Archive for the ‘art’ Category

Abstract category theory is like…

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

… writing without nouns.

But ahhh, to write nounlessly is to live anew, not to be tied to thinking concretely, not to be anchored, not to be grounded, but rather to lift off and fly, as if previously to write was just to crawl, penned in, hemmed in, restricted.

And I might add, like an Oasis song, to say everything and yet say nothing. (The traditional way to express this is to call it “abstract nonsense“; the book Abstract and Concrete Categories: The Joy of Cats has this cute limerick which captures the feeling:

There’s a tiresome young man from Bay Shore.
When his fiancée said, “I adore
The beautiful sea,”
He said, “I agree,
It’s pretty, but what is it for?”)

Journal time: I came back from a week back home in Hampshire today, after going with my brother to the Muse concert at Wembley on Sunday. (Woo! That was brilliant!) We also went to a Spanish restaurant for Dad’s birthday, which was pretty tasty.

Our degree results came out yesterday, but I wasn’t around to get them, so I’m having to hold my breath until Monday.

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QOTD XI

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

“Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.
“Like, what kind of a party?”
“Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”
“Oh, wow.”
“If you’d rather forget it…”
“You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”

— From “The Whore of Mensa”, a short story by Woody Allen (quoted at Language Log).

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Monadic fractals

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

There are an awful lot of monad tutorials out there. Monads as containers is one I saw a link to on haskell-cafe today, and it gives a rather amazing application of the list monad:


f x | x == '#'  = "# #"
    | otherwise = "   "
"#" >>= f >>= f >>= f >>= f
= "# #   # #         # #   # #                           # #   # #         # #   # #"

And we have a fractal!

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Any fool can be a wizard

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Having received the shocking news that Elsmorian has never heard Tommy, I went back and listened to it again myself. While I was listening I read the Wikipedia article, which says “Townshend’s later interest in synthesizers is foreshadowed by the use of taped sounds played in reverse to give a whistling, chirping sound on ‘Amazing Journey’”. I thought “really? never noticed” and listened to it once more.

It’s funny when you revisit things you’ve listened to casually before and discover new depths. I only even noticed these funny chirpy sounds when I listened to them again just now, while they add a wonderful other-worldliness to the song, reinforcing the idea that it’s all a vision inside Tommy’s head. They sound great even today, but it was only when I realised how fantastic they must have sounded in 1969, when the album was released, that I could appreciate it properly. Bear in mind that I’ve been brought up in a musical culture where synthesisers are mundane (we call digital ones keyboards now) and sounds like that are trivial to create with the audio equivalent of the universal constructor, the waveform editor. I think it’s rather sad that my appreciation of it is jaded by having heard similar sounds hundreds of times before, as just another instrument.


It all reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s remarks about conjuring in his interview with Stephen Briggs in The Discworld Companion (my copy is the second edition), where he explains that he would probably enjoy a Discworld play, with its improvised, amateur special effects, more than a Discworld film, with big-budget CG:


I suppose I’m saying it’s the difference between magical tricks being done by a genuine wizard and by a stage conjuror. The wizard does marvellous things but it’s, well, magic and therefore in a sense mundane. Yawn yawn, he’s produced another damn pigeon, well, that’s magic for you. But when you know it’s being done by a conjuror with a hearing aid and a day job down at the building society, and all achieved by springs and elastic and secret pockets, this makes it much more interesting. Any fool can be a wizard, but you have to be clever to be a conjuror.

I think you can say the same for any look back at past innovations. It’s difficult to appreciate the cleverness of past inventors when the modern man looks at their inventions and shrugs — to him, they’re just a prosaic part of his world, no more amazing than a flint knife would have been to a caveman.

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Regensburg Short Film Week

Friday, November 18th, 2005

This week there is a short film festival taking place in Regensburg (by which I mean a festival of short films). There are a number of prizes to be awarded in a few categories: international, German and Brazilian films; films about Bavaria, eastern Bavaria, Germany in the 1970s, communication; dance films; and films about love of the cinema.

Yesterday I went to see the 2nd collection of international films. There were eight of them altogether:

  • Per lei e me (Swiss Italian: For her and me). A rather hard to understand film about a woman whose boyfriend (who doesn’t actually appear) wants her to be him. So we see her wearing a greasepaint moustache and taking a piss standing up. Don’t ask me, I didn’t direct it.
  • Was ich noch sagen wollte (Austrian: What I just wanted to say). A very personal film about the director’s relationship with his aunt, a nun, who helped bring him up and who, later in his life, sent lots of letters to him without reply. Touching, and certainly different.
  • 1 clé pour 2 (Belgian French: 1 key for 2). A couple come home from holiday and find they’ve forgotten their keys. They argue. Sounds pretty prosaic but it turns out in fact to be a very intelligent film about their relationship. Very close camerawork — the actors might well have shot it themselves.
  • La révolution des crabes (French: The crab revolution). A cartoon about those little crabs you find at the beach that snotty kids like pulling the legs off of — species Pachygrapsus mormatus (“Depressed crab”). Their main characteristic is that they are incapable of turning. Strange but very funny French humour. (Edit: YouTube link, unfortunately with no subtitles)
  • Most látszom, most nem látszom (Hungarian: Now you see me, now you don’t). A rather schmalzy film about a boy whose father tests his new invisibility drug on him. Rather poor acting and a total overuse of music.
  • Optinen ääni (Finnish: Optical sound). A recital of Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers. Yes, you read that right. Sadly dot matrix printers don’t make very good musical instruments — their dynamic and tonal range is not very big. Actually, it reminded my somewhat of Gimbo’s music, except that this sounded somewhat like 6 minutes of fingernails scraping on a blackboard, whereas Gimbo’s stuff is actually fairly pleasant.
  • Ces aléas-la (French, [Edit: something like “those risks”]). 3 minutes about a comically unlucky woman. Not much more to it than that really.
  • 2+2=5 (Spanish). Set in a town populated with mentally disabled people. The protagonist escapes from prison (having been banged up as a result of his apple addiction) and is pursued by his inmates, a group of clowns. Utterly mad, but rather funny.

It was certainly a refreshing change to see all these low budget films — instead of lobbing money at them, the directors have to actually write a good script and use skill to make it work.

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