Notebooks

(A brief update before I begin - I am now back at Uni, and mostly unpacked. All is well etc etc. If you're nearby, drop in and visit, I have biscuits and everything.)

I rather like notebooks. And diaries ... I especially like new diaries. Empty pages, neatly laid out, waiting for exciting things to happen in them.

I like new diaries rather too much. It is always terribly tempting to buy one in January, and one in the summer when the academic ones come out. Heck, the one I'm using now I bought at the end of June or thereabouts, and yet when I was in a bookshop earlier they were still calling to me ... I managed to resist.

I am also an enormous fan of notebooks. Notebooks are somewhat easier, because at least you can reasonably stockpile them - which you can't diaries. I've bought a new notebook today (although I have about 3 on the go already). It's a rather lovely A4 hardback, dark blue, with the following quotation on the front:

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."
- Edward Gibbon

This notebook is not going to be like the rest. It is not going to be wonderfully useful for jotting down lists or scribbling timetables in. It is going to actually be a journal.

I used to journal quite a lot - I have a whole load of journals from my A level years in the shed at home. The words used to spill out, and find their form, and it was a wonderful thing.

This has pretty much completely ceased now ... but hey, that's okay. The free-flowing, gushing journalling was not an end in and of itself; it was a thing that was wonderful and so I did it, and now that it has stopped being wonderful I have stopped.

But it is still good to keep records of things, and I do feel that writing will help me to process things (cf PunkMonk which talks about journalling as a useful discipline). So I have a plan: each day I will write one page. One page of A4 is really a rather small amount. It is always doable. But it is also large enough to contain a day's worth of insight, even if that day was particularly insightful.
We'll see how it goes.

So Italy was awesome

But I am busy and have little time to babble. So! Pics.


The Colosseum in Rome.


View over St Peter's Square from the top of the Vatican, Rome.


The Spanish Steps, Rome.


The Cathedral in Siena.


View from the top of the Cathedral in Florence.


The leaning tower of Pisa!


Plaque marking the birthplace of Galileo, Padua.


Mosaic detail on the outside of St Mark's, Venice.

(You may notice we did a lot of churches ...)

Ta-ta ...

... off to Italy! For 10 days. Back - hopefully with lots of photos - on the 24th.

--C

Assorted Thoughts

Packing is therapeutic ... I've been packing stuff up for Uni, as the number of days I have at home now has dwindled to 6 (and I expect to be pretty tired for a couple of those, plus one is Gamesday so I guess that doesn't really count).

I have packed:
-5 cardboard boxes
-One medium pastic box
-One large flat plastic box (holds about 8-10 ringbinders)
-One poster tube (includes a new poster of the Codex Sinaiticus, which I think is fab)
-One small black roller-case (the sort that's designed for short business trips - mostly full of books, since it rolls I can load it up so it's quite heavy)
-One folding crate
Still to pack:
-All my clothing and accessories
-Shoes and bags
-Toiletries and makeup
-Recipe books
-Duvet
-Desk supplies (pens, stapler, scissors ... etc)
-Craft materials (scrapbooking)
-Electrical bits - laptop, CD player etc
-Other oddments ... toastie maker, mug trees ... small hand-weights ...

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I'm really looking forward to Church tomorrow. Last week's sermon was absolutely brilliant - it was about the beginning of Genesis, and how can one hold it to be scripture and yet not have huge problems of logic with it? The presentation was so sane ... and tactful, and thoughtful, and sensible. It was *wonderful* to hear a nice, mid-range view. The view which was commended to us at the end of the sermon (which was one I have been gravitating towards for a while anyway) was this: the writers of Genesis were retelling the myths of their culture in such a way as to point us towards God.

Instead of stories of a god making people to be his slaves - God makes people to be his friends and partners in working the earth. Instead of god having to fight the powers of chaos in order to be able to do things in the world - God is in charge from the beginning. Instead of disaster falling on mankind through fluke or the capricious nature of the gods - bad things happen when humans deliberately and knowingly choose to go against God.

This week the sermon's going to be about the making of Adam and Eve. It should be good. Aaaand it's a nice Anglican service so it won't be too long! Sadly this is the last chance I'll get to go to this church until I'm back at Christmas (well, unless I come back for the weekend but that looks unlikely as I wouldn't be able to get back here til Saturday late afternoon, and then there's not much point, since I'd need to be back at Uni by Monday morning), as next Sunday I'll be off in Italy, and the week after that I'll be at Gamesday.

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Final Thoughts on Firefly:

Chris and I finished watching Firefly whilst we were on holiday. It certainly developed from a show I was watching entirely out of a sense of duty into one that I quite enjoyed. But only quite enjoyed ... it failed to grip me.

I admire Firefly for the way it was very well-made, and for the complexity of the characters, which I thought was better than you get in most TV shows. I think it was the pace that really did it for me ... I just found the whole thing too slow. I felt it promised a lot more than it delivered - and I know that this'll be partly because it was only one season and of course more would have been revealed if it had had another 2 or 3 seasons. But all the same, I didn't feel that it did well enough as a self-contained season.

Cryptic hints - especially in the first few episodes - are awesome. But keep giving cryptic hints for long enough and barely ever following through on them ... and they get annoying. That was a key problem for me. It seemed like even in the last couple of episodes they were throwing out bits of bait - whilst knowing full-well that they wouldn't be able to follow through on any of it.

Obvious examples of things that I thought weren't explained anywhere near enough:

-what really happened to River wherever she was (obviously this is a huge thing, and I wouldn't have expected it to be explained fully, but I felt that River's plot was ... well ... boring, right until the last episode, where it became okay)

-who is the Shepherd anyway? And why does he have an ID card that lets him get super-priority treatment? And why did the bounty hunter in the last episode say he wasn't a Shepherd?

-what was with River and the whole tree thing and the branch that turned out to be a gun? (okay, maybe this is excusable, given it happened right near the end. But I would've liked some closure)

-Mal's background and why he is like how he is - now, this was explained on some deleted scenes which we watched after the whole series, and *then* it made sense. But I hold it as a serious flaw that that wasn't in the main series.

There were more ... but those are the first few that come to mind. I've just found via google that there's an online database of firefly universe stuff, where I can probably find answers to a lot of my questions ... so I might do that, just so as to understand more about the characters. Who were quite interesting - and by the end, I didn't find any of them annoying or boring although in individual episodes I frequently found Kaylee annoying / River boring / Jayne boring.

I did like Jayne's hat, though.

In closing ... Firefly was good. Maybe it's just that I'm not a fan of explosions and westerns generally, maybe that's why I don't get it. Overall as an impression I just feel it didn't move fast enough. The pilot dragged a lot (and, in my opinion, was badly structured - showing the Battle of Serenity at the beginning was confusing, awkward because it was hard to recognise people and because it wasn't clear who the important characters were, and just slowed down the plot - should've been done as a flashback or something), and by the end of the series I felt I was just getting to know the characters in a way that I would have liked to have happened by about episode 5.

I expect it's a show that gets better if you re-watch it. If you already know that these characters are well-rounded, you don't notice that they seem awfully flat for a few episodes. If you already know how things fit together, you don't notice things that seem random or pointless. If you already understand the world, you don't notice if it's badly explained.

Now, off to investigate the Shepherd's past ...

By the way ...

... having a dream does not mean you're entitled to get what you want. Having a dream and 'going on a journey' and 'coming so far' ... eh, all that matters is whether you're there in the end, having come a long way doesn't automatically mean you should qualify.

Dreams take WORK, people!

(I've been watching America's Next Top Model, and Grease the School Musical and this sort of thing is starting to get annoying. Although actually the model girls are usually not too bad.)

Now I have a dream of being packed for Uni by Monday ... better go make that happen.

Fossils from Monmouth Beach

After buying fish and chips for lunch in Lyme Regis, we headed out onto the beach to go fossil-hunting.


The first find of the day


Preeeeety rock



So many ammonites ...


A mixture of large and small ones


And this is the beach

The Gods Themselves (SPOILERS)

A first reaction to this: wow! The best Asimov I've read (and I've read a fair bit) - I think mostly because it is so varied.

The novel is split into 3 parts (titled: Against Stupidity ... / ... The Gods Themselves ... / ... Contend In Vain? ) and what makes the novel strong in my opinion is that each part is a story that's virtually worth telling in its own right. I also really liked the fact that although the 3 follow the same thread from different points of view, there is virtually no linkage between them - i.e. it really is 3 points of view on 1 situation, not a timetraveller jumping through 3 places or similar. The cast of characters changes for each part.

Against Stupidity ...

This, I felt, was a pretty standard Asimov-scientist story - scientists, discovery of something amazing and important (a source of free energy!), personality clashes, infighting, politics, and public opinion being irrational (as of course it is).

"'It is a mistake,' he said, 'to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealistt who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.' "

Story goes approximately as follows: Hallam (unpleasant, obstinate, not particularly clever scientist) discovers an impossible element, plutonium-186, where before there had been tungsten, because he goes "that's odd" and someone he doesn't like goes "ah, it's nothing" so he's determined for it to be something. This substance is highly radioactive, and if we can keep procuring it through whatever mysterious means it came into being in the first cse, means free energy (via the Electron Pump). Eventually they realise that there are beings in a parallel universe who are taking tungsten we leave out and turning 20 neutrons into 20 protons.

Free energy being the Holy Grail that it is, Hallam becomes as a god to scientists and to the public. But the catch ... (there's always a catch) - you can't mess about between Universes like this without the laws of the Universes carrying across, which is changing the strength of strong nuclear force. Which means that the sun might explode. Oops.

Of course nobody wants to hear this. The protagonist (Lamont) works this out, but nobody will believe him, or at least even if they do think it's plausible they refuse to go against the current of science and oppose Hallam and lose their careers. So he recruits a code-breaker (the 'what do hieroglyphs mean?' sort, not the computery sort) and tries to send messages through to the other universe to get them to stop their half of the experiment - with limited success. (He gets a few scattered answers back which sound like there's somebody on the other side who wants it to stop, but general force of opinion - as on Earth - means it won't).

Overall, I think this was the weakest of the 3 sections, but it set the scene really well and got the basic setup of the underlying science in place.

... The Gods Themselves ...

This section was great - I really enjoyed it. It contained a fascinating life-cycle of the Soft Ones (so called because they can change shape to some degree and pass through one another - they don't have static edges). The Soft Ones have 3 genders, the Rationals (left, male pronouns), Emotionals (middle, female pronouns), and Parentals (right, male pronouns).

The life cycle goes basically like this: they form into triads. A triad melts (melting being basically sex, but taking a long time and involving blackouts - i.e. the triad might get together, and all come out of their blissful haze 3 days later) and if they melt with sufficient energy can start a baby (the Emotional passes something from the Rational to the Parental and the Parental becomes pregnant). They will always have a rational child, then a parental, then finally an emotional - and the Parental has a strong drive to have children in multiples of 3. After some time, the older triad Passes On - the Rational knows when it is time to do this, and when that happens, his Emotional and Parental go with them.

Also in the world are the Hard Ones (who have defined edges, can't pass through each other, and if the Soft Ones accidentally pass through them it really hurts). They teach the Rationals (who are the only ones to undergo a kind of schooling). Hard Ones live as individuals, not in any sort of family units. It's presumed they must pass on too, although this is not discussed.

The Soft Ones feed on energy from the sun, which removes the need for an economy, so I thought it was a good setup of an alien world. Basically the rationals go and learn stuff from the Hard Ones and think, emotionals go and feed all day (they're more translucent than the others so don't absorb so much radiation so it takes them longer to feed) and chatter and gossip, and the parentals look after the kids. Simplistic, but not bad.

The story focuses on one particular triad: Odeen (rational), Dua (emotional), Tritt (parental), and in particular on Dua, who is very leftish for an emotional - she wants to think and learn, not to gossip and socialise. But she also has enormous intuition. A lot of the story is general life of the triad and tension between them (e.g. Tritt desperately wants a third baby, Dua doesn't want a third baby because she knows that once that's happened there's a possibility they'll Pass On and she really really really doesn't want that to happen, Odeen sees both points of view but mostly just sits back and doesn't do anything about it).

Of course, they are in the world that is on the other side of the Electron Pump (so they have a Positron Pump) - although they're fairly well off for energy sources, the Hard Ones are worried about the future and finding this new source is great. The Hard Ones teach Odeen about it, and encouarge Odeen to teach Dua, since that's what she seems to want, and that makes her special. Dua intuits about the other side of it blowing up, and is dreadfully upset about the idea of a massacre of other intelligent beings who are helping to run this thing (it doesn't matter from their POV on an energy source front, because Earth's sun going would mean radiating masses of energy of which they would be able to channel a tiny portion - but a tiny portion would be plenty, and certainly make up for losing the Pump). Dua sneaks around and learns as much as she can, and receives / sends messages to Earth, some of them trying to get them to stop the pump.

Throughout this there is mention of an extremely intelligent Hard One named Estwald, although whenever Odeen, Tritt, or Dua try to meet him, he's never there (but Hard Ones generally very rarely meet Soft Ones - and even when they do it's only the rationals they meet - i.e. a rational will be taught by one specific Hard One and it's unusual for them to meet any of the others). Estwald is the greatest scientist the Hard Ones have known, and worked out how to set up the pump. Dua desperately wants to stop him.

And now we come to the completion of the life-cycle ... no one knows how the Hard Ones come into being, they never talk of birth, they don't have families, they never talk of death, the whole subject is avoided. It's avoided, because the Hard Ones are what a triad becomes when is Passes On - but in order to do that, the rational of the triad must come to this realisation himself. It turns out that whilst they melt as soft ones, they become hard ones for the time that they 'lose', but they don't have memory of it - which explains why Estwald is never around when Odeen/Tritt/Dua are ... because they are Estwald.

(I guessed that the Hard Ones were the matured version of the Soft Ones in some way (which meant that I didn't freak out when Dua did - she wrongly thought that the Hard Ones were keeping the Soft Ones as pets to keep them amused), but I didn't click that each Hard One came from a triad (although looking bck it was pretty obvious), and I certainly didn't get the bit about lost time in melting being time when you were a Hard One ... I think that is really neat.)

... Contend In Vain?

And here we jump to another completely different style of story - jumping back to 'our' Universe. This time, though, the setting is on the moon (with free energy, settling there is simple enough). There is a bit of culture clash between those on the Moon and those on the Earth (particularly as the Earth retains overall governmental control of things), the moon is a bit more breakaway and unconventional.

A fair amount is made of the differences in gravity - particularly mentioning physical condition of bones and muscles, Earthies (derogatory term) not being very good at moving in low gravity, and being a bit looked down on by Lunarites - I thought this was done fairly well, it seemed a reasonable reaction of a colony to the government they've left behind (cf Aussies, whingeing Poms etc). The Earthies do have a tendencies to come to the Moon and want them to make it like Earth, which the Lunarites think is really missing the point - they don't *want* the mess of Earth or the way things are done there. So this is quite a neat humans living on another planet sort of thing, with the alienness of different culture, but plenty of realism.

Another point: there are no Pump stations on the moon. Perhaps the para-people don't like the moon, or can't find it, or whatever - but when samples of tungsten are left out as on Earth, nothing happens, no magic plutonium. So the Moon is still somewhat interested in sources of energy.

We now follow Dr Denison (in middle-age+) who was actually the person who pissed Hallam off in the first place when they were both young and just starting out in their careers - he's come to the conclusion that perhaps Lamont is right, and has the secret ambition of doing some tests that could be done on the Moon (as you have the surface as vacuum, and the scientists here are more likely to be up for doing crazy things, not quite so restricted by orthodoxy). He meets up with a tour guide, Selene, who is really an Intuitionist (apparently something that they had tried to breed for using GE at some point, but that collapsed and had bad press). She provides vital help by listening and then saying "that sounds to me like ..." and having precisely the right idea, though of course others have to do the technical work.

To cut a long story short (partly because I'm getting tired of review-writing ...), there's a bit more politics, a little bit of wrangling between Denison and Neville (Neville being vaguely in charge of science on the Moon, and also Selene's patron / sex-partner) as Neville a) doesn't want to believe the sun will blow up and b) actually hates Earth and wants to get as far away from anything to do with it as possible.

The idea that there is more than one Universe but that the number of Universes is finite is one that they reject utterly (although I am not convinced, personally), therefore it becomes a "so anything that is possible will exist" argument. This means that there exists some universe where the Strong Nuclear Force is much weaker, such that the entire Universe was one enormous star. Which means that if you manage to find that Universe at all, you'll find a bit of star, from which you can steal energy (and a weakening of the strong nuclear force, which will stop the sun from blowing up! Hurrah!).

Ah, but energy is tied up with momentum, so you get momentum too (this is something that Neville and Selene have been secretly angling for)! Cue Neville having a plan to sail the whole Moon away as a big starship (because he hates Earth), which is promptly stopped because it's a stupid idea. There is a little bit of a wrangle because Earth wants to be in charge of everything again but the Moon-dwellers won't have it, so they get to be in charge of it (and by the way, people who really want to get away from earth can have mini-versions, so as to power starships in, and can go away).

...aaand we finish on a happy note, as Selene and Denison get together (okay, but it seems less crude in the book).

Basically, it was a very good read. But now that I've spoilt the whole thing for you, you need not read it unless you like Asimov :)

Man, I'm tired

It's been a good day, though. Worked this morning, met up with some friends from Uni in the afternoon/evening, then came home and have been working on organising things.
Mostly sorting out societies' stuff - given that I'm going back to Uni at the end of the month and going away to Italy for 10 days, there's a lot to do. But I think it's almost all done now ... almost.

I had wanted to do more coursework, too, but I don't think that's going to happen - not with working and wanting to pack for Uni too. Packing and society stuff needs to be sorted by the end of the month (especially arrangements for Fresher's Fair), the coursework's not due in until about the end of April or something.

So much I want to do ... so little time to do it in ... in the next week, I want to:

• keep practising the recorder
• keep up Bible reading and faith-related study and prayer
  
• update this blog with stuff from our holiday away (I *think* I can do this tomorrow)
• work (as in, I'm working Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, and Monday morning)
• spend lots of time with Chris
• continue organising stuff for 2 societies, in particular with respect to fresher's fair / beginning of term activities
• pack up almost everything except clothing for Uni (when I come back from Italy there's very little time before I have to go)
• continue reading Deadhouse Gates
• do all the prelim photography and messing about on Paint Shop Pro needed for the 2nd blog I want to start (which will be about clothes. Which probably nobody who reads this blog is interested in ...)
  

Ahhh lots and lots and lots of things! I should probably get to bed soon. Being in my optimal sleep rhythm* will help get things done, massively.

(*which is, I think, sleeping about 11pm - 7:30 am, I don't care what they say about people who sleep for more than 7 hours a night being more likely to die: you can't apply general statistics to individual cases safely and I'd rather have a shorter life where I am properly rested and properly awake than a longer one where I go about in a daze for much of the time.)

The new Miss Marple

I've just watched A Pocket Full of Rye, the first Miss Marple to be shown with Jane Marple played by Julia McKenzie (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8210342.stm )

I had high hopes for her - after seeing photos in the Radio Times, I think she looks the part 100% - more than Geraldine McEwan or Joan Hickson ever did. Out of those two, I preferred Hickson, on the grounds that McEwan's Marple was profoundly wrong, whereas Hickson's just didn't look quite as approachable as I would have wanted. McEwan's Marple, I felt, always looked like a mischevious sprite trapped in the body of an elderly woman ... far too malicious and spiteful. Very intelligent, I'll give her that, but the intelligence wasn't as hidden as it should've been ... and the sparkle in the eye, for me, did not fit the character at all.

And I was not disappointed. This was a beautiful piece of work. Very true to the original books, and certainly helped me to get a feel for the world (I have a tendency, when reading the novels, to forget just how *big* the houses are). I was so pleased that they kept all the plot twists in, and didn't mess about with it as they had with the McEwan Marples (possibly another reason why I didn't like them? The lesbian love affair they inserted into the end of one seaside drama was the worst - and it didn't add anything to the story, they just had a character run off with the murdered man's daughter-in-law rather than his son-in-law, presumably to make it more risqué). My one complaint is that they overused the following: *camera zooms in to close up of subject's face, whilst ominous/dramatic music plays in the background*. At those times it almost veered into being some sort of parody of itself. But that was just amusing, mostly.

Would highly recommend. Especially if you are a big fan of Christie's books anyway - so wonderful to see the storyline not tampered with.

This is Babo

This is Babo.

Babo meets cookie dough ice cream

I met Babo in a comic shop in Poole on Monday.

Here is what they say about Babo:

Babo will protect you. Having a bad day? Someone giving
you a hard time? Babo's got your back. What Babo lacks in
mind power, he makes up for in love. He's everybody's best
friend. He will stick with you to the end and when something
scary happens, he will send you a nice greeting card from
wherever it is he runs away to.

A very curious, mischievous creature, Babo may need some
guidance and parenting, so make sure to bring him with you to
as many places as possible. Leaving him at home is fine, but
please put all cookies and money on the highest shelf.

So far we are getting along just fine. He may show up on the blog again in the future. Or perhaps not. We'll see.

Babo conquers the cookie dough

On Cream Teas (with diagram)

(Brief hello - got back from holidaying in the south of England this afternoon, and I have got a fair amount to say about The Gods Themselves, some cool photos of fossils from Monmouth Beach at Lyme Regis, and some scrapbooking to update with - I've got time for this quick post now, and then hope to update again on Sunday)

Chris and I went to Pecorama on Wednesday. It was quite an interesting trip - the train layouts are pretty impressive, if you admire that sort of thing (which he does very much and I do a bit) I'd definitely recommend it, although I would not particularly recommend playing crazy golf in the rain - it's just about impossible to putt properly whilst trying to hold an umbrella either in one hand or wedged between your shoulder and chin.

Whilst cowering from the rain, he had scampi and I (having already had sandwiches) had a cream tea. It then came to me that the age-old question (jam then cream, or cream then jam? I have been on outings where there has been quite a schism on this matter) could be summarised and solved by a simple tree diagram:
Personally, I am strongly in the spread your cream and dollop your jam camp.

I hope this proves of value in future conflicts.