2015
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March 31st; Tuesday. Interesting chat with Akos on how to measure market signals. This short excerpt of film nicely opens up David Talbott's fascinating theory of ancient astronomy I came across a couple of years ago. He's a post-Velikovsky catastrophist (in alliance with other theorists), & it's a haunting rewriting of history. Here's the first 15 minutes of his lucid account of why surface chasms on Mars might be evidence of enormous electrical storms.

March 30th; Monday. Finished a book borrowed from Robin 'Tristes Tropiques' by Claude Levi-Strauss. I read it in English (thanks to some unnamed translation serfs, rights are Jonathan Cape's), but for some reason Levi-Strauss decided he wanted even the English text under the French title instead of 'Sad Tropics' or whatever. In any case, sad it is. A loose collection of writings covering visits Levi-Strauss made as an anthropologist to a range of countries in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but mainly Brazil. Some lovely line drawings of pottery decorations or face-painting squiggles when he discusses 3 or 4 tribes he lived with for weeks or months. His reflections on travel and the sadness of trying to find untouched or less-corrupted peoples when the virus of decadence (as he sees it) travels with him are articulate and thoughtful, though also deeply nihilistic in the postwar 1950s sense. He writes in places some beautiful paragraphs about landscapes, stylistic differences between plant life in South America & Europe, the relations between town & country, and much else. He is unsentimental about the tribes he visits after slow exhausting journeys into the interior, and the insects he gets bitten by on the way, although at some level he is still a follower of Rousseau looking for the noble savage (a myth he claims is more due to Diderot). Since this book collects notes on India, Brazil, the USA he pulled together, there are many small gems: paragraphs perfectly capturing the essence of a sunset or the sadness of once-wealthy colonial boom towns gone to seed.
He is acute on the differences of attitude and philosophy in different cultures. Some haunting remarks in closing pages it might be harder to get published now - on Islam - bear quoting. Napoleon was a "Mohammed of the West" but a Mohammed who failed, and he has an interesting page or two where he tries to draw parallels between Islam and European modernity: suggesting both systems expect other cultures to be so very grateful to be tolerated by Islam/modernity that they stop being different from Islam/modernity. He manages flights of fancy that remain convincingly anchored to historical events & evidence: "The Moguls dreamed their art; they literally created dream-palaces" drives forward one section on Mogul tombs in India. Or note the delicately French acidic tone in: "The Islamic sense of fraternity rests on a cultural and religious basis. It has no economic or social character. Since we all have the same god, the good Moslem is a man who is ready to share his hookah with a roadsweeper. The beggar is indeed my brother, but chiefly in the sense that we commune in the same fraternal approval of the inequality between us." In the very next sentence he moves onto another, more mysterious, thought slipped in with offhand charm: "Hence those two, sociologically remarkable, species, the Germanophil Moslem and the Islamized German."
Later on the same page, a calm summarising judgment: "This great religion is based not so much on revealed truth as on an inability to establish links with the outside world. In contrast to the universal kindliness of Buddhism, or the Christian desire for dialogue, Moslem intolerance takes an unconscious form among those who are guilty of it; although they do not always seek to make others share their truth by brutal coercion, they are nevertheless (and this is more serious) incapable of tolerating the existence of others as others." The book is full of odd moments like this when Levi-Strauss moves out from particulars, anecdotes, or sharp observations and finds himself suddenly able to generalise with keen insight. "On the aesthetic level, Islamic puritanism, abandoning the attempt to abolish sensuality, has been content to reduce it to its minor manifestations: scenes, lacework, embroidery and gardens. On the moral level, the same ambiguity is noticeable: there is a display of toleration, accompanied by an obviously compulsive kind of proselytizing." Then comes the almost sympathetically delivered barb: "The truth is that contact with non-Moslems distresses Moslems." Followed smoothly by a mildly patronising afterthought, almost as if Levi-Strauss is unaware of the weight of what he just wrote: "Their provincial way of life survives, but under constant threat from other lifestyles freer and more flexible than their own, and which may affect it through the mere fact of propinquity." A curious book, dotted with lots of interesting short sections like this.
March 29th; Sunday. Mildly strange article listing 10 authors who got hugely rich but write badly. Strange because the critic/reader himself has slightly juvenile English (several spelling mistakes have been taken out since I first found this piece) and even cheerfully admits to not having read any of the books by one author he includes. At the same time, his criticisms seem fair from the few pages (and one book) I've read by some of the writers on this list. This critic is after all not claiming to be a great writer himself, but wants to read convincing stories with well-drawn characters, etc. Does raise the question of whether the way to make money as an author is to work at producing a very specific kind of bad writing.

March 28th; Curious night Friday into Saturday where I half-sleep and half-listen to wind whistling and whining through the windows and doors, moaning like a 1940s haunted-house movie. Oddly enough, I've never linked that sound to fear but find it somehow comforting. I slip in & out of eerily vivid dreams convinced of their own beauty & softness. Deep silence (this is a very quiet street mostly) is occasionally broken by the gentle wooshing of a car moving down the street, past me, and away again, each time making me think of a white chalk line being drawn across the inside of a curved dark-painted attic ceiling, like a miniature night sky made of blackboard. Then I see Boardgame Orsolya at lunchtime for her latest lesson.
The whole Amanda Knox murder-conviction case in Italy seems very confusing. I don't understand it.
1. An article defending her;
2. An article attacking her on the basis of the Italian investigating magistrate's report recently translated into English;
3. News of her final acquittal.
Note how the 2nd article chooses a photo of her looking sly & uncanny, while the 1st & (especially) 3rd articles choose photos of her looking innocent & tormented.
March 27th; Friday. Most striking painting from a review of new Tibetan art.

March 26th; Thursday. If you need to get the mascara on just right, perch in the sink like a big bird.
March 25th; Wednesday. Finish the book borrowed from Julia & Ben, called 'Stuff Matters' by Mark Miodownik. This is an engaging read about materials science - what Penguin does now on a topic that might have been handled by their imprint Pelican 50 or 75 years ago, perhaps something like the more grandly & formally titled 'Metals in the Service of Man'. Now an introduction to engineering has to work harder to seduce more fickle readers, less comfortable with reading books at all, and those readers must be gently charmed. Miodownik does charm, and manages to relate different materials to his own life in a more telly-presenter style. Each chapter starts with the same monochrome photo of him sitting in his roof garden, with a handwritten label pointing to a different material for each chapter. There is a little bit of cheating where one chapter about foam points at his sports shoes, but is almost entirely about the much more exotic and interesting special foam, aerogel, but overall the device works well. There is a chapter on chocolate, another on paper, another on concrete, another on steel, and so on. He conveys the surprising complexity and delicacy of chocolate preparation well, and feels that paper deserves our special love for it while concrete doesn't deserve our distaste for it. He tries hard throughout to be sensitive about the aesthetic & social side of materials, not just their physics and chemistry, but he is clearly lost in understanding the aesthetic ugliness of concrete. Nor can he see that 20th-century architecture's grand effort to positively celebrate concrete failed. The new forms of self-healing, biologically-treated concrete he excitedly describes if anything sound even nastier than the kinds we have already. As he appeals to us to appreciate concrete as a loyal and helpful member of the materials team he doesn't seem to feel aesthetic scale (despite being exquisitely sensitive to the structural scale of materials), to grasp how concrete seems like an extrusion, a sort of squidgy termite-nest excretia whose very smoothness & pastiness suggest vast hives of humanity encased and martialled within repulsively organic membranes that go from gooey to rigid. He has no sense that concrete emphasises people's smallness & subordination to larger units, like the pulp-based cocoon walls of cities of social insects.
He's an adventurous writer though. Because he once defended plastic in a quarrel with someone in a cinema he composes the plastic chapter as a kind of Wild-West saloon-bar screenplay about the rise of celluloid in the 19th-century US. This goes from coating billiard bells up to false teeth and thin strips of film for early cameras - making the movies themselves possible. He even pulls characters from the different scenes of that celluloid-screenplay chapter together into something of a plot. His drawings are excellently simple and clear (while also reassuring his target non-readers with their informal, back-of-envelope character {he even comments on envelope diagrams as a genre}). He shows that materials science is not only about structures we think of on the macroscopic scale as structures. A lovely personal book about one scientist's passion for stuff.

March 24th; Tuesday. Woman in Britain loses vibrator inside herself for 10 years.
March 23rd; Monday. A couple of days ago borrowed a Financial Times arts supplement from Lorinc's father, and 2 articles seemed worth reading. The cover article was an excerpt from a book called 'The Utopia of Rules' by David Graeber, and included a wonderful word 'postalisation', which was a term people in the 19th century used to describe the government taking over an industry and organising it like the national post office. Graeber's case is that private business has a strange relationship with bureaucracy and state regulation, both resenting it yet thriving because of it. In the FT excerpt he compares the Prussian postal service of the 1890s with the internet of the 1990s. This far he has a point I've also looked at, but am unsure whether to spend time to obtain and read his book. He probably doesn't grasp how private businesses that grow rich on the back of state-subsidised infrastructure do so using a loaded version of market pricing and therefore don't really represent what he thinks they do. I'd have to read the whole book to check, though. Another article, shorter, in the same supplement was stranger. It was a fulsome review by Galen Strawson of a book by John Gray about free will, lyrically called 'The Soul of the Marionette'. The title says it all really, since this sounds from Strawson's review like an extended essay poeticising the compatibilist perspective. Compatibilism is the surprisingly popular philosophical position (at least popular among philosophers) that we have no free will (we're puppets or marionettes) but it seems as if we do, so we can carry on assigning moral agency for acts and behaving as if we have free will, and it will all work fine. It's hard to guess if it is Strawson or Gray whose view is being outlined in parts but the oddly confident view that the world might have been made by a committee of demigods but "it couldn't possibly have been made by an omnipotent and benevolent God" chimes in neat contradiction with the similarly strong assertion that we cannot possibly know the answer anyway, due to "how often we are wrong - hopelessly so - about who we are and what motivates us". Simply saying that it seems highly unlikely from where we sit now that the world was made by a benevolent force doesn't appear to be enough. Nor does Strawson/Gray feel it sufficient (Strawson says we are hopelessly wrong about what motivates us, then steps back and calls this an exaggeration, and then reasserts the "astonishing extent of our self-ignorance") to say something milder about our own ignorance, such as that we deceive ourselves a lot and seem easily led. The review moves on to a general pessimism, again asserted with the sweeping-arm-gesture terms ("inescapable truth") that suggests this review was written in a bit of a hurry, perhaps on a bottle of rather good wine. "Gray couples [this] with an inescapable truth: 'the human animal is unnaturally violent by its very nature.'" What it's like to be unnaturally violent is one question, while I suppose the unnatural-by-nature wordplay is deliberate, but the book sounds not worth the reading time. I quite enjoyed a Gray book a couple of years ago, but that one was probably enough. I get what he's about.

March 22nd; Sunday. Lovely dinner avec smooth white wine at Terri & Alvi, who says his payment-app start-up chose elliptical-curve cryptography from the beginning.
March 21st; Saturday. Annika is in town, so we meet for coffee. And the healthy, futuristic bottled water without bottles is already with us.

March 20th; Friday. Twitter learning curve goes on.
March 19th; Thursday. Film-maker Peter has another lush film out. Looks polished & naturally much better than the 50 Shades film on similar bondage theme, though that's hardly a high bar to clear.

March 18th; Wednesday. Occasional days of sunshine Actually Warm If You Stand In It, like yesterday, continue to alternate with days of chilly wind & scudding grey skies. Regarding the sun, a useful summary on why fossil fuels are still good, and the rediscovery of a hidden WW2 Nazi underground lab with radioactive walls. They might have got closer to cracking nuclear chain reactions than we thought.
March 17th; Tuesday. Show Engineering Gabor a charming short video (with folk song) of some daredevil Arabs seemingly showing they can remove & replace wheels on a car while driving it. He confirms this trick is technically possible on a 4x4 vehicle. In the shopping centre last ten days keep passing some sales girls at a stall selling a range of numbered scents without names. The way they do their make-up reminds me of the assistants at the sales pods that used to fill the ground floor of Kendal's department store in Manchester. These perfume and cosmetics desks made out of backlit panels looked a bit futuristic to me as a boy when I went in there with my mother. My first impression of Continental Europe in the 1990s was that even then these white backlit panels were more common in French bookshops and German newsagents than at home in Britain. The strong, slightly sickly smell of combined perfumes around this desk in the shopping mall here takes me back to Kendal Milne's, but also the way 2 of the women who work there do their shmink. The Kendal's perfume sellers used to have an oddly bold style of make-up, involving a lot of backswept blusher & extreme eyeshadow, almost streamlined, that I don't see much in Hungary - except again now at this one numbered-scent stall. Both a bit lamb-dressed-as-mutton-dressed-as-lamb (girls in their mid-20s putting on make-up the way some women in their 40s trying to look younger do) and perhaps vaguely space-stationy, but even more so. The result was the Manchester cosmetics reps of my childhood (and a couple now at the plaza here) didn't & don't look completely human. It was as if they wanted their faces to resemble sports cars.

March 16th; Monday. Stimulating chat with Tamas about #4G telephony, and how you'd design a phone system that abandoned point-to-point structure to dispense with #metadata.
March 15th; Sunday. Some days ago saw on the tram a near-perfect face of sourness: a man in his 50s whose face was so suffused with disappointment and resentment the flesh seemed to have changed into another kind of skin-coloured substance, a sort of waxy avocado-like membrane. His eyes were cold, but something more charged than just cold. In his steady gaze at things near & far I could see how the whole world around him absolutely proved some disgusted worldview, almost to the extent of making that dark theory beautiful.
Meanwhile here's a remarkably lucid account of an appealing-sounding idea to explain why quantum effects only happen at small scales. It's that quantum superposition is an NP-hard problem, and therefore limited to groups of particles (the theorist Arkady Bolotin suggests) somewhat smaller than Avogadro's number.

March 14th; Saturday. Yesterday turned up 10 minutes early to teach Rheumatology Kata and she clicks hurriedly down the corridor towards me waving her arms and apologising profusely. This is because she's cancelled several lessons in recent weeks & is unable to keep this lesson either. She arrives outside her room still saying sorry and then in a sudden moment of inspiration cries "Chocolate!" She lets me into her office briefly to hand me a box of chocolates (patients give her confectionery every week). I laughingly accuse her of just wanting to keep her figure slim and I tap her trim waist with the big flat cardboard box, the sort of behaviour that gets you sued in Britain these days. Since we're in a normal country she carries on unhappily apologising, but also blushes and bridles appreciatively. Russian DJ radio show from last month: Lady Waks #317. Waks has an impressive collection of naff outfits: different one for each show.
March 13th; Friday. Wonderful quadruple negative BBC subheading now changed to a mere triple negative. Originally said a judge blocked an appeal against an appeal against a not-guilty verdict.

March 12th; Thursday. Quick search suggests your humble correspondent is sole source of phrase #paperised #cryptocurrency. Yes, checked -ized.
March 11th; Wednesday. Esoteric chat at cafe with charming Zita.

March 10th; Tuesday. One of those Spectator articles on an obvious, simple wisdom that we're all aware of but rarely admit out loud. Such as: No, losing your job doesn't teach you anything. Why would it?
March 9th; Monday. More interesting research into what people say they want in a lover versus what they show they want.

March 8th; Sunday. A couple of quite good short introductions to random forests in machine learning.
March 7th; Saturday. Still colouring in my polystyrene cockerel/rooster with leftover mini-tins of enamel paint. The life-sciences cluster in Dubai rejoices in the name Dubiotech. Shouldn't laugh.

March 6th; Friday. Finish Buchenwald book-review translation.
March 5th; Thursday. Full moon and the build-up last week cues feeling of lightness, as if a corner's been turned. Instead of the power drill into the wall I get from some obsessive picture-hanging neighbour 4 or 5 days a year, this time it's a nail being hammered. Would it be hard to design walls & floors that muffle sound? No, clearly it wouldn't: you'd use some kind of cheap composite that interfered with the resonant frequencies. Make a proper start on translating the short book review about this.

March 4th; Wednesday. Real spring thaw in the air. Suddenly the streets & the trams & the underground trains are full of beautifully-groomed willowy girls in black leather jackets. They're all staring or glaring into space trying to act as if they haven't spent hours getting their hair nice, taking enormous trouble with the eyeliner, grooming themselves beautifully. They sit on public transport, either glowering at their smartphones or looking fixedly ahead like Buckingham Palace guards, concentrating their steely wills on pretending they aren't bursting for some handsome young blade to come over and start a convo. After meeting Boardgame Orsolya (she rates German forex trader Birger Schafermeier & is delighted when I relate the famous Bruce Lee advice) I get on the number 1 tram, stationary at the terminus. We all wait for the driver. An immaculate blonde whose long high-toggled ponytail bobs about if she moves sits down across from three sleek brunettes and it all goes a bit quiet.
March 3rd; Tuesday. Short review of a friendly Norwegian TV show in which left-wing social-science dons struggle to explain why biology doesn't affect their subjects.

March 2nd; Monday. Interesting that my software project-manager student Akos totally agrees with me on two topics: 1/ Artificial intelligence isn't intelligent at all without autonomy, and no use to us with autonomy; 2/ Self-steering road vehicles are a hugely wasteful misapplication & misallocation that much better suits driverless freight containers on an enlarged rail network. Nice absolute beginner's intro to cell structure: short talk & slide show. Earnest American keeps it clear.
March 1st; Sunday. Another topic from yesterday's lunch was my new interest (only 3 days still) on learning how Twitter really works. The iterating learning loop continues. Meanwhile, intriguing half-hour film from early 70s purports to show a young, rather sweet-looking Uri Geller submitting to telepathy & clairovoyance tests (some semi-rigorous, some less so) with Stanford University researchers including a man by the wondrous name of Targ. Start at 0 mins 49 secs to snip off pompous opening film credits & naff spaceship graphics. Also note vile period office art on walls of room above brown leather couch.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com