What a bunch of Pick-Heads

First there was Angus Young...

Then there were Dave Murray/Adrian Smith...

Then came Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield...

Then things got more serious: Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and, finally, the Biggest Swinging Pick of them all: Yngwie Malmsteen.

As you've probably copped on, I'm charting in chronological order my journey of discovery into the world of guitar speed picking technique.

You see, picking technique is to wannabe teenage guitar heros what bicep size is to muscleheads in the gym. A former such wannabe, I remember religiously practising Nick Nolan's "Joy Of Picking" exercises on a daily basis, dreaming of the day when I might be able to nail one of Yngwie's ridiculously fast arpeggios or, at the very least, the riffs from Battery or Damage Inc.

Things didn't quite work out on that front, but I still get a shiver down my spine when I hear a particularly fast bit of picking. Imagine, then, how hard my jaw hit the floor when I saw this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynUZOJc8QI

To summarize for those who can't be bothered watching it: the guy plays Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" -- fully picking the sixteenth notes -- at 320 beats per minute! That's 4*320/60 = 21.333 notes per second. And each note is different, demanding coordination between left and right hands. As far as I can tell, it's genuine, and sounds pretty clean...

The funny thing is that his "warm up" rendition is at 170 beats per minute, which is already mind blowing. In fairness, once he gets beyond 200 bpm, it's hard to really hear the increase in speed: it just sounds like a slightly different species of buzzing insect.

This is probably not something that would appeal to anyone who hasn't spent a significant fraction of their teenage years in the woodshed sweating over three-octave scale patterns, but it is nevertheless an impressive physical feat worthy of anything you'd see at the Olympics.

Still, you have to wonder: when, in the course of his practising, he got up to somewhere around 200bpm, wouldn't he have paused to think something along the lines of "okay, well I guess by any reasonable standard my picking technique is pretty much under control; maybe I should focus on song writing or something -- that way I won't just end up as some circus act on YouTube..."

Charybdis and Scylla

Here's a self-indulgent little piece of waffle for fans of English sayings, the French language, Greek mythology, and The Hobbit...

Last night, over dinner with a random flopsy back at my crib, I was siezed by a sudden urge to look up the bit in The Hobbit where Bilbo and the Dwarves are about to leave Beorn's place and head off into Mirkwood (more precisely, I was looking for the description of Beorn's famous twice-baked honey cakes). However, the only copy at hand was my French edition Bilbo le Hobbit (purchased long ago when I was learning French but -- I confess -- never read fully). As Tracy Jordan would say: "a quandary; a QUANDARY!".

Determined to dig out the passage at all costs, I bravely plunged in, hoping my French skills would hold up in this challenging context. I quickly became distracted by the fun of pondering the French chapter titles, and decided to use this as the basis of a quiz for the floozy (whose interest was quite understandably starting to flag at this point). We also dabbled in the game of translating the riddles from Bilbo's contest with Gollum (and then trying to guess the answers). But, to come to my point: my attention was grabbed by a chapter entitled "De Charybdis en Scylla".

Now, my French vocab is not too shabby (for an étranger), but I was drawing a blank here. However, my quasi-encyclopaedic recollection of the English chapter titles quickly suggested that this must be the translation of "Out Of The Frying Pan Into The Fire". Clearly they weren't translating word for word -- so what was this funky translation all about?

(If, unlike me, you've read The Odyssey -- or happen otherwise to know something about Greek mythology -- you're probably sniggering up your sleeve at my ignorance at this point...)

Looking up "Charybdis" in the French dico, I immediately found that the word exists in French solely as part of the expression "tomber de Charybdis en Scylla", which means (quelle surprise!) "to fall out of the frying pan into the fire". It turns out that, in Greek mythology, Charybdis and Scylla were a particularly nasty pair of monsters that sat across from each other on either side of the Messina strait off the coast of Sicily (supposedly: nowadays there is some debate about the actual location), waylaying hapless sailors as they passed through.

And here's where it gets interesting (poor Flopsy, waiting patiently): looking in my trusty crossword-lovers' Chambers Dictionary, it turns out we have a saying in English based on these guys: "to be between Charybdis and Scylla". Meaning, to use a more common metaphor, "to be between a rock and a hard place".

Wow, cool. From a chapter title in The Hobbit based on an English saying, to its French translation, and finally back to the English language with a different saying. Or, I guess you could say, "There And Back Again"...

As a postscript, this morning when I woke up these words were replaying in my mind and started sounding familiar. Then I hit upon it:

You consider me the young apprentice,

caught between Scylla and Charybdis

There it was all along, in The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger". How many times have I heard that without ever stopping to think about what the heck he was actually saying there?

P.S. If anyone is interested, have a go at these chapter titles (in no particular order):

Une Réception Inattendue

Curieux Logis

Tonneaux en Liberté

Grillade de Mouton

Enigmes dans l'Obscurité

Dans La Montagne et Sous La Montagne

Une Courte Pause

Mouches et Araignées

A deluge of steaming torrents

Breaking Bad

Season 3 of Breaking Bad is under way and I'm loving every minute of it. It's so painful being reduced to 1 episode per week though --- it was much better playing catch up...

Caprica

This is a new sci-fi show set in the same fictional reality as the excellent Battlestar Galactica, 58 years before the events in that series. It deals with the creation of the first Cylons and features a young William Adama. Eric Stolz plays Daniel Graystone, the scientific genius and technology mogul who creates the first Cylon and coins the name (in T2-speak, he's "the man most directly responsible" for the carnage to come). 

I was a big fan of BSG and I loved the finale, so I was fairly enthusiastic about this show, even though it smacks slightly of milking the franchise.

Unfortunately, however, I just couldn't get into the show: I gave up half-way through the third episode. It's not that there isn't anything to like: the special effects are great, and I love the depiction of Caprica city as a kind of New York City meets Coruscant. It's just that the story and characters aren't that interesting or convincing.

24 Season 8

"Contact NSA: the terrorists just took out CTU" - Jack Bauer

Jack's back for the eighth and final time (modulo a possible movie adaptation or two). 

I originally fell under the spell of 24 around about the time Season 6 was current (this was back in the days of borrowing/ripping DVDs). It was the perfect show on which to play catch-up: at one point I got pretty darn close to watching the entire 24-hour "day" (1 day = 1 season = 24 x 1 hr episode) in real-time. I raced through the first 5 seasons within a matter of months (being between jobs alone in Dublin helped there). 

But by around Season 6 the spell was starting to wear off and it was becoming clear that every conceivable terrorist attack scenario had been explored -- several times. A memorable scene illustrating the silliness of it all was a few episodes into Season 6 when Jack, just hours after being released from one and a half years of unimaginable horrors at the hands of the Chinese, witnesses the explosion of a (small) nuke in Los Angeles and instantly gets that look which tells you he's about to save the world again.

By Season 7, I was coasting on momentum -- driven mostly by curiosity to see what would happen to Jack this time and who could possibly be left to kill. Notwithstanding the plunge into new levels of implausibility (viz. the re-incarnation of Carlos Bernard as Tony Almeida --- who was assumed dead back in Season 4 or 5), it was surprisingly entertaining and gripping. I appreciated the fact that the show was starting to poke fun at itself, with Jack practically begging to be allowed to torture suspects but being held at bay (for most of the season) by the nouveau regime.

Season 8 seems to be trying to take itself a bit more seriously, and is less interesting as a result. The cliches are feeling tired, and at this point -- slightly more than halfway through -- I'm not as gripped as I should be (to be honest, I should admit that part of the problem is watching the show at the drip-feeding level of one episode per week: it would undoubtedly work better at higher doses).

Anyway, I expect I'll see it through to the end, but I'm glad to hear they'll be calling it a day after that.

Secret Diary of a Call Girl

Watched season 3 (all 8 episodes) of this UK version of Sex And The City a couple of weeks ago. The storyline is hopelessly contrived, and you feel they are really struggling to keep things interesting with such a limited set of characters, but it is still easy to watch, feel-good entertainment. This season sees Belle dealing with the success of her first book and her struggle to meet her editor's demand for a sequel.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009)

This low-budget horror film has been hyped as the next "Blair Witch Project". The similarities are pretty clear: both films use the "found footage" style (where the film is presented as being pieced together from supposedly genuine footage), and both involve horrific supernatural phenomena with grisly consequences for the unfortunate protagonists.

In this case, the action centres on de facto couple Micah and Katie. The film starts with Micah testing out the new camera he has just bought in an effort to obtain footage of some spooky nocturnal happenings that have started to bother them (more accurately, they have been bothering Katie -- Micah is just collateral damage). This effort is to succeed beyond Micah's expectations, as we soon see. 

The main action in the film takes place from the viewpoint of the camera set up in their bedroom with a view out the open bedroom door to the staircase beyond (it's quite a swanky two-storey pad). From the first night, the camera starts recording strange goings-on. 

These are subtle at first: e.g. the first night, the bedroom door simply swings slowly closed and open again halfway through the night; this goes unnoticed and is only discovered by Micah the next day when he plays through the footage. However, even at this point there are several features to the way these events are presented that make these scenes chilling. Firstly, the fact that we see the couple sleeping (in complete darkness!) while the supernatural presence begins to manifest itself gives us a feeling of powerlessness as we can only watch while they lie there oblivious. Secondly, there is a persistent ambient hum in the audio recording, which leaves us straining to hear noises in the background.

As the days pass, the "activity" becomes more disruptive: the door slams shut, Katie starts sleepwalking, and Micah foolishly brings in a ouija board in an effort to communicate with the entity. As the manifestations become more violent, and more tangible, the movie starts to resemble more standard horror fare (I was reminded of both The Blair Witch Project and The Exorist), becoming a little less interesting as a result. As in the case of Blair Watch, the filming style prevents us from seeing most of the gore -- which is quite effective as it leaves our imagination to fill in the gaps -- but we see and hear enough to get the idea.

Overall, I reasonably enjoyed the film, but it was hardly a classic. I would say that given the supposed $15000 budget (the actors were apparently paid $500!) it was a supremely good effort -- really puts to shame the tripe that hollywood routinely dishes up on a much larger budget.

Personally speaking, I don't tend to find this type of film all that frightening (and this is saying something, coming from someone who had trouble sleeping for days after watching Wolf Creek). Indeed, as I reflected after watching the film, given that it would be so simple to record such phenomena (given the multitude of technology cluttering up the average bedroom these days), the fact that no credible recordings have ever been made is surely excellent evidence that such phenomena just don't exist! (Though maybe the fact that I feel the need to rationalize it to myself is evidence that the film got to me more than I'd like to admit ;-)

BOTTOM LINE: fairly watchable in a pinch, but not worth going too far out of your way for. I really hope it doesn't spawn any big-budget sequels.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" + "Collapse", by Jared Diamond

Have just finished reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" (2005). It's essentially a sequel to his earlier "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1998) -- which I read in Perth over the Christmas holiday. Diamond is right up there with the best (though perhaps not the most prolific) of those popular science writers who are also top scientists, and these two books are probably his most important ("The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee" is the only book of his that I've previously read -- back in undergrad days). They aren't are a super-easy (or quick) read, but well worth the effort.

GGS is a sweeping examination of human history from the original "Out of Africa" exodus to modern times, and attempts to understand the differences in the way societies evolved on different continents -- in particular, why some evolved into industrial super-powers while others remained hunter-gatherers. It's a fascinating question, and the arguments he presents are so compelling (to me at least) that the proposed answers seem almost obvious (details may be wrong, but it seems hard to refute the big picture). The humbling theme that emerges is the huge extent to which all peoples (tribes, countries, whatever) were basically the same. What differed was the environment: some areas were conducive to agriculture and animal-based farming, while others were not. These environmental differences had huge consequences, as they allowed a progression from a nomadic existence to permanent settlements based on a farming lifestyle and thence to the specialization of labour and so on to western civilization as we know it. An interesting side-effect, to which the word "germs" in the title alludes, is that the higher densities arising in permanent settlements led to an evolutionary arms race in diseases and human resistance to them -- with tragic consequences when Europeans encountered indigeneous peoples in other parts of the world. But all this was contingent on a favourable distribution of certain plant and animal species, as well as certain geographical factors (an interesting fact is that Europe is arranged "horizontally" and hence enjoys a relatively uniform climate whereas the Americas lie "vertically" and experience a large range of climates; this would have allowed farming to spread throughout the former but not the latter). A memorable image of how different things may have been is conjured up when he imagines "Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops" overrunning the Roman empire (this didn't happen because it is not possible to domesticate a rhinoceros -- but that's just a historical accident of evolution).

The follow-up work, Collapse, deals with the "inverse" problem: the demise of societies throughout history and in modern times. He explores a number of cases from history, most notably the tragic examples of the people of Easter Island and the Greenland Norse. Once again bringing to bear a scientific approach, he identifies five key factors that have been involved in such collapses. He then turns to modern societies on the verge of collapse (e.g. Haiti, Rwanda) and shows how these same factors are responsible. Finally, he looks at the challenges facing our modern global society and the sorts of practical solutions that may allow them to be faced. He ends on a note of "cautious optimism" which I'm not sure I completely share. 

One disappointing side note relating to Collapse is that his chapter on Australia drew some critical reviews from local quarters; having read a couple of these, I'm inclined to agree that he probably depicts things in an unfairly pessimistic light (it seems he may have been guilty of listening primarily to environmental lobbyist types who may have given a biased representation). The unfortunately corollary is that this calls into question his findings from other chapters, thus opening the door to skeptics looking for an excuse to ignore the broader message. I for one remain convinced by his thesis, but it is a pity that he has left himself open to such criticism seemingly unnecessarily.

BOTTOM LINE: both highly recommended for any fan of popular science writing -- though they aren't the easiest or shortest of reads. If I had to choose, I'd lean towards GGS out of the two (and in any case if you were planning to read both I'd start with this one). 

Fanboys (2008)

I watched this the other night on the suggestion of GJ (who has proven himself a reliable source of quality recos lately...). It's a feel-good comedy about four Star Wars "fanboys" who set out on a quixotic mission to break into George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in order to get hold of Episode One six months before its official release (the film is set in 1998). The poignant, though highly contrived, motivation for this unlikely escapade is that one of the group (Linus, played by Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer and won't live to see the film's release. There are sub-plots about the re-connecting of Linus with his former best friend Eric Bottler (Sam Huntington) and Eric subsequently re-evaluating what's important in life (this affirmation of nerd values seems to be a rising theme as my generation reaches film-making age...).

There are plenty of Star Wars references and gags that had me laughing pretty much the whole way through. I had a good stab at some of the quizzes (but I'm afraid I couldn't recall the name of Chewbacca's home planet in time!). There are also nice cameos from a few Star Wars actors -- Ray Park as a baton-wielding, side-twisting security guard at the Skywalker Ranch was particularly cool. It may not be for everyone, but I'd be surprised if any fan of the original movies didn't enjoy this one.

BOTTOM LINE: Think "The Hangover" meets "King of Kong". A must-see for aging Star Wars buffs and fans of cheddar cheese road-trip comedy.

Postcard from Zihuatanejo

"In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I used to think it would take six hundred years to tunnel under the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved Geology, I guess it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really: pressure, and time."

Yep: there was Andy Dufresne, the man who crawled through a river of s**t and out clean on the other side...

...and then there was Gekko, the man who mattocked his way through damn near a metre of solid rock in just under one hour. Not in the name of freedom, but so that a humble agricultural pipe could follow a straight, gently sloping line down the side of his backyard.

Today I completed phase one of the new drainage solution: the "french drain" running down beside the fence and finishing up at the retaining wall. Never one to do things by half, I've gone the whole hog on this one: 65mm ag pipe (with geotextile sock) in a bed of 20mm blue metal aggregate all wrapped in landscaping fabric.

1. Here is the trench, ready for the drain to be laid. (Note the aforementioned channel through the rock outcrop -- when I discovered this obstacle, I decided I'd come too far to be turned away...):

2. The following two pics show the drain in place. The effect is kind of like a boa constrictor in a body bag:

3. Finally, it's all covered over:

I can't help but wonder when and by whom the sophisticated piece of landscape engineering that lies buried will be unearthed. And whether they'll pause to appreciate the rock carving...

fresh "steamers" from the torrent pile

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

No real surprises here: the second instalment in the new incarnatation of the Transformers franchise does pretty much what it says on the tin: mind-boggling special effects, a plot-line that manages to be at once wafer-thin and hopelessly muddled --- plus a generous serve of eye candy on the side. I'm therefore not going to belabour the movie's obvious and expected weaknesses: having seen the first one, I knew what I was in for. With this in mind, the main criticisms I would level are the following:

1. The movie was over-long: half an hour could easily have been shaved off without detracting at all from the experience. Why do action films like this insist on passing the two-hour mark?

2. The Decepticons all looked the same to me. Half a dozen times I thought I saw Megatron blown away or ripped apart, when in fact it was one of his minions. They need different colours and "bits" which relate to the vehicles they transform into...

3. The whole storyline regarding the "Fallen" seems a little scraped-together and unconvincing. Why not draw on some of the original mythology and bring in Unicron, Galvatron and all that? (Uh oh.. I better stop there before the geek inside gets the better of me...)

Having got that off my chest, the movie is by no means all bad. After all, seeing characters such as Ironhide, Starscream, Soundwave and others brought to life would bring a warm glow to the face of any childhood fan of the original toys and tv series. The most special moment for this fan was undoubtedly seeing the Constructicons combine to become the gestalt, super-Decepticon Devastator. 

Now, for the third instalment (which will undoubtedly ensue) can we see some Dinobots please?

Sous le Sable ("Under the Sand", 2001)

At the other end of the cinematic spectrum from the robotic fx-fest just discussed is this slow, melancoly, haunting french film (boy, how many french films could those adjectives describe..). It's the story of a woman (played by evergreen english/francophone actress Charlotte Rampling) whose husband of 25 years disappears after going into the water on a visit to the beach together, and her subsequent descent into a state of self-delusional denial.

This film has been on my low-priority "to-see" list ever since it was shown as part of the Alliance Francaise french film festival back in Perth in 2002. I was studying french at TAFE at the time, but didn't manage to see it (IIRC we had a class excursion to see "Va Savoir" instead). I wouldn't rate it as a classic, but I quite enjoyed it and would recommend it to fans of the genre.

Das Model

I originally discovered this Kraftwerk classic via Rammstein's heavy
metal cover version (which I still think is excellent).

I just stumbled upon a David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) version
which is very entertaining:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Y5BSVOJPs&feature=related

The song is a perfect fit for his geeky, quasi-robotic way of moving.
The video of "Once In A Lifetime" is another great example --- a great
song and one of my favourite video clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU

Breaking back

Some photos from the backyard project...

1. Action Man -- snapped in mid-swing while digging out behind the retaining wall...

2. ...and the resulting excavation (note the ag pipe snaking its way along the bottom):

3. The piles of soil, stones, bricks and rock from behind the wall:

4. After lifting off the concrete cover, I discovered a gaping cavity under the stormwater drain, presumably hollowed out by water escaping from the gap in the join to the underground pipe --- this may be the origin of some of the water that's getting under the house. The planned fix for this shoddy set-up is a large pit covered in metallic grate.

5. Two tonnes of blue metal aggregate: conveniently deposited on our front drive way, then carted -- at considerable inconvenience -- round to the back by means of the two plastic buckets in the foreground...

I am Tyler Durden's Chest of Drawers

The Ikea-fication of our home continues apace with the purchase last night of two hefty chests of drawers. I'm going to come right out and admit that I'm becoming an anabashed fan of the Ikea way of doing things. I'm reminded of the guy from Fight Club:

"And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct.  The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue... 

You buy furniture.  You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.  Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled.  Then the right set of dishes.  Then the perfect bed.  The drapes.  The rug.  Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."

(Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 5)

In no particular order, some thoughts inspired by last night's visit to Ikea-land:

- The layout of the Ikea showroom is a seriously impressive piece of interior design. As I stroll through the carefully series of living space mock-ups I'm reminded of childhood visits to Lego World expos and, more obliquely, of the elf toy factory from "Santa Claus: The Movie" (no coincidence, perhaps, that these two also have their origins in Nordic culture?). 

- I marvel at the high-tech robot-arm-driven quality control devices that are supposedly used to simulate ten years of opening and closing of cupboard doors. Maybe they're just for show, but if so, what a length to go to! Still, you have to wonder if they've considered all the contingencies: what about the occasional extra hard slam to simulate the frustrated husband when he finds the cupboard empty of his favourite mead?

- I love the efficiency with which the cardboard boxes containing the furniture components are packed, and how we've (just) been able to fit them in the car each time. I wonder to what extent they have automated the process of determining optimal packings, and does it feed back at all into their design process?

- Less whimsically, I like the whole modular approach to furniture. It focuses the decision process down to a small, hierarchical series of simple choices: Besta or Billy? 80cm or 40cm wide? Black-brown or (off-)white? etc etc...

faits divers

I just took a 4-day long weekend which which was a welcome break from the routine. It's a sign of the times that I now look forward to such breaks as an opportunity to get stuck into some DIY project around the house, rather than some jet-setter weekend getaway.

WALT IN THE MIDDLE

Have reached the end of Season Two of Breaking Bad. I cannot recommend this show highly enough! Bryan Cranston (who you may remember from such t.v. roles as the father as Malcolm In The Middle and jewish-convert dentist Tim Whatley from Seinfeld) is brilliant as Walt White. Season Two picks up right where Season One left off and just gets better from there. Looking forward to Season Three which starts later this month. 

ALSO ON THE IDIOT BOX...

On a lighter note, two other shows I've been enjoying recently are "30 Rock" and "The Big Bang Theory". 30 Rock covers very familiar sit-com territory: set in a tv studio in New York (30 Rockefeller Plaza), it follows the life and career of Liz Lemon (played by the show's writer Tina Fey). The show's other main character is her boss Jack Donaghy --- a career-reviving role for Alec Baldwin. As I say, it covers the well-worn (though seemingly inexhaustable) terrain of single thirty something Manhattanites, but brings enough quirks to keep it interesting. 

The Big Bang Theory is kind of like Friends for nerds: instead of 3 three good-looking guys and girls we get 4 super-nerdy guys and one normal girl (who is reluctantly dragged into their geek-world by dint of living in the apartment across the hall). Once again, the show deals largely with the usual light-hearted sit-com cliches, but the novelty factor comes from the geeky themes and one-liners dotted through the show -- some of which are impressively nerdy. 

RICHARD DAWKINS @ SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

On Sunday afternoon we went to see RD give a talk at the Opera House as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival (or something..). He spoke very well and the talk was well-received (not unexpected given that anyone prepared to pay the ticket price is likely to be a fan). The format of the talk was basically a walk-through of his latest book "The Greatest Show On Earth", in which he gives an overview of evidence supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection. He went chapter-by-chapter, explaining the basic point and reading several key passages. I was surprised at the effectiveness of this "reading aloud" approach -- it really brought the writing to life. However, I was a little disappointed because it effectively limited the scope of his talk to what was already in the book (and, therefore, already familiar to those diehards who have already read it -- viz. yours truly). There was a book signing immediately after the talk, which resulted in a queue about 100 metres long (I despondently gave it a miss).

Probably the highlight of the talk was his reading from Chapter 9:

"It is almost too ridiculous to mention it, but I'm afraid I have to because of the more than 40 per cent of the American population who, as I lamented in Chapter 1, accept the Bible literally: think what the geographical distribution of animals should look like if they'd all dispersed from Noah's Ark. Shouldn't there be some sort of law of decreasing species diversity as we move away from an epicentre – perhaps Mount Ararat? I don't need to tell you that that is not what we see.

Why would all those marsupials – ranging from tiny pouched mice through koalas and bilbys to giant kangaroos and Diprotodonts – why would all those marsupials, but no placentals at all, have migrated en masse from Mount Ararat to Australia? Which route did they take? And why did not a single member of their straggling caravan pause on the way, and settle – in India, perhaps, or China, or some haven along the Great Silk Road?

Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark. We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can't afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates. They have the money and the power to build institutions, universities, even a museum where children ride life-size mechanical models of dinosaurs, which, they are solemnly told, coexisted with humans."

THE MONEY PIT

We finally got the gutters cleaned. The two-man team that came out seemed a bit of an overkill to me, but they did a good, quick job and quite helpfully pointed out a few issues with our roof ("whoever did your roof should be horse-whipped" was how one of the guys summarized it). Basically, there's nothing too serious, but some of the pointing (the cement along the sides) is broken, there are a couple of broken tiles, and there are one or awkward corners where there are no tiles at all (almost as if the builder had meant to come back to finish it off but never got round to it --- there are now some "nesting animals" in there). So, no big deal, but will require a roofing contractor to come out and fix up. Will try to get this done sooner rather later since it will only get worse if left unfixed.

MEANWHILE, UNDER THE HOUSE...

We had a plumber out on the weekend to take a look at our drainage issues. It was quite useful (and reassuring) to get his take on the situation under the house: basically, he didn't think there's a problem, but just suggested to keep the drain (in the bottom corner) clear, and possibly stick a hose down to clear it out a bit. We verified that it is currently draining out onto the street as it should. For the back corner (where the stormwater drain meets the downspout), he suggested installing a big pit which will not be easily blocked. So I will probably get this done, along with a similar thing for a couple of the other downspouts.

We got some rain last Friday night, and I took the chance to look again at the water coming under the house. I was surprised to find that the water wasn't coming from the vent holes but from lower down, through the ground. In other words, the "overflowing stormwater hypothesis" was something of a red herring. We had an interesting chat with a neighbour from across the street who built his own house and seemed pretty cluey on the issues of drainage. His opinion was that since our house is "touching rock" it is inevitable that we will have ground water getting under the house after heavy rain. He recommended that we should get an open drain installed to more effectively get rid of the water and, most importantly, to prevent it ever reaching the brick walls of the house (he also suggests getting the hot water tank raised up to head height to prevent it getting wet and facilitate accessing the corner more easily). This makes a lot of sense, and I'm now wondering if this would be something to get done. It wouldn't be trivial: to put in a drain at the bottom would require sawing/jackhammering into the slab, so it would almost certainly be something I'd get done: despite my burgeoning handyman credentials, I think this is a case where Harry Callahan's motto applies ("a man's got to know his limitations").

My current working hypothesis is that the amount of water coming under the house is still more than it should be, because of the way the water "ponds" in the patio during/after rain. It seems likely that this water would be finding its way underground and forcing its way through under the house. If we can get this water draining away quickly, that should reduce (if not prevent) the water coming under the house. So, my idea is to install a drain of some kind in front of the retaining wall, and link it up with the pit (to be installed by the plumber).

harnessing the power of the multi-core processor in Python

The following is a very basic way to get Python to launch a number of processes to run in parallel, allowing me to make better use of the 8 CPUs sitting under the hood of my desktop machine:

1. Install the "subprocess" module.

2. set up a "master" script that uses the function subprocess.Popen to launch all desired processes. Simplified example:

import subprocess

import sys

slave_file = "slave.py"

for param in params:

log_file = open("results_%s.log" % param, "w")

subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, slave_file, param], 0, None, None, log_file)

log_file.close()

The first arg to Popen is an array containing the individual strings in the command line call to python, and the last is the file handle to which std_out from the slave process will be redirected.

3. to avoid the spawned processes devouring all 8 CPUs --- causing everything to grind to a halt --- it is a good idea to limit the processors that can be used. This can be done by setting the "processor affinities" in Task Manager:

a. With TM select the "Processes" tab

b. Find the shell process from which the master script will be launched (for me it will be a "bash.exe" instance)

c. Right-click on this, and select "Set process affinity..."

d. Uncheck one or two processors to prevent them being used.

These "affinities" should then be inherited by all the python scripts that are spawned when the master script is run.