, both ended in the destruction of a way of life and an ancient culture. How interesting, though, and how like the plot of a novel, that it should be the very descendants of the Jacobites who should go on to be the driving force of the Red Sticks, in a land thousands of miles away and as ostensibly far removed as possible, and that their experience should be so similar.

Makes you go 'hmmm', see?

A Flood of Bollocks

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There is, as my grandma used to say, "high ding-dong" over David Cameron's visit to Rwanda during a time of "disastrous" flooding in Southern England. (For readers outside of the UK, David Cameron is the Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons and Conservative Party leader - the man who would be Prime Minister if the Tories win the next election.) I've just been listening to Jeremy Vine's show on BBC2 - the middle-class population of Britain's phone-in rant-a-thon - and the consensus is that Cameron is an almighty idiot, a weakling, has lost the next election already, and generally speaking the country is going to the dogs.

If ever evidence was needed that people in Britain have lost all sense of perspective, you just have to listen to the Jeremy Vine show on days with relatively "big" news stories like this ("big" in the sense that there's a lot to get sanctimonious and high-horsey about). The comments by listeners have uniformly managed to epitomise almost everything that I hate about the UK, and England in particular, being as they are ignorant, ill-thought out, prissy, moralising nonsense of the worst kind, but I can identify three distinct strands or themes:

1. David Cameron, it is said, is the Member of Parliament for Whitney and as such he should be in Whitney at a time of crisis to help sort things out rather than "gallavanting around" abroad. Why this should be isn't particularly clear: from what I can gather the fire service and the armed forces have the situation well in hand, and the flooding is hardly Hurricane Katrina (it's a level that would be considered laughable in most other countries) - but no, Cameron should be back home stealing ghastly photo opportunities and making cheap political points by pretending to help fill sandbags and showing how deeply compassionate he is, rather than trying to do something of value in a country benighted by genocide and famine which is hoping to join the Commonwealth and drag itself up out of the gutter. In other words, most people in Britain think it is more important for a leading politician to act in the name of cheap propaganda and superficial emoting rather than do real work to aid developing nations.

2. David Cameron is the latest in a long line of British politicians to, apparently, put the needs of poor people in foreign countries above those of the British public. The indignance in people's voices is strident: why do politicians show all this concern for the populations of Bangladesh and Rwanda and The Philippines and Iraq but not US!?!? The answer - that in fact people in this country are spoiled and pampered and wrapped in cotton wool, and really our politicians should be doing a hell of a lot more to help those in the developing world - sails right over their heads, like a cool breeze on a summer's day.

3. David Cameron is Leader of the Opposition and should therefore be "opposing" Gordon Brown - in other words he should come back to the UK and start criticising the government for all the mistakes it has allegedly made. He should be taking Gordon Brown to the cleaners and making him "answer to the British people about what has happened". Wherease the truth, as any sensible person can see, is that David Cameron well understands that floods are an act of God and there's nothing much the government could have done about it - so what's the use in criticising? He should in fact be being applauded for showing principle and restraining himself from making cheap points. But then again we're dealing with shrill idiots.

Anyway, the whole thing is just too depressing and silly for words. What's most stupid of all is how fickle everybody has been. Only a year or two ago Middle England was falling over itself to kiss the feet of King Cameron, and here he is making one error of judgement (in the sense that he critically misread the capacity of the English for disproportionate outrage) and people are already predicting he'll lose the next election. It just goes to show how much superficiality reigns in contemporary British politics.