gnimmel

12:46 pm: Birds

( The white-tailed tropicbird, the fairy tern, the bald eagle... the larch. )

12:33 pm: Rocks


( BONUS: more rocks )

09:31 am: I has a bukkit... but I eated it.

10:25 am: When mango-detection algorithms go wrong

11:22 am: Spiderweb and Snail Trails
Heigh-ho, more photographs. I fear these ones are a little geeky (not in a 'wow, awesome, whizzo-cool' geek sort of way; I'm thinking of the sort of geek who traps you in the corner at a party and says 'I think you'll find...' a lot). Offered without much in the way of apology or explanation.


( More overhead cabling infrastructure of the world )

( BONUS: Great transshipment ports of the world )

10:57 am: Words at World's End
To get this out of the way at the start: I work on the environmental effects of air transport. Since starting this work, I have gradually built up the sort of carbon footprint which in forensic terms might be used to identify a barbecued yeti. How? By flying. A lot. To many and varied conferences in many and varied places. I've just counted up the things I already know I will or might be doing next year and they include five trips to the Americas, so it ain't getting any better. On the plus side, I've been to many and varied places! Only without writing about them or doing anything with the copious pictures I've taken. There being a whole upcoming three months without international travel on the horizon, I thought I'd sit back, take stock, and post pictures.

This is set of pictures number one, containing various things to do with words, peculiar translations and found things, including a particularly fine example of garbled pseudoscience. It is mostly silly and flippant.

( And it is in here... )

10:07 am: Lagomorphic Bunnifications


It is the season of silly travel once more. Which means, well, this sort of thing:

( Astral hare and graph through here )

12:29 pm: Dawn Chorus
This one brought to you by listening to wood pigeons. Seriously, it's not paranoia - that is what they sound like. Since purplepiano pointed it out, I've not been able to un-hear it.



( etc )

It's a bit like the fish in the speed camera sign. I can't un-see that, either. Look, fish!


I've run out of cartoons now; I'd like to carry on doing drawing-stuff and posting-stuff (it is, on balance, good for the brain) but we shall see how it goes.

12:15 pm: Cats
This one brought to you by, um, having a cat.



( etc )

12:09 pm: The Dinosaurs of Night
This one brought to you by the melancholy deaths of Chang and Eng Bunker, the sort of dinosaur book which proclaims "Brontosauruses had two brains"[1], and the notion that if you were to permit time travel to the past only for purposes that didn't dick around with the timeline too much, dinosaur hunting in the late Cretaceous might get a look-in. Just don't step on the rodents.


( ..etc )

[1] The Internet informs me that
a) 'Brontosaurus' is an outmoded classification, and I probably meant 'Apatosaurus', and
b) It wasn't the Brontosaurus that was thought to have two brains anyway, it was the Stegosaurus, and
c) The two brains theory has been thoroughly disproved anyway.
But apart from that, all good, eh?

12:20 pm: SSS.

This post brought to you by the small child who used to sneak into the dining room at her grandparents' house every hour and eleven minutes during the long summer afternoons, to see the excitingly digital clock perform amazing conjunctions.
( ...and possibly by someone who has been reading Little Nemo )

10:30 pm: Upon juices, and the flowing thereof
I've always been vaguely haunted by the notion that we humans have all our best ideas just before falling asleep; that is to say, in that happy and almost entirely un-recallable mental interstice between wakefulness and dream-awareness. Like many of the world's notions, the survival of this one depends crucially on the fact that it isn't proveable.
However, a few months' mornings ago, I was struck with a sudden thought. I had had an idea as I was drifting off to sleep the night before. A musical idea. A good musical idea. In fact, to judge from my half-remembered flush of drowsy enthusiasm, it was probably one of the better ideas in the history of recorded sound. And it had been witty, clever and yet subtly non-novelty. The words themselves suggested a catchy and entertaining tune. I still couldn't quite remember what it was, but -- crucially -- I'd had the presence of mind to grope in the dark for a pen and write it down. Breathless with anticipation, I opened up my bedside notebook. There, in a barely readable scrawl, was the phrase Give me back my fucking monkey.

From this I have concluded two things:
a) No, we do not have our best ideas when we are falling asleep and
b) my ideas duct is clogged and requires some maintainance.

This is where you lot come in. See, the coming week is a Week of No Work. I have made a list of things from my ill-fated notebook which sound like they might be a lark to have a go at were one to, say, have a completely free week with which to get the juices flowing again. It's much easier to choose which thing to do when you have someone else's opinion to ignore. So I intend to Ask The Audience.
( More details than you can shake a stick at )

Poll #1044122 Ask the Audience
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 34

What jolly art-wankery should I fill my week with?

11:37 pm: This are serious thread
Dear Interwebs,
a) I have joined the Facebook and the Twitter. I believe this is what all the hep cats are doing these days. My Facebook data point is this: buoyed up with everyone's assertions that one just sets up an account and sits back, whereupon everybody in the known Universe finds your account and friends it, I set one up and sat back and something not particularly distinguishable from nothing happened. Rah!
b) However, I am unable to rectify this situation of dazzling popularity by, you know, actually adding people that I know for at least five days, since we are off to the Glastonbury, like. I am all virginal with regards to music festivals, and hence rather excited.
c) I'm really, really sorry about this.

Sometimes, one just has to do something to get the lolcats out of one's system....
( the usual disclaimers apply )

10:12 pm: A brief addendum...
...in honour of master strongtrousers, who suggests that there should also exist a Shakespeare Cab in which one may ask the driver to perform a speech of your choice.

( Is this strictly wise? )

08:38 am: Death and Taxis


(usual disclaimers apply; single large image behind the cut, the fluffhouse server is flaky at the moment (as was the case with the last post, now hopefully back up).

( in which someone gets a little too fond of pictograms )

08:36 am: What has it got in its pocketses?
( Fewer things than there used to be, now )

What have you got in yours?

08:38 am: Beneath ur surface, boinking ur goldfish

( This is Your Pond with Frogs In )

In other news: I did in the end make a rudimentary cafepress shop for Venn diagram postery goodness -- I was going to shiny it up a bit and look for a more UK-based solution as well, but OMG liek NO TIME.

08:31 am: The Internet is for meta-analysis
As any fule kno, the internet is for porn. This fact has stood, like some whacking great monument of truth, in the back of the collective consciousness of the world since the webternet began. And then -- alas! -- it was held up the the harsh light of Science and fell over ungracefully into the mud. For a while the webternet was without form and meaning. Then, gradually, it began to pick up a new identity; here and there, now and then I would see people imputing that these days the internet is for cat pictures.

This set me to thinking: surely the webternet is for many things? Should we deny the validity of Harry Potter/Chalet School crossover fanfic merely because it is neither porn nor depicts cats? And, with the aid of Science[1], I have therefore prepared a Venn diagram of the interwebs which should sort the whole problem out.


( Much, much bigger )
[1] Science sat on my shoulder and implored me not to do it, but hey.

ETA: version with more readable, less voluptuous font here

08:33 am: The big pink book of fantastic facts


( ...etc )

12:59 pm: True Opinions from the Public
Me: ...but the worst band name ever was Red Box. I mean, I can't even remember any of their songs. All I can remember about them is that they had such a shite name.
Chris: I think they were the sort of stuff that used to get played on Philip Schofield's radio show -- wet music for grown-up indie kids.
Me: You mean like Coldplay for the 1980's?
...
Me: So, what do you think about Fluffymark's going-to-Glastonbury plan? I'm still deciding if I want my very own wallowing-in-shit experience or not.

Shortly after this, our conversation was interrupted by the arrival on stage of the Arcade Fire, who proceeded to play an stupendously rocking set of rockingness which I'm not smug at all about having a ticket for, despite radio 6 going on repeatedly about how hard they were to get hold of. Who else was at this small, intimate gig? Apparently, the lead singer of Coldplay and the organiser of Glastonbury.
...I bet the tall bloke I kept elbowing was in Red Box.

03:23 pm: Mince Pyes
At approximately 11:50 last night, we decided it would be a good idea to make mince pies. We didn't have a recipe -- but then again, we had some mincemeat, and who needs a recipe for mince pies? And so now we have a little tray of pies shaped variously like sausage rolls, triangles, whales, dinosaurs without heads, &c., which probably proves that one shouldn't bake mince pies at midnight on Christmas Day.
Afterwards, we looked up recipes. To which all I can say is, that I now have a burning desire to cook a mince pie for next christmas, because it turns out that four hundred-odd years ago, the mince pye:
a) could be up to 100kg in size,
b) could contain rabbits, partridges, legs of beef, pigeons, capons, hares, liver, eggs, pickled mushrooms or indeed all of the above plus everything from a modern-day mince pie,
c) was often held together by iron clamps (see point a),
d) was banned by Oliver Cromwell, and
e) had a pastry model of the baby Jesus on the top.
But enough of pye! the main intention of this entry is to wish you all merriment and joy and suchlike, and to thank you again for being a superb friendslist over the year, and to mention that since I've not really got individual people hereon presents this year, I have instead bought you all some trees -- about a third of a tree each, as it happens. And I'll now return to my scheduled sherry and a surprisingly-circular pie. :)

09:09 pm: HOUSEWARMING - absolutely the final missive (probably)
It has not failed to escape my attention that some of you would like to know where we live, seeing as we've, um, invited you to our house on Saturday. See, what I neglected to mention is that our little gathering on the 2nd is intended for telepaths only[1].

...um, what I mean to say is Disorganised, me? and that you may find our address in the original entry here (friendslocked to my f'list) or here (friendslocked to Chris's f'list, or if you're on neither or not on LJ then email me (address in user info) and I'll (probably) tell you. The postcode is CB1 2LL for users of interweb mappingthingumbobs -- this only identifies which side of the road it's on, though. It's a straightforward and short walk from the train station and only a little longer from the bus station ('turn right and carry straight on' just about covers both). Coming by car is trickier: there are a couple of short-stay pay and display car parks nearby (one is at the beginning of Gwydir Street) but the local roads are strictly residents parking only and there are usually no spaces anyway. Saturday the second is also the date of the Mill Road Winter Fair, which may mean that in fact cars can't get into Gwydir Street anyway. So I'd give Mill Road a miss, park centrally or elsewhere, and walk in.

The intention is to begin the Beggar's Opera singthrough at about 2:30 (so maybe turning up from 2?) It will be rather disorganised. I suspect the Farce of Sodom will begin at around 9:00. We have some spare copies of both scripts but as yet no spare copies of the score (but there are pdfs online). It will be rather disorganised. In between at some point there will be some food (a large fish and a Rice Thing, we are thinking); as I don't know how many people there willl be I'm making no guarantees to feed everyone, but there are astonishing quantities of takeaway food available locally.

Bring things, if you want to bring things. Wear things, if you want to wear things. Etc.

[1] Actually, I can imagine few worse things than a room full of drunken telepaths - can we cancel?

10:36 pm: So, er...
MEN WHO SING!

...our housewarming Beggar's Opera (Saturday December 2, afternoon (probably 2:30ish),in Cambridge, music is not difficult and is all online as pdfs and mp3s here, is also v. good & has choruses of ruffians & whores) is a little short of you at the moment.
Chance to partake of a Very Large Fish included. And Gin. More Women who Sing also a thoroughly good thing. Also small furry beasties from Alpha Centuri who sing. Does anyone have any amiable singers hiding under the bed?

In order for this not to be the spammiest entry in spammytown ever, here is a work-related image.

11:32 pm: Get yer 17th & 18th Century Underworld Here
So: there is to be Housewarming on the 2nd of December.
As part of this Housewarming there is to be a read/singthrough of the Beggar's Opera, and perhaps a readthrough later on (after Gin has been consumed) of the Farce of Sodom. Although the philosophy of this singthrough is that if there has to be a choice between enjoyability and quality, enjoyability should kick quality's arse, this is still less than two weeks away, so it would be wise to assign parts and such. To that end, the way I'm doing casting is as follows:

1. Both scripts, scanned pages of all the songs and mp3s of most of the songs are up on the fluffhouse server here.
2. If no-one volunteers to sing or read anything, I will personally sing and read every single song and line in the entirety of both plays. You owe it to the world to stop me doing this.
3. If you'd like a part (summaries of all the parts are beneath the cut below), comment to this post. Comments are automatically screened and will not be unscreened unless they're obviously non-casting related or you ask. You should say which parts you'd potentially like, and you can also say if e.g. there are people you'd prefer not to have romantic scenes with or suchlike.
4. I wait a couple of days, and then assign parts.
5. Giant lizards take over Tokyo.

( Part Summaries, Sundrie Notes &c. )

09:09 pm: The men of this period became birds
After about a week, the mountain obsession turned into another one; a strange vision, wholly related, but one which made my physicist heart revolt. Simply relating it makes it sound a little daft. Perhaps I should provide a little backstory as to why it seemed a logical step to make.

( See, when I was a teenager I decided I'd rather like to be Tolkien... )

But anyhow, this was the end result: suddenly my mountain-reverie had been derailed by -- of all things -- an archetypal flood myth. I had slipped over to the high peaks of a fantasy world, and that fantasy world had responded by submerging everything but the high peaks in a cold, silent ocean. Honestly, haven't you heard of conservation of mass?, I said to the fantasy world; and, unsurprisingly, the fantasy world shook shook its little head and said nope.

Then the fantasy world took me out for a drink and showed me cryptic glyphs which said such things as:
'Atonatiuh, Water Sun, third Cosmosgonic Era, called Quiauhtonatiuh - Rain Sun. The Sun at this time is Tlaloc, God of Rain, and ended in a cataclysm on a day Nauhiquiahuitl - Four Rain - when Fire rained down from the Sky. The men of this period become birds.'
It told me of Uta-napishti, who Gilgamesh sought on an island at the edge of the world, and how he was warned by the gods to build a boat to save his household from the oncoming deluge; and how at the end of seven days of rain his boat came to rest on the peak of a mountain; and he and his wife were given immortality and repeopled the world. The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, said my fantasy world, abruptly switching to Noah; who, it reminded me, had also survived in a boat a flood that had covered all the high hills and mountains. It told me then that the Greek Deucalion had done such a thing as well, although he at least had neglected to fill his boat with animals; and his flood had lasted nine days, and he had come to rest on some mountain or other. The Menominee Manabus, it said, had shot two of the gods and in consequence was chased by the waters to the peak of a mountain. The Caddo, menaced by four giant monsters, hid themselves and pairs of good animals in a giant reed, so that when the flood came to drown the monsters they might survive. Manu was warned of the flood by a fish, who towed his boat to a mountaintop when the waters rose. Need I go on?, said my fantasy world. And I conceded that it might not have been a particularly original thought after all and that yes, mythology was rather fond of floods overtopping mountains, particularly where there were boats involved. One might even, I supposed, surmise things about the need for survivors of disasters to find reasons why they were spared, combined with the Chinese whispers of ten thousand years, combined with a few historical misadventures of water. But, I told the fantasy world, my accidental flood myth was at least in the future -- all the others were tales of the distant past. At which point the fantasy world rolled its eyes, said You might want to read a few more things like this, then, and left.

Ungrateful bloody mythology. Still, it has a sort of a point. Sea levels have risen in the past. Sea levels are rising now, and if I have learnt anything in my brief time flitting around climate science it is that we do not know how high the waters may reach; other than that, if all the ice in the world were to melt, we would be 60--75 metres deeper in ocean. I think of the fens, much of which are kept dry by pumping stations as it is. I think of the highest peak in Tuvalu; not particularly lofty, but in danger of being submerged in the forseeable future.

And since Venice I have been thinking of drowned cities (and there are many drowned already), serene like dead Ophelia or Fuchsia (as if the process of drowning were serene or pretty; as if a drowning city would not belch oil and sewage, as if the last to leave would not be looters and madmen). This morning Debussy's Sunken Cathedral was playing on the radio. I would think of the murky waters of a submerged London, but this is hardly a new idea. And I have been reading J. G. Ballard's Drowned World, in which London is a hellish riot of heat and swamp, of skyscrapers overgrown with creepers, of deep lagoons through which one can see the old city streets receding benath silt. At least the brief idea of worlds' end I had was serene and cold; some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

You know who else had a flood myth?, interjects the fantasy world one final time, Tolkien. He had dreams about it: of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. Oh, and by the way, the being-Tolkien corporation is not hiring.

11:33 pm: The ladder with no human end


There was a time, a few months ago, when I dreamed of mountains. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps I had read something on the subject. The complexion of my daydreams changed -- just for a week or two -- into a sort of strange and wistful pining, an unrequited wanderlust which went away as quickly as it had come. Perhaps it was just the names; the uppermost places of the Earth cluster, almost without exception, in the Himalayas, and the names of those places have a mystical, assonant ring to them, like the sound of bells coming from an impossibly distant height. Annapurna, they say; Dhaulagiri, Karakorum, Kangchenjunga, Shishapangma, Lhotse, Nuptse, Makalu. It was summer, when I dreamed of mountains, and I dreamed of cold, clear air and white snow and peaks encompassing the horizon. Of course, climbing mountains is not like that, not that sort of mountain; it is dirty, and technical, rather dangerous and hard. And I do not understand the way that mountains work, not in my instinctual heart; I don't understand their sudden storms or their thin air. Even in the lower hills of Scotland (and I do not think I have ever climbed anything with snow on it) there have been moments of perplexity. Walking up the slopes behind Blairmore house in bright woodland sunshine, Chris and I came out onto the first hill's bald peak -- and instantly our benign sky was all wailing winds and hail. We went back down, and the sun returned. But every time we tried to go back up to the peak, foul weather arose from seemingly no-where. I am stubbornly drawn to the heights, sometimes, and it worries me that this lack of understanding does not worry me, if that makes any sense. That I think mostly of the cairns and the clear water and the ponds of the hills which reflect only sky, and have a strange love for strange places that are dangerous.

( Far too much about mountains, terraforming, death &c. )

08:12 pm: A trick done with mirrors and doors
It is an odd situation that I find myself in. To say that a lot has happened since the last livejournal entry of any substance is an understatement: I have, in point of fact, got married, moved house, changed both job and academic field and spent time on three continents, not to mention crossing the equator twice and the prime meridian nine times. Moving week itself was changeable: that was what the weather forecast said; we were on the chaotic cusp of autumn, and hundreds of birds wheeled and gathered over the road, black against the sunset, as we took our little Yaris back and forth along the A428. Forget that the fenlands have no appreciable scenery for hundreds of miles, forget that the sulphurous odour of cabbage fields hangs over them like a wet fart off the North Sea -- what they have in abundance is sky, and as we carried out our own small migration that sky was a Turnerian fantasy world of cumulus rising, clashing, huge thunderheads building up and breaking catastrophically, shafts of crepuscular sunlight striking out like an announcement of the second coming. We were very little beneath it all; somewhat less than the birds. But in our little way we're no longer Bedfordians. Everything over, we have ended up here: in Gwydir Street, in Cambridge, with all sorts of wonderful things a few minutes' walk away. I am quite off balance. It's all rather lovely.

How to describe where we are? We have bought a teapot which is rather too large for two people to use. I have baptised the front door with gin. We still don't have enough bookcases. Our local shops sell pigs' blood, black salt and pea aubergines. And then there are the doors....
See, there is a measure of poverty which states that a non-poor household should have more rooms than people; a condition we only just edged into in the Mew, assuming bathrooms to be countable. More remarkable was our position in the depths of abject door poverty. There were only three in the building, including the front one. If one included all cupboard doors, that number stretched to a generous eight. It wasn't something I felt strongly about, at the time. The Mew was a house with no hidden corners. We used its space efficiently. And now suddenly we're in this strangely large old Victorian house; a house with crannies, with a mysterious locked attic, with a door in the middle of the bathroom wall which swings open as you are brushing your teeth to reveal a mirror which reflects your arse, with big wooden cupboards smelling of old sap; and which almost certainly has a hidden entrance to a basement, probably beneath the stairs. When you walk to the front door, a very small mirror reflects the movement of your feet, as if there is someone else in the room; and another mirror turns the line of curtains in the front bedroom into a cloistered corridor to mirror-land. I went to a conference last week at the Royal Aeronautical Society; afterwards, walking along the edge of Hyde Park in pursuit of a particular bookshop, I had a sudden moment of confusion in which it seemed that the chirality of the world had been switched. I have never been very sure of my left and right and east and west, to be fair. But would it be easy, in a mirror-world, on a stage with a suitable number of mirrors and doors, to turn a Bedfordian modeller of stars into a Cantabrigian modeller of air transport? And how long would have one have to stay in a mirror-world before one stopped noticing?

For all my breathless words, I can't keep down the pedant inside; who would like you to know that, though humans stop noticing pretty quickly, our chemistry might not function quite correctly in a mirror world. But I have informed the pedant that if you play about enough with mirrors and doors, you might be confused enough not to care.

Enough of this. Good people, come and have tea with us! We have a large teapot, and it ain't going to drink itself.

03:54 pm: A rather pitiful charade
Oh, bother.

See, I had all these fine words fermenting and growing ripe in my head, albeit rather glacially (can you ferment glacially? It's what they were doing, anyhow) about the wedding and the honeymoon, about roses and gold and mead and tropicbirds and tortoises, there I was, mulling over all of those happy memories and letting them settle contentedly into place -- and then I was going to post some pictures of interesting rocks, and then I was going to mention that we were moving to somewhere rather close to one of the best pubs in Cambridge in a week and a half --

-- when my happy fantasy of a well-honed, meme-free stream of livejournal posts is shattered by a lucky guess in a game of charades. Tch. By the power of webternet chains, and even though I'm not particularly sure of the rules[1], it looks like it's time for, er -

* makes vertical pulling motions *

EDIT: now guessed by andrewwyld, who has taken up the baton over here.

[1] Wikipedia is my friend.

12:35 pm: Like an enormous carnivorous cake
I have many, many things I want to post about: mountains and flea circuses and art and dovecotes and the rising of the sea. But these things are going to have to wait because, well, WEDDING.

Which reminds me to remind you:
1. Everyone on the f'list is invited to the ceilidh. This does in fact mean you, even if you think it doesn't, although we're assuming that we'll have relatively few attendees from, say, Australia. The ceilidh will be from around 7:00 to around 11:00 on Friday the 25th at Moreteyne Manor, Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire (more directions thereunto than you can shake a stick at). There will be cheese and cake. You probably don't need to RSVP. We wouldn't mind knowing if you're coming. An email circular on this matter will occur shortly.

2. Those people who have been invited to the whole thing: now's about the time that we start prodding the people who haven't replied with sticks. Prod. Prod. We know of several people who appear to be making travel plans to get to the wedding without actually having told us they're coming, for example....

3. There is now a list of charities up on the not-a-wedding-list page. Apologies to those who asked for taking so long over this.

12:31 pm: Mysterious symbols
There are certain shapes, sets of numbers, combinations of letters and so forth that I have looked at so frequently (it is usually, though not always, the fault of Work) that I can recognise them instantly. No context, no framing; just squiggly lines on a page. I suspect everyone has some of the same sort of thing. Currently, I know a lot about this shape:
,
and I have previously had a lot of dealings with this shape:
.
However, my prompt for revealing such shapes unto the world (other than to add to the daily quota of perplexity) is another form of mysterious incantation, to wit: the seemingly meaningless ascii conundrum. I showed this particular odd jumble of ascii to purplepiano at the weekend, in great excitement; it was the first time I had seen such a thing. Unsurprisingly, he had no idea of its import. But I suspect some of the people reading this might be able to hazard a guess....
.