The High Wood

Last night Pamela, Robert and I went to see the Flying Fruit Fly circus at the Parramatta Riverside Theater. Try saying Flying Fruit Flies three times quickly.

If you have never heard of them, they are a circus where all the performers are kids between 10 and 17. The FFF has a circus skills school and this is where they get to show off their skills.

They aren’t too bad at all. Occasionally you get a glitch where someone doesn’t quite manage the somersault through the two skipping ropes but they usually make it on the second try. This is fair enough for a mixed bunch of kids with different levels of skill.

Some of them are really good. My personal favourite was the guy upside down on a 30ft vertical pole who suddenly slides down the pole stopping himself by gripping with his legs just before his head hits the matting. His head wasn’t noticeably flat but he must have clobbered himself in practice once or twice.

So it was good but I have a serious complaint with regard to the way it connected with its audience, quite a lot of whom were young children. They wrapped a story around their skills (a perfectly legitimate and venerable device) but their choice of story was unsuited to their audience.

Basically it consisted of a young boy in the Outback. The first scene is his birthday party which is an excuse for some fun tumbling. However, then it all goes wrong, his father is killed in a bushfire and he ends up in the city – apparently with no-one to meet him off the train.

It takes off into fantasy at this point where he becomes a boy elephant trainer (whose father dies – this time of sickness) in a travelling circus. The circus is sold and he is the only one not taken on by the new owner. The circus people sneak him aboard the ship they are taking but the ship gets wrecked in a storm.

This was the first half. I’m not sure what happened in the second half because Robert couldn’t take it any more. He liked the circus bits but all this stuff about death of fathers and abandonment was more than he could handle and fair enough too. It wasn’t what any of us went to see.

I suspect the kids had a lot to do with writing the story. These are the sorts of concerns that interest adolescents and make good stories but they are not suitable for seven year-old kids – or at least not the subset of them to which Robert belongs.

It was a great pity. With a more cheerful story, Robert would have had a great time and gone home inspired to join a circus. Instead, we missed half the show and he had nightmares. I think I might have to write them a little note for next time.

Well, here we are in 2009 so I guess we survived another year. 2008 started much like any other year – I wrote a post just like this one. Probably I watched some cricket.

Speaking of which, the current South African tourists have been putting the feline among the avians of Australian cricket. Australia, in the manner beloved of our British ancestors, has twice snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. At the WACA they allowed the South Africans to chase down a total of 414 and at the MCG they allowed them, in the first innings, to recover from being 210 runs behind with 7 wickets down to a lead of 66.

There has been much finger-pointing, particularly at the selectors who insist on playing out-of-form and injured senior players. They might as well have let Andrew Symonds go fishing for all the difference he made. I’ve never been convinced that Ponting has been a great captain (let’s face it – I could have won with McGrath, Warne and Gilchrist on my team) but I’m not sure he deserves the amount of mud being flung at him.

But I digress. The first few months of the year drifted along. Robert went into the first grade at school, played a bit of cricket, did some ice-skating and so forth. Pamela and I went to see a bizarre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see The Bard from Bengal) which was performed in about 12 languages, only one of which was English. I created yet another website (pascalbonenfant.com) to support my 18th century research and my still-to-be-published novel (of which more later).

In point of fact, I started two new websites but the other one is in a secret identity so I can’t tell you about it. Basically, I’ve started a book review site but didn’t want to do it in my own name so I’ve created a pseudonym. This is partly so that I can give glowing reviews to Pamela’s books (ahem) but also because I was interested in creating a fake identity online. I even opened a Facebook page for said identity but the problem with that is that Facebook is rather boring – particularly if you don’t actually exist. I may reveal this identity sometime over the next year but then again I may not. That’s the good thing about secrets.

In May life got really hectic as we went for a four-week trip overseas. My sister and brother-in-law very kindly lent us their London flat in which we spent a couple of weeks. Pamela visited her British publishers and we visited family and did touristy things. Then on to New York and Madison, Wisconsin for a Science Fiction convention (Wiscon). Then Disneyland (which was interesting but slightly disappointing – just another theme park really even if it was the first) and then, finally, Sydney and home. My health was indifferent (I spent at least part of the trip on antibiotics) and it left me exhausted but it was worth doing.

Things got a fair bit quieter after that. We took Robert to a gymnastics competition in Newcastle which was a qualifier for the NSW State championships. Robert’s team all qualified and they went on to do well in the State competitions in August (no individual medals but they came second overall in their age group).

Also in August, Pamela went across the WorldCon in Denver (see temporary single dad). It is the sort of thing she needs to do to promote herself as an author but apparently it was hard yakka and she probably won’t go to the 2009 version. The fact that it is being held in the industrial town of Bradford in the north of England may also have something to do with that decision.

Oh yes, my writing project. It turns out it wasn’t really as ready as I thought and needed drastic surgery. After due consultation with my resident expert I chopped out about 25,000 words and started re-writing again. Once again, it is nearing completion. It is, I am obliged to confess, a much better book as a result. This year for sure (maybe).

Pamela’s writing is going much better. She is re-drafting the third book of the trilogy (Full Circle) based on her publishers comments. This goes back to them in February and will be appearing in the shops about August/September. She has a contract for another book set about 20 years later in the same universe. She has sold the fantasy stuff to Germany, France and Spain. She has a new children’s book (Victor’s Challenge) coming out which is also being published in the UK and possibly the USA (negotiations continuing). One way or another, that is all going well.

So what’s happening in 2009? A lot of it will be more of the same – we aren’t planning any major events. Robert goes into second grade. He will continue with cricket, soccer and gymnastics as he enjoys all of them and it keeps him very fit. Pamela will continue to write and publish. I will re-write my book again. I will continue to go to work. Anything more will be reported as it happens.

Happy New Year!

On Thursday night, I took my mother to see an André Rieu concert at the Olympic Stadium. She is something of a fan of his so it seemed a good thing to do for her birthday. In case you have never heard of him he is a violinist and entertainer.

Whatever else might be said about him, André certainly understands big. His ‘stage’ was a full-sized reproduction of the facade of a Venetian palace. On the upper floor, above the orchestra, was a dance floor where the Viennese ballet danced several numbers. There were ice-rinks in front of the wings where ice-skaters (I’m not sure of their nationality) skated in counterpoint to the dances. There was even, at one point, a carriage drawn by six white horses doing a lap of the arena. Four very large video screens were mounted on the front of the facade.

It is the presence of these screens which gives away the major problem – the Olympic Stadium is big. Big enough for Olympic events and games of football. Big enough, indeed, for the facade of a Venetian palace.

We were in the reasonably cheap seats in the middle of the football pitch. The orchestra stage was raised so you could see them OK although you only saw the top half of the ice-skaters. But although you could see the orchestra they looked tiny. More expensive seats were available back up in the stands but one side of the stadium is a long way from the other side so, while you would have been able to look down on the stage a bit, everyone would have looked very small indeed. Only the really expensive seats just in front of the stage would have had anything like a good view.

So you ended up looking at the giant screens a lot. There is no doubt the camera-work was excellent – he has been touring a long time now and it was a slick act. Everyone in the orchestra smiled and laughed a lot – possibly a bit strained in places but very professional. There was friendly mucking about and André is a good entertainer who kept the crowd with him.

I liked the music too. There is nothing inherently wrong with tunes you can hum and we got a lot of the well-known classics. There was even an Andrew Lloyd Webber number and while this is one more than I would included, I could put up with it.

The forecast thunderstorms never materialised (a good thing when you are seated in the middle of the arena) and it was a pleasant evening. By leaving before the encores finished we even managed a quick getaway rather than having to fight the crowd of 20,000 and the inevitable traffic jams.

But somehow, when the music has of necessity been heavily amplified (and the stadium was not built with acoustics as a primary design feature) and when you have to watch the video screens in order to properly see what is going on, you can’t help wondering if you might be better just buying the DVD and watching it in comfort.

I don’t regret doing it and we both enjoyed it but I don’t think either of us would do it again.

Last weekend, Pamela and I were at a miniature Science Fiction convention in Sydney called Freecon. I have posted a few photos here. A few days after that was Remembrance Day. In Binyon’s immortal works – “age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn”.

Looking around the convention room the years had condemned a lot of us but although age was doing its best to weary, a bunch of die-hard fans struggled on. I do not, by the way, count myself among them, however old and weary I might be. I found Cons pretty dull back in the seventies and occasional visits over the intervening years have not changed my opinion.

Still, for Pamela this is work. A number of these people are her potential customers and influential ones at that. People whose opinion on what constitutes a good book counts for something in SF book-reading circles. I was along as moral support and photographer.

I actually spoke at the 2007 version of Freecon (there’s a blog entry here) and thought I might have to again but in the event I wasn’t required. This may be partly because I bailed out of the Sunday sessions due to terminal exhaustion (age having wearied etc).

The days of the old-style convention must be numbered. The punters are growing older and cons will eventually go the way of other out-dated institutions. But there are still lots of fans out there – SF and Fantasy books are selling well let’s not even talk about films, games, comic books (sorry, graphic novels) and small furry toys.

A lot of it has moved online. Most of your favourite authors have blogs where you can keep up with their ideas and contribute your own. There are fan sites, chat rooms, author sites, gaming sites. Probably there are small furry toy sites. You can be a lot closer to your author than used to be the case and it is less necessary to spend a weekend listening to only occasionally interesting panels to be so.

As a not particular fan of cons I can but approve. People will still get together – however good online communication is it doesn’t quite compare with meeting actual physical people – but the format is changing. And about time too.

There are a number of well-known ‘quotes that never were’:

• Alas poor Yorrick, I knew him well
• Elementary, my dear Watson
• Play it again, Sam
• Beam me up, Scotty
• It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it

and so forth

But I was distressed to find the other day that one of my favourite quotes was bogus.

We trained hard . . . but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation.

It is attributed to Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c.27-66 A.D.) who is believed to be the author of the Satyricon.

Alas, it ain’t so. A complete and entertaining deconstruction is given by Jim Reeds at www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/petronius.html.

I mourn its departure from the lexicon but, as Reeds so pithily puts it, "if mankind lost the Petronius quote we could repair the damage by clipping out Dilbert cartoons". Hmm. Maybe I could attribute it to Scott Adams?

Or maybe I’ll continue attributing it to Petronius regardless. A good myth deserves to be perpetuated.

I’m not quite sure how it happened but I seem to have gone through the entire month of September without updating the site. So I’m going to pretend that today is yesterday. If that doesn’t work I’ll go in and hack the database for this entry so that it really does say September. Time is not my master.

It’s not like things haven’t been happening. At the very end of August, Robert took part in the State Men’s Gymnastics representing his Five Dock gym for Level 1. Pamela bought a spiffy digital SLR while she was overseas so we got some good photos – I just haven’t got around to editing them down to website size.

The same thing for the soccer end-of-season. A good camera makes such a difference when photographing sports. Apart from the zoom, control over depth of field and stuff like that it also has a fast response time. A major problem with cheaper digital cameras is the delay between pressing the button and the picture actually taking. Using one of these for sports photography means you have to sort of guess where the person will be by the time your camera reacts. Not easy.

The last couple of weeks have been quiet – just getting on with life. School holidays started this week which is good for me because the trains are slightly less crowded but bad for Pamela because it is harder for her to do any writing. And she has an end-of-October deadline so it’s going to be a busy month for her.

I’ve seen a few friends. Played some boardgames (the new game Agricola is a good one if you are into that sort of thing). Met my friend Jonathan who has been overseas for about ten years but was in Sydney briefly snooping out the possibility of a job here. Come back – we miss you.

Other than that it’s situation normal. Anyway, I’ll do better in October. Promise.

Back in October 2006 we went to the Cirque du Soleil courtesy of some of Pamela’s relatives. We enjoyed it so much we decided to go again when it returned to Australia with Dralion.

Our seats this time were not right next to the stage which was actually a good thing because we didn’t have to look up all the time. We were partially obscured by a light tower but there were unoccupied seats right at the back which were not so we appropriated them.

Cirque du Soleil is a wonderful circus. It has no animal acts – it is all about human skills. These are pretty extraordinary. The highlight for me was the hoop jumpers with a whole troop jumping singly and seriatim through a tower of vertical hoops. There was a pretty impressive trampolining act as well although having seen more gymnastics via Robert I was probably less impressed than I would have been two years ago.

In fact the whole thing was slightly down on last time. The trampolining did not match up to the equivalent act with swings last time. The clowns were ok but I didn’t get the side-splitting laughs that I got from one of the acts last time. The set wasn’t quite as spectacular either.

Having said that, we still had a great time. Robert got slightly bored in the first half where a lot of the acts were impressive but more a matter of slow control than spectacle. He picked up in the second half where there was more movement.

Will we go again next time? Absolutely!

Here, for your edification, I present pi to 1,000 decimal places.

3.
1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510
5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679
8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128
4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196
4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091
4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273
7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436
7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094
3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548
0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912
9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798
6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132
0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872
1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235
4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960
5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859
5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881
7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303
5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778
1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989

A lot of people will recognise the first five or six digits depending on whatever approximate value they were taught at school. Since we all recognise these numbers there is a fair chance (ignoring the possibly of a mind-blowing world-wide physics-distorting conspiracy) that they are correct.

The question is, how do you know that the remaining numbers did not come from a random number generator? Or maybe I went and changed one digit just to be evil? Actually, I did change one digit. Or maybe I’m lying about that or maybe I changed it back. Indeed, even if I have genuinely included what I believe to be the correct number, I could be wrong.

Possibly you have the mathematical ability to calculate it yourself, perhaps bringing your personal computer into play. However, your pc is unlikely to be able to calculate pi to 1.25 million places and even if it could there comes a point beyond which you do not have the resources to go any further.

Wherever your boundaries are, at some point you have to trust that the answer is correct.

Why am I rabbiting on like this? There are two reasons. One: I thought it would be cool to have pi to 1,000 places in my blog. Two: I have been playing with Wikipedia and I’ve got interested in the “Wisdom of the Commons” idea.

The latter seems to come down to levels of verification. Ignoring for the moment solipsistic arguments about whether you are just a figment of your own imagination we have:

1. Truths we can verify ourselves by simple observation – e.g. encountering concrete at terminal velocity will result in death
2. Truths we can verify with moderate effort – e.g. 3.1416 is a good approximation of pi
3. Truths which have been repeatedly verified by experts in the public domain – e.g. time dilation occurs at near-light velocities
4. Truths which we are told are verifiable but which are difficult to verify – e.g. pi to 1,000 decimal places in this blog
5. Truths which experts assure us are true but which might as well be black magic as far as we know – e.g. how you prove Fermat’s last theorem
6. Truths which non-experts assure us are true because they read about it somewhere – e.g. Wikipedia

It gets even harder when you get into fuzzy areas such as history or anthropology. It is much harder to separate expert opinion from non-expert opinion, partly because a lot of the so-called expert opinion is a load of dingoes kidneys. While there are fine, rigorous thinkers in the fuzzy disciplines there are also a lot of screwballs because it is far easier to hide ignorance in obfustication. There is a spoof computer language called C+- which has an even if not operator. Its analogue is used far to frequently by the practitioners of certain disciplines.

Have I said anything useful here, he asked rhetorically. Well maybe not. It looks a load of waffle to me but that may be because I’m an expert. Or so I
claim. If all else fails you now have pi to 1,000 decimal places. Maybe.

There is an Arabic saying which covers it pretty well: Trust in God but tie your camel first.

Pamela is currently at Denvention, the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, being held in Denver. Now that she is writing for adults she needs to get on the convention circuit and spruik her work. On our recent world trip (see the May 2008 menu on the website front page) we stopped in at Wiscon in Madison, Wisconsin for precisely this purpose.

However, there has been one unfortunate side-effect of this – Robert and I have been left by ourselves for a week. This is the first time this has happened to us and we have had to adjust.

Robert was a bit dubious about the concept to start with but he came round. Life has continued pretty much as normal for him. He has been doing school and all his usual activities and he had a sleep-over at a friend’s place last night as a result of which he got a reasonable amount of sleep and I didn’t because I was watching the Olympics until one in the morning.

I have been adjusting to single Dadhood (fortunately only temporary – how do single parents cope?). I have cheated a bit because I have taken four days annual leave so that I don’t have to juggle school and work. This is easier for both Robert and me as he doesn’t have to go into after school care and I don’t have to rush around like a headless chicken.

Pamela is considering going to England next year for Eastercon. This may not happen as it is being held in Bradford and, unless you are interested in the history of Dark Satanic Mills (brother of the more famous John), there’s not much to attract. It depends a bit on what her British publishers advise I expect. Had it been in Stratford-on-Avon in the middle of the Shakespeare season things might be different…

Pamela is back early on Tuesday morning. Robert and I are both pretty keen on this idea. She will undoubtedly be totally exhausted but we will be a complete family again. I don’t think this single parenting is a good idea at all.

Just out of interest I signed up to Wikipedia the other day. For anyone still living in the dark ages Wikipedia is a collaborative online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to.

The idea is that everyone can contribute in their own area of expertise thereby building up a community resource. The term “Wisdom of the Commons” gets bandied about which seems like an odd phrase to me.

Some wisdoms, it seems, is more common than others. For instance, if you want to know which movies starred both Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins the Wikipedia is an invaluable resource. On the other hand, if you want to know how to calculate wind-shear forces on a cable suspension bridge you would do well to look elsewhere. Either you won’t find the information in the first place or, if you do, there is a fair chance your bridge will collapse in a high wind.

Historical stuff seems to be somewhere in the middle. The bits I know about are mostly correct but tend to be careless in the finer details. Academic rigour, like engineering, is a matter of training not just native intelligence and some of the contributors are less than rigourous.

So, in the spirit of co-operation, I have added my own entry on a man with the curious name of Quilt Arnold. It is a fairly minor entry about a minor 18th century London criminal but I believe it has the virtue of being mostly correct. If I have the time and energy I might even do some more entries.