Observations from a Hill

I just wrote a post that in fact I realised I'd already written last year, which just goes to show that I should remove some of my reference book item tags from time to time, and also serves to highlight the difficulty sometimes of finding a topic to write about when not much else seems to have have happened since the last post. As I've pointed out previously, this blog is both a self-imposed rod for my own back and a marker of my own inevitable mortality. However, there we are, it's a thing and it's on-going for the time being, despite all else. So, where do I go hence this even-ing? A bowl of tobacco and another glass of wine, methinks, then back to the fray. Ah, there we are now: the tobacco just smoked is 'Dreams of Kadath', which is a plug tobacco comprised of Virginia, dark-fired Kentucky, Katerini, Burley and black Cavendish varieties: an interesting smoke to say the least. I've been working my way through some of these more outré blends, such as Blac...

I've been trying to write a poem about the death of our good friend Alan Moores ever since his demise, which is some considerable time ago now; and have scribbled various notes and jottings in the intervening years which kind of alluded to something or other, but none of it really amounted to much. In my usual evening search for something to scribble here, I discounted most of my usual themes: politics, philosophy, photography, coding and such, and decided on the following stanza as my post tonight: For Al. In the Fall of your time You faltered, as if frozen Against reality. Locked in, vision finally dimmed, and Outfaced by certainty, you faded; Fixed as Jaques-Louis’ Marat In breathless shout, alone. Four, now three We sat in silence.

Following on from last night's post and my encomia to Richard Feynman and Captain Beefheart of the ninth inst., my newly bought copy of 'Feynman's Lost Lecture' [pictured] arrived yesterday in the post from World of Books. A paperback edition in decent nick for a measly three or four quid, and I only had to wait a few days for it, in the end. Although the transcript of the lecture was never actually 'lost' as such, the diagrams that he used to illustrate his proof were photographed from his blackboards as usual, but those photographs were lost to history for some reason. However, his pencilled notes, including his sketches of his diagrammatic representations turned up years later in his personal papers, allowing the substance of the lecture and his proof to be reconstructed in the 1990s. His motivation for this particular exposition was to present a proof of the motions of the planets around the sun in as simple terms as possible: the lecture was delivered to fr...

Founded in 1990, in Providence, Rhode Island, the Company of Science and Art [CoSA], before becoming synonymous with software such as After Effects and being sequentially absorbed first by the Aldus Corporation and subsequently by the industry titan Adobe Systems, produced [ahem] one of the most radical if short-lived pieces of software ever to hit the graphics and video realm. PACo Producer was possibly the most stupidly powerful piece of software ever to cross my path. The complete installation, including full documentation, came on a single 1.44Mb compact floppy disk [if you're under fifty or so, you'll have to Google around it]; and yet the little beast had the power, given time, to turn a bunch of full screen frames into a full-blown 30fps video, back in the days when the most on offer from any computer manufacturer outside of the very specialised and heinously expensive likes of Sun, Silicon Graphics and Avid workstations was a postage stamp image running at sub-prime fra...

I was watching an interesting piece on YouTube the other day about bare metal coding without an Operating System , which took me back to the 1990s and a couple of old Mac applications from the era. Both had an influence on ideas of mine when we were engaged in developing software for the use of film producers in finding appropriate North Wales locations for their productions. A couple of the inspirations for my 'discovering', or rather, misappropriating the easiest solution to the problem, were two pieces of Mac-based software produced in the early 1990s, both of which saw good good service with me throughout the decade. The game 'Maelstrom', by Ambrosia Software, written by Andrew Welch, was a firm favourite of mine throughout the decade, as I'd been a bit of an addict of the arcade game upon which it was based: Atari's 'Asteroids' from 1979. The original game was hard-coded in logic chips and was very much of its era: simple line and point rendered o...

Earlier today we visited the boys over on Ynys Môn, and one of the topics of conversation was AI, a subject difficult to avoid these days. But I put forward my thoughts that after the speculative market bubble bursts - as it inevitably will - the perceived existential threat that a lot of people imagine to be posed by the technology will simply evaporate, and AI per se will simply slot into our global toolbox of technologies to be used in the pursuit of our quite mundane needs and requirements. Every disruptive and apparently revolutionary technology in its day appears as a threat to the societal status quo, provoking often violent reaction to its implementation. This scenario is true of any radical technological innovation: at first disbelief, then astonishment, followed by a gold-rush to exploit it for all its worth in the markets. This is where the kick-back starts; where the disquiet at the potential for negative societal impact begins. Outrage against the machine on both moral and...