Is fantasy wrong?

Maria

Imagination is the stuff of wonder and wonder is what makes things wonderful. But will too much fantasy detract from normal life in "reality"? Like my father once told me, infatuated with a picture in The Sound of Music, that I couldn't fall in love with Julie Andrews. Like, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. But "true" in the Bible does not equate with "physically material". Indeed the suggestion is that material things are almost the antithesis of truth. When he asked "what is truth?" I think Pilate had an inkling that where he was living at the time was not it.

I have met some who called themselves "Christian" who thought that fantasy is plain wrong. They removed books that verged on the imaginary from their children's shelves. Including Narnia. Rebellious as always I thought the very opposite. Didn't Jesus himself speak in parables?

The making of Hugo

So how much of those wonderfully detailed scenes in 'Hugo' are real? Not a lot it seems, but that does not, for me, detract from the intense beauty of the film. Isn't that the magic of fiction, of art generally, to enhance, exaggerate, colour, heighten, extend reality? Isn't this exactly what a story teller, a politician, a preacher does to "make a point". Arguably we might not be creators in the strictest sense of the word, but we can still imagine. They can't take that away from us. Imagination is the stuff of wonder and wonder is what makes things wonderful.

You can find several youtube videos on 'the making of Hugo' but this one on Vimeo is perhaps the best and it is in HD. Colour separation overlay or "chroma-key" is used extensively - this technique has been around since the early days of TV but here of course it is enhanced by animated backdrops created by computer.

Chroma-key in action

The original author Brian Selznick whose book the film is based on mixes some real history of  Georges Méliès with his plot and so it is no surprise to find that Hugo's train-crash nightmare is based on a real accident in which a train forgot to stop in a terminus station.

Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895

The Hugo version

in perspective

How I would love to be involved in the making of such a film - behind the scenes of course - I greatly admire the likes of Asa Butterfield but the only acting I can do is the fool.

Nausia

Paris backdrop - click to enlarge

Tuesday morning. The day before yesterday I was busy as ever, like, ran home from Blessington (from Baltiboys bridge along the lake shore), mended rips in the tunnel plastic, co-hosted a dinner party for 12, then wham... In bed all Monday with stomach cramps and nausea. A bug that has being making the rounds here. So everything in my life froze - I wonder did the world at large notice? In the evening I watched the fantasy 'Hugo' in HD (I had seen before but on a flight so VLD, poor contrast and non-existent sound) and was amazed by the detail in the backdrops of Paris and by the character portrayal - a very beautiful film.

Catching your dog?

Today, whilst running (barefoot) with Meg, it happened again. Maybe three times now an oncoming car has stopped and the driver rolled down his window to ask "are you trying to catch your dog?". On replying in the negative the driver went on to explain "because you were running in your bare feet..."

Is there some mysterious connection that has hitherto alluded me between loosing one's dog and running barefoot?

And why this "running in your bare feet" as if I were putting them on like shoes? Maybe I run on bare feet (who doesn't?) but I certainly do not run in them. Why not "running barefoot" or even, since shoes are the exception, simply "running"?

Pageview birthday

Whee!  My blog has just celebrated an important page-view birthday!  To quote...

Pageviews all time history 20,005

Basic

The beauty of Microsoft's QuickBasic was that you could use it almost as easily as a desk calculator for evaluating simple expressions, whilst at the same time it was a fully fledged programming language capable of running business applications. That I know because I wrote one that got used in a number of hotels without fault for many years.

The closest I have found that will run on a Windows computer is Just Basic which can both emulate the DOS based QuickBasic and can create a Windows GUI. With it you can write a one line program like

PRINT "My fish pie was as big as "; asn(1)*2

Just Basic is a subset of Liberty Basic which you will need to upgrade to only if doing serious stuff. I like their business model: Just Basic is offered totally free even for commercial applications and has no silly restrictions. Or you can get the paid for Liberty Basic which adds a few important extras for a very moderate sum.

The beauty of Visual Basic (VB6) is that creating a Windows GUI program is a doddle. Not quite as easy as QuickBasic but almost. For example, if you want to write a FOR loop to evaluate the Gregory–Leibniz series to an arbitrary number of iterations...

which converges rather slowly to Pi...

in QuickBasic this might be

for n=0 to 100
    pi = pi + ((-1)^n) * 4/(2*n + 1)
next

whereas in VB6 you will have to add to this code a Form (aka Window) onto which you drag a Text-Box or Label to display your result. And name and save the Form and Project source files.

Things only get more difficult with VB.NET. The simplest program, one that prints "Hello World", requires all of:

Imports System
Module Module1
   Sub Main()
      Console.WriteLine("Hello World")
      Console.ReadKey()
   End Sub
End Module

You cannot even easily port your VB6 code to VB.NET. And you are forced to install the bloated .NET framework. Serious programmers claim that VB.NET is much more powerful but I reckon that most of us want ease of use more than power, especially when the "power" being talked about is all about multi-threads and objects and inheritance and stuff that, frankly, we never needed back in those days when they used computers to send men to the moon.

David Platt says it all in his article "The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives" in MSDN Magazine. If we can believe him then it looks like VB6 is here to stay a while longer. I can testify that it runs under Windows 8.1 although there are a few problems in the editor. But this, I have learnt, is to be expected.

I hope, I hope that Microsoft continue to keep new operating systems backwards compatible with software that people actually use, rather than software that Microsoft want people to use. Like VB6. And another example is Word 97 which does almost everything I want of a word processor and which I therefore still use.

Sorry if I come across like I have a 'B' in my bonnet. I guess I have! But there is an old adage that goes "if it ain't broke then don't fix it".

P.S. Have just found VB6 Zone blog which records that Microsoft have agreed that "VB6 is awesome" and will at least continue to support VB6 runtime until 2024. This is good news indeed.

Alvin Maker

I am almost through reading Card's first book in the Alvin Maker series. In my last post I suggest that I might be more craftsman than artist. I like building stuff, putting things together, mending things, I cringe under the epitaph "everybody needs a (my name)", so now I am wondering if there is a bit of "maker" in me. Mind you, only about as much maker as Uncle Andrew was a true magician.

The Alvin Maker world is overtly laced with "folk magic". I am OK with this as fiction but it looks a bit too much like Card is proselyting Mormonism. In her excellent dissertation Alma Jean Porschet goes so far as to say "without Joseph Smith there could be no Seventh Son". She sees Alvin as a representation of Smith and identifies things that happen in the novels as suggestive of Mormon history and doctrines. Which begs the question - by continuing to read will I end up wanting to become a Mormon?

Creation or Consequence?

In the process of moving my office I have been sorting through some old papers and came across the following text which I wrote many moons ago whilst at college, laying in the grass one summer's day in the Botanic Garden.  Since then I ought have become wiser...

"The question "creation, or consequence" arose in connection with a study of musical compositions. To what degree was the composer truly creating his music, as opposed to it coming about due to consequence? It is creativity that is said to distinguish the artist from the mere craftsman, but what if even what we call creativity is really a subtler form of consequential happening?

"For convenience we can resolve any action into its components of so much creation and so much consequence. This of course is only possible if there is such a thing a creation. However, since all events can relate to those that have gone before, creation is never tangible except in the first event of an isolated system.

"The popular assumption that creation does not exist leads many people into incalculable quandaries, especially in the sphere of religion. They say "God created the world and all that is in the world". One might answer "Ah-ha - but what it the world were without beginning, then we could ascribe all creation to consequence" (thus doing away with the need for God). It is interesting to note here that Jewish mythology actually ascribes only the beginning of everything, including the beginning of man, to creation whilst all other formations are consequences."

What little wisdom I have gained since those days of idyllic summer picnics in punts on the Cherwell would suggest that the vast majority (if not all) of what I think I create is actually at best only consequence or simply plagiarism. But maybe that is because I am more craftsman than artist, more engineer than scientist, more practical than spiritual.

There's more stuff in this file too - probably of little interest to anyone but myself but we'll see...

Lost boys

I have just finished reading Lost boys by Orson Scott Card. Incidentally I was struck by similarities between Card's description of the Mormon faith and our own church beliefs. And yet we would not in any way align ourselves with Mormonism. The plot is, of course, infinitely sad with eight boys mutilated and murdered by a seemingly harmless and neighbourly old man. Card manages to cut right through the inhibitions which prevent most of us even voicing things associated with sexual perversion, exposing the weakness of our bodily appetites at the same time as upholding common decency and the strength of character required to control the same. Card's blunt descriptions are the opposite of euphemisms and that is a main reason why I like his writing style, why I was drawn to Ender's Game even though the bluntness almost offended me. We do much harm in covering things up, in not being willing to talk openly when open talking is needed. And I point the finger at myself - I suppose I am frightened of doing so because of what people might think. Indeed one raison d'être for this blog is so that I can try to express things that I find hard to talk about.

After setting the book down we are left agreeing, of course, that the old man must never be allowed to molest again, but not hating and condemning him so much as beginning to understand what drove him to do those terrible things. We are left feeling sadder for him than for his eight victims. Because the same 'Boy', or alter ego, that controlled him, or at least similar weakness, is found in each one of us. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Tempermental

I used to think I was reasonably musical. I reckoned I could tune a guitar, understand music theory, improvise on the piano, and generally appreciate music better than the average person. Not having yet met the average person I cannot be sure that I was wrong but I have met several non-average people and have come to the conclusion that there are many who are a good deal more musical than I am. Which peeves me because I thought I had a corner. Hence my Song of Albion posts. Which I might yet continue anyway.

As an example - I love the piano - both playing it and listening to it being played. Of course I can tell if a piano is wildly out of tune but I am unaware of the nuances of out-of-tune-ness that some of my friends claim they can detect. But at least I am interested in out-of-tune-ness.

I invented my musical slide rule whilst at school and was intrigued by the idea of enharmonic notes which it manages to discriminate between. Which led to discovering just intonation and the Pythagorean comma.

Pythagorean Comma

Which goes like this:  The seven notes of the major scale are kind of "God-given" in that they result naturally from the vibrations in pipes or strings. The third harmonic of a string or open pipe is a "just" perfect fifth above the second harmonic, the ratio of the frequencies being exactly 3:2. The just perfect fifth is the purest sounding interval after the octave (ratio 2:1) because the ratio is so simple. So two notes are consonant if the ratio of their frequencies is simple. If you start at the bottom A of the piano keyboard and ascend by fifths 12 times you will get to the top A, seven octaves up. If these had been just fifths you arrive at slightly higher than A, this discrepancy being the "comma".

just perfect fifth = frequency ratio 3:2 = 1.5
1.5 raised to power of 12 = 129.746337890625 = 1.0136 x 128 (2 raised to the power 7, thus the top A)
equal temperament semitone = 2 raised to power of 1/12 = 1.0595

thus the Pythagorean comma is about 1/5th of an equal temperament semitone.

The purpose of equal temperament tuning is to divide the octave in 12 exactly equal semitones and thus to avoid the comma.  At the expense of intervals no longer being "just" and therefore not being truly consonant. But it means that music can modulate into remote keys - whereas with just intonation remote keys are out of tune. So equal temperament has heralded the complex harmonies that are commonplace in today's music.

Thus all keys should sound the same thus dispelling the myth that flat keys sound soft and sharp keys sound crisper. Or is it a myth? In fact the piano is not tuned to equal temperament. Because of the stiffness of the piano "strings" the higher harmonics are out of tune - this is called "inharmonicity". To compensate so that higher and lower notes played together don't sound discordant the piano is actually "stretched" or deliberately tuned away from equal temperament.

Railsback curve

Which begs the question - which is the more correct? Just intonation seems to be closer to what I describes as "God given". But then, frankly, who cares? The keyboard (which almost implies equal temperament) is here to stay. And who wants to go back to Gregorian chant? And most of us don't understand the distinction and of those that do, most cannot tell the difference.

And then most of the keys on a piano strike three strings or "unisons" because they are in theory tuned in exact unison see here. Except that this site says "a piano tuner's "secret" is that not all three strings have to be perfectly in tune, a slight difference (which you'll get anyway in a couple of months with regular playing) actually beefs up the tonal quality of the note (chorus effect)". This site claims the reason is to increase the loudness to compensate for the larger bass strings, but I think this is weak reasoning. The force imparted by a given amount of thump on a piano key will be divided three ways when striking three strings thus defeating this argument. Wikipedia and other sites explain that, because the three strings are coupled by the bridge, having three strings lengthens the decay rate although giving an initial sharp decay provided they are tuned in unison - this sounds more believable to me. A side effect of coupling is that it will affect the frequency of vibration thus giving another potential departure from true equal temperament.

This site claims that the three "unisons" may intentionally be de-tuned by an amount that is culture dependent - "The effect is to change what stage of a played note the tuning resolves for maximum appeal. In the American style, the attack, or initial sound is emphasized for optimum 'in-tuneness' tonality. In the Japanese style, the sustain, or the sound of the note after the initial strike fades is where the highest degree of 'in-tuneness' resolves. In the European style, influencing the overall color of the note is the goal."

Which views are rather confusing and not always consistent.

I have access to several pianos including a grand. I cannot comment on their relative degrees of in-tune-ness - at the moment they all sound OK to me - but the one I hands-down prefer is an upright: for its crispness of tone, its responsiveness to and lightness of touch, and its great dynamic range.