the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Monday, November 5, 2012

sweet voices of reason ( part 99 ) ... oliver sacks talks about what hallucinations can tell us about human conciousness

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/oct/30/oliver-sacks-shares-hallucinations

http://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html

and a subsequent book review from will self ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/08/hallucinations-oliver-sacks-review?INTCMP=SRCH

and one from new york

http://nymag.com/news/features/oliver-sacks-2012-11/

Saturday, November 3, 2012

i took dev by surprise for this picture, holding the camera in my lap whilst we talked on a sunny park bench

we'd been talking about kindness and tolerance and he suggested that england was a far kinder place than india

we have pensions and welfare, and he has no fear of being neglected here on account of age and infirmity

then he went on to talk about dogmatism and conformity, saying that in india a family would often expect an unmarried daughter to commit suicide if she was having a child

and then he said that although he no longer believes in heaven and hell, he'd rather go to hell in the company of a "pandit", than go to heaven with ten thousand conformists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandit

the vulcan can no longer fly

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-19952395

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulcan

when i was a teenager, during the difficult times we called the cold war, one might sometimes hear a single vulcan on its way north during a still night

they were armed with atom bombs and were supposedly prepared to cross the baltic if required, on their way to bomb strategic targets in russia, if war had broken out between east and west

the idea was that they would fly in beneath the radar whilst everyone was watching the exchange of inter continental ballistic missiles far above them

the engines crackled and roared like no other plane i knew and sometimes i fancied you might glimpse the flames as the plane climbed

i often used to wonder if tonight was the night ?

but the thought only came to me some decades later that we had been living "in a moral vacuum"

Friday, November 2, 2012

one of the great william claxton's photographs via the "every day i show" blog

http://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/189434.html

schrodinger's old tom kat joins neutrino safari

Thursday, November 1, 2012

visual logic dancing ... i wish i'd seen this when i was eight and struggling to avert the violent rage of my primary teacher because i was last in the class to read and multiply

http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/

Sunday, October 28, 2012

zero de conduite

remembering music ... blimey ... how did a choir of country boys sing this whilst unable to read music properly ?

the answer is ... we probably sang it quite badly whilst thoroughly enjoying our few short moments of pure joy and spiritual ecstasy

norman townsend, the wretch, was a great choirmaster and trotted his unruly tribe of trebles through two choir practises a week in the echoing shadows of malmesbury abbey before driving off to his night shift at the railway works in swindon

i am still grateful to him, despite my subsequent agnosticism and anti-imperialism, for bequeathing this "stately" music and this "triumphalist" language which still reside comfortably as welcome guests in sunlit attics of my memory

his good taste in church music was unerring, so this is the one in B flat and not the one in C

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbaz9T-RW-M