valkeerie

I moved schools every few years as a kid, sometimes two or three times in a year, and reading was my coping mechanism. During the four years I lived in Glasgow the public library in Giffnock was like a second home.

The streets belonged to another world in the mid-sixties - quieter, smoggier - and I would cycle over to the library in the dark and freezing cold through the kind of pea-green murk that is almost unknown today, and wheeze my way around the stacks.

I still recall the books, and their position on the shelves. Even today you could name a title and I could walk right to it. The yellow dust jackets of the Gollancz science fiction imprint stood out like beacons, promising the pollen of futuristic speculation to bibliophile bees.

I must have had a strangely dated grasp of English idiom. I read everything I could find by Rider Haggard, the prolific and successful author of King Solomon's Mines, and She, and Ayesha, and numberless other adventures. I tried to re-read She about ten years ago and found it excruciating. I suspect they are lost to me now, but I still have the images of Allan Quatermain and his companion, the fabulous axe-wielding Umslopogass, branded in my mind. And thanks to the web, I find Umslopogaas really existed, a hero of norse saga translated through space and time to the savanna.

Likewise Marie Corelli, the best-selling author of the late-Edwardian period, a household name. I enjoyed her exotic spiritual romances, filled with mystical themes. I am guessing that Mists of Avalon would be a more modern equivalent, although it is hard to believe that even Mists is now thirty years old. Does anyone read Corelli now? It is decades since I saw a copy of any of her books.

Dennis Wheatley had about 18" of shelf space. I was circumspect in reading The Satanist and To the Devil a Daughter and The Devil Rides Out, as my parents were mildly spooked by my reading choices. For most people today Wheatley is recalled, if at all, as the source of the Hammer film The Devil Rides Out, remarkable for being the only film I have seen with a fragment of authentic magic ritual - the "before me Raphael, behind me Gabriel etc" goes back to Sumerian times, and I have it in cuniform.

When I was seventeen we moved to Australia. There is now only a memory of a small upstairs room, yellow dust jackets shining in the stacks like buttercups, a brightly-lit haven in an ocean of wet green fog, like the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria.

The Library Angel (Daemon, Pixie, Orang-Utan) is an entity that proactively meets your bibliophile needs. Books, apposite and appropriate, fall open at just the right page. Rare works, lost for centuries, appear in the local fleamarket. It happens so often, and in so many improbable ways, that all researchers know a higher power is looking out for them. Knowledge wants to be revealed. Serendipity is like "the force that through the green fuze drives the flower".

I drove over the Malmesbury to buy Xmas cards. I have been doing it for years. The cathedral has a bookshop and lots of properly Christian Xmas cards. The whole "Happy Mid-Winter Festival" thing doesn't work for me. I have frothed at the mouth over Christianity many times in my life, and I would be burned at the stake in any era, but the slow passage of time has left me realising that there are worse things in life than a bunch of people clustered around a happy mum, with a marketing slogan of "peace, love, and goodwill to all persons".

And with peculiar timing I had been thinking about those worse things. I had been browsing Jihadwatch (www.jihadwatch.org), one of my regular reads, picking up on reactions to the Swiss decision to ban minarets - various imams and muftis with private armies of thugs fulminating about Swiss intolerance. The issues had been on my mind the whole way to Malmesbury. An issue raised by one commentator is that multiculturalism is a two-way street, and works only when both parties acknowlege the validity of the other's position. Does Islam, in the mutated form in which it has developed over the last 50 years, contain this idea of mutual respect and reciprocity? It is an important question.

Anyway, I thought I would take a look at one of the charity shops in Malmesbury, and the first book to catch my eye was "From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple. It is a travel book with a specific agenda. The author retraces the steps of a couple of Byzantine clerics who travelled around the holy sites of their day in the last generation before Islam. It is often forgotten that the centre, the absolute heart of Christianity, lies in an arc from Istanbul to Egypt. There are (or were until recently) a multitude of ancient Christian sects with continuous traditions running back to the Roman Empire. Monsteries, libraries, relics, all in use since the time of Atilla the Hun. The entire world from Iona to Yemen and Ethiopia was Christian, with monasteries extending through India to China.

Then Islamic multiculturalism happened.

It is a heartbreaking book. The Turks have been operating a genocidal policy against the Armenian Christians since before the first world war, and it continues to this day with the systematic destruction of churches, antiquities, villages and even graveyards. Syria, paradoxically, is an island of tolerance. The Lebanese Christians lost to Hezbollah, sold up, and emigrated. Likewise the Iraqi Christians. They may have a kebab shop in your street. I haven't reached Egypt yet, and the woes of the Copts.

So thank you Mr. Library Angel. Or is that Mrs. Charity Shop Angel? Do you work together? Do you have team meetings on customer service and proactivity? It would seem so.

When I was teaching in London in the mid-80s a colleague who had visited Oxford handed me a paper by David Deutsch. I was instantly hooked. Deutsch has one of those incisive, take-no-prisoners minds. In a lesser mind his style might constitute arrogance, but in Deutsch it produces a spartan clarity of thought. He reminds me of Paul Dirac, a Bristolian and Nobel prizewinner, and one of my intellectual heroes.

The paper I was handed was an analysis of the fundamental nature of computing. Not computing as a logical idea, with zeros and ones, symbols and choices, loops and lambdas. It was computing as a physical process, and in a concise and elegant slam-dunk, Deutsch summarised an entire theory of computing using quantum mechanics.

His paper germinated in the dark for about 10 years, then Peter Shor wrote his famous paper on factoring prime numbers with a quantum computer and the NSA went ape. Literally. All the public key encryption in use today, all that https:// stuff you use when accessing you google mail, depends on prime numbers not being factored. Suddenly (and sometimes mysteriously), money was made available for trips and conferences and new departments. Quantum computing was fashionable.

One thing that David Deutsch has insisted on, repeatedly, is the literal truth of the Hugh Everett Many-Worlds intepretation of quantum mechanics. He can't see how quantum computing could possibly work without it. This is a big deal, and it is not an obscure issue of theoretical physics.

For most of the 20th. century physicists have agreed not to attach a physical interpretation to the inner maths associated with quantum mechanics. The maths was regarded as something that gave correct answers. The only thing that actually mattered was the things you could measure. It was, by analogy with psychology, a behaviourist view of the quantum world. It was a "don't open the box" viewpoint. It was a "we don't need to know" viewpoint.

Deutsch has argued very strongly against that position. His explanation of the 2-slit diffraction experiment involves multiple universes interacting. His argument is that if quantum computation works (and we now know it does), then all that parallel computation is happening in parallel worlds. In the Fabric of Reality he makes the case for getting off the fence, to stop regarding quantum maths as some kind of trick that gives right answers. If quantum computers give right answers, then those answers must have been computed somewhere.

The multiverse idea is like a new Copernican revolution. Many branches of physics now suggest it. Max Tegmark has even produced a classification. The idea of "just one universe" now appears as irrational as "just one sun". It is a profound de-centering of perspective. The Everett version is especially unsettling: do I, like Schrodinger's Cat, exist in an infinity of parallel copies? Is there a unifying meta-entity of which every quantum instance of Colin Low is a fragment?

I really don't know what to make of this. Several systems of mysticism are comfortable with these ideas, but I think it is simple-minded to pound together mystical and scientific viewpoints. There is however, a case to be made that most "scientific rationality" that I encounter (in very intelligent people) seems to be about a hundred years out of date.

BTW, these thoughts were triggered by this news.

I am going through one of my geek phases. I don't know why they happen. They are dysfunctional and pointless, as technology tends to be superceded every three years, and the thing you laboured long and hard to make can be bought in Tesco.

I want to make a compound eye, a fly-eye, for my lego robotics. Compound eyes are simple and good at movement and proximity detection. Because my robot will be running on a flat surface, the eye can be 2-D too, covering a 180 degree arc around the front of the bot. I'll use a PIC controller with I2C communications to the Lego brick.

I am so impressed with the Lego NXT 2.0 kit. The more I learn about it, the more impressed I am. Being able to build and connect my own sensors using simple standard protocols makes it the easiest no-sweat entry into proper robotics. I have some cheap Philips I2C chips that provide an almost no-extra-component breakout into lots of analog-digital conversion. The only tricky part is making up RJ12 connectors.

We are suffering from lots of mouses at the moment. Has anyone strong opinions about styles/brands of humane mousetrap that are known to work well?

Many thanks

I am surprised at the number of astronomy items making their way into the daily papers. The current generation of satellite-based observatories are astounding in their abilities. Yesterday I read an item about how the Spitzer telescope had seen the early stages of planet formation around a young star. A long time ago I did research on star formation, and on an impulse of vanity I googled myself.

And hey ... my sole written contribution on the subject is being referenced in lots of papers.

When I finished my degree in physics in 1972 I wanted to go to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. It had been set up by Sir Fred Hoyle as a kind of hothouse and had an amazing collection of people working there. Most of the names won't mean a thing to anyone who isn't an astronomer, but two household names are Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, now Baron Rees, FRS, Astronomer Royal, Master of Trinity College etc etc etc. My supervisor was Donald Lynden-Bell, another luminary, but I didn't know it at the time.

Socially, I found the place quite weird. It was like a care centre for Asperger's. Morning and afternoon tea were lacking in any kind of small talk, and unless one felt inclined to dive down a narrow astrophysical rathole (radiative transfer mechanisms in black hole accretion discs anyone?), it was best to study a rich-tea biscuit intently. Without wishing to name drop, Martin Rees stood out in that company as one of the kindest, smartest and hard-working people I have met.

Lynden-Bell suggested I work on the fragmentation of gas clouds. Any cloud of gas needs to be contained, otherwise it will disperse. Gravity is a kind of container. A large cloud of interstellar gas can be contained by its own gravity. In fact, it will shrink, and if it can loose the heat created by being compressed by its own gravity, it will shrink some more, breaking up into smaller, self-gravitating clouds.

The process had originally been studied by Sir James Jeans, and the characteristic self-gravitating mass of gas at a given temperature was called the "Jeans Mass". The question Lynden-Bell posed to me was: what was the smallest mass a cloud could fragment into? The fragmentation of a cloud would stop when it became opaque, and heat couldn't escape, which would cause the temperature and pressure to rise to resist the force of gravity. This was one of the critical questions in understanding the size of the smallest stars - the so-called brown and black dwarfs, stars so small they aren't much larger than gas-giant planets like Jupiter.

I slogged away at this question for a few unhappy years and wrote a large paper on the subject. Much of my time was devoted to studying cooling mechanisms in interstellar gas, which is so cold and rarified that one has the think in terms of quantum mechanics.

The strange social environment of the Institute removed my desire to continue in astrophysics and as I had run out of money, I found a job in the computer industry. I assumed my work on star formation would disappear into oblivion. But it hasn't. I even found one of my diagrams in a textbook on stellar astrophysics.

BTW, it is amazing the amount of hot air devoted to knocking down evolution ("it's just a theory"), when the entire process of star and planetary formation (which is just as upsetting) is out there for anyone with a satellite and $500 million - $1 billion to see.

The media is full of items on Afghanistan. I feel bewildered and bemused. I am not going to play armchair general, but I'd like to make some observations .....

• a few hundred active members of the IRA kept a large chunk of the British Army in NI for 30 years.
• Afghanistan has a population of 30 million ... that's right, half of the UK.
• the Russians occupied the country and couldn't hold it. They had about 110,000 people deployed and didn't mess about (see Chechnya). One reason they gave up was the supply and deployment of Stinger missiles to shoot down helicopters. Note this important word: helicopters.
• For insight into local politics watch all six seasons of the Sopranos. For further insight, study Italian politics during the Renaissance. The watch the Sopranos again. Study the relationship between the NY and Jersey families. That's Afghan politics.
• Hamid Karsai is cool. He is good looking, has fantastic dress sense, and by our standards is utterly corrupt. He promotes relatives, rigs elections, channels aid money into private banks etc etc. By local standards he is a bloody genius - see the Sopranos.
• Today's announcement that the opposition presidential candidate has withdrawn is hilarious. He has cut a lucrative under-the-table deal with Karsai. Er ... see the Sopranos.
• The US 'toppled' the 'Taliban' by doing the only sensible thing - paying one warlord to make life difficult for another warlord. See the history of Italy in the Renaissance.
• The Taliban doesn't exist outside of the western media. The Afghanis are more dangerous to each other than they are to us.
• The cheapest way to make progress in Afghanistan would be to support opium production, buy the crop, and use basic economics to undermine the warlord structure by distorting the local market. IMO.
• Afghanistan isn't going to become a western democracy. Accept it. We'd be more effective and productive trying to turn Saudi Arabia into a western democracy.

I don't know if anyone reads this stuff, but I have finished my latest webpage on the topic of Evil in Kabbalah. It has taken me several weeks to research and write:

http://www.digital-brilliance.com/new/themes/evil.php

The rest of the site is still work-in-progress.

I rushed out and bought the Lego Robotics Inventions Kit when it came out in 1998. It was fun, but limited by the sensor types. I programmed it in a cut-down version of C.

The new kit, the Mindstorms Nxt 2.0, is fantastic. They have open-sourced the firmware, and use standard I2C connectivity to the sensors and actuators, so colleges are using it to teach everything from basic control theory to adaptive embodied learning with neural nets. There are several communities supporting various development languages. There is even a little embedded Java virtual machine, and a package for Eclipse.

I especially like the bluetooth connectivity, and the accurate rotation sensors on the motors. 

Two interesting models among many:


http://www.hitechnic.com/models       --  watch the video


The Rubik's cube solver is great - first it scans the cube, then solves it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEUPUH7u9TU

This story encapsulates everything that is right and wrong about the postmodern dissolution of hierarchy and radical equality. I wouldn't think of trying to plaster a wall, or do a wheel alignment, but everyone thinks they can design a wedding or a funeral. And the poor vicar, who is only there as decoration, is accused of being arrogant, insensitive and offensive. It seems everyone is entitled to their beliefs ... except the vicar. I feel for the guy. Especially when I check out the top ten funeral hits.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1221450/Vicar-complains-feeling-like-lemon-pithy-funerals-blare-My-Way.html

I was thinking about sticking Linux on a couple of ancient Win98 systems, but my experience of desktop Linux was that it was very slow on old hardware. By chance I stumbled across Puppy Linux. What a fantastic experience.

It runs directly from a CD (burn your own ISO). It is very, very, very fast, even on a creaky 500Mhz P2. It has an amazing set of desktop tools for a system that can boot off a 256Mbyte flashdrive. It is so small it installs to memory and runs out of a ramdrive (invisably).

It found all the hardware on three old systems (even wireless adaptors).

I am writing this now on my laptop, having booted Puppy Linux off an old flashdrive I wasn't using because it was so small .... I swear it looks crisper and prettier (and certainly runs faster) than WinXP.

This is a great way to do something useful with that old 256Mbyte P2 motherboard. You don't even need a hard drive.


http://www.puppylinux.org/

I didn't watch Buffy when it was screened in the UK originally. It was on at a bad time for me. I had seen random episodes,  the sets seemed to consist of the same back alley and the same graveyard, the plots were repetitive and preposterous (just how many ancient relics could be buried in the San Fernando Valley?) and the masks very rubbery indeed. Low budget tat.

That was before I began to appreciate Joss Whedon as a producer and director. So I thought I would burden myself with the task of watching Buffy, from the beginning, in sequence. I've since watched all seven series of Buffy, and all five series of Angel. That's about 264 episodes.

There were some low spots. Season 1 of Buffy is probably the reason I never watched it in the first place, and Season 7 is a mess. Season 1 of Angel (pre-Wesley) struggles to make way. The rest has been hugely entertaining. It did take time to suspend disbelief and sync with the bonkersness of it all, but once I did I found it surprisingly moving, and once I'd clicked that cheap rubber masks were only a dramatic device, I found the vastness of the worldview absorbing and ingenious.

Key to it all, IMO, is virtue, in a very ancient and traditional, almost Homeric sense: the ability to transcend one's nature and deal with complex situations in a humane way. Each character has a fall into darkness, and the rest of the cast struggle to rescue him or her. One of the key themes is soul, which in the Buffyverse has a moral power, much like the tradition that each person has a good and evil angel guiding them. For me the most moving scenes were Spike's struggle to control his internal chaos, to acquire that central coordinating factor that would enable him to feel worthy. The exteriorisation of evil in the shape of rubber masks takes second place to the interiorisation of evil as we see key members of the cast experience the pull of overwhelming emotions.

The world of Angel is a complex multidimensional multiverse of portals, corruption and conflict. Much as I suspect this non-fictional world of being ;-)

When Boris met Dave



An excellent docudrama mixing the testimony of close friends with reenactment. I'd expected that Ch4 would make hay with the toffs, but it is curiously disarming and often very funny ... a useful reminder that Boris and Dave are both talented, shrewd, and committed in spite of the handicap of privilege. Essential viewing IMO.

I am finding it useful to post updates for the site as it keeps me motivated - people ask me how it is going, and I feel guilty when I've been slacking.

So here is some new content, uploaded to the draft version of the new-look site. The new site isn't supposed to be public yet as it is still full of holes to be completed.



http://www.digital-brilliance.com/new/themes/tol.php


http://www.digital-brilliance.com/new/themes/partzufim.php


http://www.digital-brilliance.com/new/themes/fourworlds.php


http://www.digital-brilliance.com/new/themes/ascent.php

I was searching for info on Victorian mens' trouser fashions & styles when I found this:


http://circulatinglibrary.net/archives/victorian-barbies-available-from-harrison-and-smythe-toy-suppliers-to-their-royal-majesties


http://circulatinglibrary.net/archives/victorian-barbies-playsets-and-accessories


Tres amusant ...

I wrote a short essay for the website on the soul in late Hellenism and Kabbalah, and I wanted to find a picture to go with it. I have scoured the books on my bookcase, which are fairly rich in illustrations of an occult nature. I've turned up nothing useful in Man, Myth and Magic, which has nearly 3000 pages of illustrations. C. G. Jung's Psychology & Alchemy, usually a good place to go for illustrative arcana, has  nothing. So many authors and editors use pictures from Robert Fludd, or failing that, Jacob Boehme, but they use them because they can't find anything else. They have become occult cliches. Mostly they are pointless decoration, because who bothers to understand the personal symbol vocabulary that Fludd and Boehme use?

So strike off Francis King's illustrated volume on Magic.

As a last resort I ploughed through every page on Google Images. Every single one. I've lost count of the album covers I've seen. Soul -> Music. It is like Goth -> Depressed.

Most odd. Aside from possibly obsolete metaphysical concerns, the soul is well defined from a materialist perspective. It is the emergent, integrative wetware responsible for our activities as human beings. It is everything that isn't protoplasm. It is multi-layered, covering everything from heaving up outside the Hippodrome to proving the incompleteness of axiomatic systems. It has its pathologies, its ecstasies, its epiphanies of pure creative magic (Claude Shannon anyone?). Psychology = psyche + logos. Rational discourse concerning the soul.

And most extraordinary of all, it has an internal dynamic of self-transcendence, a desire to be more than it is, to "unearth the within" through relationship, religion, therapy, art, science, and exploration. When it is stuck, it hurts. When it is trapped it uses every kind of anaesthetic to take the pain away.

Bafflingly, I can't find a picture.

PS: I did another image search on "psyche". Hmmm ... an excuse for painting pretty girls deshabille, a kind of neoclassical wet T-shirt competition.

It is only 10.00 am and already brains are dribbling out of my ears. I have been reading since 07.00. The fault lies in Google Books, which is simultaneously daemonic and angelic ... as you will see.

I began with my paper copy of Moshe Idel's Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, which was written for a tribute conference in memory of Iaon Culianu, an outstanding academic assassinated in 1991. I thought I might chase up some of the primary references on Google Books ...

and began with Culianu's Psychanodia: a survery of evidence concerning the ascension of the soul. This led me on to Culianu's wonderful Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. It is rare to find an academic who has a deep and genuine sympathy for magic, and he writes with great clarity. It quickly became obvious that Culianu was much inspired by an earlier work from one of the senior academics at the Warburg Institute ... this was Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic: from Ficino to Campanella.

Now I fancy myself well informed about this stuff, but I'd never come across Walker. As the intro suggests, it was overshadowed by Yates' classic Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, which I do have. But it is probably the better book. It has descriptions of Ficino's Orphic singing. The idea of Ficino translating Plato while strumming his lyre in a Pythagorean manner and singing odes to the planetary spirits is too good to miss.

And this led me to Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, also very good.

So Walker is on order. I would love to have Culianu, but mucho pricy and I may have to persuade the library to find it. I have 14 explorer windows open at books I am reading simultaneously, wiki articles etc. Brain exploding - time for tea

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8253257.stm



See above - I will be campaigning with Asda to stock kilts, sporrans, leather gilets, skein dhus and suchlike. Their range of bagpipe accessories is currently unimpressive. If they could only bring a value Prince Charlie jacket to the mass market, that would do so much for Scottish wannabees who are currently reduced to wearing Tam-a-Shanters with fake ginger hair attached.

A range of Scottish exercise equipment would be good too, to counter the Scottish diet of cigarretes, whisky, chips, pies and cakes. It is hard to find a genuine caber, and fitness freaks have taken to cutting down telephone poles, which of course interferes with internet downloads of famous Scottish music (that is, Annie Lennox).

I keep waking at dawn. Today I woke at 4.30 am. I try to fight the mixed feelings of perkiness and exhaustion ... the bit of me that wants to get up and do stuff, and the bit of me that can't focus or make sense of anything. Then the morning histamine storm kicks in and I begin sniffing and sneezing, and I have to get up and grab some tea.

I have been using the time to write. I have been writing and researching consistently since coming back from Scotland in late July - the last month in other words. I have been completely and utterly immersed in Kabbalah c. 1270-1800, struggling through difficult chapters of the Zohar while the birds are preening themselves and squawking at each other. It feels odd and yet natural to read a 18th C commentary on a series of verbal teachings given in 1650 which are themselves a commentary on a book written in 1290, which draws extensively from literature written in Palestine in late antiquity, which might have been inspired by an ancient Egyptian love poem:

"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." You don't want to know what St. Bernard of Clairvaux made of that.

The new website content is slowly coming together. It isn't what I expected. Not at all.

I wonder if the wind has blown down any part of the fence.

Tea is good. Tea is good.

There might be a song lurking in there ....

I was listening to yet another German goth shoutcast channel and liked Ablaze in Hatred. Now, I know nathing about the myriad sub-genres of church-burning music, be they death metal, doom metal, doomy death metal or deathy doom metal, and I have no idea whether this bunch is in the easy listening category of pop-fame aspiring reprobates who haven't burned enough churches to have the least credibility ...  so I am quite prepared to be laughed at.

Not really. I hate being laughed at. So be kind when you tell me that this bunch of reindeer eaters are the Abba of death metal. Cos I really do like


To Breath and to Suffocate.