Time it Was...

-

 

Diary post, and very late due to over-indulgence: we're hosting old and very good friends for a few days, and to be frank, I need sleep, and so I bid one and all, Nos Da!



Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
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...
Read more

Days of Future Passed

-
Image
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...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more