On friday I was accused by mr. bielby of having been "a bit reclusive online recently". Ha! That's a turning point that is, a crossing of a threshold, an inversion, a transposition, a collapse, a small moment in the history of civilisation. Put that last word in quotes.

Here is an interesting article.

The mind projection fallacy

a deep, confusing, and extraordinarily common mistake which E. T. Jaynes named the mind projection fallacy. [...] Jaynes, a theorist of Bayesian probability, coined "mind projection fallacy" to refer to the error of confusing states of knowledge with properties of objects. For example, the phrase mysterious phenomenon implies that mysteriousness is a property of the phenomenon itself. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, then this is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon

From Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is long and very good.

Moon, from my bedroom window.

t-e-r-m-i-nal

This was spectcular. The sun is so low and perfectly aligned it reflects off the concrete floor and makes these shadows, so very long. Look, half a bike wheel is about 12 feet. For a similar effect (in theory), visit at about 21:37 on the 17th of July. (Go in 2005 to make sure.)

Some of my faults

1. I sometimes expect other people to read my mind for me

2.

Just some photos -


These are two cool dudes we met at the Oktoberfest.


This is me, this was a nice day.

So this afternoon I sat my M208 exam. Something that occured to me afterwards was how all sorts of images and memories had popped up to accompany the process of doing the paper, corresponding with where and when I studied that particular topic (in the garden, on the train, in a pub garden, in the car by a canal, in rich and lisa's kitchen). So overall like a little tour of the last 8 months compressed into 3 hours, with maths. It went pretty well, I think.

Then we went to a pub which sold strawberry beer but had sold out so we had strawberry juice instead.

Anthony and Cleopatra - what's that all about then?

Today I've become obsessed with the soundtrack to the utterly fantastic film Pirates of The Carribean: Dead Man's Chest (look not upon the celebrities, look not upon the hype, but upon.. it). The soundtrack is so full on (pow, zap, happy) and so wrong (pow, zap, happy), its just wonderful. In fact it may even be as good as the Back to the Future theme.

The score to POTC:DMC is by Hans Zimmer. I have a theory that all Hans Zimmer soundtracks are essentially the same. As an example, I have put together a brief audio montage of sections from Gladiator and Pirates 2. It goes Gladiator-Pirates-Gladiator-Pirates . (Or does it? Can you spot the join?...)

1 | 2 | 3

MOO                  Oh, how boring it must
/                    be to be a cow.
(__)      (__)                 \                   (__)
(oo)      (oo)                  _______            (oo)
/-------\/        \/-------\          //  ||\ \            \/-------
/ |     ||          ||     | \   _____//___||_\ \___         ||     | * 
||----||          ||----||  *  )  _          _    \        ||----||  *
^^    ^^          ^^    ^^     |_/ \________/ \___|        ^^    ^^
______________________________________\_/________\_/__________________________

ASCII-art cows here!

----


And now for some traditional plink de plonk fayre.
1.
2. (everything in its wrong place)

A waterloo station roof moment.

On an aeroplane, on the runway at Salzburg at night. Near the back in an aisle seat. Sitting with strangers, companions spread around the plane. Not much leg room, but cool, not stuffy. Following a busy, fun 2 days. Looking forward to getting home. Tired but awake. Listening to music: Ben Folds, Still Fighting It. Properly listening. In a little world. An announcement is made, then the main cabin lights go off and it is wonderfully dark.

All down the rows little arms with little hands on reach up to switch on their little personal beams of light overhead, to light up pages to read. Through something in that moment I felt a bond with all those people reaching for light, bare arms illuminated, half in shadow. We were the same.

I sat there freshly unburdened, and looked to my left at the window. Coloured lights appeared, slid past, getting faster, and then as the full accelleration of the plane kicked in the music in my ears entered a slow building crescendo. Just as the nose of the plane lifts up and the runway falls away, the big drum break hits and I smile at the cheesily perfect movie soundrack synchronicity, and the feeling that plane seems to be floating up on the music, and anything seems possible.

Wikipedia:Sandbox/Poetry

There's a page on Wikipedia, called Wikpedia:Sandbox/Poetry, where people can write poems. What's cool about it is that it's 100% non-official. It's obscure, and just kinda nestling there in the armpit of the behemoth that is WP. A few days ago I decided to add a poem to the page, it's near the bottom.

(meta)physics

when you suck the air out of a
thin glass vessel, it's not the vacuum
that makes it smash, it's the air
on the outside pushing in

I just noticed that some anonymous person, somewhere in the world, added another one right after it:

(meta)(meta)physics

every time a soul fails in a
human being, it's not old age
that makes it die, it's the people
on the outside pushing in

How cool!

Here is a link to said page: Wikpedia:Sandbox/Poetry

Some news—

Am Dienstag gehe ich nach München, zum Oktoberfest!
(Und es ist das größte Volksfest der Welt!)
On Tuesday I will go to Munich, to the Oktoberfest!
(Did you like what I did with the links there?)

Some twanging—
on this twangy toy guitar.
(Sound archive #2)

Beginner's mind

Beginner's mind is a concept in Zen Buddhism, often referred to by its Japanese name shoshin (初心) or (much less commonly) nyuanshin. As the name suggests, it refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.

More brilliance

(p89):

Imagine you can see the whole Number Line and every one of the infinite individual points it comprises. Imagine you want a quick and easy way to distinguish those points corresponding to rational numbers from the ones corresponding to irrationals. What you're going to do is ID the rational points by draping a bright-red hankie over each one; that way they'll stand out. Since geometric points are technically dimensionless, we don't know what they look like, but we know that it's not going to take a very big red hankie to cover one. The red hankie can in truth be arbitrarily small, like say .00000001 units, or half that size, or half that half, etc. Actually, even the smallest hankie is going to be unnecessarily large ...

I hope you enjoyed imagining an infinite number of infinitely small red hankies as much as I did.

Sound archive

Or "stuff I found on my minidisc recorder". A charming trumpet/piano duet by my dad and I; the eleventh of January, two thousand and six; Saturday; ten to twelve.

no shit

Covent garden busker
with your guitar on your lap
You played the music inside my head
It was the most beautiful music I ever heard

Apocalypse

Yesterday evening there was some excitement. All the lights and televisions and computers went off, and all the local burglar alarms went on. For there had been a power-cut.

It was a strange moment. People came to their front doors; the evening was gloomy but not dark. Because I'm odd, I placed my minidisc recorder outside and got the sound of the alarms dying as their batteries expire (as cars pass by, as the wind blows, as a dog barks, as someone starts playing a piano...)