[Imported from "LewyLife"] Switzerland christmas holiday 2006 diary:

Written on my XDA, ready to post up using wifi which i didn't have appropriate swiss telecoms card for...so here it is posted the normal way:

Saturday (23rd):
Left house at 5am (i loaded most of the cases into the mini van taxi), 1h30 queue to get through security checks + plane crew 30min late due to working late the day before with fog, then take off was aborted, right hand generator replaced on the tarmack + refueled, so a further 1 hour late. Berne airport is small and friendly. Onto double decker, 2 drop off's then us at the "Sunstar" hotel.

Sunday:
Woke at 3am so spent 2 hours reading Freakonomics in the bathroom and nearly sleeping before rhea's alarms went repeatedly at 7:30. The breakfast buffet was very comprehensive, though the orange juice tended to run out, even with the little glasses. Up to "First" on the gondalars oposite the hotel; so hot up there I had to take off me fleece, leaving T and coat (glad I had thermal tousers on though, for all the time spent sitting on snow). A couple of runs from the top of the chair lifts left rhea tired and bruised after a rough fall, so she was lagging on the descent to grindlewald, with a fair kilometer walk at the bottom allong board unfriendly track and pavement through the town.

Montag:
Day off boarding as rhea's utterly battered from yesterday and i'm pretty achy myself. Ironically we had a earlier start today in order to catch the train up to "kleine schneidigger" via "grun", then up through the mountain to the "top of europe": a big modern place kinda like like a james bond super villian lair pearched 3.5Km up, complete with observatory/death ray. Christmas dinner for rhea and I was fries and salad, which was cool as we've been missing out on the simple food with the hotel's fancy 4/5 course dinners. Ice 'placace' was slippery but not as fancy as i'd imagined (be better is they served vodka shots!), took several panarama's, half filling rhea's 1Gb memory card in her new camera. Just made it back down in 1h30 for the evening sleigh ride, which was mostly wheels on road with 100 meters of gravely sounding snow, before the 2 poor horses steamed their way (literally) slow up the ascent to town. Out like a light at 9:30 while rhea was outside on the phone to england.

Deinstag:
On my own back up to Kl. Sn. On the 10:30. Took in 3 different runs before heading down route 21 (after a false start taking and wrong turning and lifting back up), nearly when back to the same dead end chair lift station, so walked back up a slope, only to be faced with a rubbish length of narrow flats. Rest of the decent alternated between decent streaches and patches of solid ice, impossible to board on. Made it down eventually, walking the last seaction on the flat again (getting a taste of what rhea was grumbling about on sunday), to the station, back in time for generously sized waffles in the lounge. Canaster avec spasticated laughing fit, apres shower and generous helpings of buffett dinner.

Mittwoch:
Floated down for the end of breakfast at 10am, aching/painful feet feet all around, so just go up to First and make 2 runs from the top before spotting the parrents knocking about up there. Chips and pitza on the mountain, then split from the family and boarded my lonesome way back to town (run was in better condition, more actual snow had appeared). Had a propper swim but avoided the sauna/lobster room this time. Dinned, complete with our super enthusiastic waiter, then laughed as the elvis impersonator's sound system tripped out the hotel power circuit repeatedly while we were playing some more cards (beginner's luck had worn off for me).

Donnestag: Epic lunch outting, starting at 11am, with 9 separate transport legs on the way there, including (but not limited to): bus, 4 person gondalar, 30 person gondalars, vernacular rail, normal rail and foot. All I can say is thank god the swiss transport system works as good as their time pieces! Lunch *was* taken in a revolving resturant of 60s film fame, 3Km up with the birds and crazy-ass paragliders. So was ok that we only just got back for dinner.

Freitag: Should get our last bit of boarding in... indeed we did, going up First one last time I finally felt i'd got it down, taking little jumps without problem. Rhea left me at the top, as her knees gave out again, so I made a final on my own. It felt like the right time to be going, my legs were the tiredest they'd been all week, having to stop repeatedly before they gave out. It seemed the families had landed at the hotel the previous night, as the previously quiet, little pool had 25 ppl in, mostly rowdy children. The entertainment suited the clientle, boogy and tap, fairly captivating jazz piano and dance/juggling. An odd combination, but I was happy to break off our family card game to watch, especially having been lubricated with generously proportioned long island iced tea. Threw stuff into suitcase in good spirits.

Saturday will then involve knocking about Grindlewald town til our bus connection to the airport at 2:20pm... Yup, all as planned, sucessful shopping and a takeaway pitza from across the road before departure. We're currently hanging in the departure lounge, and will be for the next 2 hours as plane is late...

[Imported from "LewyLife"] Blues and Space Jazz

So the cow milk related product embargo lead nowhere and I blatantly couldn't be arsed avoiding wheat! I have sent off for a £20 finger prick type testing kit, which should arrive just in time for me not to be in the country…

:heavy sigh of depression:…I’ve been back at my home in Rugby since Sunday night and since a couple of days before that I’ve been slowly spiralling. Don’t think it’s Christmas shopping blues. Surely it can’t just be seasonal dysfunction. Is the prospect of being back in my registered address of 23 years that bad?! I mean, summer here was a write off, and the Easter before it is, to me, synonymous with lethargy, but it’s not a bad place:

Free food cooked for me, old mates to see 1-2 times a week, drums (which I’m yet to be in the mood to play so far)…maybe the association of mental blocks on work, in my top floor domain, accumulated over the years, is standing in my way?

I haven’t been doing either coursework assignment (any if you include CMS too), but I *have* been playing with this stupid applet (see pic: right) incessantly since Alex sent me the link, damn him! It’s got the whole causality chain thing going for it, like domino toppling of my childhood or that Honda ad. I’m a Rube Goldberg machine addict!

Also, been watching Cowboy Bebop. It’s comes in 20 minute episodes (like scrubs, which makes it dangerously Moorish) is jazzy and eclectic soundtrack fits neatly with the usual, fast paced, stylistic animation, no wonder it was a hit show. While, generally not gory or explicit, it’s definitively no kid’s show, the dark side of this fictional universe is ever present, with likeable characters killed off just when you were thinking an episode might get cheesily happy.

Care seems to be taken making Faye Valentine not very likeable as a main ‘good guy’ character, which is refreshing. So far the physics is somewhat malleable, but then this more a space western, that a serious anime like Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex). I liked the Transformers the Movie reference in the 3rd episode: “reversing polarity” of the missiles, nice touch, doubt many ppl were sad enough to notice that one


[Damn! Now I’m watching crazy Japanese Rube Goldberg machines on YouTube!]

Energy for free?

New Scientist (02/12/06):

Understanding the swing of things: "By engineering such variations, Peyrard has shown, you could make heat flow 10 times more easily in one direction than its opposite."! If this can be applied in a real world aplication, surely it would mean rewritting the 2nd law of thermodynamics for starters!

There are multiple ways of extracting useful (work) energy from a temperature difference. Generally a system that does this is called a 'Heat Engine'. Therefore, combining a brand new, state of the art, physics violating heat pump and a thermoelectric generator (using the Seebeck effect) or even a good, old fashioned, Stirling Engine, you can use any heat reservoir (i.e. any matter or radiation with a temperature, i.e. anything!) and extract *all* it's heat (within the operating temperature of this new device) into useful energy.

The article doesn't say anything of the possible uses of a real device (perhaps a conjecture too far considering the massive potential), and as always there are skeptics saying that the 1D computer model of the 'Breather' effect, slowing thermal conduction, is not applicable to the 3D world. Though, carbon nanotubes are practically 1 dimensional creations.

...D'oh!...Hang on, just figured out why my free energy idea is folly: selective resistance to heat flow can no more 'pump' heat, than a diode can pump electicity! (so the answer is a resounding NO...for now) However, you could make digital electronic circuits out of such components that use pure temperature to operate them instead of voltage. Possibly very useful, if components can be realised at a tiny scale.


Also pointed to by this edition is the Pentagon buying 1 Petaflop (10^15 calculations per second) machines off IBM/Cray, to be built in the next few years. Though they'll probably just be used to calculate simulations of nuclear weapons in excruciating detail (seeing as live tests are frowned upon these days... yes france i'm looking at you! I know Pakistan and India have been naughty too, and North Korea would like us to think the have, but you should know better!), the raw computational power available in such a machine is approximately equivalent to that of all the neurones in a human brain...... which might make for a truely interesting application, if we had more than the fintest clue how the human brain is structured! Hopefully by the time the price of a 1 Petaflop device has fallen from a state budget busting $1/4 Billion to the price of an off the shelf PC (about 2025), we'll have figured out the missing details.

[Imported from "LewyLife"] This week I shall mostly be avoiding dairy!:

In a bid to not feel like shit half the time, I'm looking to find out if i have an allergy to something which has been making me tired and fuzzy headed for the last several years. I'm starting with the components of a bowl cereal: Weetabix, Crunchy Nut and Milk (i.e.wheat, corn, dairy and various others), since I had a total energy crash the other day after breakfast, falling asleep for 3 hours when i'd already had at least 10 that night.

Book discussion of Feersum Endjinn (Iain M. Banks)

Having read all the other sci-fi novels by Banks, I'd originally been put off this one since it wasn't a Culture novel and was supposed to be written largely in a strange phonetics. I'm very glad I finally got around to reading it (after picking up several of his books cheap, second hand) because it's a beautifully crafted, complex piece that has clearly influenced the likes of 'the Matrix' massively and is still relevant today, despite being written over 12 years ago.


The setting of the story is utterly unparalleled in anything else i've heard off: a post singularity earth inhabited by the descendants of technology and strong A.I. refusonists who still utilise some of the handy benefits the pro-advancement (humans) presumably left for them. [tangent: though Banks has never referred in any way to a singularity as such, and generally alludes to a pretty slow pace of change of the societies in his books. Though this is justified because each culture (including the Culture itself) is stuck at it's current level of advancement for a reason: ethics in the case of the Culture, considering it irresponsible to just up and transcend, leaving the universe in a mess] The venue for most of the story is a an oddly scaled castle and bailey with floors 1 kilometre high (seemingly an OTT artwork created by those who left), now infested by normal sized people.

One such benefit being 7 lives (a somewhat arbitrary number, but it's traditional it seems); an implant scans the state of a person's brain at the moment of death and squirts the data off to mould the brain of a replacement body; your last death is not entirely final either, as your mind/soul is then left running in the Crypt where it has a further 7 'lives'.

The Crypt(osphere) is a giant, multi-level virtual reality, where the top-most environment is pretty much a copy of real world earth, with lower levels becoming increasingly bizarre and uninterruptible ('chaotic'). When you die in the Crypt (or wander too deep out of boredom) you are absorbed into the sea of all possible knowledge/experience of the lower levels. The Crypt is obviously the repository of countless millions of souls, therefore to maintain any kind of individual identity, you must be diverse/unique/smart. The souls attached to the crypt are not just human either; some animal minds seem to be linked up directly. A skilled Cryptographer (here meaning person who interfaces with the crypt, probably as a profession) can hack his way into an animals brain and control them, though the book is somewhat vague about the specifics, sometimes it seems they are in the real world and others in the simulated.

Banks imbues the Crypt with a vague, slightly mystical format, which contrast with current day ideas to a similar (though lesser) degree as William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ (the difference being that Gibson’s world is a direct extension of our own, mere decades down the line, while Banks’ is distantly removed and carefully set). Something he does nicely is the massive speed difference between ‘Crypt time’ and normal time. With your mind temporarily uploaded you experience time at about 10’000 times the normal rate, able to have a fairly sizable adventure in the blink of an eye, gain lifetimes of experiences in days, or, in the instance where a story strand’s main character (Gadfium) is nearly assassinated while having her mind duplicated to the Crypt, use the vital seconds while the killer is distracted killing a bystander to: do some background research, hack the controls of the building, do some extensive image processing and analysis on her real life counterpart’s vision and plot the exact muscle movements needed to disable the attacker effortlessly. A very cool escape scene there.

Banks often makes use of characters with different perception rates: human Culture members could chemically stimulate their brains to think/react very fast to kick arse in combat (as if in a different time frame), and more substantially, the Culture Minds were capable of giving human level intelligences entire lifetimes in microseconds (see the end of Look to Windward). This brave ‘relativistic’ time use is something I’ve not really come across much, and only in more recent novels: the ‘Conjoiners’ can think up to 10 times faster than normal due to nanotech crammed skulls (almost trivial really, in Alastair Reynolds’ Redemption Ark), then very recently in Accelerando (Charles Stross) where spawning agents to lives alternative lives is standard practice in the later half of the 21st century.

It turns out that the hardware running the crypt simulations is the Serehfa Fastness itself (the castle building) - it’s made of a self healing computronium. The physical structure of the Crypt has a large influence on the internal environment of the simulation world; Sessine (a main character that dies for the last time in his first chapter) has to actually dodge past big, writhing, tubey things before wondering off around the (unreal) globe. This is a real last millennium conception…but I’ll let Banks off.

The culmination of the plot is complex: it turns out that the unhackable, anonymous, amnesiac, known as Asura (an accurate name for her) is in fact an real world incarnation of an instance of Count Sessine that was left to run in the Crypt independently for years of real time, thus acquiring intimate knowledge of the Crypt and pretty much all significant goings on. She reveals to *everyone* that the chaos in the crypt that the humans have been ‘fighting’ off, presuming it to be viral corruption, is actually an ecosystem of A.I. (artificial life forms) that are not hostile by intent.


Buscule, who falls (often literally) though a long series of semi-fortunate fantasy-cyber-adventure, after being manipulated into investigation by the faked abduction of his new telepathic ant friend (actually a Culture-esc nanotech A.I.) by a large bird, turns out only to be needed to scale the oxygen depleted heights of the Fast Tower to open a door that Ergates (the ant/key) was frustratingly too feeble to open itself. This mundane outcome in itself is a charmingly ‘down to earth’ twist, contrasting the Ant’s extensive capabilities in manipulation (presumably working in the background continuously to get Bascule out of all kinds of scrapes with the opposing military, etc) with it’s basic physical failings. They both achieve their destiny, activating the tower’s secret lift system and equipment, allowing Asura, Gadfium and some assorted refugee Chimerics (human level intelligence animals) to ascend the 10 vertical miles to the secured controls for the Feersum Endjinn, the solution to life on Earth’s biggest threat…

…Oh! Had I not mentioned yet that all the upset is due to a ‘molecular cloud’ ‘Encroaching’ into the solar system, blocking out sunlight so badly it’s going to kill all life, if not the sun itself. This machine is clearly something with capabilities equivalent to a Culture ship, but Banks neatly goes into no details to specify this, using only the title of the book to attach to it’s capabilities, leaving this reader happily satisfied with the title finally being explained as the last event, and leaving the novel as a stand alone artefact, as timeless as sci-fi can ever hope to be.

Through the story, the ‘King’ had been waging a secret ‘war’ against the splinter Clan: Engineers, for their access to a wormhole hidden in the lower part of the ‘Fast Tower’. The dilemma is that at the time it seems like the only escape route from the doomed earth and the governmental folks are keen to get out while they can! However, being rejectionists of high technology (the ‘privileged’ in their society are the few reserved for the high flying life, free of the distasteful chore of having Crypt communication implants) they’d rather save they arses in the full flesh rather than use an optimised approach that would allow everyone to be transmitted safely as digital uploads. This is Banks once again really romping home the point that discrimination against digital copies of people or strong A.I.s is just as bad as the racism of old, and perhaps could lead to atrocities even worst that those of the past! This is a recurring theme in all of his sci-fi, with the hopeless world of Against a Dark Background being a stark warning of a hypothetical result of absolute rejection/suppression of A.I.

Finally, the ‘original’ version of Sessine (with no lives to spare) sacrifices his soul in a Jesus like gesture of enlightened selflessness to become one with the Crypt A.I. in the hopes of giving it conscious form, with no guarantees there will be anything recognisable of himself left to reflect upon this thereafter. I would like to liken myself to Sessine, in that I’d consider my main strengths of intellect to be strong ethical/moral/logical reason (i.e. wisdom). Pompous of me, I know, but it’s a bit of an ambition of mine to take the cream of my human experience to temper the near infinite capabilities of a transcendent mind. I anticipate my fond smile as I briefly recall my human existence, like someone else’s faded dream, happy that it is now barely a fraction of what I’ve become. But then that’s just like growing up anyway (except without being able to casually prove the Riemann Hypothesis in an idle moment, etc).

[Imported from "LewyLife"] A 3rd blog for the personal and mundane:

Hey, so I've been feeling particularly tired and rubbish of late, but never mind. I've still been able to finish reading Accelerando (by Charles Stross - basically a dramatization of "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil) and check out some new software/services:

Since previously trusty Firefox went to pieces on my 64bit computer for no apparent reason, I've been needing an alternative. Eventually i got around to trying Opera (which I'm using right now). It has tabbed browsing and some useful features Firefox doesn't have, so I recommend it.

This groovy picture by Eboy inspired me to check out a few other things:

Last.fm - a custom internet radio player, equivalent to Pandora, arguably better.

Well, err, actually that's all the new stuff I'll be using from there for a bit, but i did also just get on Facebook which had been coming for a while. Well… gotta try and stay in touch with the youth, you know, even if i am just an old fart at heart!

2023-11-29 Addendum: I've imported the few posts from my old LewyLife blog to this less defunct blog, and deleted that to tidy up. Images missing that were presumably embedded via URL links only.