Ransen's Blog

 Two happy discoveries last week.  What Happens In Ulster is a very entertaining mockumentary crime podcast written by Marc McElroy, and starring Diona Doherty. I have to admit I binged on it.  And then I stumbled across a new version of Bach's Goldberg Variations, transcribed by Yasuaki Shimizu for five saxophones and four contra basses.  I've had the versions by Gould and Richter for years... ...and brilliant they are, but Shimizu's version is a whole new fresh rich sound.

 I was recently given, as a present, a copy of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam". A lovely volume.  It is a long time since I'd read the whole poem, but this time it struck me that almost every page is about death and alcohol. Fitzgerald, the translator who brought the poem to the West, decided to try to transmit the spirit of the poem, rather than make a literal translation. I can't read ancient Persian, so the only thing I have to go on is the translation. And the Art Nouveau illustrations (mostly by Renè Bull). Come fill the cup... the Bird of Time has but a little way to flutter . There you go, alcohol and death. And as the cock crew those who stood before the Tavern shouted "Open then the door! You know how little while we have to stay and once departed may return no more!" Oh oh! More alcohol and death. And how come Persia of 600 years ago is full of 1920s Hollywood actors? Want some more death and alcohol? Never fear: Ah make the most of what we may ye

 Many years ago my back was so painful sometimes I had to roll out of bed, I couldn't "get up", I had to "roll up". My doctor recommended a physiotherapist who taught me some exercises to do, and since then I've had very little back trouble. But. The exercises require you to, for example, "repeat 5 times and hold for a count of 15 at each repetition". And I as I got to do the exercises automatically, my mind would wander and I'd forget how many repeats I'd done and how long I'd been holding the position. The problem was the mixing up of the numbers.  So I solved that problem by counting the exercises with numbers and the "hold for" with letters. So if I had to hold for 10, I'd "count" from a to j . And instead of saying the letters I'd visualize them. Seemed like more fun. But I found to my surprise that some letters were hard to visualize. The first 6 are a doddle, but for the life of me I could not easily

 

 In this post : For Reasons Beyond My Control I listed a few of my favourite comedy shows, but I'd forgotten two. The first is "When The Dog Dies", written by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, with Ronnie Corbett and Liza Tarbuck.  You'd imagine a quiet gentle comedy, and it sounds like that initially, but the deep grasping nastiness of Ronnie's children and the sexiness of his lodger (Liza Tarbuck, always half dressed or in tight leather it seems) gives an edge to the comedy.  Then there's "Robin And Wendy's Wet Weekends":  It is written by and stars Kay Stonham and Simon Greenall. It is about Robin and Wendy Mayfield, a childless couple from Stevenage. Robin is obsessed with Mayfield, the model village he has built in their garage. Again it sounds like a "gentle comedy" but involves (for example), adulterous sex with a dying man in a hospital.  

What strikes me about these monsters from ancient legend, Cerberus... ...Medusa... ...Pegasus...    ...is that they are all made up of bits of animals (or animals/people with unusual numbers of parts). It is as if they did not have the imagination to conceive of a completely new being. The same lack of imagination applies to old books on demonology. Demons are also combinations of parts of different animals. A man with a beak for a mouth, a tail and wings. and often horns borrowed from goats. And here are images of Satan's little helpers (again bits of normal animals stuck together in a human format):     That is why I can't watch Star Trek. I'd like to watch it, to relax with a bit of science fiction, but every F€$£ing alien is simply and clearly a man or woman with heavy makeup on. You can forgive this in the 1960s (and I did). But these days the makeup has become heavier. And the "aliens" remain human: ...the artistry and craft is there, but the imagination i

Arthur C. Clarke's First law: " When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. " I was reminded of this as I started re-reading Goodbye Descartes by Keith Devlin (a mathematician/philosopher).  To quote from the book: " Toward the end of the 1970s the AI and natural language understanding bubbles began to burst. " Then he mentions a philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, who wrote a book "What Computers Can't Do," saying that AI programs would never scale up to anything useful. Just a year ago I heard a philosopher on a BBC podcast declare that " there will never be driverless cars. " She did not know what to say when it was pointed out that they already exist. I started playing around with neural networks after 1997 (when Devlin's book was published). It seems I'd forgotten what Devlin and Dreyfus had taugh