diary of infinity

24 hours on and I’m beginning to wonder if downloading the whole of Wikipedia was such a good idea after all! I find myself compulsively looking up articles on anything and everything, in bed last night I spent about two hours before falling asleep following arbitrary chains of articles like Dresden Codex — Richard Feynmann (who realised the Mayan codex had precise astronomical tables for Venus) — (articles on various books by Feynmann) — Space Shuttle disasters (various) (Feynman famously demonstrated the O-Ring problem, but even more than that was absolutely scathing about the cavalier and ignorant attitudes of NASA managers); or Julia Margaret Cameron — Herschel (who was photographed by Cameron) — Neptune — Pluto — Titan ...

Maybe there is such a thing as access to too much information? I mean I’m not really interested in space shuttle disasters but having run out of info on the Mayan Codices I just had to find something else to read and somehow ended up there!

Twice recently I have seen official communications which refer to an asterix () instead of an asterisk ( * ). Am I such an old fogey to wonder what the f*** is going on? Does no-one know their own language any more?

I’ve just been reading a book, A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. Bear with me, gentle reader, as I explain how I came to read this short but long-winded tome with its circumlocutory airs.

It all started just under two weeks ago. I have a great love of classic literature, by which I mean my bookshelves are adorned with many ancient and dusty books whose origins I don’t recall, written by worthy authors I have never read. But as they say, every journey begins with a single coach trip, and it is on one of these long journeys that I read A Room of One's Own. To put it succinctly, I needed reading material for a four hour journey, and it needed to be a slim, light book. Casting my eye over my bookshelves, it alighted upon this slender (~100 pages) paperback by Virginia Woolf. I had often seen it there, but never before felt the urge to pick it up.

By now you are probably thinking, “this preamble is all very well kind sir, but what is it about?” Well don’t be so snappy. Indeed, as I drifted into this book and the hours passed, I was thinking exactly the same thing. Ms. Woolf starts by telling us she has been asked to give a talk at Newnham College on Women and Fiction, and being pathologically unable to make any statement on a subject in less than 100,000 words she embarks on an odyssey whose starting premise is that a woman cannot be an author of fiction unless she has a private income and some privacy (to wit, a room of her own). She then sets about proving this thesis. Ninety pages later, I was (with increasing testiness) asking her, as if she were present, “when are you going to get to the point?” For, over the hours, I had waded through paragraphs a full two pages long, and my eyelids were drooping, and the cause was not entirely due to my having to sit immobile in the same seat for several hours.

During the course of this 90 pages, Ms. Woolf had noted that most authors were men, and that the odds were stacked against women in many respects. (Note: this book was written in 1929. It is important to bear this in mind to understand her POV.) She had attempted to do various things whilst visiting Cambridge University, from visiting the library to walking on the grass, only to discover that as a mere woman she could not. By page 85 or so I was ready to give up on this longwinded monologue and beginning to wonder about the precise threat implied by the famous work "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" — was it perhaps death from boredom?

But at the eleventh hour (or more precisely, the fourth hour, as I approached my destination) Ms. Woolf suddenly decided to "shit or get off the pot" as Captain Kirk would say. Or was it Shakespeare? Never mind, in short she cut to the chase and started to make some interesting points.

Well I hate to pause here but I will cover the last 20 pages of the book in my next post. They are in fact quite enlightening and although I still think that Ms. Woolf writes exceedingly boring books, she does at least have some valuable insights for those who stay the course.

I just finished watching the eight endless episodes of the Endless Eight arc of the new Suzumiya Haruhi series. A lot of people were screaming with rage and frustration at seeing the same events unfold eight times over: after all, we’ve been watching the same things happen over and over since June!

Well not me, I really liked it. If I like an anime episode I usually watch it at least eight times anyway ^_^;

So in the end we saw eight out of fifteen thousand five hundred and thirty two repetitions of the same two week holiday period. As Kyon noted, they had lived through the equivalant of nearly six hundred years worth of days, doing (almost) the same things over and over!!!

My thought is, well, actually I want to know what happened in the 15,524 repetitions we didn't get to see! No really! Like for instance, why does Kyon feel that he owes Yuki something? Something must have happened between them somewhere in the 2nd — 15,497th time through, since he didn't originally feel this way, but from the 15498th time onwards he always felt indebted to her.

ISTM that this omission of so much story leaves enormous scope for fanfic authors! If all the Haruhi fans got together they could easily create 15,524 fanfics to fill the gaps. That would be so cool!

Of the missing cycles, we only have definite info on iterations 2391 and 11054 when we know the festival wasn't attended. We also have general statistics on some other omissions and permutations.
One of the curious things is that the part time work was only done on 58% of the occasions, and yet it was done on all eight of the ones we actually saw, which by my reckoning has a probability of only 1.3% if we were witnessing a random sample. Furthermore, there were six variations of work, yet we only saw one of these, eight times.

This leaves me to speculate that the eight iterations we saw were somewhat anomalous for their uniformity, and that many of the unseen ones were probably very different and some may have been even too bizarre and shocking to broadcast. For instance, supposing in one they gang up and murder Haruhi in a desparate attempt to end the cycle? Or what if they did suggest all sorts of bizarre extra activities to Haruhi to occupy their final day. Visions of Roman orgies, human sacrifice, etc are conjured up. (Remember how in the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray, certain that the day will be erased, takes to punching people, throwing himself off high buildings to certain death, all sorts of things.)

Well, for the mega fanfic project, I bags the one which leaves Kyon indebted to Yuki.... hmmm... what could possibly have happened between them in that two weeks that is now lost forever except in Yuki’s labrynthine memories.... oh yes, by decree I determine this this occurred in iteration 12167, so that one’s mine, hands off! (Of course this may be just one of many iterations which leave him indebted to Yuki...)

On the same day (yesterday) that the UK's Metropolitan Police issued guidance to its officers that photography is not illegal (and it's shocking enough that they should even need to tell their officers this!), a man in Chatham was arrested, handcuffed, and generally terrorised for guess what, photographing his local fish & chip shop! Read it and weep. I hope the police officers and pseudo-police officers concerned get fried for this!