posts

The other weekend, beset by insomnia, I decided to follow my own advice and get up to do something instead of wallowing unable to sleep. I pulled my emergency jigsaw out of the cupboard and set to it. I should stress that I mean a jigsaw puzzle and not an actually jigsaw: DIY at 2am is not such a good idea!

Only one of this month three albums was actually released this month. Nelly Furtado’s Mi plan was actually released over three years ago - I only discovered it last year when I wrote the September album digest following the release of “The Spirit Indestructible”, or it might have been when I wrote about “Folklore” at around the same time.

Three albums (one very Christmassey one!) and an EP this month.

Pretty much a sliding scale between songs and electronic wibble on this month’s albums and a particularly damp, chilly feeling to proceedings too.

A cat reaches the top of a mountain after a long climb through the snow. He is cold from the bottom of his fur to the tips of his claws. He is sodden and wet, and we all know how much a cat hates to be wet.

The second Woob album (AKA “Woob 4495”) is probably the greatest ambient album ever made and is certainly the best one you have never heard of. Originally released in 1995 on the em:t label it is also a rare record. I don’t have an actual copy but I have seen one! I downloaded it off the internet and even that is quite difficult to do. My friend is an avid collector of all the em:t releases and it is easy to see why: all the albums are titled in a specific way that is very appealing to people who like to collect things and they also have very striking nature photography on the covers. In a strange way, the label was able to create an identity for its releases in a way that many artists would try to.

Sometimes, when I am feeling a bit down, I like to write down some of my ambitions. As you can see from this list they are mostly pretty humble but they are also a bit cheesy and embarassing, so I have put them after the fold!

So, two short reviews in a row. I had the day off work and went to see “Rust And Bone” this afternooon. It’s the new film by Jacques Audiard, who directed “A Prophet” – one of my favourite films of the last five years.

I went to see “Skyfall” last night and I really enjoyed it. I knew nothing about the plot, mostly because I had avoided all discussion of the plot with people who had already seen it and I even avoided reviews as so many these days seem to just rattle off plot points, instead of discussing what makes the movie any good. With that in mind I will obviously try not to give away any of the plot in this brief review.

It has been a strange month and I found that I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. I have been a bit down and when that’s the case I tend to take refuge in music that I know well, stuff that cheers me up. I have listened to last month’s fave a lot, Nelly Furtado’s “The Spirit Indestructible”. I said a lot of nice things about it but it probably didn’t come over in my writing just how much I really liked it.

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. I’m glad I went, even though Pompey lost. It’s funny how sitting in a shed in the cold watching your team lose counts as entertainment!

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).