Infinite Questions, Finite Answers

How can we truly understand infinity? What can you say you know that goes on for ever and ever and never ends? The world? It was once formed from a cloud of interstellar dust, and it wasn't a world then. And while it has lived - is living - it will have to die eventually and return to the pile of dust it once was.

Time? Time is a human concept. We decided how long a second should last, a minute, an hour, a year. And even then these minutes, these seconds have only been passing since we decided they existed and we are the ones who have imposed time back to the start of the universe.

Start. If infinity truly existed, there would be no place in our vocabulary for the word start, nor for the word end.

I have heard some people say that emotions are infinite, and they give rise to human creativity. That there is a never ending circle of life and death, children being born and people dying. None of these things are infinite. Not really. There was a first life, a single celled organism. When and where I don't know. There was a first human life too. Or rather a first germ-line mutation that led to Homo sapiens sapiens. And the answer to when that was haunts a lot of people. And eventually, who knows when, who knows where, there will be a final human life. Either through extinction or evolution, but it will happen. And when we die, so will our creativity. Our love, our hatred, our laughter and our tears. No. None of these are infinite. The life span of the human race is fleeting. The length of a life of an individual even more so. And this is a good thing, because our minds and our hearts are only equipped to deal with the finite.

Not even the universe is infinite, it has to end and it has to start somewhere and somewhen. And even if you believe in the big-bang-big-squish theory, when was the first bang? When will be the final squish?

Everything comes down to circles in the end. Nature likes circles and they fascinate us as well. And a circle shows, at least to my mind, the closest thing to infinity. Ever seen a Möbius strip? Follow it which ever way you will, it has only one side. Your finger tracing a side is inside, and then outside and then inside again. But even this is finite. For the infinity, the foreverness is trapped within this single piece of paper which itself is trapped within the world that we see and know. And how can something that ends hold something that doesn't?

As a human being, I look at the world from within the laws of finity. And to be honest, that sits a whole lot better than the concept of existing without end ever will. It scares me a little. Because to never end, it has to never grow or develop, and that leads to stagnation. I have never found something that I want to keep exactly as it is. Things need to grow and change, or else they wither and die. Even love. I love my parents dearly. I always have done and I always will do. But the love I feel for them now is different to that I felt when I was three, or ten, or will feel when I am thirty. Because it has grown with me. It has changed, and ended and started again in a different shape. It may have done it so gradually so as to fool you into thinking it was one continuous never ending thing, but it has changed, and it is different.

Infinity is one of those questions that will always be at the back of my mind, along with a few others, like, why do we use the word blue to describe the colour blue? When was it decided that that particular syllable(s) - blue, bleu, azule - was the right word to show what it was? I suspect that these questions will always muse in the back of my mind, never to be answered. But that's aright. Because by putting the concept never on it gives it a finite value, a 0 instead of a maybe that would otherwise be the case.

Still. The question remains. How can we truly understand infinity?

Froth Froth Froth

A fair bit of prior warning to people. This post is entirely to satisfy my LARP froth. LARP = Live Action RolePlay. Live Action RolePlay = win. Epic, epic win.

I mentioned in an earlier post something called LARP. I may have mentioned it in more than one earlier post, but since they are coming up to 'bout a year old now, there isn't much chance I'll remember, given my track record.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I went to my first truly big LARP event. I've not talked about it sooner because, well, you know how it is. Revision yadda yadda, exams yadda yadda... You know, just the entire reason I'm visiting the great northern wilderness for.

Anyway, I went to Wigan for one of the big CP events, one that is held there every year. I am now going to sum it up in 10 words. No particular order I hasten to add. just, the words that say it the most to me, as a complete newcomer.

1. Mud. Soo, soo much mud. I lost my boot in the mud whilst cooking bacon. EVERY morning.

2. Rain. I have been assured that it usually pelts it down at Wigan and this year was no exception. Although there was enough sun to get sunburned. Go figure.

3. Bacon. I have come to the conclusion that LARPers Aren't actually entirely human. They can apparantly live off bacon alone. They seem to be some sort of half carnivore, half machine construct.

4. Kit. Ranging from the ooohhh my word Iwoot to good grief, is that for real? mostly Iwoot though. Shiny shiny kit. Weapons and shields and bottles and bags and uuuummmmm LARP shinies.

5. Tents. Some beautiful IC ones and some funky (and huge, and tiny, and colourful...) OC ones. Having to take off boots before I could crawl into the tent was fun too. I had to hang my socks out to dry.

6. Roleplay. Done live style. No dice for these hard core members of the gaming community. I saw things that genuinely moved me that weekend.

7. Battles. Epic, EPIC battles. Both observed and participated in. Watching you could see patterns and where these pattens broke up and where people when down. Participating in them? Chaos. Amazing chaos. You are focused on the person in front of you, the one who is trying to hit you. If you're lucky, then they go away and there is another person in front of you. If not then you go away and there is another person in front of them.

8. Death. Most notably to me, my own death. And funeral. and standing down ceremony. I cried. Blubbed like a baby. You forget the outside world to that level. It's pretty immense. And intense.

9. Monstering. An uber uber uber part of the weekend. A chance to let your character rest a little and play something else. An angry cripple, a vengeful goblin, an upset ogre. Doesn't matter if you die. Coz, you know, monsters can respawn. Monstering is so so much fun. A chance to just let yourself go.

10. Refs. White tabbards, hi-vis vests, paggering :p They kinda make it work. they stand there, looking a bit out of place if they have the high-viz vests on, they make up the monsters and get them to where they're going and telling them what they need to do. I liked the refs I met. They were geekier than I was.

Well, the explanations there make it slightly more than ten words, but take the first word of every point and then the rest as a sub-vocal blurb. THEN it works.

The entire weekend remains as a series of snapshots. The frying pan, the standpipe with it's lack of a drain, Gate guard, the alchemists meeting, Water carrying for the monsters and then dying because of the monsters. Dying, and the funeral, that bit is fairly clear. Strong emotions attached I guess. And the OC tent. Thinking I had broken the zip, fixing it. breaking the zip on mine and then another sleeping bag. Lord knows what I would have done had the event been any longer. And then packing up. That bit was rather busy and then the journey home? I didn't even get out of Wigan before I was asleep.

All in all, it was one of the most amazing weekends I've had in a long while, to the point I'm still frothing about it on a near daily, if not daily basis. Leek is next. I want! I want NOW.

I'm sorry the formatting is so dense folks. apparently, it doesn't want to do what I'm telling the computer to do. I'll see if I can fiddle with it when I'm back on my machine, and back in FireFox. Also, sleepies and lack of spacing means that there ARE mistakes in there. I just hope I caught most of them.

Late Nights and Labyrinths.

I'm sat on a bed in my friend's room, whilst both friends are asleep on the bed, with the Labyrinth on in the background- Bowie for the win. Just for the hair- and for the first time in months I'm not aching all over. Codeine really is a blessing in disguise. N.B. apparently, they're not asleep, muttered comments about well, yes, about 42 must be kept to myself in the future.


Where does inspiration come from? From the heavens? From beyond that, beyond the universe? Is it a tangible thing, or is it like a shadow on a cloudy day? Or is it the pattern of light hiding in the water and throwing sparkles up on your wall?

It's different for everyone. They say Newton got his inspiration from an apple, a physical thing, and Archimedes found his in the bath. I do a lot of my good work at night, in the small hours of the morning, like now in fact. Things drift to me on the night, 'soft as velvet, dark as sin'. I must admit, when there is light around, I am usually more concerned with wanting to be elsewhere, namely out in the light, enjoying it. I don't do that enough regrettably. Not enjoying it for it's own sake.

Moods play a big part, well of course they do really. If you have lost someone, you want to write something to remember them by, if you have just had the best day of your life then things will naturally be a lot more exuberant than it would be in another case. (the birds are singing now. Its times like this when I could almost forget that I am in a small room in a huge student estate, surrounded by people.)

I find that most ideas come to me in the small of the night because by that point I have had a fairly full day, and my body is accustomed to earlyish nights. So by three or four in the morning I am at that point where I am half asleep, half meditating, and because I'm not chasing ideas down they can form naturally. Do you find that? The more you try to force an idea, the less it works or works well?

But once that idea is there, and has been left to brew for a while, then it works and that is the point you can push it along and cause it to have a more structured shape, to make it work for you, If you're really lucky, it turns out to be a fantastic idea, not simply a good one and the writing seems to write itself. (If you had seen that last paragraph unedited, you would be able to tell when it is being written: It had lost all attempts at sentence structure and grammar. Which is a pity, me being a fair bit of a grammar nazi.)

Looking at some of the wonderful pieces of art, be it a painting, a sculpture, a book, or even an inspired piece of research it's hard to believe that it is all due to a chaotic connection of nerves in someones brain. And that leads to the thought of is there outside help? is there something giving us ideas and thoughts, and if so, are they tangible to them?

I can imagine it wouldn't be a glamorous job, not at all, I can envision an open office plan building, with a typical office warren made of noticeboards for walls and pictured of the wife or the dog on the desk, with those awful inspirational calenders that seem to find their way into every office environment of this type, with thousands upon thousands of workers, all at their desks, filling out forms on old clunky computers that don't work very well any more.

'Oh hell, I've got another P189. Lord but there are a lot of them going around at the minute, production must be trying to fill a quota, although why they want yet another bad lesbian porn manga, I'll never understand.' And: ' Arrrrrrrggh that stupid computer has crashed AGAIN, all this last week's work was on that. I'll never get that production bonus if this carries on, tech support promised me this wouldn't happen again, PROMISED!'

If it is like that, then I think that I would rather prefer that it was random mis-firings of neurones. Because lets face it, the normal neurons would be concerned with keeping the body alive. Self preservation is a wonderful thing, and sometimes I think genius must run counter to that. 'The good die young.' Sure they do. Because they forget to do the normal things like eat and pay the bills so they have clean water and heating in the dead of winter and such.

I think that because it is now full light and I started this in full dark, and because the ramblings in my head, let alone on paper are starting to get increasingly disjointed, I will end this here, because I could go on for a long time and this is already of rather epic length. Good day.

The sea.

It's said that you don't realise how much things mean to you until they are gone. I found that not entirely true. I grew up by the seaside. And, even though I didn't go very often, the smell and the sound of the seagulls and when I was close enough, the sound of the sea were sounds I was more than used to. Then I moved up north to the middle of the country. The smell was wrong, although at first I was too excited to finally be at uni to pay that much heed, and there are no seagulls. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive fan of the seagull. They've stolen my fish and chips before now, and the birds up here don't half make a racket, but it's not the same.

Anyway, last Thursday I went to the beach. We parked in a car park right on the coast, overlooking the sea, and walked up the sand towards the town. Only when I was there and the smell and the sounds and the wind- not even the wind is the same inland, and as for being able to read the weather? I wish.- It just took me right back home and right back to my childhood. People say that smell is the most vivid aide-memoir to the memory, and it made me relax truly and completely for the first time in a long while. I guess, once a child of the coast, always a child of the coast. It's like a child brought up in a city, they will never be truly at ease in the quiet of the countryside where nothing is really going on. I hadn't realised before now just how much of a sea person I am.

And this begs the question: Can I really settle here in Huddersfield, in the middle of the country? Or will I eventually have to move to the coast? It's funny really. Out of all the universities I looked at, Huddersfield was the only one not on the coast, and I chose this one in the end by closing my eyes and stabbing a finger at the screen. And yet, I've been so very happy here, except, I now realize, for the lack of the sea.

The sea is an amazing creature. It has moods and feelings, and the sheer variety of life it holds in all of its waters from the hottest to the coldest is simply amazing. If you go to the seaside in the middle of summer when the wind is barely stirring, then it can seem like it is sleeping, waiting. In a light wind, enough to make the water a little choppy, on a sunny day, if you stand on a pier and look down into it, it can seem like there is light trapped just below the surface, like a school of fish, and if only you can get down there, you can capture that light and save in a bottle. And in a storm...

I was taken to Newhaven marina one time during a big thunderstorm, and we sat there in the car and watched as the waters came crashing over the arm of the marina, grey and sullen with so much energy it was almost breathtaking. I went back the next day, and the waters had calmed down again, but there was still a fair chop, moderate rather than good and the white horses were out in force.

When you get the crest of a wave and it breaks, and the white foam moves outwards from the point of the break and spreads along the rest of the wave, people see horses. I see one. Just one for every broken crest. And then I see a heard of them galloping towards the beach. And sometimes, it's not horses at all. Sometimes, it's wolves. When the wind picks up that little bit more, the horses take on a meaner edge, race a little bit faster, and to my mind, take on a little bit of that pack mentality of the wolves.

There is always something new about the sea. every time you go, it is different, a different face, a different piece of water is there. And as you watch that water bows out and lets the next principle take it's place on the surf.

I spoke of the shipping forecast earlier. One of these days I will go into greater depth about it, because I like the shipping forecast. It is like poetry as much as the sea is.

Let there be cake. Let there be jelly. Let there be... jellypig?

I am a fairly geeky person. At least, I have been told I am a fairly geeky person. I do, and enjoy doing things that are so far into the realms of geekdom you can't even see the border to normality. Things like roleplaying, Live Action Role Playing(LARP), Science, 'specially biology. And this doesn't bother me.

It does however have a point. Last time I was LARPing, before Time in (when I was effectively Hanna and not a Sergeant in the militia (another story... maybe forthcoming)) some other people, equally as geeky as I am, who have been doing it for a lot longer than I have discovered my equal geekiness when it comes to biology. And more specifically, Genetics. At the same time another conversation was going on about pigs and the yummyness that is pig meat. And I mentioned that you can get glow in the dark pigs. Well, their trotter and teeth glow in the dark.

Cue disbelieving silence.

And my insistence. and, bless her, that of my friend also on my course and also a LARPer. Soon we had won them round. "but how can you have a fluorescent pig?!?" they asked.

Well, I replied, you see, Jellyfish have this gene called green fluorescent protein(GFP). This makes them glow in the dark (incidentally, I found out today in my lecture that you can get yellow GFP and red GFP. How fun, multi-colours!), so scientists managed to put the GFP in the pig so that the trotters and the teeth glowed in the dark.

And now, I have a commission. I am to make jellypig. Strike that, I, we, have two commissions to make jellypig. For two people. It's a pity really. I wanted to make my hair glow in the dark. Still I guess it will have to wait for a bit. For the funding. and the Permission. and the lab space. then though, then Thunderbirds Are Go!

In the meantime, I shall have to stick to my other hobby. Cooking. I am going to have to figure this one out, but I'm thinking jellypig, giant jaffa cake style. they will get their pig. alternatively, get some pork and encase it in jelly the shape of a fish. a little less edible however, I think on the whole, I like the cake idea better.

So there shall be cake. And it shall be good cake. And people shall eat and enjoy their cake and all will be well.

Erudication

I have some nights when I just can't sleep. Just can't for one reason or another. So, a couple of late nights ago, I re-wondered across dictionary.com . And fell across the word of the day. And decided that I was going to take that word of the day and make a blog entry out of it. The last time I had a look, the word was Ellipsis:

el⋅lip⋅sis 

Grammer.
1. a. The omission from a sentence or other construction of one or more words that would complete or clarify the construction, as the omission of who are, while I am, or while we are from I like to interview people sitting down.
b. The omission of one or more items from a construction in order to avoid repeating the identical or equivalent items that are in a preceding or following construction, as the omission of been to Paris from the second clause of I've been to Paris, but they haven't.
2. Printing. A mark or marks as--, ..., or ***, to indicate an omission or supression of letters or words.

/ɪˈlɪpsɪs/ Show Spelled Pronunciation

Now, it is beautiful sounding word that slithers off the tongue. It makes me smile in the same way the word susurrus does. As I have indicated in a previous post, I read a lot. And a lot of what I read is fantasy. And a lot of fantasy delineates the need for precision when performing magics. So I got thinking, what if... The thinking stopped there on that occaision, because I got a healthy ker-thud across the back of my head with a foam zwihandler. It sometimes doesn't do to think in the midst of a LARP fight.

But, after falling into an exhausted sleep that night, I woke up nice and early the next day and continued the thought. What if there was an ellipsis in Magic. In a spell or something of the like. And a story was born. Mostly born. The sketchy outline of the twinkle in a father's eye was born. On a side note, I have just twigged what that means. And I am sat here shaking my head at my obtuseness.

Because, every time I see an ellipsis in some writing, I a) get distracted by thinking: that's an ellipsis, pretty word! and b) start thinking of something completely random. I believe last time the song ten little speckled frogs started playing in my head, only it started at the number three. And just for the record, it's PIE dammit! There ain't no grubs to be seen. So the story has come across it's challenges. But it is being written. But I have a feeling that It'll be a touch too long for a blog, which was it's original intention. So I'll either have to publish it in stages, providing it is fit to be read by the public, or there is going to be one very long post. I can't make any promises, but it may be appearing soon-ish. Mark the ish. It will be very ish.

In the meantime, Nose back to the grindstone. Work work work... oranges and sea-salt don't go together. See what I mean. now that song'll be stuck in my head for ages.

Books, books, books.

They say that a person's bookshelf can tell a lot about them. I'm kind of curious to know what mine would say. Because I do have, and read often classics like Jane Eyre, and they sit next to some scifi/fantasy that most people I know haven't even heard of. And that's sat right next to a whole load of pop-sci books. Not quite enough to rival my father's collection yet, but give it time.

In a way. I can actually blame this on my genes. On both Nature and Nurture. My father is a big big reader, and his siblings, the only ones I see of a regularity, also love to read. It became understood that when we went to see my uncle, we would raid his bookcase. Now he doesn't have wallpaper in his bedroom. He has bookcases. And books. Lots and lots of books.

All of this has combined to the point that I am a BIG reader, and by big, I mean that, in certain portions of my life, people literally never saw me without a book in my hands. Recently, I have become a fairly big facebooker as well, and I found this whilst browsing (or facebook stalking and certain of my friends call it). So, curious, I pulled it off and followed most of the instructions. All bar step six, in fact.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '#' to the ones you didn't like.
4) Star '*' those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (I keep trying. I'm two thirds of the way through now. It's not that I don't like it, but I keep getting distracted)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy* (sitting on my shelf, looking at me disapprovingly)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x+ (clever. very clever)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier * (possibly one of the most famous first lines ever... now to read the rest)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x+
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I think I started this. then got distracted. by that annoying work thing.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Apparantly better than the film, but the film put me off. The French Leftenent's Woman, however, is a cracking read.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x+
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons*
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (ish. I had to give it back to the library half way through)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck*
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie*
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville*
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton x+
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute x+++(if I had a favourite, this would be a hot contender)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've heard the song summery by Martin Carthy, does that count? Oor Hamlet, if you want to find it)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Meant to have read 6 out of these? Is the fact that I have read more like 35 a sign of a misspent youth? Now a few years ago, the BBC did something called The Big Read. I followed this with interest, and now have a copy of that list on my board, because I am determined to read through it. That list is different from this list, although a lot of the titles are the same. Which is why, in part, I have actually read so many on this list. For example, A Town Like Alice which is one of my ALL time favourite reads, (I must find that copy, I know it is hanging around somewhere) I only read because it was on the list and it was the first one I found in my father's bookcase.

I don't know if I will ever finish these lists.I can hope, but equally, I also hope I won't, or at least that they get added to by a new big read list. Because that means that there will always be books out there to read. Not that there wouldn't be, but, the lists make it more realizable somehow.

I think I have run out of steam just about. So I'll go back to my book. Not one on the list, but a wonderful take of the beauty and the beast fairytail. The Fire Rose it is called. By Mercedes Lackey. Try it. Consider it the start of my list for you. Whoever you may be. Enjoy.