Oct. 23, 2012
Tonight, despite feeling a bit under the weather, I went to Stevenage to watch Portsmouth play a League One game at the Lamex Stadium. In addition, I met a “person off the internet” for the second time in a week – this time Tom, a friend of a friend from Facebook: our shared passions being Portsmouth FC and really cool music. We met at King’s Cross and caught a packed train to Stevenage, a non-descript dormitory town that was even more non-descript than I remember St Albans being.
Tags: Football, Portsmouth, Twelve, London
Oct. 2, 2012
This is another mathematics post that does not actually feature any equations or graphs. It is intended to set the way clear for writing regularly about nonlinear systems. This in itself is a precursor to writing more about mathematical biology as biological systems are inherently complex and nonlinear. I am reading P. G. Drazin’s textbook on Nonlinear Systems and this post is a glossary of terms from the start of the book laid down here because I wanted to remember how to typeset definition lists in Markdown (though in the end I (ab)used <h4> tags because it looked better).
Tags: Maths, Lists, Intros, Twelve
Sep. 29, 2012
I had a bit more time to listen to this month’s albums because I was on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t manage to write about them while on holiday though! In fact I bought and listened to a few more, but I will save them for next month. The albums I will discuss now (in order bought) are:
Four Tet “Pink” The xx “Coexist” Nelly Furtado “The Spirit Indestructible” Grizzly Bear “Shields” It’s quite a diverse collection and, Four Tet apart, quite song based.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, September, Four Tet, The Xx, Nelly Furtado, Grizzly Bear, Twelve
Sep. 23, 2012
Over my holiday I read “Even The Dogs” by Jon McGregor. I’ve not quite finished it yet but that will at least prevent me from giving away spoilers. I am not sure I would want to give any spoilers anyway because it is unrelentingly grim so far. Perhaps there is a happy ending but both you and I will have to read it to find out.
I was introduced to Jon McGregor by the book group I was part of during my PhD.
Tags: Books, Jon McGregor, Fiction, Twelve
Sep. 21, 2012
Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project.
Tags: Programming, Games, Fun, Seventeen, Twelve
Sep. 19, 2012
It’s rather spooky but shortly after deciding to write about Nelly Furtado’s “Folklore” as the next understated classic, I found out that she has a new album out this week. As a result, I have been listening to a lot of her music while writing this post, and I’ve been enjoying it too.
As always with these choices of mine, “Folklore” is a record that I can link to particular events and emotions in my life and so I guess my perception of it is coloured by that.
Tags: Music, Understated Classics, Nelly Furtado, Twelve, Pop
Aug. 31, 2012
Album Digest August 2012 is also from the stack of albums that I mentioned last month. I chose this selection (along with the Passion Pit album) because the colours looked good together in the mosaic of covers that I make each month. Last month’s digest was about the right amount of detail so this will be another briefer digest. These are all good albums but not ones that will change your life, they’ll just happily sit alongside it.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, August, Twelve, Laurel Halo, Grimes, Auntie Flo, Passion Pit
Aug. 15, 2012
“I see the people working and see it working for them.” (Sat In Your Lap)
The Dreaming by Kate Bush is a strange 1982 album that many believed had destroyed her career. Two weeks before her first ever performance of “Running Up That Hill”, the NME had written an editorial asking whether she had burnt herself out completely. Obviously “Running Up That Hill” (recently used to great effect in the Olympic Closing Ceremony) and the parent album “The Hounds Of Love” that followed showed that she had plenty more up her sleeve.
Tags: Understated Classics, Kate Bush, Music, Twelve, Pop, Rock, Electronic
Aug. 15, 2012
“The Gone-Away World” is a novel by Nick Harkaway. It’s about a world slightly askew to our own in which the powers-that-be have deigned to unleash a weapon that simply wipes the enemy out of existence. Unfortunately the enemies also have the same weapon and there are terrible consequences to the extent that the very fabric of reality is threatened. If you don’t already know what reification means, you will by the end.
Tags: Books, Nick Harkaway, Science Fiction, Twelve
Jul. 31, 2012
Just a short album digest this month. I bought a stack of CDs and am parcelling them out over the next few months (together with important additional releases as they crop up). This is in the hope that I can write more considered pieces about each one. This month I’ve grouped together albums with monochrome covers and a BT album from June that I found out about recently. These albums are not just linked by their artwork, they also form a cohesive whole.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, July, BT, Actress, Monolake, Mohn, Twelve
Jun. 30, 2012
Three fantastic albums for Album Digest June 2012:
Saint Etienne Words and Music by Saint Etienne Liars WIXIW Hot Chip In Our Heads This month is a curious selection in that the albums are all by bands that I already own a few records by. When there is so much other directly related material that you can write about, it makes focussing on the album in hand quite difficult. I am always thinking up rankings and comparisons.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, June, Saint Etienne, Liars, Hot Chip, Twelve
Jun. 29, 2012
This post is about the films of Wes Anderson. I am no expert, I’ve just watched them all recently (inspired by seeing “Moonrise Kingdom”) and spotted a some similarities and differences between the films and I thought it would be fun to write about them. My appearance on Mastermind with “The Films of Wes Anderson” as my specialist subject will have to wait for now. Feel free to add to the discussion in the comments.
Tags: Films, Lists, Wes Anderson, Twelve, Yellow