Nothing is real

There's a perfectly respectable philosophical position which states that if it's possible to build a simulation of the universe, then it's probably already been done, and we're part of it: see Bostrom's article in Philosophical Quarterly v. 53 no. 211 (2003) for a discussion. Or see Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:





If it's not true already, it soon will be:

The dew appears to have fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning

A little snatch of Marvin the Paranoid Android before I go:

Those who are about to rock…

There's a part of me that will forever be a 14 year-old. And that 14 year-old is a metal kid. Never mind that I own precisely one metal album (by Slayer), my heart thrilled to the news that the Big Four are touring together for the first time ever: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth one on bill. The egos, the anger, the leather, the angst and - for the crowd - neck injuries to excel an osteopath's wildest dreams. 


They remind me of Disaster Area, the loudest band in the universe: 'Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason'.



Ah, to be young, furious and unfocussed again. 

Geeks are going to love this

I fully expect some of my friends to die of sheer crossover pleasure when they watch this: a mashup of Dr Who and classic 1980s comedy science fiction drama, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.


It's done with astonishing fidelity, and love.

For all you hoopy froods

I am not a hoopy frood. In the HHGTTG galaxy, I am more Dentarthurdent (if you aren't familiar with the world of Douglas Adams, imagine Arthur as the proto-Mark Corrigan) than Ford Prefect. They both own good dressing gowns and exist in a state of befuddlement with the world's degradation. Only Mark has eaten a girl's dog though, and Arthur's essentially kind.

Today is Douglas Adams appreciation day, known as Towel Day. This is because 'a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have', and if you know where your towel is, friendly types will lend you anything else you may have mislaid.

I will be donning dressing gown and towel today, because I'm a huge fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide radio series, BBC series and books. They're more than a collection of Adams's one-liners about tea, cricket and technology - there's real heart in there, and serious (though sentimental) liberal-left values. Arthur is a man out of time, baffled by the shallowness of the Porsche-driving advertising executives who stand in for friends. A cup of tea, a girlfriend and peace and quiet is all he needs, yet the universe keeps intervening - blowing up Earth, for instance. The series is essentially a howl of pain as Adams observes the gentle liberalness  which he saw as encapsulating Englishness ripped apart by capitalism and the Tories.



Adams' other books are also bursting with emotion, ideas and funny jokes - Bach and Coleridge are key cameos in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

Douglas also cared hugely about species loss, what we've done to the planet, and Apple Macs. He died at the age of 51 in 2001. He's also responsible for my PhD-writing motto:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by".

How management works

Having endured another encounter with the Maximum Leaders of The Hegemon, I have no words.

I merely point you in the direction of these clips on management values. Go from 4.53 of the first clip and the first two minutes of the second one.

Definitely Friday today

OK, now I know what day it is. I even know where my towel is (sorry, nerd in-joke there).

Here I am, in the office again before the start of the working day. I should be swimming, but there's a long and fascinating paper on the condition of post-communist Poland to proofread for a colleague.

Great Zarquon…

… said Douglas Adams, brushing down his dressing gown and staring wildly around him, slightly disorientated by the spinning motion which had woken him up in his coffin. "Wasn't I dead? Who the hell are you? Where's my tea?"

"I" said a small Irishman, "am Owen Colfer, an android with Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's latest Genuine People Personality technology. I am, therefore, also you. In a manner of speaking."

"Now wait a minute", expostulated the late author. "You can't just dig me up".

"No", said the stranger. "But Infinidim Enterprises can. The Encyclopaedia Galactica, the memoirs of the Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Three-Breasted Whore of Eroticon 6 - all flops I'm afraid, and Christmas-like events are approaching. No, what we needed was a massive pile of galactic credits to spend on Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters. And on new digital watches, of course. The only solution, old chum, was to rip off your dressing gown, pull down your pyjama trousers and violate you in as many unimaginative ways as we possibly could."

"But. But. You just can't dig me up and pretend everything's fine. You're behaving like the Vogons, turning up and blasting everything I stood for into a million little pieces".

"We can, and we have. What you thought was reality was in fact a bourgeois virtual construct, with your primitive ideas of integrity and authorship. We can take your old books, extract the stuff about tea, cricket and Fenchurch, discard the rest and make more trillions of credits than the Frantles from the ninety-eighth dimension made from the Zantle exhibits four billion years ago".*

"But. But. But…"

"No, no, monkey man. We need the money. And let's be honest, this pastiche thing's zarking easy, isn't it Zaphod?

"Yeah, froody", said Zaphod, banging his heads together. "Now let's, y'know, find some excitement, adventure and really wild things. Again. Coming, earthman?".

"Great", said Douglas Adams, as a few fingerjoints detached themselves from his rotting corpse. "All I ever wanted from life was a decent cup of tea. Even Marvin would find this particularly depressing".


The Zantles, as everybody in the galaxy knows, were the cunningest pan-dimensional beings of their zallifrarg. To explain this to a carbon-based lifeform such as yourself would be so difficult that even the Guide, by now a pan-pan-dimensional positronic lifeform, would melt its biocorcuits even trying to think down to your level.  

Wacky Wednesday's here again

Hello all. Despite the mirth occasioned by the Perfect Ponies discussion, today's one of utter misery. Four meetings, one of which I'm partly leading (yuck) and all of which are going to be awful - redundancy, restructuring the curriculum etc. etc. then an all-nighter finding a way into Much Ado for ver kids, because actual teaching and intellectual struggle comes a very poor second to bureaucracy in this place.  No time even to go fencing. Grrr…

Any listening to/reading the new Hitchhikers' Guide sequel, by Eoin Colfer? Cynical Ben is, and isn't impressed. I haven't received my book, but quite like the radio adaptation so far.

I love geeks

The final Twittercast (I know, I know) from the LCROSS satellite deliberately (and unsuccessfully) crashed into the moon the other days was a Douglas Adams quote - the first (and last) thoughts of the sperm whale which materializes above Magrathea then plummets to its doom.

Banned books special

It's the American Library Association's banned books week, as Intelliwench reminds me - more an American thing, as the European countries tend not to ban books much any more (though Ireland in particular had a strong track record in closing its citizens' eyes). It's easier to ban books in the US because it's a very democratic country - there are elected citizens on school boards, in the dog-catcher's office, on the town, county and state boards of education, plus the myriad of legislatures, and stupid people are often the ones who stand and vote…

Britain prefers to allow dictators and businessmen in other countries to sue in British courts over books not even sold in Britain - the US has even passed a law to stop this libel tourism.

But I digress. How many of the banned books have you read, and which ones astonish you most? Philip Pullman's back in the top ten after the film of The Golden Compass (which should be banned on artistic grounds), Anything which presents homosexuals positively attracts the book-burners, as does Harry Potter. Amongst the classics, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men and Huckleberry Finn attract the ire of banners for 'language' offences or political content.

This is the 100 most frequently challenged classics: I've read 62 of them and have read other works by virtually all of them. Some are stunning choices - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, lots of E. M. Forster, Hemingway, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Willa Cather! Most of them clearly annoy people on the right, though there are a few, such as Gone With the Wind which have attracted the opprobrium of the dimmer bulbs on the left.

Early Friday conundrum: what would you ban? Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer, How Green Was My Valley - all on quality grounds. Oh, and that chick-lit author who's standing for the Conservative Party - Louise Bagshawe.

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I am forsaking you, leaving you to wander the streets clutching bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (great website, by the way), staring with mute desperation at passers-by, imploring them to pretend to be Plashing Vole for just a few seconds.

In other words, I'm having a long weekend, returning to my keyboard on Tuesday afternoon, probably.

Which means you'll be needing a Friday conundrum to keep you going.

What snippets of high or popular culture summarise your understanding of the world?

There are so many for me. I loved Marvin the Paranoid Android's observation that 'the dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning', and the talkshow host's claim on The Simpsons that 'your tears say more than real evidence ever could'. Arthur Dent is quite a hero, and I'm just not getting into the Peep Show debate. Chris Morris has a peculiarly accurate though misanthropic approach to life.

Arthur Dent (from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!

"This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Marvin:

Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.

Why stop now just when I'm hating it?

Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.

Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

George Eliot:

The world outside the books is not a happy one, Maggie felt (from The Mill on the Floss).

Meanwhile, here are a few lines from Iain Sinclair's Downriver, just because I like them:

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk and Kish. You were obliged to super-impose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs.

It's a great book - much more wordy, as you can see from this excerpt, than my usual taste, but it's got breadth of imagination and a real nasty swipe at the wideboys, bankers, property developers and all that crew who happily demolished old London to build poxy designer flats for yuppies. It's therefore a very good book to be reading in the midst of our current situation.

This Friday's conundrum

A nice one this week.

Who are your fictional heroes? With whom do you identify or admire? I'm opting for Arthur Dent ('I seem to be having trouble with my lifestyle'), who fruitlessly and accidentally travelled the universe in search of a decent cup of tea, which is disastrous. He also sported a fine dressing gown, as I have been known to, loved cricket and was pretty decent.

I've been accused of resembling Mark Corrigan too. It's true that he (and David Mitchell) is right about most things, worries about ordinary human decency, comes from Shropshire, wears a good dressing gown and the actor shares a birthday with me, but I'm ignoring all that. (Some people say Mark's conservative - they're wrong. He's just not a liberal). My university ID card has a photo of Mark on it. Nobody has ever challenged me.

(Today's xkcd cartoon is a lovely typography one - don't miss the mouse-over. Did you know I went to watch a film about Helvetica and own several books on fonts?).

Late, but a point worth making.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe (can't remember which volume), Adams makes the point that humanity thinks it's the most advanced race on earth because it possesses nuclear weapons, amongst a bunch of other stupid developments. The dolphins think they're the most advanced species precisely because humans have nuclear weapons etc. etc.

The dolphins are right. Santino the Swedish Chimpanzee has demonstrated that humans aren't the only animals with the ability to plan for the future - an ability which proves an amazing level of abstract reasoning function. While the zoo was closed, Santino was making and storing rocks ready to bombard visitors. When the zoo closed for the winter, he didn't bother making them because he knew they wouldn't be needed.

Clearly, Santino didn't like being entertainment, and found a way to make his point consistently and clearly. What have humans done for Santino? Set him free? Provided secluded accommodation? Urgently re-written our animal experimentation laws to take into account the fact that lab chimps must spend their evenings in mortal dread of the next morning's torture?

No. Humans cut Santino's nuts off. That'll show him. Bet he didn't foresee that, despite his future-planning capability.