spring break breather

Thank god for spring break. So i can come here with some wine and finish or continue the thought i started ten years ago. It has got busy around here with the house full to the brim with kids and lots of uni work to do and also real work and then things to get drunk and poems to write or songs and all my thoughts are in a fragmented but happy kind of state.

Wine and mosquitoes in this room. New songs from BJM on the headphones. Bass ripples into the night through expensive compressors and space echoes.

सर्वकामक्रोधौ त्यक्त्वा गयोगी जीवन्मुक्त .. Sanskrit notes in my diary, i spend so much time on this now. My fabulous teacher McComas Taylor is in the paper today cause they are trying to cost cut in the school of Asian Studies, just like they did in the school of music.  Higher Education and research funding is really dire in Australia at the moment.  My Sanskrit notes sit alongside sedimentary sections of the Worange point formation from a field trip near Eden, NSW. It was a great trip, we saw more placoderm bones, some beautiful Devonian point bar channel deposits, perfectly preserved ripples, mud bombs and root casts. Also there was a storm out in the Tasman and the waves were really huge and crashing all around us spectacularly on the red cliffs there.

I am also Reading Russel for philosophy, who’s unseemly calm air I find strangely disconcerting. So in my final essay I argue (with Descartes) that the only a-priori knowledge is “I exist” and all else is induction.  I will take this argument a lot further one day.

Thinking about quantum computing, after talking wtih Michelle Simmons from UNSW, and I think one of the great things these computers will be able to do is to do causality backwards really well. Rather than needing to iterate through and run from all possible initial states of a causal system to find the one which matches a current state of affairs, quantum logic will be able to pick out the initial state really quickly. This will be great in the natural sciences for running the clock backwards. I think there will just be a real sense in this kind of computing power when we finally use it, that we are reaching into a really mystical otherworldly magical kind of knowledge of things, far in advance of how our brains can ever know or conceive. It’s going to be great.

I am desperate to record some songs – I have lots of short bits with the kids chatting or screaming in the background. Need a solid block of time to use some of the nice kit i have now. So frustrating cause in my 20s when I had endless expanses of time i was too poor to have any equipment. In the meantime it’s all about the new BJM songs..

Look at this prawn that was in the sunset last week.. I am using Gimp to do all the editing work, just like Reaper which i use for music and GePHi for my network graphs.. i love (and support) free/open software in all its flavours.