The first leg was a standard ride to the East End, where I linked up with my old cycle route to my flat in Limehouse 8 years ago. It began on the ornamental canals of Wapping, which have not changed one bit. I still know the stupidly placed lamp-posts, blind corners, potholes and the slopes before and after bridges (and the bridge you have to duck under otherwise it scalps you). I was reminded of so many random things… These canals are a popular hang-out for “Asian youths” as demonised by the local press… kids with ridiculous over-gelled hairdos and sports-casual clothing sitting on the backs of benches rather than on the seat, smoking and generally acting suspiciously by doing things most children do. One time along here I was cycling and got tangled up in a load of cotton that some kids had stretched across the path… Matthew Parris had yet to write his piano-wire cyclist garrotting diatribe at this point, and also it is unlikely that they read The Times much, maybe just the business pages, so they were not inspired by it. But after that incident I started to look a bit more carefully going between posts on off-road cycle routes. I didn’t come off because cotton is weak and puny and I am a big strong man.

I was also reminded of the time I was cycling through the King Edward Memorial Park and I saw a frog whose back legs had been run over by a previous cyclist, and he was trying to crawl along on his front legs. It was a hot day and he was in the sun, I thought he was trying to crawl to the shade. So I helped him out, picked him up and put him in some shade. That evening on the way home I saw the frog in the middle of the path all shrivelled up and shrunken and dry. Some frogs just don’t know what’s good for them.

There was a big poster on one side of the park campaigning against the construction of an outlet for London’s super-sewer in the park. It said the park would be destroyed and closed for 4-7 years. I guess they should probably think again about that and just knock down one of the more hideous riverside Docklands developments to do this work. And replace it with affordable housing.

Limehouse is looking lovely and the eastbound London blue paint route Cycle Superhighway runs through it (one of the shittier sections without actual cycle lanes, just blocks of blue paint on the road every so often… lame). I’d arrived at my destination for my old commute, so I picked up the route I used to take to get exercise going out east to the docks, via Canary Wharf. The area is looking more vibrant and busy than it was, and it really made me miss my old stomping ground, which had gone unstomped by me for at least three years. I don’t think anyone else was stomping it in my absence. Whilst it feels like a cultural wasteland, honestly, so does a lot of London, including Fulham, Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, and Caledonian Road. The difference is it is clean and tidy, and has some interesting modern architecture which balances the monotonous streets of terraced housing which blight the rest of London. And it has simply amazing pubs.

Canary Wharf looked glistening and new and exciting, the restaurants were full, but you still come out the east side feeling like you’ve fallen off the edge of the world: there is a huge gap of development between Canary Wharf and the nearby residential towers and hotels.

The old cycle lanes I used were still there, but I detoured by the river at East India DLR station along a route which a new friend showed me recently, by the river and through a bird sanctuary. This was the first section of Docklands as I remember it: an abandoned hubristic monument to Thatcher’s 80s. They thought they could build it people would come… but they didn’t, at least not for many years, and those that did come did not like windswept riverside walks with benches for pondering at the preserved industrial heritage. In fact all they like is eating and going to the gym. I guess that capitalists of the 80s did not foresee that their creation would be largely filled with the offspring of Chinese communists. Well capitalists, as much as I hate you, I love windswept walks and industrial heritage. I also love walking around something that was created for an audience that never showed up, and sits unloved in an obscure corner of London – as if it were created just for me.

Over the Lea river on a well segregated cycle track which I think has not been used since I last used it, perhaps 12 years ago. The blossom was out spraying its load all over the place: normally it would be beautiful, but it looks like a tragic female attempt to spruce up a man’s flat with a small bunch of flowers: it doesn’t work, and it misses the point of living like a man, or being an industrial area. If you’re going to be an industrial area, just go for it, revel in the brutally austere functional aesthetic, niceties be fucked. Ditto men.

Round the roundabout to Royal Victoria Dock. There was a lot of traffic here – it used to be so quiet. The vast and hideous Excel conference centre has been added to with some archetypally Docklands hotels, residential and restaurant developments. It was actually lovely cycling along here, a good kilometre of smooth and pedestrian-free dockside cycling.The wonderful preserved cranes beside the dock and the amazing footbridge with lifts at either end made an engaging backdrop.

This was formerly the end point of my exercise cycling in the late 90′s. Now I look at it on the map, it was a 6 mile round-trip, a pathetically short distance which I would now cycle look at a coughing tramp stumble over a sad dog. I used to do this just twice a week, starting around midnight so that I didn’t have to go on the road sections (of which there were hardly any) with cars, so I could cycle around the pavements of Canary Wharf with impunity, and so nobody would see me cycling. I was a bit of a bloater in those days… exercise, and being seen to be doing exercise, was an embarrassment, an attitude which was a hangover from games and PE at school. I don’t think I lost any weight at that time because I was also on my legendary “profiterole nutritional information misprint” diet and eating around 2000 calories of cream and chocolate every day thinking it was 300.

Now it all goes a bit mad. Docklands ends for real. There is a short stretch of dockside path, which is well and truly abandoned, which just ends with a wire fence, beyond which is brownfield full of concrete rubble and determined grass. Next to the dock here is a Newham council building, possibly offices and perhaps information for locals. I had to cut up onto the horrible dual carriageway which runs along here, which is full of speeding motorists who give you no room whatsoever. Past the UEL campus, which is architecturally fascinating and located with convenient access to the wasteland void which surrounds it, then north to the Beckton out-of-civilisation shopping park. Crazy drivers everywhere – what the hell is a cyclist doing here?! On a Saturday! I must run him over to teach him a lesson.

I rejoin the blue cycle lane by the A13, which is all the better for being blue, because previously it was green, which is not a good colour. The power of blue. I saw another cyclist coming towards me, the first for miles, he’s a hardcore helmetted type on a racer, and I gave him the subtlest of subtle manly nods on the way past, which he returned in a manly way: we’re both riding the blue streak to nowhere, because in the arsehole of east london, all directions lead nowhere. We’ll find the pedalling a little easier for the next mile or so.

So along the wrong side of the A13 with shit being blown in my face from passing trucks. The route become highly fragmented after a while, and eventually comes to a quivering halt, ashamed and apologising for a poor performance, at the dot on the map of a cycle route planner who had clearly never been east of Westminster. Because there is no conceivable reason you’d want to start or stop cycling at this point. I’d expect a cycle rack perhaps, a cycle shop, a big sign saying “welcome to the sweet, safe embrace of the magical blue paint – it will not let you die today”… but it really does just stop without fanfare or ceremony.

But of course, the cycle route continues, because the blue streak is a lie: there was always a cycle route here. It just wasn’t blue. I follow it to a roundabout under a flyover where I cut up towards Romford. I’ve been over this flyover many times in a car, and I see now why the road planners thought you might not want even the wheels of your car to touch the ground here. Waiting at some lights next to a house which had a panoramic view of the roundabout, a petrol station, the flyover and the industrial units beyond, a cheerful man came out of his house grinning and whistling cheerfully. If he can be happy, why can’t I? Perhaps he’s just high on a toxic cocktail of gases from burnt and unburnt petrol. He’ll be dead before he’s 50.

If Beckton is the arsehole of London, this is the pebbledashed toilet with no seat or loo roll. There was nothing of note the entire way to Romford. Angry chav drivers in pimped Citroen Saxos, fried chicken shops alternating with financial services for the hard of earning (pawn brokers, pound shops and bookies)… and everyone looking so fucking happy. What’s wrong with them? I wanted to tell them all to look around and start being miserable.

Thankfully I managed to competely avoid the centre of Romford by following the cycling signs which pointed towards Romford. Now I feel like I’m in Essex, and the architecture changes to include the odd little house which looks like it was designed with love rather than by a hateful robot Nazi. The gaps between the houses grow and suddenly… I’m in the countryside! It is hard to imagine what the edge of a city as big as London looks like, it is like imagining what is at the edge of the universe. By car it is easy to miss the transition, but cycling makes you so much more focused on your surroundings. Two or three fairly decent hills give you lovely views of lots more hills, and the final hill takes you up over the M25, beyond which you can be quite sure you’ve left the big smoke. Going over the M25 by bicycle is a bizarre experience.

Cyclists occupy the interstices of society. We are traffic, but we can transform into pedestrians with bicycles by simply dismounting. And we are treated as neither: motorists do not want us on the road, pedestrians do not want us on the pavement, and town planners are not sure where they want us. We easily and regularly operate above the law, and get away with it, with no particularly bad consequences. We are not registered, recorded, tested, licensed, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. Our life is our own. We can park almost anywhere, and we can take our vehicles onto other vehicles, when they are transformed into luggage (albeit a special type of luggage which train comapnies don’t like). One I put my bike on the back of my car, and put the car on a train to Cornwall. It left me wondering how many vehicles could be nested together like this… one day I will strap a skateboard to my bike and put the car on a train which goes on a boat. My dad told me once about a plane service he used to use which would take passengers and several cars to Holland. It is surely possible to string together every form of transport known to humanity in this way, an exercise which is left to  the reader.

My first practical journey by bicycle left me feeling I’d scammed the system: I’d gone somewhere I wanted to be without a travelcard, without a driving license, without help from a third party. Surely this was wrong? Someone will find out, I’ll be caught and fined and given an ASBO. Better hide. This wore off fairly quickly, until I made a longer journey, when the feeling returned. Seven miles! I was practically an anarchist. And the feeling returns every time I do occasional long journeys. There’s a double take when you realise you’re at your destination and you did it all yourself – it is similar to the feeling of getting home drunk and not remembering exactly how you got home at all. As if you’ve been teleported – except, of course, you’ve put very much more effort into the journey than if it were by train or car. There’s a slight panic – did I remember to pay the congestion charge? Did I touch out my Oyster card? Oh no… I shunned these earthly delights and transcended into cycling ether.

Crossing a bridge over the M25 captures this transcendence. You see where you’d normally be, you see the normal people using the system that you’ve bypassed, playing the game you’ve given up, from a vantage point which is both literally and mentally superior. It is an out-of-body experience.

Essex is full of shitty drivers. To be honest this account has been mostly about shitty drivers, so let’s just say most drivers are shitty, but in Essex there seems to be a callous and deliberate policy of scaring you off the road. But the roads got quieter as I penetrated further, and after a short ride through a forest eventually I arrived at Thorndon Country Park. This is has a nice gravelly route through to the A128. I found some goats in an enclosure under some trees, and stopped for a snack. The goats were very sweet, all different colours and styles, and some had very short front legs, presumably to make eating grass easier. Or giving blowjobs. Probably the grass thing though. They were surrounded by an electric fence, which I discovered when trying to take a photo of one. Electric fences really are bloody painful and I was left with a numb hand.

Eating food when it has truly been earned, rather than because you’re bored and fancy it, is simply wonderful. Everything tastes sweeter, meatier, fattier and you can scoff it in no time, gnawing bloody great chunks off chocolate bars and barely chewing before gulping down to make space for more. And when you’re really thirsty, water tastes better than unicorn milk and honey from some kind of mythical bee-like creature with a horn.

Onwards to the one decent panoramic view on the whole trip, and it was getting dark so my camera did a bad job of capturing it. Past a beautiful lake filled with primitivist sculpture on plinths driven into the bed, and to the car park on the other side. I’d cycled a route which many motorists probably never see on their short excursions from their cages – I’d fallen through another gap. There was an interesting little cafe with a panoramic view of the A127 selling those lovely milkshakes which are made from blended up chocolate bars, but it was shut, and it seems to open only on weekdays. I guess these people know their market, there must be high demand for blended chocolate bar milkshakes amongst the unemployed and retired.

Past a lovely pub in the middle of nowhere called The Olde Dog – what a wonderful name! I really, really hope that they have an old dog in there, that is always old, never ages or dies,  just an old dog eating crisps and lapping puddles of beer from the cupped hands of regulars. It looked welcoming but I was looking forward to getting home. Suddenly I start recognising things. Little Burstead,  South Green and finally Billericay. Cycling along roads in my home town along which I’ve only ever driven or been driven gave me a new perspective. Car travel detaches you from your surroundings: it is not just the fact that you’re caged, you are also travelling at a speed which prevents meaningful engagement with the outside world. It is perhaps why I enjoy driving in deserts so much – the scale of a desert matches well with the speed of a car. Cycling through South Green and Billericay, I noticed things that I never had in my 18 years living there. It is surprisingly hilly, the country lanes really are country lanes and not racing tracks, and it is all generally much more pleasant than I remember. Maybe it is just because I’m older.

Another secret journey is concluded. The only evidence is this account of it, which might be entirely imagined. Next time I will tell you about my bike ride to Narnia, where I helped a lion lose his virginity.

BBC News has a story about the latest object of German zoophilia, a cross-eyed opossum.

Which way are an opossum’s eyes meant to point? All animals deviate from our physical norms in many ways. Do German zoos also have “freakish” big-nosed elephants and long-necked giraffes? Perhaps the entire German nation has completely misunderstood what a zoo is.

To a German, a zoo is a freakshow collection of hideously deformed humans with bizarre capabilities. Outside of Germany, Paul the octopus was remarkable for his ability to violate basic physical laws by predicting the outcome of football matches. Germans were more stunned by Herr Paul’s lack of a skeleton, his four extra limbs, and his ability to remain underwater indefinitely without breathing apparatus. Knut the polar bear made the news when animal rights activists called for his death because he’d been raised by humans. In Germany, his care was seen as a humanitarian act of compassion towards a grotesquely hairy albino child with comically oversized hands, feet and face.

Should we tell the Germans that their zoos are full of animals, rather than curious human mutants? No.

First, they are mostly quite overweight. I don’t know if this is has always been the case, or if it is something like a response to the introduction of a fatty European diet to people without the genetics to deal with it. The weather here is very cold at the moment, so an adaptation to this might be expected, however in the summer I guess it is incredibly hot.

Second, they are terrible at drawing maps.  All the maps I’ve seen have been incredibly confusing, no consistent “up” direction, no consistent scale across the map, and topologically often just plain wrong. I wonder if this is a cultural difference – do Navaho people just see space differently? Of course they are fully up to speed on modern mapmaking, so know how it might be done normally. And I’ve seen maps that are just as bad on websites and so on.

Third, they mostly wear very baggy trousers and hoodies. This is from children up to adults. Again this might be because it is pretty cold.

Fourth, a lot of the men have weird stuff on their teeth. I suppose maybe there is no tradition of brushing teeth. They don’t have bad breath or rotting teeth though, so I guess it is OK for them.

Fifth, they really like black, white and red geometric patterns.

I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday, and stayed for £32 in a hotel room that would cost £150 anywhere else. I returned to Planet Hollywood as they’d treated me so well last time, upgrading me to a suite, no such luck this time. Vegas has changed a lot since I was last here. First, it is really cold. I’m not sure what motivated this change, but I am sure the local government and businesses know what they’re doing. Also, the sun sets a lot earlier, and rises much later. It keeps people gambling I guess. Also, a lot of new designer shops and a designer shopping mall have been built, and one or two massive and sophisticated new top-end hotels built. They look genuinely beautiful, which is a change from the impressively kitsch or bombastic yet unimaginative which has dominated so far. I really hope they come out as cheap as the other Vegas hotels.

There are a few things that you can almost always rely upon being provided in an American hotel. One universal is an ice machine. In the UK ice is a luxury item, it takes an age to make enough for a handful of drinks in your own freezer, and at parties (until quite recently) it was assumed that asking for ice would be like asking someone to wipe your arse with smoked salmon, a comparison which I shall not attempt to explain any further. More recently it has become common to ostentatiously buy in a bag for parties, which I always do because there is nothing sadder than a warm gin and tonic, not even the tears of a clown, warm or cold. In the USA ice is a right enshrined in the 17th Amendment, and even the crappest hotels that don’t have beds in the rooms, or even have rooms at all, will always have an ice machine clattering out alarming quantities of ice into a plastic bag-lined ice bucket. There is a Holiday Inn in Tuba City which is just an ice machine in a car park with branded cardboard boxes littered about for patrons to sit in whilst sipping perfectly chilled drinks.

You will also often find vending machines in most corridors, and a coffee machine in your room. Coffee is a religion in the USA, and it is pretty much always delicious: somehow the incredible smell of coffee persists in the flavour, no doubt due to terrible but delicious additives. Tea, on the other hand, always tastes dreadful. I asked for tea with my breakfast this morning, and was instantly corrected – what I wanted was *hot* tea (as opposed to iced tea), and it appeared as such on my bill. American tea is like Chinese chips: tastes a bit funny because they don’t really understand, and never will. Planet Hollywood does not have a coffee machine in the rooms – facilities provided for free in a hotel are inversely proportional to its luxury status and (outside of Vegas) its cost. The crappest B&B in England has a tiny kettle and a selection of tea, instant coffee and biscuits on a miniscule tray in the Lilliputian rooms. In Vegas you get a room larger than your flat back home, where they find space for a display table with a prop gun from Waterworld in it – but no hot drinks.

Last time in Planet Hollywood I had a salad from the Earl of Sandwich for dinner, and this time I did exactly the same. I also had a stomach-busting buffet breakfast for a bargain $11. I am clearly a creature of habit, although these habits are just repeating things that I remember being nice before, which is just sensible, not a habit. Stop judging me! I was genuinely full to the neck when I finished, I think that vomiting it all up would have been quite easy, had I been so inclined. It would have just needed me to slightly over tighten my belt, cough awkwardly, blink too energetically, or think about doing any of these things. But I held it down and set off towards the Grand Canyon, via the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam is to blame for Vegas, and in fact most of Nevada and a lot of the states around it. It is beautiful because it was built in the 1930′s. In fact, they started to construct it at about the same time my grandparents started to construct my dad. My dad, however, has none of the streamlined art deco styling which characterises the Hoover Dam, and also he generates a negligible amount of electricity, barely enough to power a single one-armed bandit or two-armed prostitute. My dad cannot, in himself, hold back enough water to make a huge lake, and he does not have hundreds of tourists milling about all over him taking photos. However, this is where the dissimilarities end. My dad recently had a motorway bridge constructed to divert traffic from driving all over him, a great relief to all concerned, he has male and female toilet facilities, and he also has an end in two different time zones, just three of the things that would be useful talking points if my dad were ever to meet the Hoover Dam at an infrastructure and dads mixer cocktail party.

The Hoover Dam has a fascinating monument constructed next to it. It was designed by the artist with the following purpose: it was to inform future civilisations, or aliens, about the lost civilisation which constructed the Hoover Dam, in perhaps thousands of years time. This is art purposeful and perhaps pompousful art, but for me it encapsulates both the spirit of the USA and a time when that spirit was at its strongest, driving progress, oozing self-confidence, and aware of its potential place in history. It is the America that is easiest to love, and art deco is one of the few cultural assets the USA has given the world which has deep worth, beyond satisfying the basic desire for junk food, junk films and junk music.

I continued my drive to the Grand canyon, and as I got closer I became alarmed by the rapidly lowering temperature… I had to put the heater on, and then nearly crashed in surprise at the sight of snow by the road. Then the snow came on to the road, then ice, and then I arrived. To get in to the National Park I had to pay $25 to a woman who was like a supermodel but in a really strange way, a very fixed grin and cheery oddness about her… I often wonder what USA customer service type people are like when talking to their friends. I want to say, come on, drop the act, please talk to me as if I were a normal person. I’d probably get spat at and shot in the knees, but at least I’d know.

A very chilly but very grand Grand Canyon was figuratively and literally breath-taking. I visited it once about a million years ago, and remember liking it but not being too fussed, possibly because I was a stupid little dick. I had a pint and then a hot chocolate with whiskey and cinnamon schnapps, and read a bit of Cannery Row to send me to bed at 9pm, ready to get up to see the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. More on that next time.

The anticipation of lecturing is, for me, a pathetic pseudo-realisation of the anticipation of my imaginary career in stand-up comedy or electronic music. I envisage an interactive and dynamic didactic moment where teacher and taught are conflated and we realise we are not so different after all. The philosophical nature of the subject gradually dawns upon the class, and as the sun rises the questions come thick and fast. And how I field them! People cannot speak as fast as they think and we end up jabbering away excitedly, perhaps onanistically, in an orgiastic celebration of knowledge and understanding.

Then the lecture starts. I am presented with a sea of miserable and blank faces. My spirit is crushed: there is no opportunity to hush the excited whispering which precedes any great oration. In fact, they are totally fucking silent from the start, a silence which continues pretty much throughout the lecture. It is an orgiastic celebration of sitting and staring at a monotonous pompous prick and waiting for an opportunity to get a snack.

From the point of view of a lecturer, your role as a student falls into very few categories. You might whisper to your neighbour and laugh occasionally – this is a way of telling the lecturer he is shit and should start to fuck up all his explanations of things and panic slightly that he is losing his audience. You might look slightly startled and like you’re about to cry, which will make the lecturer worry that he’s pitched the content too high. You can look thoroughly bored, which is an indication that you’re slightly less bored than the lecturer. Finally, you can look interested and nod and smile and very slightly engage with the subject, and ask the odd question, in which case you’re a fucking god and I love you.

If you are in this last category, then I will mostly look at you when lecturing. I know this makes you feel awkward, and wish that I’d look at someone else, but damn I am a human being and I have to look at someone when I’m talking. Because otherwise I get the feeling that I am a mental case who has accidentally wandered into a room full of people who happen to be looking the same direction, and stood in the corner and started to jabber on about the perplexing minutiae of an esoteric subject. While this is something that I feel I might enjoy, it is not something I think I should do as part of my actual job.

So I blather on for an hour or two and slowly become more and more bored with the sound of my own voice and eventually stop when the room booking ends. The expected applause which draws a line under a hilarious comedy routine or stimulating musical performance doesn’t come, and I have to announce the end of the lecture several times in order to rouse the students to pack away and leave. It feels like you’ve tried to have sex but you’re too tired and a lot of effort has resulted in nothing much at all and you just want to leave as quickly as possible to avoid the awkwardly pathetic glances. But you’ve got a laptop and cables and things to pack away, and the students are discussing arrangements for drinks that you wish you were going to, and you wonder how it came to this.

One day – one glorious day – I will conduct a lecture as I imagine I should. I will swear a lot, tell stupid jokes and anecdotes, respond to pertinent questions with well-observed satire, inject enough personal sentiment to betray my human side and leave my audience with golden nuggets of knowledge and wisdom which stay with them for decades to come. It makes me wonder if the best scenario for lecturing would be a pub… because this is a good description of an average night in the pub with me, mark my words. Come along, buy me a pint, and I’ll tell you about fucking software engineering.

“Since the Second World War, each conflict our armed forces have been asked to fight in has been radically different from the previous one, each needing the very military capability our political leaders have told us is no longer required. How different would the UK be today if we had been unable to liberate the Falklands Islands in 1982?“

I have to say this question floored me. I have never before been asked to contemplate such a stark “alternative reality” – and I have read a lot of science fiction. Visions swam through my head and I nearly fainted… Below I have compiled a series of images which I think is a reasonable prediction of what post-defeat Great Britain would look like. God Bless Margaret Thatcher.

My taste in music frequently wanders into the extremes of experimental composition, but still, these projects tend to produce plinky, droney or otherwise irritating sounds which the creators assume take on some significance due to the source of the data driving the audio. The creators of the “God sound” say: “it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition”… indeed it does. That is, in part, because many contemporary composers often use similar methods with other, often non-scientific data sources, with similarly cacophonic results. But in terms of music and sound, the source data is often effectively a random number generator, because (for some reason) we are quite picky about what differentiates an interesting sound from a dull or irritating one. Avant garde composers, for the large part, understand this, and whilst pushing the boundaries of tolerance, are usually careful to ensure there is some aesthetic quality to the audio.

If a sonifier tries to force aesthetics upon the sound produced from a dataset, then really it is drifting away from the dataset and becoming less useful as a tool for understanding the data. Still, this concern does not seem to matter in visualisation: we are careful to choose clear fonts, colour schemes and arrangements of elements which please us.

For me, then, the most profound limitation in sonification is that is is a very low-bandwidth way to get information into our brains. It is two streams (assuming you’re sonifying in stereo) of one-dimensional data. Visualisation is two streams (admittedly with a lower sampling rate) with three-ish dimensions of colour and two dimensions of our retina. Of course, whilst this is a large space, we cannot make complete use of all of the dimensions because there’s a limit to what our brain can comprehend – there have to be patterns which are similar to those we see in everyday life, for example coherent blocks of colour, which reduces the bandwidth considerably. But the same applies to audio. In addition, whilst we can see animated images with our eyes, it is not an essential part of understanding with that sense: we can look at a static image and immediately understand. Audio inherently has time as one of its dimensions, so listening to a sonification is inherently time-consuming.

Sound has its best role in enhancing the visual – for example, clicking sounds when you type on a keyboard, or a ting ting to alert you to an event when your eyes may be on something else. Maybe we should start looking at audio-visualisation as the next step in understanding the increasingly complex data coming from scientific work? Or maybe I’m missing something? All of this leaves sonification as a tool for creating interesting artworks to stimulate public interest. I don’t think this particular work does that in itself, but it has got the Higgs boson back into the news. It has stimulated journalists to write about it, and bloggers. So it is being used as a kind of scientific agitprop! I’m not sure this is what the creators intended, but if it is, then hats off to them.

Can scientific data ever produce an aesthetically pleasing listening experience? If it ever does, then I’d guess it would owe more to the aesthetic judgement of a musician or other human being, than to the nature of the data itself. Which leaves the data as mere inspiration for composition, rather than the driver behind it. I’d be fascinated to hear any sonifications which, without too much human interference, are inherently pleasing. But I suspect that the only sounds from the natural world we’ll ever find pleasing are the ones we hear all the time anyway: rain, flowing water, birdsong, rustling of trees and so on.

Finally, the BBC article has some quotes associating the work with religion: “We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed”, “it may also enable us to eavesdrop on the harmonious background sound of the Universe” and “those who have been involved in the project have felt something akin to a religious experience while listening to the sounds”. First, anyone who has a religious experience listening to these sounds, please get in touch with me, as I can recommend plenty of music which, by comparison, will elevate you to a euphoric god-like state with a new-found understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. Second, whilst I have no issues with the spiritual or religious, this attempt to link it to basic science is spurious and dangerous. Perhaps the creators thought it was clever because of the “God particle” alias for the Higgs boson, or perhaps there was another reason. However, as a biologist, I’m fully aware of the care needed to avoid giving ammunition to the minority of religious people who are vocally anti-science.

http://vladg.com/2009/03/make-windows-fonts-look-as-smooth-as-mac-os-x-fonts/

It just works, it is very fast, and Windows looks a million time better when using it. It looks particularly good with PowerPoint presentations (many people comment that presentations look better on Apples than Windows, and this is why – it is very effective on the low-res projectors). I was so pleased with the results from this I just had to share it!!!! But remember, this alternative method isn’t “better”, it is just different, so check out the screenshots and see which you prefer. I’ve been using it for two days with no ill-effects, but of course this is free software which replaces a fairly fundamental part of windows, so if you start getting random crashes, blame this sooner rather than later.

The fantasy lifestyle section is followed by the Marketplace, an ambush of nick nacks representing the zenith of the little bits next to the checkouts in supermarkets, designed to draw you in to filling your trolley with shit which is so cheap you’d be stupid not to buy it. This is how they Get You, and they Get Me every time, but you know, fuck it, I’ve got a lot of useful stuff from there. A lot of crap too, but it only cost three quid so who cares?

Finally there’s the thought experiment of the self-service area, where you finally open the box and the cat suddenly decides to be dead or alive. This is the most exciting bit of Ikea, when hopes and desires bred in the blissful serenity above either become joyous flesh or are facelessly snatched away by the failure of a stocking algorithm. A third and even more disheartening scenario is attempting to piece together bits of interchangeable kit systems and finding an element is not there… You must then decide to either buy what you can and come back later (financial outlay without immediate satisfaction, very sad) or leave it and come back later to get everything (risking a repeat performance). Precisely analogous to opening the box and finding that your cat has radiation sickness, and is losing its hair and is generally looking awful, and you have to decide to either put it down, or keep it and pay a vet to help it out, although it might just die anyway which means you’ve wasted your money. This analogy is perfect so don’t bother analysing the elements to see how they correspond, I’ve done that already and it is fine.

After you’ve paid for all your lovely life-problem-solving stuff/walked miserably past the tills having failed to find what you want (and it is your failure, because frankly, if you can’t find what you want in Ikea, you’re too fucking fussy and you should be made to use stuff you’ve found out of skips as furniture, even if it isn’t furniture), you can reward yourself/compensate your failure with a delicious hot dog, with sauce and mustard out of a cool pump thing. I love these hot dogs and find it hard to resist getting one on every trip. And there’s the brilliant Swedish food shop, which sells lots of food with generic Ikea style branding on. This is my vision of the future, and is in fact one of the most joyous elements of Ikea: they make so many different things I think it would be thermodynamically impossible to come up with a different “brand” for each one, so bosh, use the same basic font everywhere, just make up a funny name to help people remember. Ikea was doing brand-free branding before Muji was a twinkle in the eye of a sushi delivery man. This is the future, mark my words. Anyway, at the food shop you can buy all the stuff you need to make the food they serve in Ikea, so you can recreate the Ikea experience at home. I look forward to them extending this concept by supplying equipment to create a one-way path through your home, through all the different rooms, with self-print tags to put on all your stuff like it was an Ikea. The marketplace would be a little jumble sale of all the stuff you’re trying to get rid of, and at the end you’d have a warehouse with some random subset of all the things someone else would need to recreate your house. Someone shopping at your Mykea would make a rather less impressive home than yours, just as all our homes are less impressive than an actual branch of Ikea.  Someone shopping at the Mykea made by someone shopping at your Mykea would have an even less impressive home than theirs, and so on. At the end of this chain would be some poor bloke trying to live in a hex key.

Anyway, to conclude, I love Ikea and I love shopping at Ikea. You go a bit crazy when you’re there, but to be honest most times I go I’m there for about three hours.  I would go mad shopping anywhere for three hours.

Constructing Ikea furniture is so much fun it deserves its own review, which will come in the future (not in the past, like you thought).