"Experience Bram Stoker's Dracula in a new way -- in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,) and this blog will publish each diary entry on the day that it was written by the narrator so that the audience may experience the drama as the characters would have."

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H.

"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."
 

When we talk about the interacting systems that exist on our planet, we're talking about something that is not only mind-bogglingly complex, but also complex in a very specific way. The complexity we're attempting to work with here is one of unresolvable uncertainty.

This is why a 'wait and see' approach is as (or more) fundamentally naive as a 'panic, do something, do anything!' approach. We're in a position where there's always going to be an information gap, and where every choice we make is going to flow into an immense feedback system.

We don't have a comprehensive and precise way of understanding how our choices will affect this planet, how they will interact with global climatic systems such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation and La Niña, political, social and biological systems, or indeed the ripple effect through each of these systems and onto others. And while some aspects of climate change are demonstrably anthropogenic, it's essentially nonsensical to demand quantification of 'how much?', because the anthropogenic elements weave in and out of all these other systems.

What we need to do as a species is to move from a model of decision making where uncertainty triggers a need to seek more information, to a model where we learn to make better decisions under unresolvably uncertain conditions in a constant state of change. And arguably, this is a requirement for which human history has equipped us poorly.

Likewise, hundreds of thousands of years of human experience have not given us context for problems of very large temporal nor physical scale. There's no reason to assume we might be effective at dealing with very large (planet-sized) problems or problems that related to a time-scale larger than a generation or two; it's just not something we've had much opportunity to deal with before.

On the other hand, we're very experienced at making decisions which optimise the well-being of a couple of hundred people around us, and the immediate offspring of those people. Humans may be squishy and somewhat feeble creatures on our own, but are staggeringly efficient survivors and adapters in village-sized groups.

Unfortunately, extrapolating our behaviour to a planetary scale, or indeed a many-generational time scale doesn't work well at all. Choices that maximise our well-being and the well-being of those around us may actually be exceedingly poor choices in a larger context.
 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

(from The Lovesong of Alfred J Prufrock)


His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

(from Preludes)
 

My Little Ponies made-over as film and TV characters.  The little He-Man pony cracks me up.

Apartment Therapy teaches you to Overcome Your Reupholstering Fears.   How did they know I was scared?

Did you know you could develop film using coffee and vitamin C?  Neither did I.

Here's a Flickr set of HDR photography of abandoned hospitals.  Astoundingly, creepily beautiful.

And here's some guy's top 100 Amiga games.  Just looking at this gets my fingers itching to download an emulator again.
 

1. Today's editorial over at The Guardian, In praise of...Vikings

"In fact, as scholars have long known and as a conference at Cambridge university this weekend has heard, there was a lot more to the Vikings than pillage."

2. Paula Hays' amazing terrariums.

3. tacit 's recent article, Some Thoughts on Body Modification, Ethics and Self, which discusses concepts of self-determination, medical ethics and agency, not to mention this mind-boggling point:

"In the United States, it is considered a breach of medical ethics for a plastic surgeon to change someone's appearance outside the socially accepted standards of physical beauty."

4. Armour Sans Anguish's wonderful gallery of clothing constructed from recycled and salvaged materials (via

(a) The Stupid, Heinously Expensive and Technically Impossible Internet Filtering Plan looks like it may be dead in the water.

(b) Faith No More have reunited to tour Europe this (northern) summer.
 

(a) I went to see House of the Holy Afro last night at the Festival Club (aka Beck's Music Box because we need corporate branding) with a bunch of work people and it was brilliant and filled with shimmy.

(b) I'm also going to see Nine Inch Nails on Monday; only a festival set unfortunately, but it will probably be my last chance to see them.

(c) I went to a pond in the park near my house on the weekend to get some tadpoles for my container water garden, and found that there were no tadpoles but plenty of pygmy perch, so now my barrel is home to many more small fishies.  There were also lots of gilgies (like miniature marron) living in the pond - I'd lived there for eight years and never realised.  While I was scooping up fish, a woman with a tiny bulldog on a lead saw me with my net and came over to look, and we stood and marvelled at the pond life for quite some time. I wonder where it all came from?

(d) Also on the scintillating topic of 'The Park Near My House', the grebes at the lake managed to hatch all three of their eggs and now have three tiny, tiny babies paddling around after them. It is super cute.

(e) I'm doing the Tax module of my Chartered Accountancy right now. It is kicking my ass. This should come as no surprise, since the CA programme is designed to be a monumental ass-kicking from beginning to end.

(f) One of my workmates has brought me in pirated moves and home-made tomato sauce; what a champion. It also supports my medium-term career goal of creating a miniature barter economy within Large Accounting Firm based on home cooking and illegal downloads.

(g) I made lemon butter from alibaster's mum's lemons, and it turned out freakin' awesome if I do say so myself.