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...)

Extract from book

The book is called Eveything and More: A Compact History of ∞ and it's by David Foster Wallace. I'm really enthused about it at the moment, it's philosophy/maths and beautifully written with a refresingly direct but also esoteric style that I really dig. It's about historical struggles with the concept of infinity, with particular reference to Georg Cantor.

First notable extract (p3, footnote):

In modern medical terms, it's fairly clear that G.P.L.F. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time [1800s] when nobody knew what this was, and that his polar cycles were aggravated by professional stresses and disappointments, of which Cantor had more than his share. Of course, this makes for less interesting flap copy than Genius Driven Mad By Attempts To Grapple With ∞. The truth, though, is that Cantor's work and it's context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there's no need for breathless Promethiusizing of the poor guy's life. The real irony is that the view of ∞ as some forbidden zone or road to insanity—which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years—is precisely what Cantor's work overturned. Saying that ∞ drove Cantor mad is like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon; it's not only wrong but insulting.

(Isn't that blazingly clear and refreshing writing?)

Second notable extract (p41):

The standard way [of dealing with the Paradox of Galileo] is to declare infinite sets the math equivalent of unicorns ... The other—which is revolutionary, both intellectually and psychologically—is to treat Galileo's paradoxical equivalence not as a contradiction but as a description of a certain new kind of mathematical entity [as G. Cantor did]... Except on the other hand such an attitude could not be revolutionary but merely insane. Rather like taking the fact that nobody's ever once seen a unicorn as claiming ... that unicorns constitute a whole new kind of animal with the property of invisibility. Here of course we get The Fine Line Between Brilliance and Madness that modern writers/filmmakers dine out on. The truth is that all manner of strange [concepts] originally entered math under the same sort of insanity/incoherence cloud but are now totally accepted, even essential.

There's lots more (ob-viously) and I haven't finished it yet but cool huh? And appropriate to the current topic in comments.

Poem from dream

As I awoke this A.M. I was definitely composing a poem. Something to do with a crack den being busted by police.


They called it a 'cracking up'
To turn an assembly into an incident
100 free policemen were dispatched
and the scientific branch from Plymouth

!!!!

Due Tramonti (Einaudi). Notes: aside from the obvious slips and hesitations; nice start, tendency to rush the repeating phrase (throughout). R.h. theme - be a cello, not hard. Create space. Bar 23-27 &c. still finding notes. 19-20 (1.33) tratt. - a tempo: more tratt. please, but a tempo 'come stelle' comes in well, liking what I did there. Also 28-31 (2.11) good l.h. tone. End trails off, lost interest I think. Focus on: timing. And look up the italian.

--

sempre trattenendo un poco il canto : [always withholding little a song?? (babelish)]
nobile il canto : [nobleman the song?? (babelfish)]
come stelle : like stars
intensamente : intensely
allargando : Growing broader, louder and slower / Getting slower (more majestic) / a gradual slowing down, but with full tone quality

--


come stelle : like stars .. wow. what a beautiful direction, and a lot to live up to

Image from dream

I am not up late. I just had an unusually deep sleep, having lain down at 6.55 pm with some maths to study, and managing about one sentence and a diagram. I rescue this fragment of my dream; an image:

Mood: magical and strange. Good night.

Even better,

now my emails are coming from 1988 too!

Happy New Year! Pleased to see your e-mail shows you to be still in the 80s....


> From:
> To:
> Subject: yo
> Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1988 03:25:35 +0000
>

If you have one of these, treasure it. :)

My computer thinks it's 1987

I just think this is so cool! I think it's because I took the battery out. I don't wantto change it now, I like it being 1987. (But, nearly 1988 as you can see.)

ELECTROPLANKTON

Its sooo cool!

It lets you make music by the means of plankton. I made these with it
lovelyluminara
swoopy
perfectlynormal
5'29

This relates to the park closing times

I bought a book, it arrived, I'm very excited!

The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy is one of the most exciting and original books ever written on ancient, as well as medieval and Renaissance astronomy, indeed, on the history of science. Here, for the first time, the reader can learn not only about ancient astronomy, but how to do ancient astronomy.

From inside:

Is the Heaven or the Earth in Motion? An Ancient Debate

As far as practical astronomy is concerned it makes no difference whether the motion of the stars is explained by the westward motion of the celestial sphere or the eastward rotation of the Earth on the same axis. Observations of the heavenly bodies provide no basis for choosing. One may, however, still ask which hypothesis is physically true. Although the opinion in antiquity was overwhelmingly in favour of a stationary Earth, there were thinkers who subscribed to the opposite view.

I like how it's written so as to embrace the unknown and the means of discovery, rather than oh well of course we now this, but back then, they were all wrong, how silly of them!