Guerilla Gardening: resistance is fertile

The other day, Le Fox and I made our way down to Manchester's Urbis to check out their new exhibition on Manga. Having seen the exhibition (which to be honest seemed to be aimed mostly at the emo-kids in the Cathedral gardens outise), we wandered upstairs to kill a little more time. To my pleasant surprise they had an exhibition about Urban Gardening. It seems that I was not alone in my desire for the greening of Manchester's city centre - there were a great many tips for what to grow in confined balconies and window boxes. (No doubt the whole exhibition was a passionate response to Sociomath's Urban Orchards post.) What intrigued me most, however, was a small corner of the exhibition devoted to so called Guerilla Gardening. It seems as though people as despserate for green space as me had decided upon a more pro-active strategy than posting rants on a blog. They instead congregate on what is considered by them to be wasteland and plant trees, herbs, vegetables and flowers in an effort to foster a greater sense of well-being and civic pride among local residents. A couple of years ago, the hallowed airtime of the Beeb itself devoted a moment or two to the notion of guerilla gardening and in particular it's London posterboy, Richard Reynolds: a 30 year old, MG-driving, road-bike riding, well spoken former advertising executive. Have a look at a slightly tongue in cheek seven minute documentary below about guerilla gardening in London.

As for the history of Guerilla gardeining, Wikipedia claims that it started with the True Levellers or Diggers as they became known. These were folk who started gardening on common land and living in cooperatives in the second half of the 17th century. I'd argue that perhaps, since these people were growing food on land that would otherwise have been used to graze cattle that they don't really embody the "pleasant mischeif" mindset of the modern Guerilla gardener. It seems that it all really started (as most vaguely radical movements) in New York in the 1970's with the Green Guerilla group transforming a private derelict lot into a garden. One of the parts of the exhibition which really caught my attention was the concept of 'seed-bombing'. The idea is to be able to plant seeds in relatively inacessible places (behind fences/barbed wire etc). Rather than trying to bypass obstacles, such areas are 'bombed' with lumps of mud and compost containing seeds. By the next year, voila: flowers aplenty! Have a look at this video of some seedbombers in Chicago.

I'm told that there are such orgainisations in Manchester. I know nothing about them. Some links:

• Richard Reynolds' blog
• Wikipedia's Guerilla Gardening Page
• Urbis' Urban gardening exhibition

The Brazil Nut Effect

Ever wondered why on packets of cereal it sometimes says something to the effect of "Please turn packet on its side to redistribute nuts evenly"? I'd always thought that this was because any of the larger particles would have sunk to the bottom. It turned out that this was in fact not the case. Yesterday was the day of the MRSC08 conference for postgraduate maths students in Manchster. One of the talks explained the so called "Brazil nut effect", the phenomenon of larger nuts rising to the top of packets of mixed nuts during transport. The following video (taken from here) shows the effect working on a brass cylinder among polystyrene foam beads.

It turns out that although gravity pulls the cylinder down relative to the polystyrene, there are granular flow effects that also push the cylinder up which are far greater than expected. I can't claim to be an expert, but the talk was incredibly interesting. (See Prof. Nico Gray's website for research about granular flows in Manchester).

Here's a slow motion version of the above video to maybe give some intuitio for what's going on. I have to admit, I still don't quite understand from where the upward force comes.

A musical Offering

You're listening to:

1. Chop Suey! - System of a Down
2. Dirge - Death in Vegas
3. Filmstar - Suede
4. One Way - Levellers
5. Dusted - Leftfield
6. Sympathique - Pink Martini
7. Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden
8. Over the hills and far away - Led Zeppelin
9. Perpetuum Mobile - Penguin Café Orchestra
10. Neighbourhood - Space

Mathematical duality

Let me set the scene. A brooding overcast morning in post-industrial Manchester. A Mancunian café underneath an old railway arch. Two large lattés. On my side of the table a physics book for mathematicians, on Le Fox's the Economist. I opened my book on at a chapter on the basics of quantum mechanics. It stated:

"A description of physical reality is made in terms of two set of objects: observables and states. A set of obsevables A, B,... will be denoted by A and states w, x, y,... by W. Each state assigns to each observable its probability distribution on the real line. This pairing (mean value) defines a duality between A and W."

I just love how physicists like to use phrases like physical reality... It reminds me of Arnold's classic book Mathematical Methods in Classical Mechanics, which I seem to remember states in no uncertain terms

Definition: The universe is a four dimensional affine space.

Which was perhaps inspired by Wittgenstein's

1 The world is all that is the case 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. etc.

In any case, I started to wonder about the notion of duality. In mathematics at least, duality seems to be reasonably well defined. The modern idea I suppose started with the idea of a vector space having a dual which might have been somehow inspired by duals of platonic solids through the reflexive property of taking duals (at least for finite dimensional spaces). But then there's also Poincaré duality for compact oriented manifolds which says that the kth and (n-k)th Betti numbers are equal (for coefficients in Z2, orientability isn't required).

The picture of foolhardiness, I then tried to give Le Fox some idea of what Poincaré duality might mean through a couple of badly explained examples messily scribbled on a napkin - decomposing a sphere into a 0-cell (point) and a 2-cell (plane) and a torus into a 0-cell, two 1-cells and a 2-cell. As her eyes slowly glazed over, I tried to think of a more concrete way of thinking of duality. Suppose that I have a bag containing ten balls. I then take four balls out of the bag. If I know I have four balls in my hand then I know that there are six balls in the bag. Knowledge of how many balls are outside the bag is therefore somehow equivalent to knowledge of how many balls are in the bag as long as we know the total number of balls. It seemed to me that these two statements were therefore in some sense dual to each other. In the back of my mind I had Poincaré duality which could be rephrased along the lines of "Knowledge of k-cells is equivalent to knowledge of (n-k)-cells as long as the space is compact and oriented...". Here it seems that knowing that there are ten balls in total and knowing that the manifold is compact play the same role, setting up the bridge between the two dual statements in each case. For finite dimensional vector spaces, the notion of the dual space can be formulated in a similar way. Given a set with the structure of a finite dimensional vector space, the space of linear functionals can be formed. This is non-canonically isomorphic to the original space, just by mapping a given basis to its dual basis. On the other hand, given the dual space, I can construct the original space again by applying the dualising process. It's one of those well known facts that a finite dimensional vector space is canonically isomorphic to its double dual (reflexivity). On one level, the analogy with the balls fits quite nicely into the first half of this: knowledge of the dual is "the same as" knowledge of the space. On another, it doesn't really work so well - how do I get a notion of 'canonical isomorphism' in this setup? I still haven't thought of an example... any ideas?

The Ontology of Blogging

I stumbled upon this great Rocketboom video of Dave Weinberg giving a talk on mass media and blogging. Enjoy!

Artificial Ball lightning

A few years ago, a friend of mine and I decided to try and create artificial ball lightning in a microwave. All you need is a grape, a microwave and a knife.

WARNING: Attempting this could impair your health and that of your microwave! Approach with EXTREME CAUTION!

1. Cut the grape in half so that there is only small piece of skin attaching the two halves together and they look like a pair of bongo drums.
2. Take the tray out of your microwave.
3. Put the grape in your microwave with the wet faces up.
4. Start the microwave and have your finger on the stop button.

You should see a bright ball and maybe some licks of flame appearing within a second or two. I remember scortching the top of the microwave the last time I tried this so be sure to have a finger on the stop button. I'm not totally sure the physics behind the whole thing. The explanation my friend had was that the microwave sets up a standing wave inside the microwave which has around the right wavelength to create a big potential difference between the two grape surfaces. Eventually, as some of the water in the grapes boils, steam is ejected. In the presence of such a large potential difference, this ionises and forms a plasma for a split second. I'm still not totally convinced that this is actually what's going on, but I have no better explanation.

It turns out that it works even better when you have a flame in your microwave. The gas in the flame ionizes very easily and it's even possible to contain the plasma in a vessel of some sort for some time. Here's a video of someone trying it with a match:

Here's what I think happens:

The microwave keeps giving electrons in the hot gas enough energy to escape their nuclei. When these electrons return, they give off a load of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, some of which is the light you see. Presumably different burning materials give different parts of the characteristic spectrum (and so different colours...)

Le Fox, I would guess that if your chimney is struck by lightning when you have a fire in the fireplace, much the same things happens...

I could well be wrong...

See here for a good explanation of a similar grape experiment (with diagrams!).

Foudre en boule

My Grandmother once told me that as a child, when she used to stay in the countryside with her uncle and there was lightning, it was quite frequent that the thunder would come through the fire hole. The thunder ball would then go around the room and find the nearest exit. My Grandmother's advice: "Stay very still and it won't hit you". Of course I could never be sure she was telling the truth until I saw Tintin:

Another advice my Grandmother gave me about thunderstorms is: "In case you're walking outside and there is lightning, wear nothing but a silk scarf and you'll be safe." If you decide to try it, send me a picture ;-)

Farm life

One of my favorite times on the farm when I was little was when the power would go out. It was such an adventure! We had a wood burning stove in our house, so we could still see, stay warm, and cook. It was such a novelty to put the pan on top of the stove just like they did in the olden days. We would usually cook something out of a can as it was easy. I remember feeling very industrious and pleased to live on a farm, because that meant that we could survive anything! We had all the tools and supplies we needed. Living in the city now is the complete opposite, just like Philonous said, you look around and realize how entirely vulnerable you are. Imagine just trying to get out of the building and having to rush down 7 flights of stairs- what if the door wouldn't open because the buzzer was off? Our urban societies are much more fragile than we think.

Power Cut

Earlier this evening, the electricity supply for some reason cut out. I was at the time surfing the web on a laptop so the instant the power went off, the network connection disappeared. Having fumbled around the house for matches for a while, I finally managed to light a candle which for once wasn't being used for ambience. It suddenly occurred to me that without electricity it would be essentially impossible to survive in my flat. Being relatively new, my home depends exclusively on electricity for energy. From heating to cooking, everything in the house is plugged into the wall in some way. I had been planning to heat up some leftovers in the microwave. But now I couldn't use a microwave. Or a toaster. Or the oven. In fact, I couldn't eat any raw food at all - it was lucky that there were some leftovers, however cold. Sitting on the couch, swaddled in a duvet against the dwindling warmth, it occurred to me that by the next morning any remaining hot water in the tank would have cooled and anything in the freezer would have started to defrost. My only consolation was in reading a book by the flickering light of a couple of candles. No wonder Russia weilded so much power over the Ukraine when it came to energy supplies. There has been so much publicity over the rising cost of energy in general, but we at least still have access to energy, however expensive it may be. And then the lights came on again.

Technology- amazing.

Just saw an article in the Guardian that made me marvel at technology (how old do I sound?) There is an idea to put 'under floor heating' beneath road surfaces, but heating that is powered by solar energy, collecting it during the hot summer to melt ice in the winter and improve driving conditions. Wow. Now that's a good idea, and I hope it works. Read more here

I love you Google...

I'm glad I've got a google account (thanks to this blog) because now I've set up my iGoogle page, which is clever on their part, so now each day I'm greeted by new art, quotes, and words to ponder on. I never thought it would be so easy to enrich my life- it really seems like cheating. But here is a quote to start:

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

-John Le Carre

Save the animals - buy fur.

I must admit, the thought of buying fur makes me feel slightly queasy. I have no explanation for this other than an emotional response triggered by many years of exposure to the anti-fur movement's advertising. On the face of it, farmed fur really is a pretty horrible thought. Animals raised in captivity in terrible conditions just so that folk can be dressed from head to toe like someone from Dr Zhivago. Now that synthetic materials are avalailable which perhaps offer better protection against the elements than mother nature, it really does seem rather a cruel and distasteful fashion accessory. I was amazed therefore to read of fur as being marketed by various organisations as an 'eco-friendly' product. According to Canada's Fur Council. Their website in the optimistically titled 'Fur is Green' section argue that fur is a renewable resource and is fully biodegradable (as opposed to fake fur which is make from petroleum byproducts). Indeed they seem to imply that they are somehow in tune with (and I quote) 'the circle of life', calling it 'the ultimate eco-clothing'. I can see hundreds of hippies wandering round in bear-skin Birkenstocks right now... A slightly more serious claim to environmental responsibility in relation to fur is New Zealand's possum fur industry. Though quite cute, possums are considered eco-system destroying pests across New Zealand since their numbers have grown beyond all expectations. The trapping and poisoning of possums is in fact encouraged by the government in an attempt to preserve natural habitats from dessimation by these marsupials which were artificially introduced around 150 years ago. Amazingly, conservation organisations such as the WWF have endorsed the possum fur industry as essential for maintaining biodiversity.

Writer's block and favourite poem

I thought it would be nice to post my favourite poem. It was composed by the German dada artist Kurt Schwitters. It is a love poem that doesn't make sense (a translation is posted after the original):

o du, geliebte meiner siebenundzwanzig sinne, ich liebe dir! - du deiner dich dir, ich dir, du mir. - wir? das gehört (beiläufig) nicht hierher. wer bist du, ungezähltes frauenzimmer? du bist - bist du? - die leute sagen, du wärest - laß sie sagen, sie wissen nicht, wie der kirchturm steht. du trägst den hut auf deinen füßen und wanderst auf die hände, auf den händen wanderst du. hallo, deine roten kleider, in weiße falten zersägt. rot liebe ich anna blume, rot liebe ich dir! - du deiner dich dir, ich dir, du mir. - wir? das gehördt (beiläufig) in die kalte glut. rote blume, rote anna blume, wie sagen die leute? preisfrage: 1. anna blume hat ein vogel. 2. anna blume ist rot. 3. welche farbe hat der vogel? blau ist die farbe deines gelben haares. rot ist das girren deines grünen vogels. du schlichtes mädchen im alltagskleid, du liebes grünes tier, ich liebe dir! - du deiner dich dir, ich dir, du mir - wir? das gehört (beiläufig) in die glutenkiste. anna blume! anna, a-n-n-a, ich träufle deinen namen. dein name tropft wie weiches rindertalg. weißt du es, anna, weißt du es schon? man kann dich auch von hinten lesen, und du, du herrlichste von allen, du bist von hinten wie von vorne: "a-n-n-a." rindertalg träufelt streicheln über meinen rücken. anna blume, du tropfes tier, ich liebe dir! (Kurt Schwitters, An Anna Blume)

This poem has also inspired the German hip-hop band Freundeskreis:

Translation:

You, oh you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us? This (incidentally) does not belong here. Who are you, countless woman? You are - are you? - People say you are - let them say it, they don't know where the steeple is. You wear a hat on your feet and stand on your hands, on your hands you walk. Hello, your red clothes, sawed into white pleats. Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us? That (incidentally) belongs in the cold embers. Red flower, red Anna Blume, what are people saying? Prize question: 1. Anna Blume has a bird. 2.Anna Blume is red. 3.What color is the bird? Blue is the color of your yellow hair. Red is the cooing of your green bird. You plain girl in an everyday dress, you dear green animal, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me - us? That (incidentally) belongs in the ember box. Anna Blume! Anna, a-n-n-a, I am dripping your name. Your name drips like soft suet. Do you know, Anna, do you know yet? You can also be read from back to front, and you, you most marvelous creature of them all, you are from the back as you are from the front: »a-n-n-a.« Suet drips caress my back. Anna Blume, you droppy animal, I love ya!

I found this translation on http://www.jbeilharz.de/expr/expr_poems.html. Unfortunately the complex German grammar which Kurt Schwitters plays with in this poem cannot be translated into English.

Are you people or sheeple?!

Yesterday, I watched the "What would Jesus Buy?", a documentary following the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on its tour around the USA. The centre of the film is the charismatic Reverend Billy who urges devotees to stop shopping and turn around the consumer culture which they see as a marketing-driven addiction. He and his gospel choir preach and sing their message to various people around the USA in a protest against gentrification and large corporations. I found the film entertaining enough, but was never totally sure whether there was a religious aspect to Rev. Billy or whether this was all a humorous package for a serious message. Check out the trailer:

Also check out the Church of Stop Shopping's website.

100 hat solution

I suddenly realised that I haven't yet posted the solution to the hundred hat problem. In slightly mathematical language, here's the solution. Replace black by 0 and white by 1. Let the ith prisoner have hat colour c(i). The first person shouts out the value of

The next person does the calculation

and shouts his answer out. In general, since the kth prisoner knows c(2), . . . , c(k-1), (having heard them shouted), c(k+1), . . . , c(100) (being able to see them) and

courtesy of the first prisoner's shout, he can calculate c(k) = (c(k) mod 2). Of course, here we've set the number of prisoners to 100, but this isn't necessary.

For non-mathematically literate folk:

The idea really isn't complicated at all - if it seems so, then I've explained it badly. First of all, knowing if a hat is white or not is equivalent to knowing its colour since there are only two. The first person to go counts up the number of white hats he can see in front of him. If it's odd, he shouts 'white' and if it's even, he shouts 'black'. Prisoner number 2 then counts the number of white hats in front of him. He then figures out if it's odd or even. We know that

• (odd number) - (odd number) = even number
• (odd number) - (even number) = odd number
• (even number) - (odd number) = odd number
• (even number) - (even number) = even number

Prisoner 2 can use prisoner 1's shout as the first number and his own tally as the second. This spits out something on the right hand side. If he gets 'even' he shouts black, if he gets 'odd' he shouts white. Prisoner 3 has heard prisoner 1 and 2 and also knows whether the number of hats in front is even or odd. He then does a similar calculation and shouts out the right answer...and so on.

Perhaps this isn't perfectly explained. Never mind.

Adbusters adbusted?

Tonight I was wandering in Manchester city centre as one does when suddenly, a projection appeared on the side of the City Tower in Piccadilly Gardens. Since I'm not in the habit of carrying a camera/tripod with me on my strolls, I had only my mobile phone to take a quick snap. It's slightly hard to see, but there's a projection of a few pawprints and the text "Felix for Mayor".

On returning home, I went online to see if anyone else had noticed what was going on. Searching for the slogan "Felix for Mayor" brought up someone's flickr page with a picture of some advert in what I think is the London edition of Metro. It turns out that this is a publicity stunt by Purina, the multinational corporation responsible for the well known pet food brands Go-Cat, Bakers Complete, Felix as well as my favourite Bonio, no doubt after the eponymous character in Romeo and Juliet's raunchier sequel.

The spontaneity and slightly cobbled together advert reminded me a little bit of so called culture jamming. For those who aren't in the know (like myself until Le Fox kindly filled me in), culture jamming is the process of subverting corporate brands to expose various perceived social injustices. Most culture jammers don't seek to make any sort of profit and so can be seen as somewhere between part time artists and activists, promoting various often radical social perspectives through guerrilla-art. They could perhaps be thought of as media hackers who seek to bring what they think of as balance to capitalism's constant stream of advertising.

Tonight's event was part of a wider program of organised publicity stunts presumably to give the Felix brand a bit of a boost. While adbusting relies on twisting carefully planned and widely established corporate brand images to deliver high impact messages, it would seem that the the quirkiness and spontaneity characterising guerrilla art has been hijacked by a corporation. The social and political messages of culture jamming have been changed into an meaningless and inane phrase supplementing adverts in traditional media.

Seeing this, it occurred to me: has Purina managed to culture jam the notion of culture jamming itself? It would seem that it has.

Some links:

• New York Times "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" (December 23, 1990)
• Mark Dery's 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs"
• Billboard Liberation Front
• Adbusters
• Purina's UK site
• Felix's "Mischief on Tour" calendar of planned spontaneity

Urban Orchards

After living in the Manchester's city centre for a couple of months you start to notice that something is amiss. In the back of your mind, there is something that itches away relentlessly. No matter how hard you try, you just can't put your finger on it...until... There aren't any parks! Ok. That's not strictly true. According to MEN, there are various green spaces to which you can slink away to "eat your lunch or take a break from a hard day's shopping", but anyone who lives in the centre knows that these rarely measure more than 3ft across and are normally surrounded by busy roads. Should anyone find a viable park in the city centre, please do let me know. Various cities have tried to combat the slow decline into a concrete jungle, perhaps most notably Singapore with its garden city drive since the 60s. LA has tried similar approach with its Million Trees initiative which aims to clear some of the pollution as well as providing some shade for residents. One great programme that has caught my attention recently is the Fruit Tree Tour through California. The poor quality of the diets of children worldwide has been a prominent source of controversy recently with government reports and a media frenzy attributing behavioural problems to deficiencies in diversity of food consumed. Apparently, only 11% of Californian children are getting their recommended daily allowance of fresh fruit and vegetables. The Fruit Tree Tour aims to tackle both this statistic and lack of greenery in cities by planting fruit trees. These urban orchards will provide fruit for local people as well as focussing communities on self sufficiency, ecology and various other noble (trendy?) causes. I think its an absolutely brilliant idea, though I'm not sure I'm totally in tune with the 'Mother Earth' songs they seem to be teaching all of the kids... Check out their promotional video:

100 Lamp solution, 100 Hat problem.

Yesterday, I posted a little puzzle about a hundred blind lamp lighters. Don't read on if you'd like to give this a go for yourself. Here's the solution: The squared number lamps will be on at the end, i.e. 1,4,9,16,25,36,49...etc. We need to find the number of lamps which are on at the end. So let's try and figure out in what circumstances a given lamp will be on. As an example, think about whether the 6th lamp will be on. It's turned on by the 1st guy, off by the 2nd, on by the 3rd, and then off by the 6th. Notice that we've just listed all of the numbers that divide 6, i.e. 1,2,3,6. In general, for a lamp to be off, the button should have been pressed an even number of times; for it to be on, the button should have been pressed an odd number of times. For the kth lamp, the number of times it is pressed is the number of numbers dividing k. Now let's look at another example. The 12th lamp will be pressed by guys number 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12. We can split these divisors into pairs: (1,12), (2,6), (3,4) where multiplying the numbers together gives 12. Since we can pair these things up, there is an even number of divisors. Suppose now for example, that we take the number 36. Here we have divisors 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36. In this case, we have the pairs (1,36), (2,18), (3,12), (4,9), and 6 is paired with itself. Here we have an odd number of divisors, the reason being that one number (6) is paired with itself. So a general number k has an odd number of divisors if (and only if) one divisor is paired with itself, that is, there is some number which multiplied by itself gives k. In less obtruse words, k is a square number. And there's the proof. (Note that actually, the number of lamps doesn't matter as long as it's the same as the number of lamp lighters.) Last night after the Pure Postgraduate seminar, a post-pub discussion brought up the following hundred hat problem: Here's another problem, this time with a hundred hats. Suppose that there is a strange kingdom where logical prowess is prized above all other things. 100 prisoners languish in prison all sentenced to death. Since the king is a nice sort of fellow, he decides that he will set the following challenge: The prisoners are all lined up facing along the line so that a given prisoner can see all the people infront of him, but not himself or the people behind him. A hat is put on each prisoner, either white or black. The prisoner at the back (who can see everyone else's hat but not his own) then shouts out the colour he thinks his hat is. If he gets the answer right, he is allowed to live. If he gets the answer wrong, he dies. The same process is repeated by the prisoner second from the back and so on. The prisoners are allowed to confer before the whole process and so can decide on a strategy. How many prisoners can defintitely be saved by an appropriate strategy?

(Hint: At least half can be saved. The guy at the back can't be helped: he may as well shout randomly. He could however, help the guy in front of him. If they decide beforehand that the first guy will shout the colour of the hat in front of him, then at least he can save the second guy who will then know his own hat colour. Continuing the process, we can save for certain at least every other man. In fact, they can do a lot better...)

Too many Lamp Lighters

Yesterday, as on every Thursday, Manchester University's geometers, mathematical physicists and topologists gather for the Geometry Seminar. The talk itself was a really great proof of the Mischenko-Fomenko conjecture about the existence maximal complete commutative subalgebras of finite dimensional Lie algebras. Alexei Bolsinov gave a geometric proof of one of the subcases of the proof using some quite neat parts of the theory.

As per usual, we decamped to the pub afterward to discuss anything and everything. Soon enough, one of my supervisors started posing interesting little mathematical problems. Here is one which "of course, the school children know how to solve" which occupied a some minutes in an otherwise boring sleepless night.

Suppose there are a hundred push-button lamps and a hundred blind lamplighters. All lamps are initially off. The first lamplighter passes along the row and pushes each button in turn thereby turning every lamp on. The second lamplighter passes along the row afterward and pushes every other button regardless of whether the lamp is on or off. (So now all the even numbered lamps are off.) The third lamplighter passes along the row and pushes every third button, the fourth pushes every fourth button and so on. After all of the hundred lamplighters have passed by, which of the lamps remain lit?

For the answer and an explanation, see tomorrow.

Wings of Desire

On Sunday, I went with a few other folk to see Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), Wim Wenders' 1987 moody film which inspired the apparently insipid Hollywood remake - City of Angels. The basic story is about a couple of angels who live in Berlin in the late eighties. They seem to exist to quietly observe the human condition from afar and perhaps to console. Having observed the human race for a while, one decides to descend, no doubt inspired by his trapeze-artist love interest whose loneliness fuelled predilection for Nick Cave sees them united at a gig. I have to say, I don't know if I really got it in any deep sense of the word. There were certain moments where the characters seem to disconnect from the real world to spout some sort of existential poetic soliloquy which I don't think had the desired effect on me. They smacked of Alexander Nevsky's looking into the corner of the room before delivering some pro-Russian Stalinist agenda in Eisenstein's film of the same name. But then, I really liked that film. At least half of the film is shot in black and white.

If nothing else, it's worth watching just for the amazing framing of the shots and the graniness of the film. There's a great moment where the camera moves slowly backward from a view out of a window to a mother and son in a room; at each moment the shot could have been taken as a perfectly composed photograph.

All in all - I really liked it but was left wondering if there was any more to it than I'd taken away. Here are the first five minutes to give you some idea of the atmosphere - though a tiny youtube window hardly does it justice.

Picture of the Moment III

Woolf vs Schopenhauer.

I like this math

I'd like some of that cake

Ms Foxy Fox, can you please make me one of those cakes? I'm not handy enough to do it myself (and you look cute in an apron). On another note, a friend who works at a park in California sent me some advice on how to not be attacked by a mountain lion (a hazard in her work). Could prove useful one day- to quote Natalie (who I first met in Italy, but we're both from Ohio!) In the case that you should run into a mountain lion back there in Ohio- you are supposed to do three things. You shouldn't run (b/c then you are acting like prey). You should hold your coat up and open above your head so that you look bigger than you really are. And you should talk to it in a very firm and demanding way- "HEY- YOU- GET AWAY FROM HERE OR I'M GOING TO EAT YOU UP." So there we are. Cue 'the more you know' rainbow and music. On that note, 'the more you know' is a phrase I use often, and is lost on most of my non-American friends. It is a staple of American life, being a the tagline for 'public service announcements' which appear on tv, to teach people about all sort of things (health, environment, education, etc). It's been around for decades. I think this spoof from 'Scrubs' will give you the idea.

Avicenna's Argument

Avicenna was apparently one of the most important polymaths in the so called "Golden Age of Islam". He lived in Persia from 980 to 1037 and was renowned in many fields of knowledge, even to the extent that one of his textbooks on medicine was still used as the core text in Montpellier and Louvain in the mid 17th century. One of the great ideas of Avicenna was his argument for the existence of God which, to me at least, smacks very much of mathematical proof (and is therefore understandably quite appealing to one such as myself...). So, what's it all about? Avicenna uses heavily the concept of contingency. A state of affairs is contingent if it could have been otherwise. So for instance, my mother at some point had a child: me. It was by no means a logical necessity that she do this - I might not have been born. Therefore my existence is contingent upon the fact my parents decided to have a child. Similarly their existence is contingent upon their parents having had children, and so on... Avicenna's argument tries to construct a necessary object and then calls that God. Ok. So the world contains a great many contingent things (like me for instance). The existence of each one of these things must therefore have been caused by something else which is itself contingent and so on and so forth... Such and such a table was made by a carpenter whose existence was caused by his father and mother etc. So we get a big long causal chain of events which are all contingent. The usual (cosmological) argument for the existence of God says at this point that this chain must stop somewhere so we get an 'uncaused causer', which is taken to be God. Avicenna comes up with a slightly subtler approach. He basically defines 'the world' as the set of all contingent things and all the causes between them. He then states a principle of composition which, applied here, says that the set of all contingent things is also contingent. Since the world is therefore contingent, it must be caused by some object X outside the world. Suppose X is contingent. Then it must be part of the world, which is impossible. Therefore X was in fact not contingent, i.e. necessary. He defines this X to be God. Of course, as with any argument for the existence of God, there are quite a few problems with this:

1. What justification do we have that anything is contingent in the first place?
2. How do we know that this X is the God of (in Avicenna's case) Islam as opposed to just some abstract object? That is, how do we arrive at any of the traditional attributes of God such as omnipotence etc.?
3. What's all this principle of composition about? Admittedly, if I have a car, all of whose components are blue, then my car will be blue. But if I have a car, all of whose components are well made, then it's certainly not true that the car itself must be well made.

Despite all of these, I think it's a pretty cool argument and echos Russell's paradox which came much later. Here's a nice Rube Goldberg example of a set of contingent events:

Flame from lamp (A) catches on curtain (B) and fire department sends stream of water (C) through window. Dwarf (D) thinks it is raining and reaches for umbrella (E), pulling string (F) and lifting end of platform (G). Iron ball (H) falls and pulls string (I), causing hammer (J) to hit plate of glass (K). Crash of glass wakes up pup (L) and mother dog (M) rocks him to sleep in cradle (N), causing attached wooden hand (O) to move up and down along your back.

Little cake, bombastic effect

Have you ever wondered how to make those small hot chocolate cakes which you get in restaurants? This a French dessert recipe for all chocolate lovers... feeds 3-4 people Preparation time: 10 minutes Baking time: 10 minutes You need: - 4 ramekins - 100 grams + 8 squares of dark dessert chocolate - 3 eggs - 80 grams of sugar - 50 grams of butter + a little extra - 1 table spoon of flour + a little extra Then work your magic... 1. Pre-heat the oven at 260°C 2. Melt the chocolate and the butter 3. In a big bowl, mix the eggs, the sugar and the flour 4. Pour the warm melted chocolate and butter in the mix and stir 5. Butter and flour your ramekins 6. Pour 1/3 of the mixture in each of them 7. Place 2 squares of dark chocolate in each and cover with the rest of the mixture 8. Put the ramekins in the oven for 10 minutes Your little chocolate cakes will blow in a soufflé-kinda-way, the chocolate squares will have melted, and you will have the great pleasure to calm your chocolate craving. Enjoy!!!

Quotes

Spence from Ashburne emails me very frequently and always ends with different quotes, that I find really amusing a) because he has the time to find them and 2) the iniaitive to find them- both things I lack. Therefore, I am now going to make a considerable effort to 1) make more time for the small things in life and b) be more creative (like I used to be!) So here goes: Real, constructive mental power lies in the creative thought that shapes your destiny, and your hour-by-hour mental conduct produces power for change in your life. Develop a train of thought on which to ride. The nobility of your life as well as your happiness depends upon the direction in which that train of thought is going. Laurence J. Peter US educator & writer (1919 - 1988) I like this because I've often made bad jokes/metaphors about trains (like, I lost my train of thought, it jumped the track). I'm going to start working on my thought train, now! PS I totally cheated to find my quote, I just used Google and http://www.quotationspage.com

Covers

Johnny Cash famously covered Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails: it seems that a good song is good no matter what your personal take. Here, for your viewing pleasure are assembled a couple of my favourites. They are:

1. The Unforgiven - Iron Horse/Metallica
2. Baby one more time - Travis/Britney Spears
3. Holiday - Hayseed Dixie/Green Day
4. Love will tear us apart - Susanna and the Magical Orchestra/Joy Division
5. Satisfaction - Devo/The Rolling Stones
6. Ain't no Sunshine - Woven Hand/Bill Withers

Thoughts from the Lodger

I'm not a math-lete by any stretch of the word. I exist in the grey nether region of the social sciences, the touchy feely artists, and dirty archaeologists (the dirt comes from digging, not from being crazy or perverted, although they do drink a lot, and that can lead to all sorts of behavior). So here's my first post.

At Culture24, homes of all things museums related in the UK, an article announced the shortlist for some award from the Guardian for the best family friendly museums in the UK. Needless to say, my museum, lets just call it The Hall (it's a medieval Hall in case you don't know) was not on the shortlist (for this award, anyways!) One quote from the article really amused me:

“To be family friendly no longer means having to have plastic Viking helmets for kids to dress up in or rows of Egyptian mummies. We’ve made too many presumptions in the past about what kids like. They can appreciate fine art as well as finger painting.”

It made me laugh because I know exactly what museum they're talking about with the Viking Helmets (doesn't everyone?) And I am pretty intimately aquainted with it now, short of working there, because I pal around with its founder, who is a trustee at The Hall. Nice. The aforementioned museum does get a lot of flak for those helmets and the like, but damn is it popular! It's now kind of like the Starbucks-McD's-Walmart of museums, I think. There's a whole field of study on this type of heritage consumerism (also see Williamsburg). I find it very interesting. But its what museums have to do now to survive- we're in competition with every other form of entertainment out there for families/kids.

Picture of the Moment II

Is it just me or does Sundblom Santa look a little bit like Marx? Maybe he had a cutting sense of irony...

Critical Mass 2: I Bike MCR

It was a dark and stormy night...and yet there was still a considerable turnout for Manchester's Critical Mass. Yesterday marked the start of the I Bike MCR festival which for the next month celebrates cycling in and around Manchester. Critical mass has a long standing policy of trying to keep the whole ride as one throughout. Of course, this becomes more than slightly problematic at traffic lights where the right might be severed by a light changing to red. Critical mass therefore has a policy of 'corking' roads. This basically means that if the light changes as the ride passes, some cyclists will block relevant traffic until the remainder of the ride has passed. As far as I know, this is illegal. I must admit to feeling slightly uneasy at the prospect of corking roads - especially since the ride is supposed to simply by a collection of people cycling in the same direction with no particular agenda or affiliation. In any case, Critical Mass is certainly worthwhile, if only to promote cycling in cities. Over the next month, a variety of different activities will take place as part of the I Bike MCR festival. Looking over the programme, I noticed that there is to be an Alleycat in Manchester. In fact this is not the first Alleycat to take place in Manchester, just the first of which I've been aware. Alleycats are bicycle messenger races. Various checkpoints are chosen through a city, the object being to be the first to arrive at the final checkpoint. There is no set route and so winning the race depends as much upon shortcuts as brute speed. Alleycats are of course quite dangerous. In order to win, participants have little choice but to break traffic rules and ignore lights. As such, these races are not without their casualties. This is Lucas Brunelle's video of a (ridiculously fast) London alleycat:

Maybe one day I'll pluck up the courage to join these folks... In the mean time, here's a video from the I Bike MCR website showing some of last year's less crazy events:

Have a look at the I Bike MCR website to find out about the when and wheres of the events this year.

Fashion Obsession

Fashion photographer Scott Schuman, alias "The Sartorialist", is the man responsible for my fashion obsession. His blog has become one of my top priority lunch break activities: eating, checking emails, looking at new updates on The Sartorialist...

Unlike his counterparts who photograph top models in studios, the Sart goes out in New York, Paris and Milan to see what "real" people "really" wear. The subject of his images may be the elites of the fashion industry, eccentric artists or simply image-conscious people.

Verdict: worth checking out. Although it can make you strangely addictive and can make you wonder where these men and women find the time and money to spend on their image.

(Pictures taken from Wikipedia and The Sartorialist)

Dot Matrices

Remember those old screetchy printers and the paper with the holes in the edges? Well they seem to be making something of a comeback, albeit in various guises. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a great project involving dot matrix printers used as synthesisers. Moving the head at different speeds produces different frequencies, so the idea is to computer control a printer to play electronic sounding music. Here's a video with a push-button controller

Thank goodness someone finally harnessed the onerous noise-making capacity of dot matrix printers for good.

Dot matrix printers have also found their way into the world of protest and art in various new forms. In 2004 at the time of the Republican National Convention in New York, a student came up with a mobile dot matrix street writer mounted on a bicycle. The idea was to have people from all over the world write thought proviking slogans on the website and have them instantly written on the pavement somewhere in New York. This "Bike against Bush" was kitted out with a laptop, phone and some sort of GPS device as well as the custom chalk sprayers that made up the printer.

I remember seeing this at the time and decided to check up on the project to see what had happened since. I found the following video about the triumph of American free speech. It turned out that the Feds (or NYPD or someone...well let's just say the man) had been tracking any signs of dissident activity from militant anarchists to church groups and anti-war protesters for a long time before with the intention of apprehending them before they had a chance to protest. Ah, it's the world's favourite democracy in all its characteristic glory.

The latest incarnation of dot matrix printers I've seen recently is Bit.fall by German artist Julius Popp. It's a dot matrix printer for rain! The principle is the same as Bikes against Bush with a whole load of water jets with electronically controlled taps connected to a computer. Perhaps the artist could explain it better himself:

I suppose it's all part of some sort of 80s revival...

Here are some links:

• Dot Matrix Music
• Bikes against Bush
• Bit.fall

Sleeping with sleepy kittens

How many times have you woken up at night, unable to fall back asleep, plagued by anxiety? “Wouldn’t it be nice”, you thought to yourself “if I could watch sleepy kittens”.

Taxing Water

I've never quite understood the point of bottled water. I'm told that it tastes an awful lot nicer but I suspect my sense of taste isn't quite up to telling the difference. In Manchester and London in particular, various urban legends about the provenance of tap water circulate constantly. Not so in San Fransisco whose mayor in a Newsweek interview boasted:

"Our water in San Francisco comes from the Hetch Hetchy [reservoir] and is some of the most pristine water on the planet."

As such he as made it public policy for no ("single portions of") bottled water to be bought for government offices/functions etc. After all, surely water provided by the state government for the average person ought to be good enough for the government itself. How much of an impact this really makes remains to be seen - it seems something of a publicity stunt rather than anything substantial. Seattle government has followed suit in order to regain the faith of it's populus after a recent Associated Press study in the US revealed that various pharmaceuticals were present in tap water. Again, how much impact this really makes in any way remains to be seen. Chicago has (in my opinion) a more sensible policy of taxing bottled water. The Mayor insists that the tax is not on the water but on the bottles. After all, the city pays for the disposal of discarded bottles, for policies to cut emmisions (which are produced in the manufacturing process) and a whole raft of other costs associated with the manufacture and distribution of bottled water: why shouldn't people have to pay for the slightly dubious pleasure of drinking water which has in the US a forty percent chance of being tapwater? Rock on Chicago.

Picture of the Moment

Not many people realise that Kitchener was inspired by Wittgenstein.

Early morning ethics

Philonous says (05:06): are you still awake? Archie says (05:06): yep Philonous says (05:07): just updated the blog Archie says (05:07): awesome man Philonous says (05:08): see if you recognise the pictures... Archie says (05:11): i cant say i do! Philonous says (05:11): oh, well the guy on the left is Baudrillard and the guy on the right is Grothendieck. Archie says (05:12): i see! ive only ever seen the guardian obituary picture of baudrillard Philonous says (05:12): yeah, I don't think it looks a whole lot like the other photos I've seen, but hey... so whadya think? Philonous says (05:13): sweet as pie? Archie says (05:14): about the pictures? i like them! i just need something interesting to write Philonous says (05:14): woah! that hasn't stopped me I've asked Le Fox to write something when she gets the chance she was going to write something on 'The Sartorialist' Philonous says (05:15): hey, do you know much about ethics? Archie says (05:16): well i only know the fundamental positions of certain philosophers and, of course, my own position why? Philonous says (05:16): I was just reading about consequentialism Philonous says (05:17): as opposed to deontological ethics Archie says (05:17): ultimately they all rest on a ridiculous idea Philonous says (05:17): say what?? Archie says (05:17): namely that you can measure an "outcome" Philonous says (05:17): mmm no not really Archie says (05:17): even an idea like "positive" Philonous says (05:17): deontological arguments are to do with duty and obligation Philonous says (05:18): well ok but the point is, they're a personal framework Archie says (05:18): of course Philonous says (05:18): so all you have to do is to be able to make personal judgements on these sorts of things Archie says (05:18): i have my own completely arbitrary ethical code Philonous says (05:18): mmm there's another position again are you a moral relativist? Archie says (05:19): i get called that a lot in debates Philonous says (05:19): mmm It is sort of an ivory tower of a position Archie says (05:19): yep but, so what? is there anything wrong with that? Philonous says (05:19): well yeah Archie says (05:19): "" Philonous says (05:20): I think that moral philosophy should be about trying to fit some axiomatic system to the every day process of making moral judgements so that when you find that your intuition fails you, you try and derive something concrete from your framework to help you out... Archie says (05:20): of course you think that - youre a mathematician whereas i think it should be based on an arbitrary set of values which is how it DOES function Philonous says (05:20): well yeah sure Philonous says (05:21): but those arbitrary values are exactly these axioms (if you're a relativist) Archie says (05:21): which was my point earlier if you are going to have "consequentialism", you might as well have "Archiecentricism" too Philonous says (05:21): well no, not really but if you're some sort of moral relativist then it's hardly conducive to the solution of conflicts Archie says (05:22): who said i wanted to solve conflicts? Philonous says (05:22): oh yeah, I forgot - you're a nihilist Archie says (05:22): not really Philonous says (05:22): hedonist? (and moral relativist) Archie says (05:22): i just find definitions of the virtue of these things of ideas a bit shakey at the very least, worth questioning Philonous says (05:23): agreed ok, so if you're going to get relativist on my ass, then you can climb back up into your ivory tower of theory Archie says (05:24): well hey, im not saying that i dont have a functioning ethical world view which values certain actions as "good" and others as "bad" that doesnt mean that im ready to reduce the patterns into fundamental axioms and call the whole thing a success Philonous says (05:24): ok, so your world view is essentially that there is no coherent axiomatic world view Philonous says (05:24): it's a 'take it as it comes' kinda thing Archie says (05:25): well theres obviously a philosophical sentiment and a seperate practical one Philonous says (05:25): hmm Archie says (05:25): which is where you might think im an idiot Philonous says (05:26): see I don't get it. I figure philosophy ought to be a little bit practical: I should be able to live by some world view which philosophy can provide (and if philosophy can't provide it, then by definition, my 'philosophy' is my world view) Archie says (05:26): im pretty sure you can - the only real question is why you dont... Philonous says (05:27): well I think it's either because language isn't complicated enough to capture what goes on in our heads (Wittgenstein can go suck an egg) or because we're not eloquent enough to be able to phrase it. Archie says (05:28): sure why not Philonous says (05:28): It sorta leads to the question - Is moral philosophy doomed? Philonous says (05:29): it seems like any personal moral philosophy has to be derived from someone's personal 'common sense'. But then maybe that's all there is to moral philosophy. Archie says (05:29): well thats my conclusion! Philonous says (05:29): hmmmm Philonous says (05:30): I don't like it Archie says (05:30): yeah its not a nice thought... Philonous says (05:31): So... I hear there's a black guy running for president...

Critical Mass

At 6pm on the last Friday of every month, a motley crew of cyclists gather in front of the main city library in Manchester to...cycle. The tradition of massing critically began in San Fransisco in 1992 with a handful of commuters cycling together for solidarity. 16 years later, there are critical mass events in most major cities ranging from tens to hundreds of people. Notably most of these gatherings have no official agenda and are publicised as 'organised coincidence' rather than any form of protest or activism. Cycling around Manchester is in general a very stressful experience. Although the council claims to be taking environmental pollution seriously, there seems to be no great effort for the most part to renew cycle lanes or to think of provision for cyclists. Where cycle lanes do exist, they are exceedingly badly planned and maintained, pockmarked by potholes and drain covers. Furthermore, motorists seem to have almost no awareness of cyclists whatsoever. Having cycled in Manchester for two and a half years, I can recall only one occasion where a motorist actually looked in his mirror and stopped before turning left through a cycle lane. This being the norm in most places, cyclists often feel somewhat disenfranchised as road users. Critical mass gives a much needed feeling of solidarity and safety in a domain which is, more often than not, distinctly hostile. Here's a video of Manchester critical mass last May: Last month I decided that having known about it for long enough, it was now time to finally gain some personal experience of critical mass - more than anything else, to sample the prevailing atmosphere. It definitely was a very peculiar feeling. There is no fixed route, the mass of cyclists simply whoever happens to be at the front. I was definitely not disappointed. The thing that struck me most, apart from the novelty of greatly outnumbering cars was the totally relaxed vibe. Being surrounded by cyclists rather than cars leads to enough of a noise reduction to be able to hold conversations with other cyclists in the middle of roads. The usual feeling of being more than slightly harried by passing motorists was replaced by complete relaxation and well-being. Come along next week at 6pm 28th March in front of the Main Library in St Peter's Square.

Umbrella-ella-ella

Ok. I hated the song. But where does the word 'umbrella' come from? Well `umbra' is latin for shadow so umbrella presumably means something that creates a little shadow. But then what is the difference between `parasol' and `umbrella'? Well 'para' on the front of anything seems to mean `almost but a bit less' (paramedic, paramilitary, parambulator, paracompact(!)...) so `parasol' ought to mean something like `less sun'. Technically, then there is perhaps no difference between the two. Maybe the French have got it right with 'parapluie' which I guess means `less rain'...

Loop sampling

Over the past little while, I've noticed a couple of quite cool videos involving one person making a whole lot of live music using a loop sampler. Here are some examples... This is a guy called Foy Vance on a BBC Northern Ireland music show. Initially, I thought he had a drummer and some guitarist in the background - that is until I saw him sampling his voice. This is a guy called Shlomo who's a UK beatboxer performing on the BBC's Glastonbury coverage. It's amazing how quickly he builds up the layers of sound. Somehow having this as a voicemail answer message doesn't seem to do it justice...

Darkroom!

I've started a darkroom. It's something I've always wanted to do I suppose, but now seemed the time to do it for some reason. Ok. So it's not a proper darkroom, but then again it's not just a dark room... It's a darkroom built for pinhole camera photography! But how does one take photos with a pinhole camera?! It turns out it's actually reasonably simple. The basic principle is as follows. An image is formed in a pinhole camera just as in any other camera so all you have to do is put some film in the right place. The standard darkroom process involves developing your film, then putting the negatives you've just made into an enlarger, projecting them onto photographic paper and then developing the paper. On the film, parts struck by light become dark. The same is true of photographic paper so during the process, the colours are inverted twice, giving you the original again. So, everything is peachy. Well actually no. Enlargers are *really* expensive (the cheapest one I found was about 160 pounds without an enlarging lens, timer easel etc etc etc...). Setting up a darkroom was therefore going to be out of the question. Until I saw podcast about pinhole photography. All you do is stick a pin in a box. Then you have a pinhole camera. So how do you take the photo? Actually, the process is exactly the same as for film except instead of using film, you use photographic paper and instead of using an enlarger, you contact print. For a grand total of 30 pounds I was all set. Watching photos appear is perhaps the coolest thing I've seen for a long time. Highly recommended. To see the podcast, check out: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/08/make_video_podcast_weekend_pro_1.html There are lots of other cool things on the site. I find that actually, his design isnt' all that great. The best thing I've tried so far is a beer can as the container with a hole punched in the side.

Pirandello

The other night I went to see Six Characters in Search of an Author. It's a good play I think. To be honest, the production at the Lowry for which I had tickets failed to impress somewhat. The vast majority of the cast seemed to have come prepared for a pantomime rather than a radical existentialist romp. The story follows a family of six who were created by some author who didn't bother finishing the project. They are left in a sort of limbo of neither being seen by anyone else nor being entirely non-existent. As a result, they barge into a rehearsal for some play or other and demand that their story be told. I think it could be a very powerful drama but alas, such power was lacking from this performance. Could be an interesing thing to watch though. In other news: String theory is cool.

Conferences, Sleeping

Goodness, it has been rather a while. I've been away. This is my general excuse for everything (and it's not as if anyone reads this so I'm sure I'm not depleting some great following by neglecting to write anything). I was in Poland for a week and in Bakewell for another week. Two very different places. The Polish conference was one organised by the ESF on Algebraic Aspects in Geometry. (I was convinced that ought to have been 'of' rather than 'in', but hey, what do I know). It really was a rather strange experience - The only native English speakers were a guy from Wisconsin and me and yet all lectures were in English. The rest of the time, most people spoke either in French Russian or a small smattering of German. I suppose it helped somewhat that most of the people there seemed to be from Luxembourg presumably at the prompting of one of the organisers, Norbert Poncin. I met more than a few interesting people there though, which was great. Right now though, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with the mathematics... I thought I was doing ok, but it turns out that everything that took me a long time to figure out was already known. Boo.