a swamp of fear and loathing

Nice little economy you've got here. Be a shame if anything... happened to it.

makyo — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:21:19 GMT

While chatting with a few friends on Saturday, we noticed a disconcerting similarity between a famous photograph of two notorious sociopaths, and one of the Kray twins.

call for guinea pigs

makyo — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:55:51 GMT

As I've mentioned recently, I'm trying to write an undergraduate abstract algebra textbook that's readable by humans,¹ because I think that somebody should.

Well, that's perhaps a little unfair. There are many completely unreadable textbooks on abstract algebra, so many of which unaccountably think it's ok to start with "Definition 1.1: a group is a set G equipped with an associative binary operation ∗ …" without first explaining either what a binary operation is or why anyone in their right mind might care, and which then carry on in that vein with almost no illustrative examples, motivation or mention of applications. But there are also quite a few which make a reasonable effort to explain either group theory or ring theory in an accessible manner, include plenty of examples, provide a bit of historical and biographical background about the key people and topics, and so on. Unfortunately, most such books either focus only on group theory and leave rings and fields out, or (more rarely) focus on ring theory and introduce groups as a bit of an afterthought.

There are also a couple of really good, readable and comprehensive books that I know of. One is A First Course in Abstract Algebra by John Fraleigh, which I bought a copy of twenty years ago in my second year at York, and which I found to be life-savingly clear. The other is Contemporary Abstract Algebra by Joseph Gallian, which also covers everything that turns up in a typical undergraduate algebra course, and does it well. Unfortunately, the current edition of Fraleigh is about £50 (nearly £80 in hardback) and Gallian is nearly £60 (or nearly £150 in hardback), so they're both beyond a typical student budget. (Presumably there's some compelling business case that these prices are optimal from a sales point of view, but I can't remotely imagine how.)

Meanwhile, the core second year Algebra II module here has been taught in alternate years recently by a very tall, high-powered Russian algebraist. He's a very clever guy, and tends to go quite fast and cram a lot of extra, advanced stuff into the course. So his lectures are brilliant if you're in the top 10% or so of the year, but are a bit less fun (sometimes confidence-damagingly so) for the other three hundred students taking the course that year, many of whom entirely turn their backs on algebra (an important area of mathematics) as a result. Over the last few years a number of my undergraduate tutees have said "I'm not really following the lectures - can you recommend a good book that might help?" and I've not really had anything helpful to tell them other than "See if you can find a cheap second-hand copy of an earlier edition of Fraleigh" or "Run to the library and grab one of the four available copies of Gallian before anybody else does".

So I thought I'd have a go at writing a textbook that was readable and comprehensive, and then see if I could persuade someone to publish it at a reasonable price (ideally, somewhere in the £20-£30 range).

About three chapters in, I serendipitously found myself in contact with a commissioning editor at a notable university press, mentioned I was trying to write a textbook and asked him if he'd be willing to have a look at what I'd got so far and let me know if he thought it was any good. Yes, sure, he said - send me your current draft and I'll take a look at it. So I did, and he liked it and encouraged me to send in a proper book proposal when I felt ready to do so - which I did a little bit later. In particular, he said that affordability is a key consideration for him, and all the books he's commissioned recently have been in the £25ish range. I've been thinking carefully about the layout, and have stolen some ideas (wide margins, sidenotes rather than footnotes) from Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as well as a few other books: in particular Introducing Einstein's Relativity by Ray d'Inverno, which does really well at explaining really complicated stuff like tensor calculus and advanced cosmology in a very friendly way. (I mentioned this to the editor and he said "I was the commissioning editor for that when I first started working here - I'm glad you liked it".)

So at the moment we're waiting to hear back from the reviewers, who have been a bit slow, but he says he's "very keen on the book" and is pushing the reviewers to get back to him with detailed (and positive) comments. All very exciting.

Anyway, so I'm getting to the point where I could do with some test readers. I'm going to enlist the help of some of my first- and second-year undergraduate tutees (who are, after all, the target audience), but if any of the rest of you would be interested then I'd be very grateful for any constructive comments you might have.

View Poll: Call for Guinea Pigs

(Note added in proof: for "GCSE" read "up to and including GCSE/O-Level or equivalent" and for "A-Level" read "A-Level, AS, Scottish Higher or equivalent".)

¹Most mathematics undergraduates are also humans, of course.

dwj

makyo — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:19:05 GMT

Diana Wynne Jones, one of my favourite writers for over twenty-five years, died last week.

When I was very young, in fact about as far back as I can remember, my parents regularly took me to Beeston Library, the nearest public library to where we lived. I can still picture it: the small exhibition area to the left of the main entrance, the staircase up to the children's section on the first floor, and the mysterious and uncharted landscape of the grown-ups' section. I can also, perhaps strangely, remember how it smelt: a faint, almost comforting mixture of well-thumbed paper and polished wooden floors.

Once I got the hang of reading (I have a clear but probably retconned memory of suddenly realising, one day at infants' school, why so much effort was being expended in teaching us these symbols and the sounds that went along with them) it just seemed completely normal to devour as many books as I could get my hands on, in batches of four or six at a time. One day, at the age of about five or six, just as we were about to go on our annual fortnight's holiday, I ambled out into the drive where my parents were packing the last few things into the caravan, and proudly announced that I'd finished all of my books. There then followed a quick trip to the library to obtain another six books; it was patiently explained to me that this shouldn't be regarded as a challenge, and that these new books would have to last the whole of the next two weeks.

At some point (probably around the age of eleven or twelve) I kept noticing a book called Archer's Goon, which had a black cover depicting three people hovering over a house. I think the reason I kept noticing it was that my dad had recently introduced me (via some records borrowed from the grown-ups' section on the ground floor) to the highly esteemed (but, as it turned out, completely unrelated) Goon Show. A little while later, I happened to borrow a book called The Magicians of Caprona from the same shelf. It had a dark blue cover, and the summary on the back assured me that it indeed featured magicians (I'd been caught out by misleading titles before: J Meade Faulkner's otherwise enthralling classic adventure story Moonfleet had turned out to involve no spaceships whatsoever).

So I took it home and read it, and found it so absorbing that on at least one occasion my dad had to tell me to eat my breakfast because otherwise I'd miss the school bus and then I'd be in trouble because neither he nor my mum had time to drive me in. I reread it several years ago for the first time in about ten or fifteen years, and was pleasantly surprised to find how much of it had stuck in my mind: the rivalry between the Montana and Petrocchi families, the relationship between magic and music, Benvenuto the cat, the Duchess, the Angel, Tonino and Angelica being turned into puppets in the Duke's Punch and Judy show, the conference with Chrestomanci at the palace. (In comparison, I know I've read at least the first five Harry Potter books, because there are copies with creased spines on my bookshelves, but even if you offered me a substantial sum of money, I don't think I could tell you anything about what happens in them.)

I can't remember which of her books I read next, but I definitely read the library's copies of Charmed Life (which amongst other things explained who this Chrestomanci fellow was), Archer's Goon, Eight Days of Luke, Dogsbody, A Tale of Time City, The Ogre Downstairs, Howl's Moving Castle and Witch Week in relatively short order.

I really liked Archer's Goon, with its seven wizards running a town behind the scenes, and for a while I half-seriously kept an eye out for evidence of them (or people like them) controlling Nottingham, before eventually coming to the disappointed conclusion that bureaucrats and politicians seemed to be in charge.

Eight Days of Luke is an interesting one. I'd read bits of Norse mythology a few years earlier, so when a character called Mr Chew turned up, followed by a one-eyed gentleman called Mr Wedding, accompanied by two ravens, then I started to twig what was probably going on. But I didn't realise who Luke really was until the end of the book - which I initially felt a bit silly about, because if I'd figured out who Mr Chew, Mr Wedding, and Mr and Mrs Fry were, then surely I should have put the remaining pieces of the puzzle together. But then it occurred to me that my failure to see what was right in front of me was entirely to be expected, considering the identity of the character in question. Some years later, I read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which shares a central premise with Eight Days of Luke, and exactly the same thing happened: I got tricked by the same character. (I think it's a testimony to the talent and originality of both Jones and Gaiman that they can each take the same basic premise and do something completely different with it.)

I read most of Witch Week during a school concert: I was in the choir, but we were only in about a third of the programme, so I surreptitiously read during the band and orchestra bits. (My classmate Richard read most of it over my shoulder, and came to find me at school the next morning to ask "so, who actually was the witch then?" - the concert had finished before we got to the end of the story.)

I didn't read The Time of the Ghost or Fire and Hemlock until later but they both became two of my favourites. Hexwood was excellent but baffling, and I must reread it sometime soon to see if I can figure out exactly what was going on with the time travel.

I got to meet Diana once, at the 1999 Eastercon. She was very friendly and approachable, and kindly signed my copy of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (her wonderfully funny, scrupulously cross-referenced deconstruction of pretty much every fantasy trope and cliché you can think of), and I nervously told her how I'd loved reading her books as a child, and still enjoyed them now.

The world seems a greyer and less magical place now. My condolences to everyone else who loved her books, and to those who knew her in person.

up in the hills above Bradford, outside the napalm factory

makyo — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:11:36 GMT

It being the first Thursday after the Paschal full moon last week, I caught the train up to Bradford for a few days to attend LX 2009, this year's Eastercon - believed to be the sixtieth such event (modulo a semi-mythical convention which may or may not have taken place in Kettering in 1957).

I went to (and participated in) some programme items. Nowhere near as many as I'd intended to - there were lots of interesting things on, but there were also lots of interesting people to chat to too.

Friday 17:00–18:00: The Poincaré Conjecture (me): Several people said they liked my (somewhat disorganised and incomplete) talk on knot theory last year, so I thought I'd have another go at something similar this year. My aim was to give a brief introduction to the topology of low-dimensional manifolds, and explain basically what the Poincaré Conjecture is about, and why lots of mathematicians care about it. It seemed to go quite well - I got a decent-sized audience and several of them came up to me later and said they'd found it interesting, so that was nice.
Friday 19:00–20:00: Bad Biology (ang_grr, Paul McAuley, adelheid, Alastair Reynolds): Discussion about inaccurate biology in SF. Very interesting but I was still a bit tired after my topology talk so I bailed out on this one after a little while and went to have a rest.
Friday 22:00–23:00: The marketing of novels (Ian Whates, Danie Ware, Pete Crowther, Colin Brush): Interesting discussion about how publishers go about marketing novels.
Saturday 11:00–12:30: George Hay Memorial Lecture (Adrian Bowyer): Fascinating talk about the RepRap project, an open-source replicating rapid prototyper (a kind of 3d printer). It uses a light, cheap, biodegradeable starch-derived polymer (polylactic acid) to build up three-dimensional items layer by layer, and can be built for about £500. And once you've got one, you can use it to make most of the parts for another one.
Saturday 14:00–15:00: The Music of the Spheres (Ricardo Pinto, Doug Fazzani, emmajking, me, Gary Lloyd, Andrew Patton): Panel discussion about how music and our understanding of the universe have developed alongside each other. I think we were a little apprehensive about this, but in the end we had plenty to talk about, and the audience seemed to find it all interesting.
Saturday 18:45–19:45: Doctor Who: The now traditional mass watching of Doctor Who on a big screen on the Saturday evening. I rather enjoyed this one - certainly more than some Easter or Christmas episodes, although obviously not quite as much as the first episode of the new series back in 2005.
Saturday 22:00–23:00: Bad Sex in SF (lproven, dougs, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Gali Golan): A reading of various samples of entertainingly bad descriptions of sex in SF novels. Including the classic Houseplants of Gor, helpfully provided by watervole. Some excerpts were amusing, some I found a little disturbing.
Sunday 12:30–14:00: Spring-Heeled Jack (David Clarke): A fascinating talk about the Victorian legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, discussing its origins and development, tracing it from its first appearance in 1837 through to the present day, and looking at a few theories of Jack's identity.
Sunday 15:30–17:00: BSFA Lecture (owlfish): The first annual BSFA Easter Lecture, a kind of arts and humanities counterpart to the SF Foundation's scientific George Hay Lecture, was entitled "Visualising Time in the Middle Ages". The series got off to a strong start with a very interesting talk about the way our measurement and depiction of time has evolved over the last several hundred years. In 14th–16th Century France, for example, the year began on Easter Sunday (which had the awkward side effect of some years having more than one March or April). Days were at one point divided up into twenty-four hours, but these weren't always of equal length, consisting of twelve hours of daylight and twelve of darkness. Shana traced the different ways of measuring time (sundials, water-clocks, candles, mechanical clocks, etc) as they developed, and finished with a discussion of allegorical depiction of time, taking in the "New Iconography of the Virtues" (or "The Virtues Went Shopping"). I hope to hear more about the Hedgehog of Nineveh at a later date.
Sunday 23:00–24:00: A Brief History of the Universe (emmajking): Entertaining and interesting talk about the cosmology of the early universe, followed by a brief but (due to light pollution and overcast skies) ultimately undersuccessful attempt at astronomy.
Monday 10:00—11:00: University Challenged (johannes_d, me, ceb, Ruth O'Reilly): Discussion about university SF societies and their connections with the rest of fandom. I found this one quite interesting, and came away with a couple more ideas to suggest to the rest of the Warwick SF&F Society committee. Also, thanks to nmg, I now have a copy of the first issue of New Fusion, a fanzine produced at Warwick in the late 1980s.
14:00–15:00: Beginner's Time Travel (emmajking): Another entertaining and interesting talk about theoretical physics, this time about time travel.

All in all, a splendid convention - thanks very much indeed to everyone involved in running it: the committee, the staff and volunteers, everyone who took part in a programme item, and everyone else who went. I'm very much looking forward to Odyssey 2010 next year.

Pete Fenelon

makyo — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:15:17 GMT

Late one evening about fifteen or sixteen years ago, while I was an undergraduate at York, I found myself sat at a terminal in Goodricke library. I don't remember exactly what I was doing - either emailing or reading Jorvick most likely, but I do remember that at some point the door slammed open and an orange-bearded, bespectacled, portly gentleman wearing a black leather jacket cheerfully stamped in, sat down at another terminal on the back row, and started hammering away at the keys. After a minute or so he started grumbling about 'maggot-boxes'. Pretty quickly I deduced that this must be Pete Fenelon, one of the only other people on Jorvick who posted under their own name rather than a pseudonym of some sort.

Over the intervening years, Pete (blue_condition) introduced me to some splendid music (including Half Man Half Biscuit, who subsequently became one of my favourite bands), some even more splendid people and some fascinating books and films. His knowledge of the restaurants (particularly those which specialised in curry) of York and its environs was legendarily encyclopaedic, and in the past few years he demonstrated a strong talent for photography. Had I been in any way interested in alcohol or motor-racing, my horizons would have been similarly expanded by his knowledge of whisky, beer and Formula 1. He definitely had a sense for the finer things in life.

I was rather hoping and expecting that this was all going to continue for several more decades, and it has come as a tremendous shock to learn that this won't now be the case.

He was a splendidly funny and intelligent man. His articles on the Paranoid Programming Language and the various types of programmers found in academia, as well as his critical analyses of 1970s children's television programmes (such as Bagpuss, Bod and Scooby Doo) make me laugh as much now as when I originally read them in the early 1990s. His handy questionnaire provided an entertaining guide to the modern British social class system long before the word 'chav' had been coined, much less passed into popular use.

He had a reputation for being a grumpy old sod, but to those of us who got to know him, either in person or online, I think it was pretty obvious that the gruffness and cynicism was only on the surface - underneath he was a thoroughly nice bloke, on whom you could completely rely in times of need. Which isn't to say that he suffered fools gladly (although as Eddie Izzard has remarked, who does?). On one occasion, an annoyingly evangelical poster to Jorvick had just made another of his regular, clumsy and unwelcome attempts to convert the masses by inviting them along to that evening's Christian Union meeting to discuss theology and faith over a subsidised toasted sandwich. Pete's one-sentence put-down "There are some depths to which even I will not stoop in search of a 30p cheese toastie, and consorting with god-botherers is one of them" was, I believe, quoted in at least one colleague's usenet and email signature block for some time afterwards. On another evening in Goodricke library, he showed me an entertainingly blunt email message he was about to send to a user on a computer system he helped administer: "Currently /home is 99% full. Is there some pressing academic need for you to store 80 megabytes of Cindy Crawford pictures in your home directory?" (at the time, 80MB was a non-negligible proportion of the available storage space).

As others have noted, Pete didn't believe in an afterlife, but on the offchance that he's wrong, I daresay he's sipping the angel's share of a glass of expensive whisky while watching Ayrton Senna racing Donald Campbell. At the moment, though, I can't quite believe he's not still down here with us. He was a splendid chap and I for one will miss him terribly. I'll try to make it up to York on Friday, so hopefully I'll see some of you there.

agent of buffoonery

makyo — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:09:53 GMT

Over the past few months, johnaldis and I have been cataloguing the Warwick SF&F Society library. The library (which consisted of about 1500 books last time anyone counted) has a fairly diverse collection of books, ranging from modern classics of the genre, right through to utter drivel. Some of the latter is "of its time" - tat by today's standards, but when considered in context it sort of hangs together, although there's some other stuff which one has difficulty imagining was ever any good (for some reason, for example, we appear to have acquired an entire cupboard full of Star Trek tie-in novelisations).

Halfway through an afternoon's careful cataloguing, John handed me Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, and said "I bet you can't read the blurb on the back of this book without laughing". I failed:

The terrible dictatorship ruling the planet was the Brotherhood of Assassins, and Boris Johnson, head of the Democratic League was plotting to overthrow the Hegemony and to restore democratic rule.

THE HEGEMONY, that mysterious group that controls the entire solar system, was now threatening to control the entire human race and render Man extinct!

The entire galaxy in chaos; now bloodshed, then infinity...?

orbital

makyo — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:19:59 GMT

One otherwise unallocated Sunday afternoon nearly ten years ago, while I was living in York, I cycled round to see my friend Tim in case he was running one of his occasional board games sessions. He invited me in and said "Nick, this is my friend Chris. Chris, this is Nick, the chap I told you about". "Jolly good", said Chris, and added "You're coming to Eastercon". Then things went a little bit hazy and I seem to remember handing over a cheque (it turned out Chris was on the 1999 Eastercon committee).

The following Easter, I traipsed up to Liverpool for ReConvene, where at various points I found myself attending lots of fascinating talks and panel discussions on a whole range of topics (some of which were only tangentially related to SF), meeting lots of splendid new people, discussing magic realism with Jeff Noon and John Clute, hearing Iain Banks read excerpts from his books, and generally having an excellent and fun time.

So naturally I went back the next year, the year after that, and indeed every year to date (and also went to other conventions over the years: a few Novacons, a couple of Picocons and a Unicon). At various points over the decade (gosh) I heard people mutter darkly about somewhere called the 'Radisson Non-Euclidean', a legendarily confusing hotel in Heathrow whose corridors doubled back on each other and intersected in a way that surely couldn't be possible in ordinary Euclidean 3–space. And this year I got to go there (for Orbital 2008) and find out what all the fuss was about. Indeed, it was a maze of twisty passages, all alike whose topography and topology I never quite managed to figure out. (We're going back there in 2010 so perhaps I'll have to get one of those clever π–meter things they use in Greg Bear's book Eon.)

I made it to a range of programme items this year (and missed at least twice as many more that I wish I had made it to):

Friday 12:00: So You Want to be an SF Writer (John Jarrold, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Jaine Fenn, Anton Marks and Ian Whates): I went to this panel discussion not because I necessarily have any currently active ambitions to be an SF writer, but because I was interested to hear what was involved in the process. Useful advice from writers ("join a writing group and get someone to criticise your work") with John Jarrold giving the publisher's/editor's/agent's side of the story.
Friday 13:00: How to be a Panellist at Orbital (Iain Coleman and Stephen Kilbane): Thought I'd better go to this one, since I was going to be on my first ever panel discussion on the Monday. Lots of useful advice.
Friday 22:00: Guest of Honour: Rog Peyton (with Greg Pickersgill): Many entertaining anecdotes about Rog's long career in UK SF fandom.
Saturday 11:00: Guest of Honour: China Miéville
"For God's Sake It's Just A Story! A Reader's Guide to Ruining SF": A fascinating and erudite talk on whether or not interpretation of literature 'ruins' it in some way. Amongst other things, Algernon Blackwood's story The Wendigo was summarised as "Brokeback Mountain with monsters", reference was made to "The Star Wars film – the first of the recent awful ones", the phrase "vibrating aboutness-cluster" used without eyelid-batting, and H P Lovecraft's story The Horror at Red Hook interpreted as "You know foreigners and working-class people? They're ******* horrible!"
Saturday 12:30: Fantastic London (Neil Gaiman, Geoff Ryman, Louis Savy and Graham Sleight): A very interesting discussion on depictions of London in fantasy, and the various real but fantastic bits of London's geography and history. It turns out that the traffic lights and bollards on the Mall are bolted, rather than concreted, in. This is so that with about 25 minutes' notice, they can all be removed, and the Mall turned into a functioning airstrip in order to evacuate Buckingham Palace.
Saturday 15:30: George Hay Memorial Lecture (Prof David Southwood): The Hay Lecture has now established itself, for me, as one of the unmissable highlights of an Eastercon, and this year's was no exception. David Southwood gave a fascinating presentation on "Space Programmes in Fact and Fiction", drawing on the 1950s vision of the future presented in the adventures of Dan Dare and the various missions organised by ESA and NASA.
Sunday 11:00: Guest of Honour: Charles Stross
Sunday 14:00: Guest of Honour: Neil Gaiman: The membership count this year was somewhere around the 1300 mark, roughly twice as many as usual, and I think Neil Gaiman had at least something to do with that. He didn't disappoint, either, giving some very entertaining reminiscences about his first convention ("I got in through the front door of the hotel, and John Jarrold called to me from the bar: 'Neil! I'm fan guest of honour. I've got an open bar tab. What are you having?' Then it was 26 hours later and I still hadn't checked into the hotel") and reading a short story Orange and an excerpt from the forthcoming The Graveyard Book.
Sunday 15:30: Writing the Near Future (Matt Browne, Paul McAuley, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Justina Robson and Charles Stross)
Sunday 20:00: The Death of UK Physics (Simon Bradshaw, Dave Clements, Inge Heyer): Panel discussion about the current funding crisis looming over UK physics research (especially astrophysics and particle physics).
Sunday 21:00: Mitch Benn Entertains (introduced by Neil Gaiman): Excellent, as ever. I thought he was going to do the Ikea song at one point, and hoped he'd be able to fit in his brilliant Eminem pastiche Macbeth (My Name Is) as well, but it turns out there's an upper bound on the number of songs and jokes you can fit into an hour, and something had to give. I laughed for pretty much the entire show, and I certainly wasn't the only one. Mitch also seemed to be having a great time, so hopefully we'll see him at another convention or two in the future.
Monday 11:00: The Mathematics of Knots (Nicholas Jackson): After nine years of attending interesting talks and panel discussions organised by other people, I thought I should probably contribute something, and offered to give a talk on knot theory: one of the few topics I feel confident talking about in public. I was expecting maybe 5–10 people to turn up, but in the event there was quite a decent-sized audience. It seemed to go quite well - there were some interesting and insightful questions, and lots of people said very nice and encouraging things afterwards. The only drawback was that I'd enthusiastically overestimated the amount of stuff I could coherently talk about in an hour, and kind of ran out of time – although at what I felt was a fairly natural stopping point (I'd talked about the history of the topic, the mathematical notion of a knot, the idea of a knot invariant, and then given a couple of examples of the latter: n–colourability and the Alexander polynomial). The slides are available here if anyone's curious.
Monday 13:00: Infinity Welcomes Careful Thinkers (Iain Coleman, Colin Fine, Nicholas Jackson and Susan Stepney): This was also a lot of fun. It was originally supposed to be Iain and me together with someone else, but unfortunately she had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances. Fortunately, Susan and Colin very kindly joined in at fairly short notice, and we ended up with quite a fun panel. Susan talked about numbers that are mind-stunningly, ungrokkably big but nevertheless finite (eg Graham's number) and various methods for representing these, and then Colin and I explained different sorts of infinity (especially countable vs uncountable). I gave Cantor's proof of the countability of the rational numbers, and then ciphergoth kindly joined us from the audience and proved the uncountability of the real numbers. I don't think we were quite expecting that level of audience participation, but it was great nonetheless. Susan explained a useful search heuristic for navigating one's way back home through a maze of parallel universes: minimise the number of zeppelins, because parallel universes always have more zeppelins than ours does.

Recommended reading: Anything by Jorge Luis Borges (especially The Book of Sand, The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel. Also Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker.

Excellent fun all round. Thanks in particular to everyone who made it happen: the committee, the tech crew, the gophers, the guests, the people who gave talks and took part in panel discussions, and everyone else who did stuff behind or in front of the scenes. I even took a few photographs.

subvertin ur art-forms

makyo — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:28:26 GMT

This category macro will, I suspect, make no sense to any of you, but amused me tremendously - particularly the accompanying 'I can has cocheezburger?' comment.

alas smith and jones

makyo — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:59:51 GMT

Some say that he works part-time as a plasmavore's bodyguard. And that he's not subject to the Blinovitch limitation effect.

All we know is that he's called The Stig.

she's more verbose than the gods of olympus

makyo — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 23:09:25 GMT

So apparently some book's just about to be published. It seems that yet another `major character' is going to snuff it, and this time the smart money's on Dumbledore. I reckoned it was going to be him last time, which probably shows how clued-up I am about these things.

Anyway, The Guardian is holding a little competition to see who can write the best parody account of the death of Dumbledore in the style of a different well-known author.

I chose Homer.

Sing, O Goddess, the wrath of Voldemort whose name must not be spoken. Many a stereotypical character did he send to Hades, and none of these more cliched than white-bearded Dumbledore of the cryptic utterances.

Sinister Voldemort raised his phoenix-feathered wand and turned to ridiculous-hatted Dumbledore of the half-moon spectacles. All watched in horror: lightning-scarred Harry, bossy Hermione with the orange hair, and wicked-exclaiming Ron of the great ineptitude, as Voldemort exultantly cried a single, terrible word of dog Latin. With a crash like the thunder of Zeus, a bolt of green fire struck brave but absent-minded Dumbledore in the chest, casting him to the ground, his frail and aged body now broken and lifeless. Thus died Gandalf-carbon-copy, mentor-archetype Dumbledore, and the wails and grief of those who knew him bore his shade unto the Elysian Fields, there to feast forever with heroes and gods.

``Son of Lily and James!'' spoke headmaster-murdering Lord Voldemort, ``weasley Ron, muggle-daughter Hermione, and all other Gryffindorians, as the gods themselves witness, I have slain your kindly and aged teacher, as prophesied by every other epic saga ever written. Now I depart, to await my inevitable defeat in the last chapter of the next and final book.''

Harry of the bottle-glass spectacles watched in terror as template Voldemort escaped, borne on wings of night, to marshal his armies and draw up his ambitious but subtly-flawed plans to take over the world.

As before, please nobody tell me if it is actually Dumbledore this time - I'll almost certainly not be reading the book until it comes out in paperback.

manifold hyperbole

makyo — Fri, 20 Jun 2003 17:12:39 GMT

So apparently some book's just been published.

Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ``It is time,'' he said, ``for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.''

Harry obediently sat down, and waited patiently.

``You see,'' continued the elderly wizard, ``and there's no easy way I can say this, Harry, all the adventures you've had over the past few years have been... well... a bit boring.''

Harry's mouth dropped open in dismay. Dumbledore continued, a sad expression on his kindly old face.

``It's true, I'm afraid. All your adventures here at Hogwarts, and all your friends, teachers, enemies, even that weedy kid - Neville, is it? - are two-dimensional cardboard replicas of characters and events in books by more talented authors.''

``Even that grumpy caretaker's flea-bitten, bad-tempered old cat?'' Harry asked, shocked.

``Even the cat. Lifted wholesale from a Diana Wynne Jones novel written twenty-five years ago. In fact, while we're on the subject, and despite Neil Gaiman's careful and, frankly, magnanimous protestations to the contrary, you yourself do bear a number of striking similarities to Tim Hunter out of the Books of Magic - written about fifteen years back. You've even got an owl, for Christ's sake.''

``B-but... what about my adventures? I've saved the world from the evils of Lord Voldemort...'' Harry stammered.

``Yes, I suppose so. Granted, he's a bit of a predictable template bad-guy, but save this somewhat lacklustre world you did. And I'm sure your adventures were jolly good fun at the time. But can you remember any of the details?''

``Well... a few years ago Voldemort turned out to be hidden in that teacher's hat. And then... erm... that red-haired kid's pet rat turned out to actually be a magically-disguised bad guy...''

``Whose name was...'' prompted Dumbledore.

``Erm...''

``Exactly. Even you can't remember. Pop quiz: That classmate of yours who was killed by Voldemort. What was his name?''

``Oh, it was... ummm... Martin or something?'' hazarded Harry.

``Not even close. In fact, the only reason we remember Voldemort's name is because everyone goes round telling each other not to say it. No, Harry, as hard as it may be to accept, your adventures are entertaining enough to read about on a train, but they're not exactly memorable. And as for being great fantastic literature...''

Harry looked down at his shoes, knowing in his heart that Dumbledore spoke the truth.

``You're a good boy, Harry, you just lack character development, that's all. You should have been in a Diana Wynne Jones novel, or a Philip Pullman book. In fact, you probably are.''

``What about you, sir? What will you do now?''

``Harry, my boy, don't you worry about me. I'm an elderly wizard with a long white beard. Plenty of options: Gandalf, Merlin, even a sorceror in a David Eddings epic, if I feel like slumming it again. And your little friend Hermione - plenty of career openings for a bossy know-it-all schoolgirl character. Granted, not so many now that Enid Blyton's dead, but I'm sure she'll find something to do. Professor McGonagall's off back to `The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' where she belongs, Professor Snape has a new post as the template English villain in a Hollywood movie, and young Mr Malfoy and your friend Ron are off to Grange Hill to be, respectively, the class bully and the inept and rubbish kid he picks on.''

With that, Dumbledore smiled at Harry, picked up a bucket of water, and abruptly tipped it over Fawkes the Phoenix, who was smouldering gently in his cage. There was a surprised squawk and a hissing sound, and when the steam cleared, a sad, bedraggled heap of feathers.

``Always wanted to do that. Damn thing kept setting the curtains on fire.''

nicholas

Actually I do quite like the books really - they're entertaining enough. But I shall most likely wait until until this latest one's out in paperback before I read it, so I'd kind of appreciate it if nobody tells me whether or not Dumbledore's the one who snuffs it :)