Classical-clock-punk

In the land before time, when dinosaurs and Romans and a young John S. McCain roamed the Earth, there was a nation whom unto others was like a shining white city upon a hill, and yea, in that blessed land there were olive trees and grapevines and a slow lazy sun overhead, and the Oracle up in her Delphic mountains did look down upon the people of Helen, and did mutter, rant and gabble gibberish under the influence of vapours, and she did feel satisfied.  Her Hellenic people were the Greeks; the City was Athens, and the Time was 212 years Before Christ.  Even back in those early days, they had seen it all before; they had been there, and done that.

Our own era has stoked our ego as an old lady does a cat, and purr in our own hubris, but we are pur-blind to believe that we know more than the ancient Greeks and the Coptic scholars.  Charles Babbage and his first vaunted computer are mere plagiarizing whipper-snappers, to say nothing of the Great Mimic Turing.  The real inventor of the computer:  why, it was Archimedes, of course.

Wheel of Fortuna

poq draws your attention to the legendary Antikythera Mechanism, which does – well, we don’t quite know what exactly.  But under the guidance of Ptolemy, it was said to read the stars and predict the solar eclipses.   Perhaps there were many dozens of these.  Perhaps together, they would make voices that would rise up in an intangible, smoke-like mass, in a great Babylon of noises and times and thoughts, in, one might even call it, an ancient Greek Cloud.

Re: How Big is the Internet, Exactly?

Cuil:

1.  The tabs at the top are a clear, almost wondrous improvement.  Type in the “LSE” and it will put up tabs for “London School of Economics”, “London Stock Exchange” and “Luxembourg Stock Exchange”, allowing the searcher to easily filter out conflated search results.  Impressive.

2.  The colour scheme.  Because who hasn’t gotten bored of Google’s plain white, after a decade now?  But poq suspects black and blue will get old fast.

3.  Really?  It has more pages than Google?

Not Cuil:

1.  It doesn’t store personal information, so it doesn’t know what people are looking for, and so it doesn’t produce good results.  No PageRank, no love.

2.  It doesn’t seem to have the same incestuous relationship with Wikipedia.  Almost nothing brings up Wikipedia, which is almost always what actually answers the question.

3.  The pictures take ages to load, and aren’t necessarily at all helpful.

Which is the fairest engine of them all?

More important, Google responded with this claim:  the Web is even bigger than poq said it was before when poq said it was even bigger than you thought it was.  Yes, at this point it is official:

“for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a “new” page.”

The Web is infinite.  And because information is contained on every web page, even ones which are essentially a random pile of crap, that means that WE HAVE CREATED INFINITE INFORMATION, which poq believes is an impressive, almost alchemical achievement for mankind, and we deserve a pat on the back.

Post-poqalypse

Amy zipped up her eiderdown anorak, stuffed the key-card into her pocket and opened the door.  She jogged down a few winding stairs to the ground floor and left the apartment.  She could see more than usual were out walking today:  old families, new lovers, kids on scooters and bikes.  They had come to the Lily’s windswept promenade to see the purples and oranges of twilight on the waves.  They had come because there was nowhere else to go: if they wanted to walk, this was where they had to walk.  This evening, though, they had come for another reason.  They were out to look at London.

The Lily was drifting over London, following the deep currents of the Thames, and here and there the old London still broke defiantly up through the sea.  Amy could see the shattered spires of the City; empty steel skeletons, because the glass had long ago been bashed in by waves and storms.  The eroded finger of Big Ben, and the strange gull-stained circle-island of St Paul’s dome.  The stubborn brick tower of the Tate Modern, and in the distance she saw Primrose Hill (an island now, with a few shanty huts of corrugated iron clinging to the top).  Hiding like reefs beneath the waves she could see the bridges of the Thames, and the abandoned railway lines, Embankment and Waterloo and London Bridge, a spider-web above the rest of the buildings, which were too murky to see.  Here and there a street-light still shimmerered weakly like a will-o-the-wisp, like the lure of an electric fish.

Beneath that, Amy remembered what she had heard of the Tube: an endless flooded network of caverns and tunnels, full of eels and bottom-feeders, and maybe darker things lurking in those lightless places.  Legend had it that Victoria Underground Station had been strangely preserved in a trapped bubble of air, and that (if one was brave enough) one could dive past Buckingham Palace and the old theatre musicals, swim down the motionless escalators and surface in the station, and see the peeling adverts (sell your car on Gumtree!  New V&A exhibition:  Guns of the Conquistadors!  Asda prices!) of the 21st century.  It sounded so foreign to Amy.

She spent a moment more, wondering at the inventive chaos of London, envying the freedom they must have had, marvelling at the diversity of life, mourning its loss.  But she didn’t blame her ancestors for what they had done.  She wouldn’t have changed her ways either.  Then she took out her key-card, and went back to her flat.

Tomorrow, the Lily would sail for port (the first time in months), in Salamanca.

The Post-Everything World

poq writes to you with post-postal technology;  no longer the stamp, envelope and pen, but by some technomancy too complex to comprehend.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke

We are post-magic.

We are post-post-modern:  incredulity towards the metanarrative has become incredulity towards incredulity, and there is nothing left save inanity.

We are post-American – and we have long been post-European; now we are post-Western.   We are post-boom times; we are post-cheap food, and post-cheap oil.

We are post-Harry Potter, post-Spice Girls, post-Facebook, maybe even post-Oprah.

We are in the post-everything world, because our we cannot sit still anymore, and we cannot pay attention for more than 24 hours at a time.  We are not post-Pixar yet, but we will be next week.  We are post-ideology, and post-Chinommunism; we are post-everything but the Cloud.

Are we post-Hillary too?

May it long sustain us.

McCain Song

Suicide saigon, saigon,

hey saigon; saigon, long gone,

“we’re leaving”, he said, saigon so long.

Women and War

O Bravery in blood, for war and women to

Keep him under arms, to keep him under my arms,

He told me it was not to be,

And the letter speaks of the Somme, so I’ll

Carry him weeping to the cairn, so I

Laid him low and laid him

deep below.

A Cautionary Tale

Once upon a deep blue dale,

Cuts of clothe did flutter and flail

And out at sea the men did sail,

Against their fate the crew did rail,

But all were drowned in a dreadful gale.

Serif Seraphim

poq does not presume to doubt the learned and wise ways of this blog’s many readers, but circumstances have revealed a widespread ignorance which calls by its very existence for a vigorous crusade to dispell it ‘lest society itself fall in flames and ashes.  Therefore, poq is taking up the burden itself of answering this serious, nay, critical question: just what are serifs?!

Many readers may have heard the word from MS Word, which offers many fonts ’sans serif’.  Readers, do not assume this language to be the mere linguistic up-marketing of a font; it is not like a restaurant offering uncooked pasta as ‘al dente’ or a realtor selling you a 5-foot room as ‘cozy’.  No, it has a specific meaning in the rarified world of the font:  serifs are the little bendy bits and curlicues at the edges of the letters, which are there to ‘enhance readability’, as if painted on by helpful little angels (or children in Vietnam).

You have Steve Jobs himself to thank for this impressively obscure optional feature of Office programs, since he did typography at Stanford whilst bumming around people’s floors in his ‘only a poor student’ days.

Now wasn’t it good to learn that?  Now go make one yourself.

Hypoqcrisy Buckles Belts

In an entirely unsuprising development, the leaders of the G8 have decided to treat themselves to a 14-course meal on their first day in Hokkaido, which highlights one of the essential skills of diplomacy:  a large stomach.   Given that the talks today were focused on the world food shortage (and Gordon Brown’s new ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy), some considered the unnecessary luxury to be in …poor taste.