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Of Feedback & Wobbles

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Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
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Days of Future Passed

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Another year's turn and already the New Year is now just This Year. The future passes and the past accumulates. The arbitrariness of the New Year's celebrations themselves mirrors those of sundry religious festivals - including Christmas itself - despite its less spiritual nature and history: what marks the start of a New Year? Depends where you are of course, but logically the year's turn occurs at the Winter Solstice, already long gone by the time we link hands, sing in Scots' dialect and fall over drunk 'till morning comes [other modes of celebration are of course available]. It also depends on your global location as to how significant this time of the year is: the experience of the annual changeover is very different in Northern Europe, where most of these traditions come from, than it is in say sub-Saharan Africa or Polynesia. But continuing the theme of the last two day's posts, it seems fitting to close out this rhetorically threefold digression with a r...
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A Time of Connection

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I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
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