Inflation and deflation

Friday evening we packed up the car and in the blustery heat of a July evening, departed for a campsite at the little seaside town of Swanage, in Dorset. A morale-lowering sequence of events then followed.

The campsite itself was OK-ish, just that little bit down-market (no defined pitches, poor washing/WC facilities). The ground itself was stony, a nightmare to get the tent-pegs in. A warm wind was gusting and rocking the tent, so I cared more than usual about this.

8 p.m. and Clare was urging me to get in the car and drive to the Swanage beach front so we could get to eat. I then noticed that my air-bed had deflated: yep, it had a leak. I guess I wasn't the most sparkling dinner companion at that not-entirely-perfect Italian restaurant; my mind kept anticipating a night on the car seat. After the meal, we wandered the high street and came across a shop - just closing- - which sold beach paraphernalia. Hearing our tale of woe, the store owner was prevailed upon to sell us a Lilo airbed for £2.99. Not ideal, but better than the stony ground for the night to come.

I guess it must have been 2 a.m. when I realised that the Lilo had also developed a leak and had deflated under me. As the tent shook around me, I found that sleeping on your back is best in situations like this - the hip then doesn't dig into the hard surface.

We spent Saturday on the beach at nearby Studland. Crowded but pleasant. I watched the wind-surfers being blown over by the gusts to the complex sound-symmetries of the 'Art of Fugue' on my MP3 player. We abandoned our second night camping, however, and stopped off at Corfe Castle on our way home. An ancient (William the Conqueror) castle blown up by the parliamentarians after the civil war.

Clare standing in front of the Keep, fenced off as it's unstable.


This is the view of the village of Corfe Castle from the Keep (and myself).


Former Prime Minister John Major made a good point on TV this morning about the current Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. To paraphrase his argument (addressed to the Israelis): "Can you kill them all? No? Then you will eventually have to cut a deal with them. Does the current campaign make sense in that context, regardless of how good it feels?"

A comment of my own: I am mindful that it takes two to negotiate.

Einstein's view of death

Albert Einstein wrote the following, in a letter of condolence to the sister and son of his long-time closest friend, Michele Besso, upon his death, four weeks before Einstein's own (18th April, 1955).

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Thinking of oneself four-dimensionally is challenging. We think the phrases 'past self' and 'future-self' are metaphors, but actually they are literally true. Somewhere 'up-time' is the future you and me, just as real as myself at this moment of writing, or your moments of instantaneous reality as you read these words.

My past self-slice can communicate with a future self-slice through use of media. If I read this blog later, that's exactly what will happen. I try to imagine that future self, but it's hard. It's not a dialogue: my future self can't answer me back.

---

Note added on December 10th 2025

Hi, it's your future self just re-reading this post. I feel quite real I have to say but it's been a while - nineteen and a half years. You'd be pleased to know it turned out pretty well.

Up-time from here is the now-more-imminent moment of my own death.

I sure hope that guy is having an easy time of it - but he can't tell me...

---

Exercise and Ed Witten

Having spent six months running a couple of miles three times a week, and then stopping in February due to recurrent knee, thigh and hip pains (too much weight in the middle!), I have finally re-converged to slobdom. It feels bad.

I have therefore determined to buy a bike, and do 30 minutes of serious biking three times a week as a non-impact aerobic thing. I am inspired (only a small amount) by 'Le Tour' of which Clare is an avid fan. Round to the bike shop, then, on Saturday.

Reading 'Not Even Wrong' one is struck by the sheer, sustained brilliance of Ed Witten. This puts whatever intellectual pretensions one might have completely in their place. And that's from a distance - whatever must it be like for his close colleagues?

Kafka - the computer game

I am reading Kafka's The Castle at the moment. The hero, K., is a land surveyor who, through bureaucratic error, has made the long and difficult journey to the Castle. He is marooned in the village, where he meets all kinds of bizarre people in his doomed attempt to either visit the officials in the Castle, or get any kind of sense out of them. As is usual in Kafka, there is a sense that the hero is living in a wakened dream.

Genre literature (thrillers, hard SF) is susceptible in a more or less crude way to computer gaming even today. If the focus is depiction of physical reality, plus crude behaviours of game-agents which speak to our primary impulses (kill it!) then the technology is good enough.

How would you 'do literature' as a computer game? The point of Kafka's work is the crazed environment combining local sense with systemic irrationality made manifest through K.'s conversations with everyone else. This is coupled with K.'s reactions, both his immediate mood swings and his cumulative reaction to events through the novel.

Kafka, being a genius, could script all this, but if the game player is to be K., then the game agents have to be human-level personalities with back stories, personalities and roles.

This is why there is a yawning gulf between computer games - interactive media - and literature.

A conversation with Danny

"Danny showed me his video parser. I gave him a .3gp video of my son, newly arrived back from snowboarding in Canada. The video, from my camera-phone, was tiny and grainy. Danny's program read frame after frame, displaying each magnified pixel map. It was incomprehensibly to my eyes.

"The program does standard things like edge-detection, object-inference and finally scene-reconstruction. It's based on the detailed models of people and objects stored in its object-database. The parsed result is a high-resolution 3D animation model similar to those we use to generate video games. We can then invert the process and render this model at any resolution we choose."

Danny showed me his processed video based on my original postage-stamp movie, but it was now rendered on a high-definition TV screen. And it was perfect.

"You do realise the implications, don't you?" Danny said. This cinematic version of your video is a reconstructed reality, a kind of 'informed hallucination' based on your original coarse and tiny video. And that too was a kind of hallucination of reality, formed from pixels illuminated by your camera lens.

"And as you sit there looking at me, your brain is doing just the same thing" he continued. "You have no access to the 'real me'. Your 'view' is entirely reconstructed from retinal images on the back of your two eyes: tiny, noisy and upside-down neuronal 'bit-maps'. It looks like you're seeing the world, but you're hallucinating a view based on retinal image processing."

He grinned. "Intellectually you know it, but you don't really believe it, do you?"

Miffed, I replied. "You're sitting there looking at me and being amused. Consider this - the 'you' being amused is just the activity of 100 billion neurons doing their thing behind your eyes. 'You' are no more than the sum of their activity. How does that work, d'you think? And do you really believe it?""

Some 'Learnings' (sic)

In the sense of Vernon God Little.

1. Be a 'yes' person.

Trade little favours with other 'yes' people (in the sense of the 'Favor Bank' in 'Bonfire of the Vanities'). 'No' people are both high maintenance and incur too-high transaction costs to get them to do stuff well. 'Yes' people get the world's work done.

2. You can look stupid talking to lay people

How many times have you discussed something technical with a bright person who knows nothing about the area? As you run an internal translation system to filter acronyms and too-hard concepts, and work on generating appropriate metaphors on the fly, your conversational partner thinks you can't really understand this stuff all that well.

You are then joined by someone else who is also an expert. You switch gear - now you are motoring! Your original conversational partner is amazed: they now have no idea what you are talking about, but they see you flying rather than crawling. Your reputation is back.

I have been on both sides of this divide.

3. Building your reputation takes time.

How many times have I fallen into the trap of wanting to impress someone, and therefore hitting them with a lot of intellectual firepower - kind of hosing them. Although it's a truism, it is also true that less is a lot more. Understated competence allows people time to assess the evidence and to make their minds up. After a week or ten days, they may start to trust you and you may acquire a reputation. Attempts to short-circuit the process fatally undermine it. Patience and the Tao!

Lyme Regis

This week-end we camped close to Lyme Regis. This little seaside town on the English south coast dates back to Saxon times - today it looks rather Georgian, like Bath.



At the west side of the enclosed harbour is a seawall about twelve feet high called 'The Cob' (see picture above, where I'm standing on the uneven surface).

It's been there for a long while.

Jane Austen was in Lyme in 1804 and her later novel, Persuasion, had the dramatic scene where Louisa, one of the female characters jumps off the top of the Cob, supposedly into the hands of Captain Wentworth, the male lead character. Missing, she sustains concussion and the event helps to precipitate the happy ending whereby Wentworth gets to marry the heroine Anne.



Clare, pictured above, shows steps leading to the top. We took our courage in both hands and climbed up using this route. A fall from the top would really be no joke.

Our banal camping movie is here.

Why big companies are more competent

As Adam Smith noted, the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. There are not many specialist rocket scientists, brain surgeons or carrier network architects who can make their living within the economic confines of a small town.

But one could equally state that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the company. A large company making economic profits can afford specialists and can allow them to work with some autonomy - freed from the immediate need to make the next dollar, euro or pound. This is not just a complex way of describing traditional R&D: large companies also do better with large scale product development as well as support services and systems integration, if they are in a somewhat competitive market.

The smaller company may enjoy freedom from group-think and an incentive to innovate, but it is the large company which brings the innovation to the mass market. A number of possible causes have been proposed for this phenomenon, but look to Adam Smith’s insight for the real reason.

Laptop problem (cont.)

The problem reported a few days back recurred in a different way recently. At random intervals, the laptop would freeze as the CPU was taken over by an unknown process. Using ctrl-alt-delete to open the task manager was no help at all. Various tasks such as iexplorer were flagged at 98-100% of CPU but stopping them (eventually) did not solve the problem.

Too many times, I would have to kill the machine dead by holding down the power button.

I rather feared that the spectre of a full XP-reinstall would be forced upon me. But I decided instead that the problem was with the Microsoft Indexing Service, via cidaemon.exe. This was, after all, exactly where I had had the problem before.

I therefore turned the service off using the control panel (administrative tools - services - indexing service => disabled). I use Google Desktop to search for local files anyhow.

Postscript: no sooner was I celebrating 24 hours of the problem apparently being cleared when it recurred! I have noticed, though, that whatever process is grabbing 100% of the CPU then releases it after a few minutes. So I walk away from the problem, get a green tea, come back and restart the machine. Seems to work provided life is not too urgent!

Video old and new

Clare has managed to push my family tree of male ancestors back to a John Seel, born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1847. We have no idea what he looked like.

A while ago there passed away the last generation of which this could be true. Consider the .wmv movie of Adrian Seel, here. As I was taking it, I was conscious that despite the poor resolution and 2D technology, it is easy to anticipate a future technology - based on 3D modelling - which could transform this video into a high-resolution 3D object: all the information required is either there, or can be extrapolated.

Technology forecasting: take something which would be good to do, and where in principle we know it can be done. It will happen - 10-20 years max.