Ever since I learned about it I’ve made use of it in everyday life, increasingly without thinking about it; but it’s not something I would necessarily have picked up anyway. It’s not intuitive: I had to be told about it. It’s a different kind of thing from hitting a nail with a hammer, because it requires the application of a counter-intuitive principle; and yet just like using a hammer it becomes a part of my complement of skills and tools. Actually, perhaps it’s more that it’s a mental tool, as opposed to the hammer, which is physical. A hammer requires conscious use, but it requires no conscious application of scientific knowledge. We intimately know the physics of a hammer blow, but some phenomena, like granular convection, are remote from us: they are not built into our bodies.

In this video, the guy is demonstrating the effect with exactly the same muesli that I eat every morning. It’s ideal for the purposes of a demo because it’s full of brazil nuts. But he’s doing it wrong – all you have to do is shake it gently from side to side – so I’m sceptical about his explanation of how it works.

I’ve come to regard it as quite ordinary, but there is more to it than first appears. The particles actually divide and circulate in a flowing motion, very much like liquid convection. I don’t know how it works. But then, nobody really does.

Pony-Powered Enlightenment Bullshit

This sounds like bullshit, of course, and I confess I’m spinning this out more than is warranted, but there is an immense calm, neatness and harmony about developing with Django. Everything’s at just the right level; everything fits together in just the right way. Everything’s in the right place, everything’s in nice little pieces that fit together like a jigsaw.

You know when you read a textbook and you get the feeling that the author knows exactly what you’ll have trouble with? Or a teacher who always seems to be able to anticipate your difficulties. Well that’s what it’s like to work in Django. There have been countless occasions where I have exclaimed, after a bit of struggling, “oh, you mean I can just do this!” Just where you need it to be, it’s all done for you. You know the bits I mean: the tedious shit. The painful repeated Ctrl-C Ctrl-V crap that you go through every time you do a form.

Django is high-level, but in a low-level way. There’s no fucking about with shitty interfaces, arcane meta-languages and strange customs, just to put a website up that has editable content; there’s none of the horrible mess of PHP; there’s no need to download three thousand PHP files and work with a horribly complex interface just to set up a wee blog for God’s sake. With Django, you build things up yourself, in just the way you want. If you think this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not – it’s way less work, because Django knows roughly the kind of things you’ll be doing.

I confess that I never got around to trying a PHP MVC framework. No doubt all this great stuff I’m talking about is largely owing to the general MVC pattern, rather than to Django itself – but I’m not so sure. Django’s helper classes, such as forms, make the whole web development experience fun. Anyway, it’s so much nicer to write in Python.

Demon-Driven Enlightenment Bullshit

(This section doesn’t have much bullshit in it actually, but I couldn’t stand to leave the first two titles unbalanced.)

I’ve been blogging over at my philosophy blog, critique-of-pure-reason.com, which is why this is the first post here for a long – shit, it’s October already! That blog and the studies from whence its content sprouts have been taking up a lot of my time. Right now I’m studying scepticism, in particular Descartes, who suggested that for all I know I might be dreaming at this moment, or I might be the victim of a malicious deceiver demon who is creating all of my perceptions for me; so I cannot take my perceptions for what they seem to be, and so I have no ground for the belief that I am sitting at my computer writing; even though I bloody well know I’m not dreaming.

Now, you would think that “I bloody well know I’m not dreaming” would be absolutely inadmissable in philosophy, but most answers to Descartes seem to be saying something similar, especially those from Moore and Wittgenstein. Anyway, that’s enough of that. This is neither the time nor the place. This is the place if you’re interested. I did the blog engine from scratch in Django, by the way. Have I mentioned how much I like Django? Come to think of it though, the site’s sadly lacking in navigation, categories, tags and all that. Well, I did it over a single weekend so what do you expect?

So I’ve been staying up till all hours poring over philosophical papers from the journal Mind, just trying to prove that I’m not dreaming. It’s not as fruitless as it sounds though: mountains and valleys of thought are appearing from over the horizon. I’m moving ever nearer, exploring the foothills on my way to the dizzy precipices of [insert more bullshit here].

Not Enough Hours

And that’s not to mention all the music: saxophone, piano, theory and composition. And the maths. I’m working through a book of undergraduate mathematics, and Euclid’s Elements – oh and I’m half-way through a textbook on logic. Am I insane? Is this whole paragraph a cliché? I think it is you know. Fuck.

I was in the basement of Waterstone’s at the west end of Princes Street. Three young members of staff, one female and two male, were talking loudly. The males were teasing the woman in a deliberately petty, repetitive fashion. I was quite distracted by this incessant stupid chatter, and although I was in a public place and we can’t expect the silence of a library in a high street shop, I was irritated. I think I was justified:

1. Different standards and conventions – loose codes of conduct – apply on different floors of a bookshop. We do expect a quieter, more peaceful atmosphere on floors other than the ground floor.

2. There are chairs on these floors so that you can sit and read. In general, the shop itself creates the peaceful ambience or the expectation of it.

3. I’ve been in this particular Waterstone’s many times and the basement is normally very quiet and peaceful. This is probably one reason for my frequent visits.

4. On this occasion, there was no other sound in the room, so their loudness was unnecessary, uncivil and discourteous.

5. This loudness was just one aspect of their swaggering manner, in which they showed a disregard for the customers, acting as if we were not there and as if the whole room belonged to them. This was manifest in their movements and bearing, the way they would talk across the full width of the room even if there were people in between, and so on.

In any case, I was irritated. I was trying to choose between two books based on what I could gather from their prefaces about the standard of knowledge required to read them. The unpredictable monkey-like noises of the staff – interspersed with their occasional macaw-like screeches – made it difficult to concentrate.

Transformation

But then something unexpected happened. There was suddenly a new noise: whispering, between two customers, a middle-aged man and woman, who must have just come down the stairs. That someone should think it suitable to whisper was absurd enough, given that the staff continued to dribble out their inanities for everyone to hear; but, worse than that, the whispering was loud, considerably louder than most normal speech. I don’t have proof of it, but I’d guess that if they had talked at a normal, quiet volume, I would hardly have noticed them.

If you’ve never heard loud whispering, let me tell you: it’s bloody irritating. I think this is partly because it’s so stupid, more than because of the intrinsic qualities of the sound.

Anyway, there I was, trying to read a preface to a book on mathematics, my ears buffeted by irregular waves of jungle-like cacophony coming from the staff and scoured by the rasping voiceless speech of the whisperers; and I wasn’t irritated any more. I just smiled at the wonderful absurdity of my situation.

When I was a pale skinny ghost of a youth, still aimlessly haunting my hometown of Largs in Ayrshire, an Australian appeared amongst our group of friends for a short time. The town was a stop-off in his travelling, and I have forgotten his name, but something he said has stayed with me ever since. He was talking to me about all the places in Scotland he had been to, and asking me about all the places he still wanted to go to. I hadn’t heard of half of them, and the other half were names that meant little to me. I had certainly not actually been to more than one or two of them. I felt ashamed as he responded to my confessions of ignorance with awkward and polite disbelief.

But I didn’t do anything about it for a long time and went off to England to begin a career. Then, after moving to Edinburgh I began to get excited about the Scottish landscape, and during a long weekend in the west highlands I saw Glencoe for the first time. I got out of the car and ran down into the glen towards the river Coe, and then looked behind me. It was a slightly unsettled day, overcast, with fingers of cloud stroking the high peaks, obscuring the tops themselves. It had been raining heavily, and white cascades of water fell from out of the mysterious heights over ledges and parapets of black rock. I now know that this was the great Aonach Eagach ridge. I turned to look up at the other side of the glen and stumbled with dizziness, so overwhelming was the topography. Here were the Three Sisters, which I now know are but the limbs of the huge mountain called Bidean Nam Bian.

A while later I conveyed my awe on discovering this place to a friend, who casually said that he’d been at the top of one of those mountains just a few weeks before. This comment, and the memory of my shaming by the Australian, became two ingredients in a mental mixture that finally cohered into the idea: why don’t we, my brother and I, start hillwalking in the highlands?

More to follow.

Image created by Photoshop genius - Las Tonterias -

A couple of years ago I saw Bill Oddie on his TV show “How to Watch Wildlife,” explaining how to attract squirrels. I was inspired by Bill’s amazingly successful technique: he just noisily rustled a paper bag full of nuts, and squirrels came to him from all around – came right up to him – and ate the nuts right out of his hand.

At the time it was important to me to make the most of my weekends, working as I was in a very stressful IT manager role, and I thought that squirrel-feeding/watching/stroking would be a perfect leisure activity. So one lovely summer day I went down to Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, which I knew from previous sightings to be home to hundreds of the delightful bushy-tailed rodents.

I purchased a paper bag full of squirrel food, conveniently available at the Botanic Gardens shop, and then followed the procedure just as Bill had demonstrated. I found a suitable bench to sit on, underneath the great boughs of a venerable oak tree and in close proximity to several beech trees, pines, cedars, and one medium-sized bush. Perfect!

I quietly approached, sat down, and began to rustle. I didn’t want to make it too obvious, so I kept the bag in my pocket while I rustled it, and nonchalantly scanned my surroundings for signs of my quarry. I looked all around me, up in the branches of the trees, and in the nearby bush, but I couldn’t see even a hint of that unmistakable silhouette, nor could I hear any signs of mammalian life. A few pigeons nodded over in my direction but I wasn’t interested in them. I wasn’t there for the pigeons, was I?

After about five unproductive minutes I reckoned it was time to bring out the bag. After all, I reasoned, perhaps these squirrels hadn’t been conditioned, like those in Bill’s neighbourhood, to respond to just the sound of a paper bag. Perhaps they had to see it too. So I brought out the bag and held it aloft, so that there was no way any watching squirrels could miss it.

After another five squirrelless minutes I resorted to throwing the nuts on the ground. I’d been reluctant to take this last step, as it just seemed too easy. In any case, Bill hadn’t needed to do that.

Already I felt something of a failure.

Surrounded by nuts and pigeons I sat expectantly. Then hopefully. Then in bafflement. What was going on here? This place was squirrel-central and had been for as long as I’d been going there. All I wanted to do was feed them, some of the tamest squirrels in the land – squirrels that wouldn’t normally have any fear of humans. Why would they reject my advances like this? Was it something about me that was repulsing them?

I couldn’t understand it, and I don’t mind saying that I grew quite embarrassed, and then downright angry. Here I was, taking time out of my precious weekend to offer food to these creatures – and asking for nothing in return! Well I wasn’t going to be made a fool of any longer, so I stashed the bag of nuts back in my pocket, stood up and stormed off in the direction of the exit.

But then, as the path approached a large collection of rhododendrons, I saw a lone squirrel hopping about on the ground, apparently in search of food. The enthusiasm that I’d so recently lost suddenly returned to me, and I quietly crept towards it, taking the bag of nuts out of my pocket and rustling it in an enticing fashion. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, and it would be more special, more dramatic, because of what I’d gone through. I envisioned those blissful future moments, just me and my squirrel friend sharing nuts on the lush grass in the summer sunshine.

Then it noticed me, and looked me up and down for a few seconds. I upped my game, throwing a few nuts from the bag and speaking softly in encouraging tones, all the while growing nearer and nearer – to the squirrel, and to that fateful moment.

But, suddenly, it just turned and hopped away into the rhododendrons, without any panic or fear whatsoever. I chased after it, hoping against hope that it might eventually come round. I dived after it into the tangle of branches and struggled to follow, but it just scampered off into the darkness of the undergrowth, never to be seen again.

The anger welled up in me again, this time tinged with intense humiliation. I felt defeated – an utter failure. I tried to walk proudly away without a care, but I couldn’t do it: I just skulked, went home and crawled into bed, where I replayed the day’s events a thousand times.

Needless to say, ever since then I have hated squirrels.

Note: this story originally appeared in a Flickr group, Photographic Editing Offences.

Obsession

I’ve been working in Edinburgh since March, and the main benefit has been that I’ve had time to practise the sax almost every day, for one or two hours. Some of you may remember my burning enthusiasm in March last year, which died because owing to awkward circumstances I couldn’t feed it. This time I’ve kept it well stoked. Soon after I took out my horn again I felt the familiar old obsessiveness begin to consume me, and part of me worried that it was just another example of starting something I couldn’t finish. But I’m pleased to say that the obsessiveness has been the sustained boost I’ve needed to get things going. Even if my enthusiasm sometimes declines, I know that I’ve now got the momentum to keep on going until it returns.

This happened recently.

I couldn’t really practise very much on our visit to Canada recently (watch this space for stuff on that amazing trip), and I seemed to be feeling my obsessiveness more when I thought about canoeing than when I thought about practising. Back in Edinburgh I couldn’t get back into my former mode. All I wanted to do was drink and smoke and read sci-fi and laze about. But I think there was more to it than simple laziness. At the beginning of the Canada trip I read Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey, and I found it profoundly thought-provoking. I cannot follow Bailey all the way to his extreme ideological position, but there is much in what he and his interviewees say that I agree with and which I found inspiring, surprising and even unsettling. He calls into question some elements of my approach, and seems almost to be trying to expose music teaching, in both jazz and classical music, as a self-serving anti-musical conspiracy. I found this all very liberating, but perhaps too liberating. With some of my practise techniques called into question, I felt that my practising had lost some its value, that some of my work was pointless or counterproductive. Given all this maybe you can appreciate that I didn’t want to practise when I got back from holiday.

Incidentally, one very definite effect of reading that book was to turn me off the idea of studying composition, but there have been other reasons for that, including the complete nonresponsiveness of the Open College of the Arts, who advertise a three-step Composing Music program, one course per year, the aim of the third course being the production of a major piece of music, with the guidance of a personal tutor, who is a professional composer. I’m still considering it, but I reckon with a big keyboard and some books I could just teach myself.

Anyway, last week my sax obsession returned, after practising a new scale pattern. Sometimes it only takes a little thing like that to relight your fire.

And I’m happy to discover that I’ve got parallel obsessions (if that’s not an exaggeration or an impossibility): I’ve still got fires burning for canoeing and hillwalking. Maybe I’ve found a balance? I had a conversation about this a few years ago with my good friend Paul Keir. Agreeing that it’s not productive to always skip from one obsessive interest to the next, we came to the conclusion that what we needed in our lives was balance. I don’t know how much he would agree, but I think Paul has now managed to achieve a large measure of this balance in his life.

New Sax

Several weeks before leaving for Canada I bought a new sax, the culmination of weeks of increasingly intense GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), the symptoms of which included drooling over pictures of the Cannonball Big Bell, the Keilwerth Shadow, Berg Larsen metal mouthpieces, and (the shame!) Rovner ligatures.

Now that I think about it, it was the new sax that initially took the edge off my obsession, because it took a lot of getting used to. I sounded worse for a while and it was very depressing, because I felt rather lost, not knowing if it was me or the instrument. As it turned out it was me, of course, a happy result given all the hard-earned cash I’d spent. It was an embouchure problem, which I’ve been fixing since, and now that I’ve got used to the instrument it’s really showing its worth, and I’ve gradually fallen in love with it. It’s a Yamaha 875 Custom, made around 2004. Very shiny.

I recorded a little piece when I was in Canada, with Laura’s-sister-Jeannie’s-husband-Richard, as I’m obliged to call him (it’s just “Richard” to most other people.) He’s a good musician and songwriter (and lead guitarist in the band Mr Completely), and he was able to accommodate my musical inadequacies. He put the drums in and played the keyboard, creating an eastern-sounding context within which I could improvise. The soloing is very basic, fragmented and far too tame, but I was pleased to hear that my tone is roughly what I’ve been aiming for. I’ll post it up here soon.

Lastly, thanks must go to my sax teacher Chez Taylor for the valuable guidance – just being able to spend time with an accomplished player of the same instrument is a wonderful experience; and most of all to Laura, for the endless encouragement – it really makes a difference.

A serious disagreement threatens to bring to an end the very successful hillwalking duo of the Robinson brothers (Stu and me). We’re both passionate, committed people, so it’s no surprise that it happened; and it’s more of a challenge to resolve it than it is to struggle up a steep slope of scree or navigate over boulder fields in thick cloud.

I won’t explore the ins and outs of the argument on this blog, but the whole thing is quite interesting. The crux of it is that Stu is an arrogant, selfish little – no, just kidding. The real crux of it is that my photography can slow us down sometimes, and on two recent walks (not our most recent walk, described later in this post) Stu has found himself far ahead and alone.

Until now we’ve been able to accommodate our differences quite easily. He generally has an eager, impatient temperament, while I am unhurried and leisurely. Also, our reasons for walking, while they do overlap, are different. I won’t presume to try to list Stu’s reasons for hillwalking, but we probably share the following ones:

Enjoyment of camaraderie and good conversation
Brotherly bonding
A shared sense of freedom
The shared experience of testing oneself
The challenges and satisfactions of talking through problems and coming to decisions, with a similarly-motivated intellectual equal

The argument flared up in an email coversation after the walk described below. At the time of writing I don’t know where things stand, but I feel that the partnership is too good to come to an end only three years after it began.

And besides, he’s got the car.

Ben Vorlich and Stuc a’Chroin

Starting from Ardvorlich on the south bank of Loch Earn, we went up Ben Vorlich and then up Stuc a’ Chroin, which lies nearby. Except for the first and last hours we were in cloud the whole way, and this partly explains why I kept up with Stu throughout the walk: I didn’t take many photographs, because my camera couldn’t see any more than I could.

Regular readers will know that on the previous walk we were reckless, complacent and ill-prepared. We made up for that this time, and never have preparation and careful navigation been more important. The poor visibility was continually challenging, and even with the map and compass we were close to going very badly wrong on one occasion, as I describe below.

The climb to Ben Vorlich from Ardvorlich was very easy, mainly because it was on a good path all the way to the top. It seems a rather tame peak because of this, and yet it does have that special high peak feel right at the top. Fenceposts marked the way between the summit of Ben Vorlich and that of Stuc a’Chroin, staying on or near the tops and ridges and the crest of the bealach between the peaks. It had no fencing wires between the posts, but I suppose that in the past it demarcated the border between land estates.

It was difficult to find our way on the bealach, a much more complex feature than it seems from a distance and much more time-consuming to traverse than expected. We were unsure of which way to go a couple of times, before we realised that the fenceposts would be a good guide. Stuc a’Chroin rises up quite suddenly, especially when you’ve had no warning of its proximity. The decision at this point was crucial. Should we climb this peak at all, given that it was a scrambling route on wet rock with little visibility? We didn’t know about any other route, and we couldn’t go wandering off to look for one in those conditions, so the choice was to scramble up or return to the car. It looked dangerous, because:

If there was no path, then navigating on a scrambling route would be very difficult;
We could easily lose each other in those conditions, and it’s surprising how the mountains can just swallow up the human voice;
The rock was all schist, which is slippery when wet;
There was a lot of loose rock, and it was obvious from the rubble at the bottom that it was a very unstable cliff;

So I was inclined just to return to the car – an attitude I justified with these concerns about safety but which was really just laziness: after doing one Munro I’m sometimes not in the mood for another heart-busting workout, especially if there’s some unenjoyable terrain to cross, in this case a field of angular boulders littering the foot of the cliff. This retiring reluctance always passes, however. In this case Stu suggested we walk up for some distance to see what it was like, which I agreed to, and we found that it was easy enough, with a path of sorts most of the way. There was loose rock all over the place, and on one occasion I dislodged a big one and sent it hurtling down the slope. We both stared at it, willing it not to hit any of the people below, until Stu realised how useless that was and shouted “watch out below!”

http://www.mrsbrowns.co.uk/acatalog

I was energized on this part of the climb by some pieces of tablet. And while I still think that the mighty little Chomp is the best chocolate bar there is, henceforth on the mountain it’s got to be tablet, or perhaps kendal mint cake. It must be the sheer sugariness of it. Chocolate – especially those posh dark chocolate buttons from Coco that I had on the day – is far less sugary and therefore less effective as an energy-booster.

The route up the cliff ended abruptly, opening onto a small flat summit with cairns and an engraved stone in memory of Donald Stuart, founder of the Falkirk Mountaineering Club. Though we could see nothing, we together worked out that this was not the top of Stuc a’Chroin, as we had presumed – that would have been too easy. As Stu likes to say, the Munro always makes you work that bit harder.

It was a gentle climb along the broad ridge to the actual summit, where we stopped for a short while to rest. My concern was not about our present situation, but about navigating across the moorland to get back to the glen, once we had descended from this peak. All we had to do here was retrace our steps to the other end of the ridge and wind our way back down the cliff. So we set off back along the line of fenceposts, and after about fifteen minutes they began to veer off and head down the side of the mountain. There was a path here and we figured this might be preferable to retracing our steps all the way, which we always try to avoid. But I sensed I was losing my bearings (I didn’t know the half of it) and looked at the compass to find that the direction that was supposed to be south was actually north. While my mind was still reeling I told this to Stu, and he was equally bewildered.

I studied the map and after a while discovered the truth. It was a truth so obvious once accepted, but, prior to this, so outside the field of normal expectations that it eluded us for many minutes. Setting off from the summit, we had followed the fenceposts in the wrong direction, south instead of north. A spectacular mistake, the realisation of which stunned us into head-shaking and self-admonishment. It was a further few minutes before we came upon the best – really the only – plan of action: we had to return to the summit, so that we were guaranteed to find our way again by following the fenceposts in the right direction. This was uncomfortable, because in that fifteen minutes we had descended quite a way, and there was a tempting-looking route skirting northwards around the summit. But it had to be done, and this way we avoided getting lost.

And so we learned another rule: In bad conditions, before you set off again after a stop, consult the map and compass to establish your bearings and work out where to go next.

This is by no means obvious and doesn’t occur to one naturally. Only a mistake such as this could have taught us it.

To conclude, an appeal: if you want to help us preserve our hillwalking relationship, and thereby also the quality of these blog posts, please send in your messages of support. Also, any independent diplomacy or arbitration would be very welcome.

And in case anyone wants to pull me up on my lack of sports knowledge, I do realize that the white banding of an American football does not extend all the way around the ball, but only half-way. This was an honest mistake.

The other egg, an abstract work in mixed media, was stolen by a dog, which picked it up carefully in its front teeth and ran away with it. As a consequence of only having one egg for lunch, I became a bit peckish a couple of hours before tea-time.

Drawn in pen, this elaborate doodle is interesting because while I was drawing it the black was the figure and the white was the ground. So the black was the thing to notice, and the white was just the space in between, the substrate. This was natural, as I was actually drawing the black on a white background. When I finished it (and I was satisfied to find that there was a moment when I realised, without any doubts, that I’d finished, because it was right) there was a figure-ground reversal and since then it’s the white shapes that I’ve noticed, lying on a black background, or in a black space. When I was drawing it I hadn’t realised that, effectively, I was drawing the spaces between things, rather than things themselves. You can still choose to see it either way, by creating your own figure-ground reversals.

Seen the new way, which does seem stronger, several animals can be spotted. You can see a dolphin, a crocodilian (a cayman perhaps?), a duck, some kind of bird and a happy sperm-whale-like creature. But seen the other way – the way I drew it – it’s more refined and flowing.

This is another impression of the Quirang in Skye. I posted a photo of my first one, a painting in acrylics, in a previous post. It really does require art to convey the oddness of the place. Photos don’t capture it. This is one aspect of what 19th/20th century modern art was about – the experience of seeing a thing or being in a place, and the truths of shape and light and colour and perception.

I’ve made the rocks the wrong colour. They shouldn’t look so earthy, because they’re volcanic. But I was trying out my new water-soluble pencils and I liked the contrast of the brown and the green.

(About that last paragraph, I ask myself “but why even mention that?” Well, after a moment’s reflection I now know the bizarre reason: it’s because I’m insuring myself against any accusations of inaccuracy from geologists. Go figure.)

Obviously this is a bit half-assed, but I’m working up to something – it’s the second one like this I’ve drawn. Not sure what it is, but I’m pleased to see that the disc – the sun – really does look bright.

At the risk of revealing a shameful fetish: in case you don’t know what a Moleskine is, have a look at this.

I believe they’re seen as a bit pretentious, but the facts remain: I haven’t seen a better-quality, better-looking, better-feeling notebook anywhere.

I’ve been reading Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. You couldn’t hope to find another writer on art so wise, modest, generous, uncorrupted by fashion and lacking in snobbery. I have two heroes who are important in similar ways: David Attenborough and Jacob Bronowski. I think that Ernst Gombrich will be joining them.