an evening with William Gibson at #guardianlive

An entertaining evening with William Gibson, who developed the original cyberspace through his novel Neuromancer.

Fascinating 30 years after its original appearance to hear him talk of his lack of knowledge of technology back in the days of the earliest Personal Computers. He spotted an advert for the Apple IIc, which looked like a briefcase and needed a separate television plugged into it. Add that idea to him watching people gaming with early Segas and appearing to look into the space behind the TV set and the idea of a connected alternate reality began to appear.

Gibson also assumed that everyone nerdy had already thought of the idea of cyberspace, but for him it provided the arena to present his commissioned novel.

Fast forward to now (I won't say in real time - we've learned its a legacy term) and it was like being able to splice into thought lines thirty years along the novel's trajectory.

Although, some of the ideas of (e.g.) the cellphone interruptertron might have been too advanced for the sensibilities of the early 80s, when people were still getting used to four television channels and the idea of satellite broadcasting.

Gibson explained the necessity of some of his novel's devices 'I wasn't very good at getting people in and out of rooms' and referred to others who had inspired - E.M. Forster's Aspects of a Novel, the literary effects pedals of William Burroughs.

He's just published 'The Peripheral' although I'm only a (virtual) few pages in. Set, I believe, in a future London, which he says is his non-American reference city. A city he knows pretty well but one that also changes enough between his enjoyed visits.

Don't be a stranger, Mr Gibson.

The Imitation Game

Time to see 'The Imitation Game' today, which is a movie dramatising the life of Alan Turing, who led a team which cracked the German Enigma machine encryption in World War II.

An enjoyable and engrossing movie, although there were some parts that made me think '-er- I'm not sure it would have been like that'. Some adaptations would certainly have been in the interests of dramatisation and in some cases to simplify the storyline.

Some people have taken exception to the way this version gets told and the historical inaccuracies. I'll regard it as an accessible way to show at least a couple major intertwined themes, in an acceptable movie length format.

There was a simple code example included in the trailer:

uvsjoh
etcemgf
wkh
irmkqe
htij

It's fairly easy to crack the above using a certain technique, which is similarly adopted in the movie. There's a movie moment quite early on where something gets said which is like the planted line for the later plot point. I won't reveal it, but it made me think 'a-hah' when it was first mentioned.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays an autistic Turing, and there's a great surrounding cast keeping the two time lines in the story-telling moving along.

Afterwards we headed to a Spanish restaurant where the chatter rolled forward to today's spying implications with cloud data. With the suspected state-developed multi-stage Regin viral payload resurfacing, maybe it's time to break out the InfoSec Taylor Swift Security Starter Pack.

a warmup for seasonal overpacking?

With the festive season fast approaching, I realise that I don't always understand the logic of packing goods for postal delivery.

I can understand that there could be an outer shell carton to help prevent handling damage, and from time to time I marvel at goods delivered in those customised double layer boxes.

This time I'm slightly confounded by the packaging approach to what was a 330cm by 4 cm box containing a tube.

The box which was packed inside a roughly 400cm by 30cm by 25cm carton. The amount of bubble wrap to prevent rattling around was truly wondrous. The box could have easily contained 40 of the tubes. Even the chap delivering commented that the box seemed very light for something so large.

I guess it stopped them posting it through the letterbox.

penguined out

The television adverts for Christmas are in full swing now and the one with the penguins has been on for about week.

Judging by the local store, it seems to be working, because just about everyone seems to be walking around carrying the penguin bags.

Bizarrely, they are also being advertised on ebay for several quid each.

This shopper has done particularly well, managing to clutch four of the rarer Sloane variety simultaneously.


Although it could get tricky when he gets to the tube station.

finding Vivian Maier

I finally watched that movie/documentary about photographer Vivian Maier during the week. She's the one whose pictures were only discovered fairly recently by John Maloof, who has since been promoting the fine body of work.

The area that gets the most attention are the street photographs, often from around Chicago, where Maier was working as a nanny. Often shot on a Rolleiflex TLR from chest height, many embody the idea of getting in close.

What struck me when I saw her pictures originally was their consistently high quality captures of people in scenes from around the city. She seems to have been able to find ideal moments to tell stories with her film.

I knew there were more pictures, but didn't know the sheer scale of the photographs she had taken. There's tens of thousands, including many that had not been developed, including New York, a world tour and some from Europe. There's a high strike rate of good shots in the ones I have seen, although it's difficult to know whether some were destined for cropping because so many were originally unprocessed.

The documentary shows the unfolding of her story. Born in Chicago she presented herself to employers as if from a small town in France. In the audio recordings she speaks with a hybrid American accent shaded with what to me sounds more German than French. There's footage and recollections from her visits to the family village in rural France.

Maloof is, himself, something of a fastidious person, who meticulously adds to the materials he first acquired from an auction. He has progressively assembled more from Maier's life. There's her still photography both monochrome and colour, some 8mm and 16mm cine films, audio cassette diaries and paper journals. Maier was also a hoarder and there's thousands of receipts and other pieces of documentary evidence around.

At one level the documentary provides answers, at another it doesn't. Why so many pictures undeveloped? How was the continuous photography funded? Why did she choose to show herself with so many different names/spellings/identities? Why nothing ever shown? She appears to also have flipped from mild mannered to sometimes vicious, including with the children she nannied.

One of the people interviewed said something about Vivian becoming too crazy and having to be let go from that specific nannying role.

The documentary was partly about the photography, partly about her curious life and it couldn't help but also show the quirks of Maloof now trying to ensure there's decent recognition for Maier's work.

Almost Wordless Wednesday - #vehicle

or maybe:

Yes, a few of the fancy cars in the nearby car park are being wrapped up for the winter season. Others parked here are more hardy:

stopping the leaves from falling

I was around by Parliament today and decided to have a quick peep at where they are de-leafing the lime trees inside New Palace Yard.

I took a quick snap and you can just see the trees in the background. The ones on the left in the picture still have the bright yellow looking leaves, then there's a couple of stepladders and the trees on the right are de-leafed.

The gardeners have explained that its a more efficient process than letting nature take its course and then raking up the fallen leaves.

I originally thought it was in some kind of major public thoroughfare where thousands of tourists would be slipping over on the wrong kind of leaves.

No, actually its around that secure bit leading to the underground car park for MPs.

In one of the reports it said something about the leaf removal being a form of planching. I don't buy it. I thought planching was knitting the branches together to make a sort of canopy or trellis. This leaf denuding seems to be more like a performance art installation.

Still, it can't be as expensive as that other MP thing going on.

The High Court investigating whether the MP said something unpleasant to the police in Downing Street when they would't open the gate for his bicycle. The MP is suing the Sun Newspaper and apparently has racked up just over £500k costs via his legal representatives Atkins Thompson.

I don't know whether these fees include the speculated £150k for expert inputs to the case. Last year it was reported that one academic was supposed to have been paid £80,000 to calculate the time it would have taken to deliver the MP's alleged “59 syllable” exchange (which apparently took 48 seconds).

I would have provided the speaking rate information for half that fee, but now it is too late, so here's a free version.

Using spoken presentations as an available metric, the average words per minute spoken is around 163 and the average syllables per minute is around 230. So in, say, 45 seconds it would be easily possible to deliver 59 syllables and as much as 230*.75 = 172 syllables. In approximate terms it would only need 15 seconds to deliver the phrases at presentation speed.

But, of course, the MP is saying he didn't actually utter the alleged words.

It all seems somewhat disproportionate. I gather the MP has some previous form for fruity-language exchanges with the police, so somehow this one all seems to have got a bit out of hand.

cycling towards winter

I've pretty much switched into winter cycling mode now, although a couple of weeks of gap whilst up north means that I still have a way to go to reach this year's target of 4,000 miles.

Not only that, but I got one of those yow!! leg cramps after my last fifteen miles. Not at the time, but later in the evening. It's slightly annoying because its one of those things that I can just tell will come back until I get rid of the knots in my legs.

Maybe some stretching is required? More likely some electrolyte.

Anyhoo, I'll try to crank out another twenty or so miles this afternoon. And take some High 5 along.

a NaNoWriMo reason for being a bit quiet

Oops. I did accidentally succumb to the novel writing madness. A slightly late start and then some time spent underground didn't help, although I somehow seem to be on track at the moment.

Going to that Moon exhibition at the Baltic gave me the initial whimsical thought, around the idea of the second moon of Earth. I've also roped in Ganymede, which is the largest moon of Jupiter.

Now I just need 50,000 words, without resorting to space monsters and battle cruisers.

realistic hollywood haboob

My recent visit to the cinema got me thinking about the drama of dust storms.

They say that global warming will increase the propensity for dust storms. Cinematically, they look dramatic and can form part of dystopian (sorry about that) storylines.

The thing is, I can remember experiencing a real one that looked just about as spectacular as those in the movies.

It was only around three years ago, when we were in Scottsdale, Arizona and one blew up from the right side of my view and then tracked slowly as a wall of sand across the landscape. I took a photo of the newspaper story at the time.

Not a movie still. This is the real one from around Scottsdale.

We'd only just arrived in Scottsdale which is right next door to Phoenix in the Arizona desert. They both have that 'settled-in' look which dramatically stops at the city limits. It is similar at the outskirts of Palm Springs in California, where you drive past the last block and are suddenly back in desert. Holding back the environment with technology. Switch it off and the sand returns.

The Americans call these big dust storms Haboobs, which I'd heard before when I was in the deserts of Arabia. I think haboob is actually an Arabic word.

Wherever it's from, it's interesting that Hollywood's IMAX depiction of really big storms don't seem to be much larger than some of the real ones that already cut through parts of Arizona.

another year adds a bit more history

This year we celebrated my birthday in a castle.

Langley Castle was originally built in 1350 during the reign of Edward III, but then got caught up in a scuffle with Henry IV in 1405. He was not too happy with the Barons of Tynedale and in Henry's campaign against the Percys his troops set fire to it. Henry Percy lived to fight another rebellion, but his land had been confiscated and after the second rebellion failed Percy's head was put on a pole on London Bridge.

The castle was mainly a shell for the next few hundred years even when the the Earls of Derwentwater and Viscount Langley took over the estate. They sided with the Jacobite rising in 1715. It didn't do them much good either as they were carted off to the Tower of London where they were executed.

There's a large stone cross by the roadside nearby which says: In memory of James and Charles Viscounts Langley. Beheaded on Tower Hill 24th Feb 1716 and 8th Dec 1746. For Loyalty to their Lawful Sovereign.

They were trying to get James VII of Scotland back onto the British throne instead of Queen Mary II and that Dutchman, William of Orange.

After the executions, the Crown confiscated the estate and took away the titles. Curiously, the estate's administration passed to the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich, some 300 miles away. It may explain why the nearby pub is called the Anchor.

The castle remained a ruin until a local historian bought it in 1882. His name was Cadwalladar Bates and he decided to restore it to its original 14th Century look, admittedly with a Victorian twist. Because it had been left as a ruin for the previous 400 years, it didn't suffer from the kinds of modifications that affected many castles. Cadwalladar and his wife Josephine worked on the castle for many years, and after Cadwallader's death, his wife continued the restoration until her own death in 1933.

The building was then used as a barracks in World War II, then as a girls' school, before being bought by another local businessperson, who converted it to its current use as a rather desirable place to stay. I somehow managed to stay in the actual Cadwalladar room, complete with its 7 foot thick stone walls.

To keep things moving along, the castle as a business is now owned by MIT Professor Dr Stuart Madnick, who is a well-known computer scientist, and author or co-author of hundreds of computing books.

For us, it provided a very suitable place for a bit of a celebration, although I notice there's quite an updraft from the quantity of birthday candles.

No wonder the staff looked edgy, they didn't want a repeat of what happened in 1405.

interstellar transcendence

You can't go wrong having a corn field somewhere in a science fiction movie. Come to think of it, the big chord from the intro to Also Sprach Zarathustra is another goody.

Without giving anything away, the new Christopher Nolan movie manages both in the first minute or so of screen time.

Interstellar is more my kind of space movie than, say, the upcoming Jupiter Rising, which appears to have CGI overtly plastered throughout the film.

By contrast, Interstellar uses mainly practical filming, with real sets and real atmospherics, best viewed on the largest available screen.

And, although a space film, there's a clear grounded quality alongside the movie's big ideas, making something altogether more thought-provoking than the arcade shoot-em-ups of many comic book movies.

There's a few places where a character has to give a plausible-sounding science explanations, and Nolan uses one of his fascinations, expecting the audience to track various timelines (think of Memento and Inception).

Science folk will no doubt pick on some of the paradoxes and questions raised but I'll take that as a Nolan victory that people are puzzling it through.

But I don't really want to say too much about the story and characters, so I guess I'll just have to say it's a movie I'll see on a big screen again.