Three Sips of Tepid Iced Tea...

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:13:00 +0000

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My Farewell

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:10:00 +0000

Hello!

I don't blog here anymore, I got hip and got a tumblr.

http://tobiasrevell.tumblr.com

thanks.

My Bright Future

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sun, 02 May 2010 16:06:00 +0000

HTML5 is coming! This may well be totally meaning less to most but it's effects are going to be incredible. Companies are already flocking to put their names in the hat for it's eventual release in 2020. It's going to be huge. For a while now there have been no significant desktop-native software packages released, merely updates of the original and some (such as Photoshop and Google Office) are already web-native. HTML5 will also mean the gradual end of third party web programs like flash, all activity on your computer will be based out of the browser that's gradually becoming your window on the world. So when's all this going to happen? By 2020. Practically just around the corner!

And we're going to Mars! Yes Barrackbama said NASA are going to be popping in on the little green men for tea. Scientists are working on way to isolate bacteria in Alaska that can break down rock and turn it into soil and the 95% carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars makes it a haven for plant life. And the combination of photosynthesis and some mild geoengineering means we'll soon have an atmosphere up and running to block out all the UV rays that bombard the red planet. So, when does this exciting time in humanities history begin? First stages may possibly be in planning by 2050!

And nanocomputers are on the way! At the moment the best one's managed to do is start a sodoku and not even touch it's coffee but soon they'll be performing instant calculation by the superpositioning nature of photons. A new age of computing that'll see the heralding of practical optics and exceptional storage power at a fraction of the energy cost. How long before this science fiction hits PC World Dagenham? By 2070!

All a long way off, the future, isn't it? So what about more immediately? What's literally just around the corner that will revolutionise our lives? Nothing. Spend less money, use less energy, be nicer to people, don't eat crap food and you might make it far enough to see the invention of the 20-way extension plug.

My Patron Saint

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:15:00 +0000

From a young age, the thing that we were taught to remember St. George for is slaying a dragon, saving a chick and generally being a good role model. As you grow older, you realise that in the apparent absence of dragons from reality that actually the entire story must be a crock of shit and really no way to live. Chivalry dies in those moments. So you send off for your fake ID, buy some condoms (maybe) and start planning ways to get in and out of the house undetected. We decide as a child, that honour has no place in this world built on lies and instead realise that devious, bitter, vengeful and jealous selfishness is the only way to get the girl, the adoration of the town and the golden horde the big scaly fucker is camped on.

St. George became a metaphor for Englishness - and back then - Christianity, despite the fact he probably never came here and he never so much as slayed a dragon as was slayed by a dragon. He was a Roman soldier who apparently stood up for Christians and ended up murdered for it. In reality, dragons are big and scary, they're made of departments, ministries, constituencies, precedents, judiciaries, laws, statutes, rights, restrictions, taxes, paperwork and guns. So religions responded by taking the same form, they sprouted leathery wings and jagged claws, took to the skies and ruled from up high.

Neither the Dragon nor St. George are heroes. St. George is the Dragon and vice versa. The horrific, fat, greedy, gravity-defying beasties circle the sky above you breathing fire down your neck day in, day out. So what about the girl? We're all out of honour, freedom and chivalry but she needs saving. Well, it's amazing what fake ID and condoms can get you.

My New Band

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:24:00 +0000

Finally pulled my finger out and did the good thing. Listen, learn, love and so on right here:

The Feral Five-Hundred

My Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:25:00 +0000

Not really a haunted house. But check out Mystery Google. You can search for anything but get the results of the last person to use Google. Pretty clever stuff if you're after the inter-grail of true random anonymity in your online activity.

Might be a bit better than the 'random' button on Wikipedia. Although the article on Rezazadeh Stadium was particularly gripping.

My Hypercube

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:45:00 +0000

In E8 you got Dalston, Mare Street, London Fields and even bits of Shoreditch. It's the kind of place where the girls wear denim short-shorts even when it rains (pairing with a kitsch raincoat of course.) It's the kind of place where cultures are supposed to smash together to birth sparkling creativity. Yes, truly one of the coolest postcodes in Britain. There's just one thing slightly cooler than this haven of the hip. Yup, that thing above is also E8. It's a 248-dimensional hypercube.

Allow me to stretch your mind. A hypercube, essentially represents the algebraic basis of a cube in different dimensions. A hypercube in 1 dimension (n1) has 2 vertices linked to 1 other, basically a line. A 2 dimension hypercube (n2) has 4 vertices connected to 2 others; a square. And a 3 dimension hypercube has 8 vertices linked to 3 others; a cube. All the connections must be at opposites and right angles to all the other connections. Here's a diagram of the first few:

Innit' pretty and perfect? You can keep going with the same basic formula. Using the 2 to the power of the number of dimensions to figure out the number of vertices (2, 4, 8, 16 etc.). Easy. Only it starts to fall apart after a while, things go wrong and the forms don't work, the right angles can't be held etc. etc. All very erm... "mathy". Anyway, at 248 dimensions it all briefly clicks back into place for some reason. This is called the Exceptional Simple Lie E8 Group. There's too much to go into here. Most of it I don't want to go into since I'm not sure and I don't want to put my foot in it with some militant mathematicians.

But, my point enters here. (You probably could have skipped the bit above but they are nice diagrams I suppose, well done you.) A theoretical physicist, also known as an extreme sports fanatic and firm believer in the 'balance' of life turned it into a Theory Of Everything.

(Gasp here.)

Extreme sports aside, Antony Garrett Lisi is taken quite seriously in theoretical physics so when he published An Exceptionally Simple Theory Of Everything in 2007 a lot of people sat up and paid attention. He showed that it might be possible to unite gravity and string theory (the wet dream of all theoretical physicists) using the E8 group.

Not sure how, still don't get it. As far as I can tell, you take the 248-dimensional super structure, imagine it as a wobbly 2-dimensional sheet and at every point (of which there are infinite) place a sphere. The interactions of these spheres define the universe. I think.

Sounds nuts and it probably is. The point is, that in the light of a theory that might possibly unite the behaviour of the entire observable universe in a flawless mathematical form, Shoreditch pretty much sucks.

My Diagnosis

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:04:00 +0000

The brilliant thing about the whole 'related articles' thing is that for a paper like the Telegraph, which bridges that gap between the insane hysteria of the Mail and the conservative sobriety of the Times, an article titled 'Copper Pipes could Cause Disease and Alzheimer's', a title just one exclamation mark away from the dashboard of a transit van, links to these little gems of medical genius: A pint of milk stops heart disease, two drinks a day STOP Alzheimer's and divorcees and widows are more likely to get Alzheimer's. The irony is that a divorcee may well turn to the drink in which case she nulls her increased risks anyway. My favourite though; Statins cut risk of dying more than a tenth.

That's right folks, roll on up. For a 10% chance at eternal life take these crazy drugs. Occasionally though a newspaper does provide something useful. The Guardian recently put this up. A link to various government figures from 2007. Everything from your local BNP buddies to how much your school sucks. As if you didn't figure it out at the time. To a kid, every school sucks.

There used to be a blog called the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project. It tracked the various pieces of medical genius pumped out by that particular rag. Sadly, it hasn't been updated for two years.

What I'm proposing (and I'll need help) is this; start a set of blogs: Things That Will Kill You and Things That Will Grant You Immortality. Every day or so a group of us put up on one or both blogs the various things in the days media that would claim to cut short or extend our mortality with a brief explanation of how exactly this is supposed to be achieved.

It's just an idea. Perhaps a brilliant one. Could turn it into a book. Anyway, not sure how to end, here's a list from McSweeney's:

THE OTHER BATHROOM NUMBERS.

BY DAVID WECHSLER

- - - -

3. Shower

4. Shave

5. Talk to mirror

6. Vomit

7. Moisturize

8. Brush teeth

9. Masturbate

10. Clean (a. tub; b. toilet; c. sink; d. floor)

11. First aid

12. Both 1 and 2

13. Take drugs (a. legal; b. illegal)

14. Just want to be alone

Radical.

My Doctor WHO?

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:23:00 +0000

This week, heavy demands were put on the World Health Organisation by the world. Well, 14 of the most developed countries. They want to know exactly why the WHO told them that the world would end unless One Gazillion US Euro-Dollars Sterling was spent stocking up on Tamiflu that wasn't really used. And I suppose they're right to ask. We're in the middle of the worst recession for almost 100 years, but swine flu is now officially on the way out in Europe and bird flu never put in an appearance at all despite saying it was 'attending' on Facebook.

So, whose idea was it to buy all this Tamiflu? It is of course, better to be safe than sorry and despite the obvious and much-highlighted flaws of using anti-virals once a virus has already begun to spread (akin to digging a moat to keep the Nazi's out, in 2008), Tamiflu is good at keeping the chattering masses focused on the failures of the financial world. This still doesn't answer how the WHO so massively overshot the mark on this one. An internationally responsible and accountable body falsely predicting the end of the world twice and each time encouraging people to spend all their money on Tamiflu does raise the type of questions that would have Naomi Klein squealing 'Sir! Sir! Sir! Oh me! me! I know! I know!' with her fingertips touching the ceiling in the Political Commentators school of Sceptics.

The thing is, that all this happened in the same week that seven hundred previously secret documents were released by the EU parliament. These documents detail email conversations in which the tobacco lobby was seen to be putting pressure on the various committees of the EU to focus on the economic aspects of policy rather than the social. Needless to say, links were made. Post 9/11 the US has a policy of; "Just because it happened in Europe doesn't mean it CAN'T happen here.'"

So once again, just like in the nineties, the role of 'Big Pharma' in the political world is being questioned. We probably don't realise here, but in the US the stranglehold that pharmaceutical companies have over the population is staggering. If someone on Fox News was to make a passing comment about say... Scurvy, you could guarantee that the next advert break would be for 'Orangozaic!; now with Pro-Scurvical-Ionidotopatoids to Protect You AND Your Family!' Twenty minutes later just about 6 billion units will have sold.

It's a terrifying thing to think that consumerism is based on fear. The fear of flu made world leaders happy to buy enough overpriced Strepsils for an entire planet, Tamiflu were happy to provide, 'the media' (a phrase almost as unpalatable to me as 'the youth of today') were happy to keep the fear pumped around and we were happy to lap it up, bitch and moan about it round the water-cooler and do absolutely fuck all.

But, as one informed reader of the Telegraph wrote: "Swine flu is now a political disease and, as with all things political, one has to be seen to be doing something." Even if that something is just panicking like an impotent, pathetic little worm and waiting for someone to blame. Well now we can all blame the World Health Organisation, an organisation set up to put international well-being, health and happiness before politics, finance and personal resentment. Way to crush every attempt at positive global cooperation.

Anyway, with global warming, economic doom, the failure of dollar imperialism, pandemics and resource shortages, and oh yeah '2012!' (yeah, that's back in the popular press) it's only a matter of time before the whole WHO gives up and just screams hysterically into a massive speaker system that everyone HAS to spend their money on re-enforced concrete, spears, Bibles and those crazy money-spinning cigarettes.

My Plagarism

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:51:00 +0000

I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time that went into that. The irony is that I stole it from a blog called copycunts. A blog with just about enough irate scorn to make up for the irate bitterness and stifled rage you feel when you see shameless plagiarism, so much so that the ridiculously profane language on the blog doesn't actually annoy you since all your spite is directed at idea thieves.

Awesome.

My Waterloo

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:16:00 +0000

What have they done to Waterloo Bridge? I don't know how long it's been going on for but it was certainly new to me this morning. Someone has obviously thought; 'What are the biggest pinch points for traffic in London? The bridges? Really? How many lanes do they have? 4?! Well that's far too many, one each way should do it I think.'

But what are we going to do with the other two lanes oh great and wise TFL? 'Oh I don't know we'll put some cones out, a few generators, you know the usual, all very meaningful.' Any workers there? 'Nope.' This leads me to ponder who it actually is that does road works. I've seen road works and I've seen road workers but in over two decades I don't recall ever seeing them in the same place.

Apparently the Waterloo Bridge thing is that so as not to disturb traffic, they're only going to be working on it at night. That doesn't mean they re-open the whole bridge during the day and block off the other two lanes in the evening. What it means is that, the bridge will always be cut down to two lanes it's just that there won't be anyone making lots of noise that might frighten you while you commute. Fantastic, I have an acute fear of infrastructural progress.

So where do the road workers work? They're around, I've seen new buildings and things and pavements have to come from somewhere, but when do they construct these things? There's enough images of folk in loincloths dragging rocks the size of Devon cottages into the shapes of pyramids but I've never even seen a photograph of a man in a helmet digging a hole.

I'm going to leave this one open-ended. I don't think anyone knows the answer. It must be a secret society thing. This may well be the thing that keeps us from getting angry at builders and workers. The sense of mystery. The ninja-like stealth with which they pave roads, erect columns, repair facades and put out cones. It's this mystery that keeps a small part of me believing that by the time I commute to work tomorrow morning, Waterloo Bridge will be 20 lanes wide and lined with silk.

My Blank Cheque

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:15:00 +0000

A while ago there was a day where like nothing happened. So as I was getting ready for work the thing that was kicked to the top of Radio 4's 'Must Discuss' list was the possibility that the Monetary Organisation, might, possibly think about maybe starting to phase out cheques after 2018. Possibly. Maybe.

Fatuous and pointless a discussion as it is, it did inspire some debate. I've written maybe one cheque in my life. I resisted getting a chequebook for ever, I didn't see why I'd ever need it. I now use it for storing Euros. The point being made was that those of an elderly persuasion, the ones who haven't yet mastered the intricacies of Paypal and whose only understanding of the plastic in their wallets is that it most certainly is not a condom, might not be so cool with paying by card or cash. This seems reasonable, it's always my Gran that sends a cheque and my mum that 'transfers' on the web and my Dad that slips me £20 note with the ever-classic and non-sensical 'Don't tell your mother.' As if she'd go on an insane bender at the thought of untraceable cash liberally flowing around our immediate family.

So they had people on pointing out that cheques were expensive and slow and liable to forgery. The point was made that they're unnecessary, impractical and unreliable. All this time the other side just repeatedly muttered the words 'But what about the older folk? The aged? The widowed? People who are too old to know about cards? The elder and immobile? The wisened and frail? Those to whom the internet is a strange and confusing world?' Like the noise your washing machine makes when it's getting itself pumped up for a brisk spin dry again. You know the; 'hmph, hmph, hmph, hmm.' noise.

The argument for phasing them out was strong enough, I didn't really need any more convincing. Really the defenders were scrabbling in the corner, clinging for purchase. But, the aggressors could have made much shorter work of it by using the powerful argument that if the Monetary Organisation decides to start phasing out cheques in 9 years time, the people who really rely on them will be, or very shortly be dead and buried. So it doesn't matter, allow the world to evolve please, thank you very much.

Still, like I said, nothing much was happening at all that day and if they had sped through the whole debate with that one, crushing blow then I would have had to have listened to that dreadful chap who does the Christian poems on 'Thought for The Day.'

No thanks.

My 11

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:57:00 +0000

The volume on the BBC iplayer goes up to 11. Staggering references like that pull me backwards through time.

My See

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Some people are aware of this, but the 'c' key on my keyboard does not work. Now you're wondering how I type the 'c's. Well, I have the wikipedia article on 'Concubinage' in my favourites bar at the top so that when I need a capital, or little 'c', I just copy it and then use the apple-v thing to paste it in on in the text. No probs.

Sometimes it's annoying because I've copied some link or bit of text and I end up with it in the middle of whatever I'm typing.

Sometimes, for a challenge, I try and use no words with 'c' in.

It's the little things.

My Arc

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:51:00 +0000

I'm on my back staring at the cold, sharp night sky on top of a hill. I'm not in this position of recline through choice: Bad decision making in regard to the lingering compacted snow at the top of Shooters Hill and unorthodox (and violent) dismounting of my beloved bicycle has given me time to consider the pristine heaven that would normally be processed as a background so empty of threat, so devoid of impact, that it fades into nothing while I ride.

After a few minutes, when the throbbing in my legs and back stop and I've managed to inconvenience an acceptable number of motorists, I decide to right myself and after the various parts of my conscience have had a good talk about it, we decide it's best to continue on foot. With my pedal cages clanking on the ground due to my slightly too-small wheels, I have no choice but to sling the bicycle over my shoulder and traipse across the heath to my home.

At this time of night, the heath is deserted. The temperature is below freezing, but I can't feel it. My lower body is still numb and my arms are warm from the effort of carrying my steel load. A friend once commented that she was amused by the relationship my bicycle and I have:

'Sometimes you ride it. Sometimes it rides you.'

With my attention now open and wondering, I take in the land that I cross first thing every morning and last thing every night. The snow is powder despite the feet that must have flocked here at the first word of it. The heath is deceptively large, and not even those thousands can destroy that desert of cold, white sand.

Briefly looking up to the village at the bottom of the heath I think back to what I once read about the 15th century polymath Nicholas of Kues, a man to whom no pefect sphere could exist and to whom every straight line was simply the imperceptible arc of an infinite and inconceivable circle. Here, at this moment, with the light from the lamps swimming across the tracks in the snow and bathing in the untouched patches, I can see the curvature of the land.

The light slithers from the edges of the heath and bounds across the plain, surfing on the sheer white snow, leaping to the distant boundary to struggle against the dense, callous black of the far horizon. It acts as a sheet that traces the outline of the world it rests on.

It describes for me a perfect, sweeping, pristine white arc. It extends from the edges of my vision, sweeping across the distant hills, hills that it carefully edits into blackness on its smooth incline. It cruises under the street lamps and darts in front of the old townhouses that straddle the heath. It slows toward the centre, exactly cutting through the whole of Blackheath Village itself before meeting at the lighted point of the church with it's famous 'Devil's Toothpick' spire. This is the arc that the polymath wrote of. I wonder at the infinite circle it describes, a circle that casually and unseen rips through the heart of the land. Unnoticed and undisturbed, it is a circle that sweeps out from this very point, further than any of us is ever going to see or know, it touches parts of the universe that rest in the most uncharted of theory.

The first cosmologists believed that the universe was an infinite sphere with the world at the edge and in the middle and nothing in between. This was the edge of that sphere, the fine line upon which the world resides, balanced on the precipice between all and nothing, the very universe and the perfect vacuum. For a moment my heart places me above the sphere as my mind struggles to grasp that on that celestial arc, no matter how closely one could look, that impeccable and ineffable curvature is never lost.

I realise my feet are wet, I only wear canvas shoes these days, and they won't stand up to the fine and treacherous powder around me. I realise that I'm now shaking from cold. I realise that my shoulder hurts from the hard steel digging into it. I realise that I need to get to the shop before it closes. I realise that I received a message and my phone has been buzzing away in my pocket for about ten minutes.

I try and grasp the arc again, try to block out the distractions of the world on the edge of that perfect curve. It's too late, I've lost it, the arc is gone, resuming the irregular, imperfect, flawed and human jagged edge that was built here an eternity after the template was shaped.

I make my way to the road, the sheer black that cuts through the arc and delicately get on my bicycle and, with no ceremony of beginning, start to pedal down the hill. There's simply no point in looking over my shoulder to check for cars, or stopping at red lights, or being wary of junctions, roundabouts and pedestrians. With the lingering geometry of that curve still fresh in my mind I realise that the sphere doesn't care for such obscure, man-made maths.

My EU Presidency

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:37:00 +0000

Helen's was the face that launched a thousand ships, these are the faces that run a continent. Herman Van Rompuy and Lady 'Cathy-Casual' Ashton are the new crown heads of Europe and in some shady and deceptively un-democratic back-room deals it was these two faces of modernity that were slipped into the most powerful seats within a few hundred miles of London.

Basically, Europe is divided into two main camps; Christians and Social Democrats, and everyone agreed that each camp would have one of the two seats; Presidency and Foreign Minister. Since Ashton managed to cop herself the Foreign Minister's chair, it was decided by Europe that His Blairiness couldn't have the presidency or else there'd be two Social Democrats at the top and that would seem a little too much like the reformation.

Instead, the Belgian prime minister, who has had his job for a little over a year was put in the top spot and now we have two 'people' who look suspiciously like inbred bullfrogs in charge of steering this continent off it's tectonic plate.

I think what amazes me is the way they almost seem like an awkward married couple. Sure, she had an affair a few years ago and his minute of silent, stubborn refusal before they get down to the once-monthly dirty doesn't let her forget it, and she hates the way he breathes because it's been the soundtrack of her menopause, the empty void that was once filled with a child's laughter is now replaced with the rustling of his nose hair and makes her long for a phone call, the sound of the cat-flap, the beep of the tumble dryer, the chink of crockery. And he just wants to spend time in his garage, or working on the lawn because it's through occupying his life with monotonous, controllable, repetitive and menial tasks that he can block out the thing that haunts him in the night and every time he watches the television past 10 p.m.; the fear of change, of the new, of the fresh. The only fresh he wants is cut grass, short back and sides and salad.

They hate their lives and they long for the day that the Doctor will tell them that the blood their coughing up is a clear sign of the end. They also don't care who goes first, safe in the knowledge that even if they were the last one to head on down the Styx at least they'd have a few months without the grumbling of discontent that their desperate, lonely marriage has become.

So yeah, they're in charge of Europe, you know, Herman and Cathy from the bungalow next-door. At last! This is our chance to compete as a continent with America and they're comely, cultured, courageous and charismatic Apollo-esque President.

Bring it on.

My Supersymmetry

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:31:00 +0000

It's round two for the Large Hadron Collider. After an initial set of power failures, catastrophic contamination of the coollant, a man going on TV to say that it was 'sabotaging itself... from the future!' and many grumbles, both from people expecting and not expecting the end of the universe as we know it at the hands of the Swiss, they're turning it on again. At half power.

'But what's the point!?' I hear you cry, 'What's the point in spending a gazillion Euros on an accelerator that is now only very slightly less powerful than the world's existing particle accelerators?' Well, the physics boffs swear they'll crank up the rev's when they're confident that it won't end time and space but that's kind of irrelevant since the thing that they're looking for, the Higgs boson, is supposed to exist at energy ranges well within half of the LHC's power (at about 120 - 118 gigaelectronvolts).

So why do we need this universally-uninsurable underground light-speed ferris wheel? Because ultimately what we're looking for is not the 'God particle' that Dan (Daniel) Brown based his 'comeback' on but for evidence of super-symmetry.

Supersymmetry essentially says that a fraction of a second after the big bang half the particles went and hid behind copies of themselves and became 'super-symmetric' partners. This theory manages to plug all the wide open holes that the standard model of quantum physics fame fails to fill; gravity, hierarchy and the fact that 75% of the universe is missing.

Supersymmetry, through various complex processes makes gravity explainable by quantum theory, just like the other forces. It also accounts for the large difference in size of the Higgs boson calculated by theory and then by maths (the hierarchy problem). So how do we know we found it? Easy, make a high enough energy reaction and some of the energy will be missing after.

But the critics disagree; 'Ha!' they say, 'If there was such a thing as an exact and opposite partner to every particle in the universe then they would have decayed into a neutron form and now make up about 75% of the mass of the universe, and you'll never be able to prove it because they'd be totally undetectable! Ha!'

It's almost too perfect.

My Vegetarianism

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:09:00 +0000

Lord Stern, the former adviser to the government on environmental affairs, narrowly over-shot the headlines this week when he claimed that we could all save the planet by not eating meat. There's so many angles on this that on further analysis, his point begins to resemble something that MC Escher would have said was 'bloody clever'.

The basis for this cruel hypothesis is that by not eating meat, the demand for 'fleshy goods' will drop, less of them will be reared, rounded up, shot in the brain and turned into McBurgers and stuff like that. So far so good, very Keynesian. There is a problem.

The demand for arable goods would now shoot up through the roof, amid the well documented lack of fertile farmland, unreasonable subsidies and pointless import/export laws. We've also now got cows, piggies, duckies and likkle, wickle chickeny-chickens on the Worldwide Wildlife Foundation's endangered watch list. After all, none of these guys have any natural habitats anymore, especially after your johnny-come-lately sense of guilt turned all that beautiful grazing pasture into the Cabbage-Patch Dolls new playground. Cute.

Don't forget that the major benefit of farming chickens is that you can raise, in a fundamental sense, 3.5 billion of them in an area no bigger than your washing machine. How are we supposed to feed the world on tomatoes, an example of flora that follows the same evolutionary route as Mariah Carey when it comes to making it's demands? If two-thirds of the world lives on rice, then that means two-thirds of us are vegetarian already, and there's enough work showing how rice field burning at the end of the season and when there aren't any buyers causes a huge amount of permanent damage to the farmland and the air above it. Cows on the other hand, have to die. It's just like, fate man.

Perhaps I'm just being over-sentimental. I'm a die hard meat-eater, I've killed chickens to eat myself, I've seen the whole process with all of Farmer Giles' little friends. It's not pretty, but neither is the prospect of a future of boiled beans and rice. It shouldn't be this complicated, why should I sacrifice my pork chops for an animal that would probably be extinct by now anyway if it hadn't been proven to be so lip-smackingly delicious when we decided to stop picking berries and stabbing mammoths with pokey sticks? (Incidentally this is an interesting book on why we farm the animals we do.) But good lord, who would betray that heritage?

My hairier and hungrier ancestors kept poking those much more terrifying but equally hairy elephants until one gave up, lay down and died for a reason. That reason is what I intend to have for dinner tonight. The biggest, juiciest most deliriously heady steak and chips I've ever seen.

I've sacrificed already because my parents and their parents were lazy and decided to mess the planet up and hope that we'd just come along and sort it all out. Please don't let them take my bacon sandwiches.

My Athenian Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:57:00 +0000

Yesterday a rather spectacular thing occured. A gentleman of respectable stature and clear intellect approached me at my workplace and introduced himself with:

'I have never read a book.'

He grinned, aware that this was clearly the challenge that I had been waiting for.

'I can read, I read the newspaper everyday, but I've never read a novel. I feel that I've been missing something.'

'You are,' I agreed 'do you know the story of the mad Athenian harbour-master?'

I proceeded to spin the yarn of the Thrasylaus.

This man was seized with a form of insanity which made him think that all the ships which put into the Piraeus (Athens' port) were his property. He greeted their arrival with the greatest delight, and when they departed bade them farewell and watched them sailing away. In a word, he was thoroughly happy, just as though he were really the owner of such great resources. If a ship was lost he did not miss it; if one arrived safe, he was full of glee and boasted of his good fortune to other people, until his brother Crito, returning from Sicily, took hold of him and handed him over to a physician. All the same, on returning to his senses, he maintained that he had never lived so pleasant a life as when he was in the grip of his delusion; for while enjoying so much happiness, he said, he had never suffered a moment's uneasiness.
(Taken from Adages II, vii 1 to 3 by Desiderius Erasmus)

I didn't put it as eloquently as Erasmus, but in making this point I myself realised the importance of fiction. That hour or so a day of happy delusion is vital to our sanity. If we must suffer 23 hours of slings and arrows then we surely deserve an hour to imagine ourselves at the head of a vast fleet.

Anyway, after twenty minutes or so of highly thoughtful discussion I convinced him to buy The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. A work of singular genius, which I felt best epitomised an accurate analogy of the happiness of delusion.

I would recommend this book to anyone, whether you've read before or not, as would anybody else who has read it.

The happiness of delusion and the absurdity of invention. These must be the defining parts of my life nowadays.

My Nervous System

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:21:00 +0000

I remember seeing this, Nervous System from Conrad Shawcross a few years ago and being blown away. I think it's one of the things that kicked me into Interactivity as a subject area, or certainly kinetic art anyway.

He's just started a new project called Chord which is showing in a tunnel in Holborn. It's the same as Nervous System but loads bigger and made of metal and that. Unfortunately, the only picture I could find of it is that one, but you can see a bit of Chord in the background. There's an article about it here, but unfortunately every single day is sold out forever. Damn.

My Thylacine

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:21:00 +0000

This is the Thylacine. It's supposed to have been extinct because people put dogs in Australia. Silly. Although there are apparently sightings very occasionally. This makes it a cryptid, something that, through a combined sense of boredom and blatant disregard for the mundane reality that faces me on an hourly basis with an offensive slab-like punch of 'hey, I'm people and life and I'm real predictable like that bit, about two minutes into Friends, where everyone meets in the coffee place and goes "oh hey"' fascinates me.

Sparse sentencing. Regardless, considering it for a new tattoo, it's life story is fascinating.

My High-Five

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:42:00 +0000

I love high-fives. There's something intrinsically positive about it; the build-up, the satisfactory connect, the sting of affection and the hangover of a childish grin shared between friends gives me a joy that warms my very soul.

So, cycling to work this morning, imagine my excitement when I saw a woman on Waterloo bridge at the bus stop, leaning out into the road to hail the bus behind me like so:

I literally couldn't resist. I delivered one medium-power high-five, right to the palm, as I trundled on by.

I turned just in time to see her look of disgust turn to confusion then to the joyous smirk that only a high-five can give.

My Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Ahem. That's the Internet you know. Well, a bit of it.

My Protest

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:27:00 +0000

The Huffington Post has posted it's collection of the funniest protest signs of 2009. Naturally, most of them revolve around homosexuality and racism.

Some just have poor spelling.

Some defy the boundaries of sense.

Some just further what was formerly a marginally recovering American steroeotype in Europe.

But yeah, most of them just don't make sense.

And this one was pretty much made with Marcus Harris in mind.

There are a couple of things that come out of the American right taking up protesting. The first is that you realise theat they're in a minority, they're the opposition now. This is nice. Secondly is that a sign saying 'Homo's Go To Hell' is a lot more fun to play with than one saying 'America is Killing Innocent People.' As they have in former years.

Anyway, those guys over at God Hates Protestors have cashed in on this. From the witty and subversive;

To the plain lovely;

AW.

My First Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Tobias Revell) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:36:00 +0000

In case you're wondering why those last two were the second and third. Well the first was in wales. With Gavin. Organised by the Utrophia lot. Laugh away. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't sunny, it wasn't even dry or warm but it was good old fashioned folk fun.