{blog_title}

I started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything today, and before I’d got thirty pages in, I was distracted by a thought (which is why it sometimes takes me a long time to get through books). The passage I was reading was about the Big Bang, and how time and space begin at that precise moment:

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—-whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there for ever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past from it to emerge from. (p. 28)

Now, this isn’t a new idea to me, and I can see the logic to it perfectly well; time and space were created in the Big Bang, so neither could have existed before the Big Bang and it came—-literally—-out of nothing. Fine. Only it isn’t fine. When I try to imagine nothingness, my brain sneaks in some container for the nothingness, or some frame of reference. When I try to insist that it really is nothing—-not just an absence of something filling something else, my brain whimpers and tries to hide. I assume that I’m not the only one, so why do we find it so hard to imagine true nothingness? Our brains just don’t seem to be able to cope with the concept.

Science has pushed back the boundaries of what we have to try to imagine and visualise, so perhaps this is a temporary deficiency, and we’ll eventually be able to do it. I’d be interested to hear from physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists and see how you cope with imagining the unimaginable. I wonder if this inability is behind some of our spiritual beliefs? If you can’t imagine nothingness after death, you create a container—-heaven or hell.

By a huge coincidence, I spotted a highly relevant sight gag in the episode of Futurama I watched today on DVD. The planet Eternium (Nibbler’s homeworld) is shown from space, with the caption, “Inconceivable Dimensions Not Shown”.

[First published 08/11/2002]

In the little coffee room on my floor at work, a fridge-freezer has just appeared. It’s a standard domestic model, only distinguished by the sign on the door.

“Experiment in progress. Do not open.”

I am aflame with curiosity. What’s the experiment? Why is it taking place in a fridge? What dreadful calamity would befall me if I took a peek? Is it all a Cunning Plan to stop people stealing this guy’s milk? I guess this is why scientists can get into so much trouble. One minute you’re thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I dropped a lit match on this large heap of grey powder?”, and the next moment all that’s left is a pair of smoking boots.

[First published 16/11/2002]

I missed capturing a moment as a digital image today, because I didn’t have my camera with me. So, here it is translated by my brain from the image formed in my eyes.

Our bus approached a deep flood in the road, water arcing up on each side. Kids in grey hoodies ran alongside, exhilarated, trying to get soaked, dolphins surfing the bow wave. Sun shattered the water drops into sparks, igniting their smiles.

I realized afterwards, with sadness, that I’ve reached an age where I would have been angry, not excited if I were in their position. But, I did see the moment of beauty and appreciate it, so perhaps I’m not irredeemably lost.

We did some more work in the garden over the weekend, and I planted some lettuce seeds in one of the beds. When I got home from work today, I went out in the garden to have a look at them, which was slightly ridiculous. I knew perfectly well that nothing would have germinated in 24 hours, but I wanted to look anyway. Growing plants from seeds is such a magical process, even if you know—-in theory—-how it works.

As I stood casting an encouraging, “grow, please” eye over the beds, it started to rain, and I suddenly caught that fleeting, subtle, exhilarating smell of the first rain drops on warm tarmac. I breathed deeply, enchanted and surprised by it, because it’s a smell that I associate with the heat of summer. Then I realised that I was getting unpleasantly soaked while standing mere metres away from a dry sofa and tea making facilities, and went inside. So much for my Earth Goddess moment.

I’ve had one of those weekends where almost everything I’ve tried to do on the computer or with anything electronic has gone wrong. My computer has crashed twice while I was in the process of putting it to sleep, some work I was trying to do on Tracks [hasn’t worked out][1] and I don’t know why, and—-most aggravatingly of all—-my phone keeps crashing.

By lunchtime today, I had reached my tolerance limit, and wanted to deal with something for a few hours that couldn’t crash. Some friends of ours are in the process of moving house, and have been tidying up the garden and dividing plants. They came round this morning to give us some of their spare plants¹. So we spent a very therapeutic few hours in the garden, weeding, planting and trying to rip ivy out². Ivy is amazing stuff; as you pull big lumps of it out, more seems to appear from nowhere, like one of those handkerchief ropes old-fashioned magicians produce from people’s ears.

The garden is looking surprisingly neat now, and delving about in non-crashing soil for a while did me the world of good. We also found a gorgeous bee on one of the new plants. It had beautiful orange ‘fur’ on its thorax and abdomen, and its head and legs looked like black velvet. I’ve just looked it up and found out that it’s a [Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva)][2]. I hope it likes its new home.

¹ A note to non-gardening geeks: think warez-sharing, only legal and more muddy.

²Further note to non-gardening geeks: like trying to get rid of spyware.

[1]: http://dev.rousette.org.uk/changeset/68 “The ‘BROKEN’ title says it all” [2]: http://www.insectpix.net/Andrena_fulva.htm “A lovely photograph of Andrena fulva”

I’ve just entered the dreaded 35-45 age bracket on marketing surveys. Urg.

My return flight to the UK has been delayed by at least 4 hours. Delays are always a pain, but I always find that on the homeward journey I get in to a kind of ‘return mode’, and so I find delays on the return journey particularly painful. I’ve been wandering round Osaka airport for a couple of hours already, randomly spending money to try to pass the time. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I seem to have amassed quite a collection of pens—-I go into a shop, see some fancy, 4-colour gel pens that you can’t find in the UK, and buy some. At this rate, I’ll have a supply to last me about three years. I’d better start writing things in lots of different colours…

Anyway, I’ve just found a wireless hotspot, which conveniently extends to the inside of a coffee shop, and parked myself in a seat by a power outlet with a large cup of coffee. Surfing my [checks] 427 unread feeds should kill an hour or two.

I’ll write much more about it later when I’ve had time to collect my thoughts, but it has been a fantastic trip. Japan is a fascinating country, although we’ve only seen a tiny portion of it. I’ve utterly failed to learn much of the language. I know the words for ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘hello’ and ‘beer’ (you know, the Standard International Survival Set), and the Kanji for ‘big’, ‘little’, ‘open door’, ‘close door’ and ‘button’. This will come in handy when I next get stuck in a Japanese lift and have to choose between something big or something little.

I’m just about to leave for Japan (well, to leave to get nearer to the airport from which I’ll be going to Japan), leaving the house in the capable hands of Mr. Bsag. If I get time and an internet connection, I might update the site a little, but otherwise it will be at least a week (plus recovering from jet lag time) before I post again.

Play nicely in my absence.

Sometimes it’s nice when people in officialdom are brutally honest. I had to go to London yesterday, and caught a Virgin train from New Street to Euston. That service has now been more or less converted to using the fancy tilting ‘Pendolino’ trains, which can get to higher speeds (when they aren’t stuck behind another train, held up by points trouble etc.)

Anyway, the train I got was slightly late arriving, and was also not a Pendolino, but much older rolling stock. As we got underway, the conductor (or steward, or whatever they call themselves now) came on the intercom. He apologised for the late start, then paused and and gave a big sigh.

“There’s no way in the _world_ that we will be able to keep to the Pendolino timetable”

Tell it like it is, man. Tell it like it is.

One thing I’ve noticed since living in Birmingham is the number of names of shops and businesses that feature puns. Of course there’s the usual hairdressers’ names—-like A Cut Above or Curl Up ‘N’ Dye—-but then you expect hairdressers to use puns (for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom).

No, what’s unusual here is the diversity of other businesses employing a finely-honed play on words in their name. Here’s a few of my favourites:

• Petshop Lads—-a pet shop, obviously, and it took me a few seconds to get that one
• Woodfellas—-a firm of carpenters
• Melon Cauli—-a greengrocer

I must also mention another wonderful shop name which isn’t a pun, but is just wonderfully, gloriously weird: Jeff’s Useful Shop. What do they sell? Why, Useful Things of course.

It’s funny how inspiration has a tendency to wax and wane. A week ago, I was really struggling with development of Tracks. I was tired, and even when I had time in the evenings to try and code something, nothing worked out. Then Rails 0.10.0 came out, and I’m flying along again. Things I tried and made an utter hash of before worked first time, and Tracks has come on in leaps and bounds. Either I’m less tired and more inspired, or this release of Rails came with an undisclosed feature of Magic Pixie Dust that wasn’t listed in the changelog.

I had to go into the city to do a bit of shopping yesterday, but my mind was whirring with ideas, and I was eager to get back to my laptop. This was when I discovered that my multi-tasking skills are seriously lacking. I was waiting at the bus stop to come back, and designing a new bit of code in my head when I realised that the bus that had been right in front of me for some time—-the one which was closing its doors and moving off, and driven by a man with an ‘I can’t see you pounding desperately on the closed doors’ expression on his face—-was in fact my bus. In my irritation (and still thinking about securing the signup page), I read the number on the next bus as 104 rather than 114. That one digit makes quite a bit of difference in time to get home, as it turns out. Still, I got to see some new bits of the environs of Birmingham.

I had to get up in the very early hours of this morning to use the bathroom, and was amazed by finding the bathroom full of moonlight. The full moon was a couple of days ago, and the room was dappled by shards of silver light, broken up by the patterned, etched glass in the window. I went into Mr. Bsag’s studio and watched the blue shadows of the trees outside dance on the walls.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the moon, but that just means that it’s a delightful surprise when you come upon it unexpectedly.

When it isn’t being remorselessly dull, British weather is just plain weird. When I left work on the train this evening, it was beautifully bright. The low sun and clear air made even the dowdiest buildings shine like jewels. Gradually, as I got closer to my station, the colour drained away and big, fat flakes of snow started to fall. By the time I got off the train, the sky was low and a soft dove grey and I walked into a swirl of dim whiteness. It was like stepping out of the wardrobe into Narnia.

Do you ever have one of those days when you do a load of work and then find that you have to undo all of it? I do. This afternoon, I was trying to add some kind of authentication to Tracks. I knew what I wanted to do, had a vague idea how to accomplish it, and off I went.

Two hours later, and all I succeeded in doing was making a total pig’s ear of the thing. All I can say is thank goodness for svn revert. Time for a beer and a film.

I don’t know what it is about the weather today, but I’ve been generating massive amounts of static electricity in the office. The combination of dry, cold air, an acrylic fleece and a synthetic carpet must be nearly optimal conditions for generating static, because every time I touch anything in the office (light switch, sockets, poor shocked PowerBook), sparks crackle from my fingers like I’m some kind of human Van der Graaff generator.

It’s got to the point where I’m aversively conditioned towards metal objects. Every time I look at the light switch I feel a little knot of fear. I actually contemplated not switching the lights off when I left the office this evening, because it hurts. I can see that I’m going to have to wear a very long version of one of those grounding straps around my wrist, with the other end attached to the radiator.