I'm starting this blog entry with no idea what I'm actually going to say. I've never really been sure what the purpose of this blog was. For a while it was meant to help form thoughts for what is rapidly becoming the Never-Ending PhD. Well, today, what I'll do instead is be self-indulgent. More than usual. It's my blog after all; if anyone's reading, apologies - some vaguely connected thoughts follow; they'll all loosely related by a thread of cold icy chill. One chill from telly, one from history, one from the interwebnets, and I guess there's some snow there at the end, as well as the sun being destroyed. Which is must have been, cos it's dark. No real narrative thread.

Interwebnets first: I'm on academia.edu, and it turns out that it emails you when you're googled. This is only slightly more passively narcissistic than googling oneself directly, but it's been quite alarming. It should, of course, have been obvious, but since I decided to use my own surname (rather than my old secret leftie name you'll never ever find), every blog comment or appearance I make is viewable. When someone googles 'dan olner climate change' what do they find? Having not done a thorough survey, I suspect they find someone with inconsistent views, and venting more in comments than I would consider civil. A recent google of my name + 'economics' reveals more than I knew myself about the various places I've been posting, and that my Transitionista sympathies are on clear display. This is stuff to make sociologists wet themselves; we're all seeing each other now, consensually. I don't really feel like I consented, though sticking to my own name seems an honest choice, but it does look like I've ceded privacy by default. I can't recant anything. Luckily there are no awful, drunken diatribes out there - I don't think. Who knows?

"Assuming the world doesn't end, will there come a day when all the music it's possible to write has been written? It's finite isn't it?" - Claire W, via Twitter.

Excellent question. Apologies if I patronise in what follows, I like describing things from the bottom up! Yes, there are a finite number of songs in the universe - with the one condition that no song can last forever. Let's make it more restrictive and say no song can last for more than 5 minutes (though we could choose 20 or 30 mins and come to the same conclusions.)

Given that, though, it turns out it might not make very much difference that its a finite number...

Obama: vp, running mate, nation, biden, girl, antichrist, berlin, birth certificate, muslim

McCain: vp, running mate, ad paris hilton, paris hilton, paris hilton ad, mccain houses, mccain celebrity, vs obama

Biden: obama, vp, senator, wife, veep, abortion, voting record, israel, quotes, family

Palin: for vp, alaska, scandal, mccain, vice president, investigation, for america

US President, Andrew Jackson, speech to Congress, 1830:

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?

Heard this on Simon Schama's excellent first programme about the limits of US infinity - available online for a little while.

Was just reading this which is being discussed locally here and for some reason (probably my own common-or-garden liberal internal self-loathing I would imagine) I was reminded of the following from Waking Life. Youtube snippet here.

If the world that we are forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible. On the way to discovering what we love, we will find everything we hate, everything that blocks our path to what we desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness. We'll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. We'll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. We'll devalue society's currency. To confront the familiar. Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Where there's fire, we will carry gasoline. Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience, and all the normal expectations that go with it.

To live as if something actually depended on one's actions.

To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society, so that our oppressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward. To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. To immerse ourselves in the oblivion of actions and know we're making it happen. There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life. To exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions.

An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation.

(To man up telegraph pole) Hey, old man, what you doing up there?

I'm not sure.

You need any help getting down, sir?

No, I don't think so.

(quitely)... stupid bastard.

No worse than us. He's all action and no theory. We're all theory and no action.


import uk.myGeography.*;
import uk.childhood.cycling.*;
import parents.washingRoutines.*;
import parents.larkin.*;
import uk.job.random;

public class Morning implements AlarmListener {

Life me;
int today;
boolean breathing;
boolean sleeping = true;

public Morning (Life alive, int today) {

me = alive;

this.today = today;

}

public void alarmGoesOff(MorningEvent m) {

breathing = (me.stillAlive(today) ? true : false);

while (breathing) {

wakeUp( me.initialAngst(), me.generalGuilt() );

goToSleep( me.checkCheeseLevels() );

}

system.exit( me.religiousBelief() );

}

Obama wins the democratic nomination and ends his first speech as nominee thus:

Now, the other side will come here in September and offer a very different set of policies and positions, and that is a good thing. That is a debate I look forward to. It is a debate that the American people deserve on the issues that will help determine the future of this country and the future for our children.

But what you don't deserve is another election that's governed by fear, and innuendo, and division. What you won't hear from this campaign or this party is the kind of politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon. What you won't see from this campaign or this party is a politics that sees our opponents not as competitors to challenge, but enemies to polarize, because we may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first.

Macro:

• Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth - so there's hope yet for polluting our atmosphere even more. Gosh, that'd be quite a mission.
• Laws of gravity wrong...? Probably not - but as I've written about elsewhere, scientists are a conservative bunch and spend years checking and re-checking their findings. So time will tell...
• Earthrise - a crap version of a hi-def film from a satellite circumnavigating the moon. Look! It's us, that little blue dot!
• Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? Reincarnation through probability. Hmm. Though they fail to mention that, if true, every other possible permutation of you and your friends and your mother's breasts attached to the side of your head is also possible. Gosh, paging Doctor Freud...
• Planets and stars in scale - really, really macro.

• to get a passport
• to get pregnant
• to boil an egg
• to get to the moon
• to digest food
• to walk a mile
• to get to Mars
• for hair to grow
• to build muscle
• to get a US passport

"How long does it take..." in Firefox quicksearch, using Google. Implying that each must be done before the next is possible. The US really have raised their citizenship bar. A whole phalanx of new and slightly meaningless sayings there too: 'weeell... you gotta boil an egg to get to the moon, you know...' etc.

Just come out of a lecture by Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism. (Note the link to Amazon. Tsk.)

Two things: first, an old friend from Sheffield had a copy of this book. Many years back, one of her friends misread the title as 'Demading the Impossible'. Demading the Impossible henceforth became a formidable superhero of inscrutable powers. There's even a drawing of him somewhere.

Second. A comment from the after-lecture question session: a young man related a recent tale from his hometown. One evening, early but already dark, there was a powercut. Showing no signs of ending, people lit candles, put them in jars and - after a while - started wandering out of their front doors. Chatting ensued. Chatting led to a large fire 'in an entirely inappropriate place'. A large musical band formed. Sometime after the music got going, some people in balaclavas clutching weapons turned up and asked if anyone fancied a fight. There was a thoughtful pause, broken eventually by a guitarist who starting singing, 'don't worry, be happy'. Everyone joined in. The storyteller didn't relate if that included the balaclava people. He ended with the question:

So, when the lights go out, what kind of anarchism will we have?