“A Pig. In a cage. On antibiotics”

So I’ve know they’ve been around for a while, and I’ve got a copy of The Bends, and I’ve heard a few songs here and there, and saw them at V a couple of years back, but I haven’t really got into them especially much.

Then I bought In Rainbows the other day (I thought, I’ll pay about £5, how can it go wrong?) and it’s one of the albums I’ve enjoyed most recently. Reckoner and Nude are two of the most brilliantly beautiful songs.

So when I saw OK Computer for £4 at Zavvi (Virgin Megastore, until they decided on path of Southern Comfort-style brand suicide) and again thought, what the heck, at least I’m not out much if I hate it.

But no, I’ve been listening to it more or less non-stop for the last few weeks. I think I may actually be slightly in love with it, which is slightly worrying. I’m not a music expert or journalist, so I’ll try and refrain from using phrases like “soaring soundscapes” and “constructed melodious noise”  because I have very little idea what they actually mean.

What I do know is that possibly my favourite track is the breathtakingly experimental track Fitter Happier where a computer voice recites 90s-era motivational era statements at you, getting causually and effortlessly more surreal & disturbing. The feel is bleak and Orwellian - it’s wonderful.

(This was written yesterday and posted into the Future)

I’ve been thinking about this one on & off for a few days. Something that’s vastly better about the public transport in London as opposed to Birmingham or elsewhere is the quality and quantity of the signage.

I was sitting on a London Overground train - which on a tangential point had departed from Brondesbury station, which has been very nicely refurbished and repainted following the TfL takeover - and I had a sudden realisation that I wasn’t even really sure I was on the right train, going to the right place.

On a Tube train, there’s pretty much always a map of the line somewhere in your eyeline, and the station you’re at or travelling to is clearly signposted by signs on the station platform itself, the recorded  station announcements, and the scrolling matrix displays. It’s almost impossible to lose track of where you are, so much so that you can master the Zen of Tube Travel and completely conk out on a trip back, waking up just at the right station.

On this Overground train I was totally lost - the station names weren’t announced, the stations were inadequately signed, and there were very few maps on display.

Which got me thinking about how important all this kind of stuff is.

For instance, the bus maps displayed at bus shelters are no end of useful, as they show not only the routes serving the local area, but a small street map showing the location of nearby bus stops. This is useful above and beyond simply finding buses, as it also gives the pedestrian both a map and a point of reference from which to navigate. It makes travelling around London a heck of a lot more pleasant, even when you’re going somewhere you’ve never been before.

However, travelling large distances on foot in London is still difficult. Using tube and bus maps for long-distance walks, or even short hops can be unhelpful because of the distortion of distances and positions to convey the networks in a simpler way.

So, rather handily, they’ve instituted a project called Legible London which aims to install good pedestrian signage across London to make pedestrian naviagation simpler and more intuitive, by capitalising on research into how we naturally navigate, i.e. forming mental networks of routes between landmarks. It’s very interesting stuff, and a prototype has been installed around the Bond Street Station / Oxford Street area.

Which might help certain people (who shall remain unnamed) realise that there is no actual street called Bond Street. To be fair, it’s a fairly common mistake

Or, as it’s often called, the Many Worlds Interpretation. It’s one of these things that’s often misunderstood. You’ve probably heard of the idea that every time a choice is made, the universe branches in two, and in one branch the choice went one way, and in the other, the choice went a different way. It’s a compelling idea, but it is, in fact, wrong. Or, to be more accurate, it’s been misinterpreted and oversimplified.

Alas, it’s hard to properly describe it without using words like "wavefunction" and "quantum state", but I’m going to try anyway.

Your basic elementary particles like electrons have a property called spin, which is kind of like the particle spinning on its axis like a spinning globe, but in fact is actually very much not like that at all. Anyways, a particle can either be spinning one way, or spinning the other, and these are known as spin up and spin down states.

Which again, isn’t entirely true, because particles don’t have to be in either of the states, they can exist in what is known as a superposition, where the particle is a mixture of spin up and spin down, and only when you try and measure the spin state of a particle does it become up or down, a process known as collapse. This is the choice alluded to in the first paragraph - in one universe, the particle was seen to be spin up, and in the second, the particle was seen to be spin down. The superposition has collapsed into two definite outcomes.

Where the idea of the branching universes isn’t right is in this idea of collapse. What the originators of the orthodox Quantum Mechanics forgot to include was the vital element that essentially the person doing the observing and measuring is himself (or herself, with a lower probability…)  a quantum system, and the state of that quantum system is affected by the result of the measurement. Something different will get written down in the results.

In essence, the superposition of the spin states of the particle doesn’t collapse into certainty - the physicist instead enters a superposition! This is the crux of the idea - that large systems can enter superpositions, then each state in that superposition evolves independently of each other - forming individual universes, unreachable and undetectable.

This approach extends naturally to the entire universe, evolving in time as a single quantum system, with every single possible event playing out simultaneously.

It also has a rather grisly underside - the idea of a quantum suicide. As long as there exists a possible state in which you remain consciously aware, then a version of yourself will be consciously aware. Subjectively, this means that you can continue to survive an indefinite number of suicide attempts, murders, deaths by natural causes, etc. What worries me is that there are likely to be many more states in which you survive indefinitely in horrible pain than there are where everything goes really well.

This realisation really freaked me out the first time I sat and thought about it. Still unsettles me now.

Actually kinda makes me hope that Everett was wrong, and that wavefunction collapse does actually occur.

So I really want an Asus Eee. It’s roughly £200, although one place I’ve seen is selling at £189, and it’s possibly the teeny-tinest machine I have ever seen!

It’s about the size of a hardback book when closed, and doesn’t have a CD drive or a hard disk, but does have onboard flash memory to save stuff on, and wi-fi for getting on the Interweb. It runs Linux, because Windows is too expensive, but I’m cool with that, especially because I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty (as it were) with Linux for a while now.

So the only difficulty I can see is that spending £189 would leave me uncomfortably close to being utterly broke. Which isn’t good, for very obvious reasons. Like my powerful need to continue being able to eat, but even so… I wants one.

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

If so, you can get Portal: First Slice, composing:

• Portal: First Slice (being the first third of Portal, the Game of the Year)
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch (being a game where you can kill people with ballistic toilets)
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (short tech demo fun)
• Peggle Extreme (addictive promotional puzzle game)

Seeing as how this bundle is free, it’s well worth getting!

Head over to the Steam website to get it.

Hope everyone had a good festive period, etc. etc.

Normal service is now resumed, I guess. There’s been a bunch of things I meant to write, but I’ve forgotten them all now. Instead, check this out: Man sues God.

Brilliant!