Uyuni to Tupiza We left Uyuni the night after the big storm, having stopped just a day or so to visit the salt flats. Our next stop was a strategic stay in Tupiza, a large town encircled with red hills. It resembled many towns that I visited in South America: low buildings arranged in a grid pattern. Not much greenery and plenty of dust billowing about. The reason for our stay was strategic, it’s only a short distance to the notoriously fussy border between Bolivia and Argentina.

La Paz to Potosi We left La Paz, this time ascending the rim of steep hills around the city in a slightly less clunky “Death Bus”. Perhaps it was because we were travelling uphill or because it was daylight, but it didn’t seem so bad. We set off to Potosi through strange towns with weird monuments (see the pictures) and Oruro where great festivals happen around Ash Wednesday each year that are famous throughout the continent.

Overlong reflection upon the past is one sure way to make yourself unhappy so I try to avoid it. Nevertheless it becomes unavoidable at this time of year, especially if, like me, you are somewhat prone to reflection. At this time last year I was, as detailed in the most recent report of my South American adventure, in La Paz, Bolivia. I think I felt as lost then as I do now, though back then I had the novelty of new places and good friends to steer me through.

I recently started a new job and moved in to a new flat. This means I’m too busy to write any long blog posts at the moment. Also I’m still not quite at home there, so I tend to spend my evenings tidying up or setting up new things. It’s a shame because I have plenty of things to write about (even without observations on moving, starting a new job, etc) but I guess the writing will happen eventually…

This is a longer form post about artificial intelligence inspired by reading a little bit of “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace and putting a picture of a “ghost” up on Instagram. This might be the last of these that I’m able to write for a while. On Not Reading “The Pale King” “The Pale King” is the third and final novel by American author David Foster Wallace. He was working on it when he committed suicide in 2008.

Album Digest September 2014 contains four amazing albums, including the long-awaited return from the Aphex Twin, and an album from Cymbals Eat Guitars released about a week after I wondered what had happened to them. Spooky. Rounding out the selection this month are a cool punky-disco album by The Juan Maclean and a truly remarkable offering by Vessel. Aphex Twin SYRO SYRO is the sixth album by Aphex Twin and his first official Aphex Twin release since Drukqs in 2001.

This post deals with how to generate random numbers in R. It is good to know how to generate random numbers with a particular language or software package for at least one of the following three reasons: You want to test something that depends on a particular distribution. You’re running a stochastic process of some kind (Branching process, random walk etc) and you need random numbers for deciding whether an event occurs.

I recently finished reading All The Birds, Singing, the second novel by Evie Wyld. It’s about a woman called Jake who lives alone on a farm with a dog called Dog on an island somewhere off the coast of Britain. She has sheep to look after but something keeps coming in the middle of the night to kill them. Meanwhile, as the narrative on the island moves forward in the present, a second narrative peels off backwards to explain her past.

The album digest returns with five albums by four artists. Karl Hyde & Brian Eno Someday World & HIGH-LIFE Lone Reality Testing FKA twigs LP1 Mogwai Come On Die Young: Appendix Karl Hyde & Brian Eno Someday World & HIGH-LIFE I’m a big fan of both Karl Hyde’s work with Underworld and of Brian Eno’s stuff so Someday World seemed like a dream collaboration to me when it was released last May.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage is the latest novel by Haruki Murakami. It comes with free stickers. Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about this book, which is slimmer than Murakami’s recent efforts. The plot begins with an intriguing premise. Tsukuru is part of a group of close friends and is one day expelled from the group for no reason. Unfortunately, the development of the plot is uncontrolled and by the end of novel too many holes have developed for it all to hold together.

What it is Ulysses is a markdown editor for the Mac. It has a simple drafting model that makes it easy to organise ideas and move between them. Pieces of writing are represented as sheets that can be tagged and grouped together - the grouping can be made manually or using filters. There are no files, the sheets are entries in a single database that is synced with iCloud. Because everything is plain text it won’t eat up your storage space.

I have already given some of the personal background to why I love this album and now it’s time to give a bit of love to the music itself so I’ll stick to giving a track by track account of “A Ghost Is Born”. If you are familiar with Wilco’s first few albums, you’ll know that A Ghost Is Born is on the line of best fit through Being There, Summerteeth, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Picking up where I left off at Machu Picchu, we headed down into Aguas Calientes (trans. “hot waters”) by coach and by the time we got there it was torrenting down with rain. So much for exploration. We waited out the downpour in a pizza place and deliberated over whether to buy souvenier snaps from the tour guides. Ironically for a town named after hot waters, it was bitterly cold. One of those places where the sound of running water follows you wherever you go, the best thing about it was the huge trains that ran down the middle of street - big clanking hulks pulling huge passenger trains.

Hour of the Star is a short novel by Clarice Lispector, a Ukrainian-born Brazilian author with an interesting life story. This is her last novel and is a remarkable book: inventive, funny, and sad, all at once. I found it in a special selection at the local library dedicated to Brazil because of the World Cup. First some biography. Born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine, in 1920, her family escaped the pogroms and emigrated to Brazil in 1922.

I recently spruced up a post I wrote four years ago about Biosphere’s wonderful album Substrata. I added the following footnote about the difference between voice samples and found sound: I suppose I am distinguishing between found sound and vocal samples here. Perhaps there is very little difference, or that one is the other? When is a vocal snippet something more than found sound? Is it the fact that one has meaning?

Finally saw Guardians of the Galaxy today. Here are fifteen observations about the film that may or may not constitute a short review. At least two Oscars for Best Use Of Body Paint (Green) and Best Use Of Body Paint (Blue) are sewn up. Chris Pratt basically plays Star Lord as “Andy Dwyer in space” and this is fine by me. Best movie to feature a talking raccoon in a long time.

Or at least its subversive soundtrack… I listened to The Orb’s amazing live album “Live ’93” the other day (after discovering the insipid “History Of The Future” collection on Spotify) and I was amazed at how countercultural and subversive it was. I was listening to this stuff at the age of 14 and now that I’m old enough to be a parent, that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Actually it does nothing of the sort, because it’s frigging awesome.

I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and ah… and ah… heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it and it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt, it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock ’n’ roll.

The hat in question is a Wilco baseball cap that I bought at a gig of theirs in 2004, the night that Germany got eliminated from Euro 2004. I’d love to show you a picture of it but I can’t, there isn’t even a picture of it from a Wilco merch site: at least not one that Google or Bing images can see anyway. I did manage to find a side-on picture of it in my bedroom in 2005 and zoom right in on it like they do in CSI.

Watter are a “supergroup” composed from various members of Grails, Slint, and other bands. I did not know anything about Hundred Waters before this month: “The Moon Rang Like A Bell” is their second album. In fact second albums by bands I know nothing about are a something of theme because “Sunbathing Animal” is Parquet Courts’ sophomore effort and I don’t know anything about them either. Meanwhile, I’ve meant to write about “The Four Seasons Recomposed” since April.

This month was strange. I didn’t listen to much new music and after last month’s bumper digest there’s probably a reason for that. Not to mention that Spotify gives you more reasons to look backwards than forwards. Nevertheless, this brief post features new albums by Little Dragon and Coldplay, along with the mini-album collaboration between Röyskopp and Robyn. Little Dragon “Nabuma Rubberband” I discovered Little Dragon, like most people, I imagine, via Gorillaz’ “Plastic Beach” album.

In a tour full of highlights, Christmas week of 2013 was nonetheless one of the greatest weeks of my life. I may have moaned, groaned, and got completely soaked, but it was worth it to see Machu Picchu in the sunshine. “The Story So Far” Arriving in Quito Otovalo and Misahualli Banos Ingapirca and Cuenca Into Peru The Road to Lima The Nazca Lines Arequipa and Cusco The Sacred Valley On 22nd December, we set off from the hotel in Cusco for a trip along the Sacred Valley that lines the Urubamba river.

I am thinking about whether I want to use Dropbox to sync my files anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dropbox. It came along in beta in just 2008 just as I needed it to manage my PhD thesis. In fact I often jokingly claim to having invented it by asking on the MacRumors forums whether a program like it existed - just a few weeks before its beta rode in to my life like a knight in shining armour.

I’m back in the UK so it’s back to posts about albums each month. This one is a bit different because I didn’t listen to very much new stuff while I was away so not all of the albums are up to date. I had to write about the new album by Liars though because it’s awesome and I couldn’t wait to discuss it! Here’s the list of albums: Tegan and Sarah Heartthrob Fanfarlo Let’s Go Extinct Liars Mess London Grammar If You Wait Tegan and Sarah Heartthrob I would argue, as I have throughout my sequence of understated classics posts, that a great album is one that changes you as a person.

Arequipa and Cusco – the two cities that are the subject of this post – are probably the two cities in Peru that are most amenable to travellers (though Lima certainly has a lot to offer too). For me they should have been punctuated with a trip to Colca canyon, one of the deepest canyons in the world and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, I got really sick on the second day in Arequipa as my attempts at keeping my tummy bug at bay finally failed.

Next up was a piecemeal section of the trip that took in a varied set of sights and helped us get to know the new passengers who joined in Lima. On the first day we took a boat trip out to the Ballestas Islands, a nature reserve that is informally known as “the poor man’s galapagos”. Living there are penguins, sea birds, sea lions and seals. The speed boat out was a little wet and wild (and in fact the return trip was even wetter and wilder) so we all got soaked (twice) but the microclimate around the islands themselves was calm and warm, and we all got good value out of our cameras (if they still worked that is).

From Punta Sal we took a long driving down to Huanchaco, via a stop off at the Lord of Saipan museum. The lord of Saipan is a Moche mummy found dressed in all manner of gold and surrounded by artefacts and other sacrifices (including other humans and decapitated llamas). The tour took a while to get going (our guide was late) but the exhibition was so amazing (the pieces were painstakingly restored in Germany) that it was hugely enjoyable.