I love the concept of the Turing Machine...even though frankly I don't really understand it. It just makes me think...a mechanical creation with a computational power equal to anything produced my modern computers.
It's evocative. I see a clacking, scrawling, erasing clatter of wood, wire and clunking metal, emitting raw heat with the speed of its working.
Busy Beavers, Operations, and Halts. Results output on a long paper tape.
The Steampunk Captain surveys the results and makes computations of scientific fact, and navigational corrections to the course of the great iron spaceship straight out of Jules Verne. The gunnery officer calculates his deflection to shoot accurately upon the martian enemies as they speed by in their heliothopters, and the engineer predicts the temperature of his great whirring bearings with his own Turing Machine in the engine room.
The best thing about Turing Machines? They don't really exist. They can do anything you want, virtually. I can make one on the table over there merely by imagining it, and it could do anything I wanted it too, if I so wished.
I wish I could make a real one, my mechanical passport to a better life.
Tuesday 28 May 2013
Friday 24 May 2013
Sharknado and other Creature/Weather fusion movies
A Guardian piece today drew my attention to the existence of "Sharknado", and it also crops up on Total Film's list of the worst promo posters of the Cannes Festival.
http://www.totalfilm.com/features/cannes-2013-s-worst-funniest-movie-posters
Sharknado, obviously, stands out.
Shark movies lend themselves effortlessly to terrible movie publicity; remember Sand Sharks and Sharktopus amongst a million others? They also lend themselves to terrible films like Jaws IV: the Revenge, and John Barrowman's pussy eating dialogue fest Shark Attack 3: The Megaladon. But I think Sharknado ratchets up the idiocy level another notch, The Asylum taking a natural phenomenon that we've just seen in Oklahoma is quite deadly enough without throwing a load of Great Whites into the mix. And how do the sharks themselves survive being whipped around at 200mph in a fairly non watery environment? All that torn up wood and weatherboard must clog their gills.
Starring Tara Reid, whose career since American Pie seems to have been a mirror image of Alyson Hannigan's, it looks like the Asylum have come up with a (straight to) DVD cover before they came up with the actual film. But, it does make wonder what other weather - creature fusion movies could there be? "Pirana Hail"? "Jellyfog"? "Panthronimbulus"? "A Light Drizzle of Killer Ants"?
I like the idea of Jellyfog in particular; imagine the terror of feeling the deadly sting of a Queensland box jellyfish or irukanji down the back of your neck as you walk to work in an autumn fog.
If I could draw, I could come up with the one-sheet myself.
http://www.totalfilm.com/features/cannes-2013-s-worst-funniest-movie-posters
Sharknado, obviously, stands out.
Shark movies lend themselves effortlessly to terrible movie publicity; remember Sand Sharks and Sharktopus amongst a million others? They also lend themselves to terrible films like Jaws IV: the Revenge, and John Barrowman's pussy eating dialogue fest Shark Attack 3: The Megaladon. But I think Sharknado ratchets up the idiocy level another notch, The Asylum taking a natural phenomenon that we've just seen in Oklahoma is quite deadly enough without throwing a load of Great Whites into the mix. And how do the sharks themselves survive being whipped around at 200mph in a fairly non watery environment? All that torn up wood and weatherboard must clog their gills.
Starring Tara Reid, whose career since American Pie seems to have been a mirror image of Alyson Hannigan's, it looks like the Asylum have come up with a (straight to) DVD cover before they came up with the actual film. But, it does make wonder what other weather - creature fusion movies could there be? "Pirana Hail"? "Jellyfog"? "Panthronimbulus"? "A Light Drizzle of Killer Ants"?
I like the idea of Jellyfog in particular; imagine the terror of feeling the deadly sting of a Queensland box jellyfish or irukanji down the back of your neck as you walk to work in an autumn fog.
If I could draw, I could come up with the one-sheet myself.
Tuesday 21 May 2013
CONCEPTS - More thoughts on super fast space travel
I spend a lot of time travelling through space (inner) considering methods of travelling through space (outer).
I was reading about relativistic jets, the beams of energetic particles emitted from the poles of objects like neutron stars and the supermassive black-holes found at the centre of galaxies - the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has a particularly fine example.
Consisting of streams of electron-positron or electron-ion matter marshalled into energetic jets by tightening magnetic fields around a black-hole's accretion disc, or by frame-dragging, a "way out there" phenomenon associated with super massive objects sitting in space time.
These jets move at anything up to tiny fraction below the speed of light, and so it occurred to me, you could out a craft in these jets, suitably heavily shielded against the tremendous energies and ration involved, and surf the jet to a phenomenol speed in a guaranteed constant direction. In my notebook, I even drew a picture of this thing happening! As a three year old physicist would.
The other idea I threw into the space above my head, was a craft employing a generator that projected a major stream of Higgs Particles at a point in space, to generate a super massive singularity ahead of it in space-time. The craft can then fall towards it's self created gravity well, and when sufficient acceleration is gained, it can then project the stream to a further point to keep its momentum up.
Yep, this probably violates every newtonian law of motion under the sun, but this isn't newtonian space! And in my space, perhaps these things can work!
I was reading about relativistic jets, the beams of energetic particles emitted from the poles of objects like neutron stars and the supermassive black-holes found at the centre of galaxies - the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has a particularly fine example.
Consisting of streams of electron-positron or electron-ion matter marshalled into energetic jets by tightening magnetic fields around a black-hole's accretion disc, or by frame-dragging, a "way out there" phenomenon associated with super massive objects sitting in space time.
These jets move at anything up to tiny fraction below the speed of light, and so it occurred to me, you could out a craft in these jets, suitably heavily shielded against the tremendous energies and ration involved, and surf the jet to a phenomenol speed in a guaranteed constant direction. In my notebook, I even drew a picture of this thing happening! As a three year old physicist would.
The other idea I threw into the space above my head, was a craft employing a generator that projected a major stream of Higgs Particles at a point in space, to generate a super massive singularity ahead of it in space-time. The craft can then fall towards it's self created gravity well, and when sufficient acceleration is gained, it can then project the stream to a further point to keep its momentum up.
Yep, this probably violates every newtonian law of motion under the sun, but this isn't newtonian space! And in my space, perhaps these things can work!
Saturday 18 May 2013
Design Classic - The Buck Rogers Starfighter
When the TV show "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" arrived on British TV screens in 1981 or so, I was captivated. Not by the storylines, which even as a young child I could see were rubbish. Nor by Gil Gerard, who sporting what a friend of mine later described as a "utility haircut", was a long way behind S and M clad Avon and his grittier Blake's 7 chums. And as for Erin Grey's charms, well they only became apparent much later, in a post testosterone influx kind of way.
No, it was the spacecraft - the beautiful starfighters, with their twin pointy noses and excitingly angled fins, and different look - that caught the imagination of this viewer. And better still, even to a klutz like me, the basic shape was easily copiable through the medium of lego. When I finished my classwork early, which being a spoddy sort of kid I always did, I always got first crack at the lego and was chruning out various variants of Buck and Wilma's starfighters in chunky handfuls of coloured bricks.
They populated the never ending Aspergerish stories of my imagination, although sadly they haven't done so for a long time. I wished I had a toy, but when it appeared - and a couple of my rather more spolit schoolfriends got their mitts on them - I was gutted. Why oh why, did it have an ugly bar between the nose prongs THAT WAS NOT THERE ON TV!!!
Hah Corgi, you lie! I never saw a toy that looked like the one on the left there. You only got the version that looked like a spaceship designed for slicing vegetables, not cutting through the interstellar medium. It put me right off them, and they disappeared behind X-wings and Colonial Vipers in the stories of my mind.
Corgi! You destroyed a small piece of my childhood!
WORDS COPYRIGHT BLOODY MULBERRY 18/05/2013
No, it was the spacecraft - the beautiful starfighters, with their twin pointy noses and excitingly angled fins, and different look - that caught the imagination of this viewer. And better still, even to a klutz like me, the basic shape was easily copiable through the medium of lego. When I finished my classwork early, which being a spoddy sort of kid I always did, I always got first crack at the lego and was chruning out various variants of Buck and Wilma's starfighters in chunky handfuls of coloured bricks.
They populated the never ending Aspergerish stories of my imagination, although sadly they haven't done so for a long time. I wished I had a toy, but when it appeared - and a couple of my rather more spolit schoolfriends got their mitts on them - I was gutted. Why oh why, did it have an ugly bar between the nose prongs THAT WAS NOT THERE ON TV!!!
Hah Corgi, you lie! I never saw a toy that looked like the one on the left there. You only got the version that looked like a spaceship designed for slicing vegetables, not cutting through the interstellar medium. It put me right off them, and they disappeared behind X-wings and Colonial Vipers in the stories of my mind.
Corgi! You destroyed a small piece of my childhood!
WORDS COPYRIGHT BLOODY MULBERRY 18/05/2013
Thursday 16 May 2013
Anti Matter Man
I was reading about Anti Matter a couple of days ago, and the question of why there is such an imbalance in favour of matter in this universe of ours, when high energy particle collisions would indicate that matter and anti matter should have eradicated itself out of existence in a blitz of photons.
Anti matter has hidden itself away. It has buried itself where normal matter cannot find it. It is locked in the DNA of the folk with Tourette's and Asperger's, the me folk, the we folk.
For when we have a relationship with somoeone made out of normal matter, catastrophic annihilation results. So we live alone, contributing to the mysterious dark matter that physicists can never figure out.
Well, I know where it is.
Anti matter has hidden itself away. It has buried itself where normal matter cannot find it. It is locked in the DNA of the folk with Tourette's and Asperger's, the me folk, the we folk.
For when we have a relationship with somoeone made out of normal matter, catastrophic annihilation results. So we live alone, contributing to the mysterious dark matter that physicists can never figure out.
Well, I know where it is.
Monday 13 May 2013
A Kite of Jellyfish
Can you imagine a prettier thing, than a giant kite made out of jellyfish?
They wouldn't be nasty, horrible, stinging jellyfish like irukanji or Portugese Men'O'War. They would be large, floaty jellyfish with long tentacles that dangled harmlessly from their transluscent bodies.
The tentacles are painted silver, and decorated with gossamer bows made from dragonfly wings. The wind need only be as strong as the lightest breath to send the kite of jellyfish pulsating aloft to glitter irridescent in the sun.
I will take my kite of jellyfish to the beach to impress women of a literary bent, and sea creatures will be impressed with the care and lack of coercion I take over my jellyfish, who fly for me without any harsh words or threat of force.
My jellyfish will fly for me out of love, for they recognise I have a far greater empathy with gentle invertebrates than I do my fellow humans.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry
They wouldn't be nasty, horrible, stinging jellyfish like irukanji or Portugese Men'O'War. They would be large, floaty jellyfish with long tentacles that dangled harmlessly from their transluscent bodies.
The tentacles are painted silver, and decorated with gossamer bows made from dragonfly wings. The wind need only be as strong as the lightest breath to send the kite of jellyfish pulsating aloft to glitter irridescent in the sun.
I will take my kite of jellyfish to the beach to impress women of a literary bent, and sea creatures will be impressed with the care and lack of coercion I take over my jellyfish, who fly for me without any harsh words or threat of force.
My jellyfish will fly for me out of love, for they recognise I have a far greater empathy with gentle invertebrates than I do my fellow humans.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry
Saturday 11 May 2013
Knightmare and the Helmet of Truth
A lot of folk are excited that here in the UK the classic adventure game show "Knightmare" is being re-shown on the Challenge TV channel.
Rating as one of the best things ever put out on ITV - yes I am a BBC snob - I never got to see it as much as I would have liked, as initially I never got home from school early enough, and then I was at university for a large chunk of its run.
Various things stick in the memory though. The fact that to conceal the fact that the young adventurer was actually doing his dungeoneering in a bare green screened studio, he was forced to wear "The Helmet of Truth" - essentially a bucket with horns on it, as can be seen here;
The bearded, slightly psychopathic looking chap here is Hugo Myatt as Treguard, the guide, the dungeonmaster, much given to saying things like "Life force is becoming critical" and "But team, where is the trumpet to blow down the Walls of Jericho?". He would sit with the other members of the team, three classroom spods with pencils and paper who would shout "FORWARD! LEFT! LEFT! NO LEFT!" like someone playing a ZX81 text only adventure with a voice recognition system. They also had to cast spells, getting the spelling right, as some kind of educational sop to the "quality television" brigade. The watching kids, of course, thought this was a load of pointless bullshit getting in the way of the action.
And all the while, as the be-bucketed one struggled to get a key in a lock, or dispose of a troll, thumping heartbeat music would sound ominously, and a graphic of a face would appear in the corner of the screen. This would slowly disintegrate into a scary looking skull with bits of meat on it as the lifeforce ran out, always reminding me of the life indicator in the old Spectrum game "Atic Atac".
The show ran its course, as they always do, as even with some location footage mixed in and some updated graphics Knightmare began to look underpowered compared to the latest in Snezzy Megasony home video game technology. However, the charm of this and the earlier BBC2 "The Adventure Game" is unmatchable to any retro low tech lover like me!
Rating as one of the best things ever put out on ITV - yes I am a BBC snob - I never got to see it as much as I would have liked, as initially I never got home from school early enough, and then I was at university for a large chunk of its run.
Various things stick in the memory though. The fact that to conceal the fact that the young adventurer was actually doing his dungeoneering in a bare green screened studio, he was forced to wear "The Helmet of Truth" - essentially a bucket with horns on it, as can be seen here;
The bearded, slightly psychopathic looking chap here is Hugo Myatt as Treguard, the guide, the dungeonmaster, much given to saying things like "Life force is becoming critical" and "But team, where is the trumpet to blow down the Walls of Jericho?". He would sit with the other members of the team, three classroom spods with pencils and paper who would shout "FORWARD! LEFT! LEFT! NO LEFT!" like someone playing a ZX81 text only adventure with a voice recognition system. They also had to cast spells, getting the spelling right, as some kind of educational sop to the "quality television" brigade. The watching kids, of course, thought this was a load of pointless bullshit getting in the way of the action.
And all the while, as the be-bucketed one struggled to get a key in a lock, or dispose of a troll, thumping heartbeat music would sound ominously, and a graphic of a face would appear in the corner of the screen. This would slowly disintegrate into a scary looking skull with bits of meat on it as the lifeforce ran out, always reminding me of the life indicator in the old Spectrum game "Atic Atac".
The show ran its course, as they always do, as even with some location footage mixed in and some updated graphics Knightmare began to look underpowered compared to the latest in Snezzy Megasony home video game technology. However, the charm of this and the earlier BBC2 "The Adventure Game" is unmatchable to any retro low tech lover like me!
Thursday 9 May 2013
Squid Life on the Abyssal Plain
It is a little known fact, that after first transmissions of "The Abyss" seeped down from our airy world to the cold depths below it, the squid decided it was high time to get organised.
It has long been realised that some Cephalapod species show great intelligence; what wasn't known was how far this intelligence extends. The two species of large, 15 metre plus squid that live in the Southern Ocean depths - The Colossal Squid, and the Giant Squid - constructed a form of living television viewer made from shoals of small bio luminescent fish that lived with the squid in a symbiotic relationship. The fish provided television pictures with the help of iron rich nematode worms used as aerials; the squid provided the fish with food.
So when the squid first saw "The Abyss" in 1990, not only did they fall in love with the "Hippie" character, they decided their agrarian existence on The Abyssal Plain at depths of 4000 metres or more needed a greater sophistication. They organised their farmland, and built cities.
The Colossal Squid act as the farmers and hunters. They tend to huge crops of molluscs and bivalves that live on the sea bed, feeding them on a nutrient rich preparation derived from the outflows from thermal vents. For more mobile protein, they longlined in an enviromentally sustainable manner for Patagonian toothfish, indeed the toothfish were glad to be caught by such a noble creature as the colossal squid, recognising in them a care for resources that the brutal humans in the world above never had.
Meanwhile, the giant squid, with their longer, more precise tentacles, acted as scientists and engineers. They constructed geo thermal power stations at the the volcanic ocean vents, and harvested the minerals to construct glittering pyramidial squid cities out of fools gold and topaz. In these cities the squid live, writing great treatises on oceanic philosophy and cephalapodic poetry. They play a form of table tennis for recreation, holding bats made from turtle shells in all ten tentacles and lumps of smoothed and polished obsidian for balls. They prefer polygamy to tedious life long partnerships, and have decided not to extend their dominions to the surface of our planet as human beings are not worth the effort.
At least, they are leaving humanity alone until they are aboslutely forced to do otherwise. And for that moment, they have squid weapons to use on us that our totally beyond man's feeble comprehension...
Copyright BLoody Mulberry 09/05/2013
It has long been realised that some Cephalapod species show great intelligence; what wasn't known was how far this intelligence extends. The two species of large, 15 metre plus squid that live in the Southern Ocean depths - The Colossal Squid, and the Giant Squid - constructed a form of living television viewer made from shoals of small bio luminescent fish that lived with the squid in a symbiotic relationship. The fish provided television pictures with the help of iron rich nematode worms used as aerials; the squid provided the fish with food.
So when the squid first saw "The Abyss" in 1990, not only did they fall in love with the "Hippie" character, they decided their agrarian existence on The Abyssal Plain at depths of 4000 metres or more needed a greater sophistication. They organised their farmland, and built cities.
The Colossal Squid act as the farmers and hunters. They tend to huge crops of molluscs and bivalves that live on the sea bed, feeding them on a nutrient rich preparation derived from the outflows from thermal vents. For more mobile protein, they longlined in an enviromentally sustainable manner for Patagonian toothfish, indeed the toothfish were glad to be caught by such a noble creature as the colossal squid, recognising in them a care for resources that the brutal humans in the world above never had.
Meanwhile, the giant squid, with their longer, more precise tentacles, acted as scientists and engineers. They constructed geo thermal power stations at the the volcanic ocean vents, and harvested the minerals to construct glittering pyramidial squid cities out of fools gold and topaz. In these cities the squid live, writing great treatises on oceanic philosophy and cephalapodic poetry. They play a form of table tennis for recreation, holding bats made from turtle shells in all ten tentacles and lumps of smoothed and polished obsidian for balls. They prefer polygamy to tedious life long partnerships, and have decided not to extend their dominions to the surface of our planet as human beings are not worth the effort.
At least, they are leaving humanity alone until they are aboslutely forced to do otherwise. And for that moment, they have squid weapons to use on us that our totally beyond man's feeble comprehension...
Copyright BLoody Mulberry 09/05/2013
Saturday 4 May 2013
Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, and the Acid Spiders of Runaway
Runaway is a film little seen on the small screen these days, and I've never come across it in all my charity shop and market stall rummages either.
And before you ask, finding it on the internet is cheating!
It's a film that sticks in the memory though. Because of Tom Selleck playing a near future cop trying to establish why people's formerly docile domestic housekeeping robots have gone suddenly rogue? No, I'm guessing that at the time Tom was still kicking himself for not being able to take the Indiana Jones gig when it was right under his nose, and was trying to make up for it by appearing in unsuccessful movies like this one, or the X rated Indy movie Lassiter.
Could it be that the villain of the film, dastardly manufacturer of microchips that turns droids into killers is none other than Gene Simmons of Kiss? No, he makes a reasonably effective villain, if a little monotone and his tongue undeployed.
The reason the movie is memorable is, like The Black Hole with its terrifying bowel churning robot Maximillian, that the movie is stolen by a robot. Or rather robots, and unlike the powerful hovering Maximillian with his whirling blades, these robots are small, eight legged and yet just as frightening.
These robot spiders have a seriously unpleasant, double threat. Not only do they inject their victims with acid to cause agonising pain, as is happening to Mr Simmons here;
they then explode.
They have a sinister, vibrating motion, coupled with an ability to jump like mechanical fleas onto walls next to the quivering necks of their victims...
...before plunging their acid dripping needles into the vulnerable flesh.
The film isn't an out and out turkey, it is watchable and although it never made Selleck into a major action star like he must have been hoping, he does a decent job. But to an 11 year old boy, as I was, the performances and the script just don't register.
What makes the impact is the thought of having killer robot spiders inject agonising, burning acid into your neck, a thought sufficient to make you go to sleep with a pillow over your head for a fair few nights!
Words copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/05/2013
And before you ask, finding it on the internet is cheating!
It's a film that sticks in the memory though. Because of Tom Selleck playing a near future cop trying to establish why people's formerly docile domestic housekeeping robots have gone suddenly rogue? No, I'm guessing that at the time Tom was still kicking himself for not being able to take the Indiana Jones gig when it was right under his nose, and was trying to make up for it by appearing in unsuccessful movies like this one, or the X rated Indy movie Lassiter.
Could it be that the villain of the film, dastardly manufacturer of microchips that turns droids into killers is none other than Gene Simmons of Kiss? No, he makes a reasonably effective villain, if a little monotone and his tongue undeployed.
The reason the movie is memorable is, like The Black Hole with its terrifying bowel churning robot Maximillian, that the movie is stolen by a robot. Or rather robots, and unlike the powerful hovering Maximillian with his whirling blades, these robots are small, eight legged and yet just as frightening.
These robot spiders have a seriously unpleasant, double threat. Not only do they inject their victims with acid to cause agonising pain, as is happening to Mr Simmons here;
they then explode.
They have a sinister, vibrating motion, coupled with an ability to jump like mechanical fleas onto walls next to the quivering necks of their victims...
...before plunging their acid dripping needles into the vulnerable flesh.
The film isn't an out and out turkey, it is watchable and although it never made Selleck into a major action star like he must have been hoping, he does a decent job. But to an 11 year old boy, as I was, the performances and the script just don't register.
What makes the impact is the thought of having killer robot spiders inject agonising, burning acid into your neck, a thought sufficient to make you go to sleep with a pillow over your head for a fair few nights!
Words copyright Bloody Mulberry 04/05/2013
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