The first nerd

Some facts which turned up in the autobiography of Charles Babbage, the Victorian mathematician and inventor who designed and partially built a Turing-complete mechanical computer eighty years before the birth of Turing.

1. As a young schoolboy, Babbage was told the story of a man who sold his soul to the Devil. It occurred to him that the part about the man becoming rich and powerful in his lifetime was a matter of verifiable historical record, but the part about him being damned for eternity could only be conjecture. Accordingly, young Charles attempted to summon the Devil in his school common-room, but was unsuccessful.

2. The first computer error message was "Wrong tabular number."

3. In later life, Babbage claimed to have had a telepathic communication from a piece of Gloucester cheese, which revealed a great deal about the nature and origins of the universe. Unfortunately Babbage deemed the revelation unreliable because a piece of cheese has obviously no real understanding of the universe.

4. Babbage was asked "If you put the wrong numbers into the Engine, will the right answers come out?" twice, both times by Members of Parliament.

5. Babbage took several shiny steel buttons with him everywhere he travelled, but pretended there was only one and that he treasured it greatly, so he could swap it for things.

6. Explaining the Analytical Engine to an audience, Babbage told of how, when it wanted a logarithm to use in its calculations, it would stop, ring a bell, wait for the number to be punched in by the operator, check the logarithm was correct, and then continue. Somebody asked, if it had to check the logarithm was correct anyway, couldn't it just calculate it instead of stopping work to ask for it? Babbage expertly fielded the question: "That is far too simple to explain at present, but if you stop by my workshop in a few days I shall have prepared you an answer."

7. Babbage's use of 'want' in the above may be the first implied attribution of consciousness to a machine, the Engine being the first machine sufficiently complex for it.

8. The child Babbage was shown a miniature clockwork dancer, called "The Silver Lady", at a street exhibition. Much later, he found it in a junk shop, bought it, restored the mechanism, and dressed it in a different outfit each day.

9. Babbage invented the pilot or cow-catcher for steam locomotives.

10. Babbage mentions Ada Lovelace only once in passing in his autobiography, though other sources indicate it was Lovelace who first realised the true capabilities of the Engine.


At the risk of jinxing it, my next farce will probably be about him and Lovelace.

The game's afoot

A reminder that my first self-written Edinburgh Fringe play, Broken Holmes, opens this Thursday 6 August, running every day except Sundays until Saturday 22nd, at 10:10pm at The Space@Venue 45 on Jeffrey Street. It's 45 minutes long so there's plenty of drinking time before and after.

Thursday 6, Friday 7 and Saturday 8th are previews, which are exactly the same as the rest of the run except that tickets are cheaper.

The play is a darkly comic interpretation of Sherlock Holmes featuring angst, wit, murder, smut, silliness, a puppet, and my own semi-serious theory about where Watson's wife disappeared to after two books.

Please support local new writing at the Fringe - and celebrate Edinburgh scholar Arthur Conan Doyle's 150th anniversary year! - by making Broken Holmes part of your 2009 Fringe fun.

Tickets are £7.50 (£5.50 concessions, all tickets £5.50 on preview nights) - you can book from the venue on 0845 508 8387, or through the Fringe office here.

The elegant variation

The term "elegant variation" was coined by H. W. Fowler, describing a particularly erroneous journalistic rule – namely, that no word should be used twice in one written piece, or repeated inside some limit like three paragraphs. English teachers propagate this myth; second-rate newspaper hacks obey religiously. Thus, editorial articles, having once mentioned bananas, subsequently reference "bendy yellow fruit", while public figures accumulate curious nicknames — "troubled superstar", "erstwhile ginger prime minister".

Ostensibly, these literary gymnastics prevent readers getting bored from perusing identical expressions successively. However, its real effect instead obfuscates communication, demanding ever obscurer, less precise synonyms because authors exhaust their mental thesauri searching for new alternate lexical strings. Difficulty with composing also increases exponentially. Such arbitrary regulations predictably reduce linguistic freedom, producing unstomachably crippled prose, which sceptical scribes will find becomes easily apparent upon any prolonged attempt to maintain strict avoidance of repetition.

A grammatical mnemonic

In this world there are many otherwise intelligent people who suffer an extraordinary mental defect:
Namely, the inability to differentiate between the words affect and effect.
Were I a drug-smuggler I would consider having some memory-enhancing steroid trafficked
In order to help these unfortunates remember when to use effict and when to use affict.

And I'll post a full update of my adventures when I've had time to write them up, and when I've escaped from the bicycle shop I'm being held prisoner in.

The pub rot, my birthday, and a voyage of discovery

Nobody knows why the pub rot happens. You have a lovely old pub with real beer, rickety wooden stools, a dartboard, a pool table or if it's very lovely a bar billards table, old tin kettles and flintlock pistols hanging from the ceiling, a blazing fireplace ideally with a dog asleep in front of it. Then, on what you believe to be a perfectly normal day, you go in one morning to find the place suddenly and horribly transformed. The tables are chrome-plated, the chairs are faux-leather and have no backs, beer mats have disappeared so everything is slightly wet, and the floor is bare pine boards and not even dirty. The nice old landlord and landlady are gone, and an Australian teenager tries to sell you a pint of ice cubes with slightly alcoholic fizzy-pop poured between the cracks, and asks to see your "scream card".

My formative beers were drunk in the Marquis Wellington on London Road, Leicester. I learnt bar billiards, went to the Monday-night quiz and sometimes won, had business lunch and got my first grown-up programming job, played chess, wrote the zeroth drafts of Nerds and Broken Holmes, gained and lost friendships and relationships, and talked - at a quick estimate - about three weeks solid of complete rubbish. Now the Marquis is dead, or as good as dead, and I mourn him.

So, my last Sunday lunch in Leicester for the foreseeable future will be a few hundred yards up the road, in The Old Horse. I hope the pub rot never spreads that far, and the Horse shows no signs of it yet. It's possible that owls ward it off.

The occasion is twofold. Firstfold, it's my twenty-eighth birthday, almost to the day, although it was actually on Wednesday and I was getting pleasantly sentimentally drunk in Nottingham with an old friend. Secondfold, I'm disembarking that very day, from that very pub, on a voyage of discovery.

I'll be riding my Brompton, with its trailer - you can get a trailer onto a Brompton if you put the coupling axle through the holes where the back castors go - down through England to a suitable port, and chartering a vessel for a voyage south, where I have cause to believe there lies a large body of land waiting for some gentleman-adventurer to explore it. I have a pith helmet and everything.

I'll either reach Rachel in a week or three - she's somewhere in the foothills of the Pyrenees - or get lost, bored, or both trying and hop on a train the rest of the way. I'll be back in summer to start rehearsing Holmes.

Buxton to Leicester

The plan was to ride my touring bike from my aunt's house in Buxton back to Leicester around the Macclesfield and Trent-Mersey canals. The bike, with trailer, was to be loaded with all the things I need to live on for a while; spare clothes, bike tools, a few books, laptop, other bicycle - the Brompton - and a tent and blankets for the night. The plan was foiled by the rim tape tearing on the tourer and no bike shop being around, so I had to do the ride on the Brompton. After some messing about with luggage bungee-cords I realised that if you take the back castors off the Brompton, the coupling axle for the trailer fits through the holes, so it's just about possible to pull the trailer on the Brompton with the coupling held high enough for the whole thing not to sway horribly. I had to take less than half of the load, though.

I went by what I thought would be a shorter route round the High Peak Trail and down the Cromford canal through Derby. At the bottom of a 1/8 incline on the High Peak Trail, which you aren't supposed to cycle down, the front tyre of the Brompton exploded. It was worn down to the thread so patching up the inner tube was no use. A long time ago I read on the internet that a tyre stuffed with grass beats walking. It is actually surprisingly not-bad on soft surfaces like towpaths, but horrible on anything paved. I also found fallen leaves to be slightly better than grass. There was no bike shop in Cromford so I set off down the canal.

The towpath was closed about half a mile in. A paper sign informed me, in Comic Sans, that there was a diversion, thattaway, but it was for walkers only and cyclists should "find an alternative route". None was suggested. I had no map so I followed the walkers' route. It took me several hours, put me up to my ankles in mud, and I had to push the bike most of the way, and carry it - with full trailer - over stiles and kiss-gates. It did take me right through a herd of deer though, so it wasn't all bad.

I got back onto the canal path just as night was falling, pitched my tent, and found that among the things I'd left at my aunt's were all my blankets. I slept in my clothes and overcoat and had a rather unpleasant time.

In the morning, a hundred yards down the towpath, it was closed again.

I found a train to Derby, bought a new tyre at the first bike shop I found, and had a lovely ride to Leicester round NCN Route 6, which did include about a mile of the Trent-Mersey Canal.

I went back to my aunt's house yesterday on the train for the rest of the stuff, and can't believe I thought I was going to get it all on a bicycle. It was one of those moments of awkward self-knowledge when you suddenly realise you're a bit odd. Everyone gets those, right?

Attention venue managers and eccentric millionaires

Broken Holmes has a web page now.

My big project for 2009

is to put the full-length version of Broken Holmes on the Edinburgh Fringe festival. I have rounded up the following provisional cast:

Sherlock Holmes - JAMES BOBER, the world's greatest fictional detective;
Doctor Watson - CANAVAN CONNOLLY, his faithful but ill-used sidekick;
Morgana Scarlet - REBECCA D'SOUZA, a charming murderess;
Inspector Lestrade - PATRICK SPRAGG, a mentally challenged Cockney policeman
(and THE SUMATRAN WEASEL-VIPER as itself.)

These are four of the most talented people I know and I am ingratiated to Providence for none of them being shackled by "real jobs".

If any of my theatry friends are reading this, I'm still looking for tech and stage managers (the stage manager gets to operate the glove puppet) and anyone else who wants to help.

There. It's official now.

Chai Latte

Everywhere has its national dish or local delicacy, such as Spanish paella or Malaysian chicken satay;
San Francisco has the chai latte.
You cannot inhabit the cafes and 'peace centres' of the Bay Area and hope to look alternative of arty
Without your chai larty.
'Chai' is a Russian (I think) word for tea, related to the Indian 'cha' and British colloquial "cuppa char"
And 'latte' just means milk, so an etymologist might be forgiven for thinking that a chai latte and an ordinary decent cup of tea with milk aren't too different, but it turns out they are!
The 'chai' itself is an aqueous suspension of one part cinnamon to ten parts sugar, it seems,
And the 'latte' part is a warmed-up dollop of one of the less palatable aerosol shaving creams.
All this is served in a paper cup with a plastic lid with a hole in it so you can sip from it in your BART seat like an infant in a cot without it spilling.
It costs two and a half dollars plus tax, and is a far cry from Earl Grey and a bun in a Lyon's tea-room for a shilling.
But you have no choice. If you are anybody in San Francisco you cannot be seen out without your chai latte in a sippy cup:
It is what shows you are a liberal intellectual, and all grown up.

Ephesus Hyde excerpt

The first thousand-or-so words of the zeroth draft of the new story collection I'm scribbling to pass the winter. The characters are taken very roughly from my NaNoWriMo effort last year, but re-imagined somewhat.

Nobody knew where Ephesus Hyde came from. It was not that he kept it secret. When asked, he would say quite openly and matter-of-factly that he had been born on Mars, some two centuries into the future, but people are cynical, and most chose to believe one or another of the various rumours that followed him about. Some said that Hyde, or whatever his real name was, was the son of an aristocrat or an industrialist, driven mad by wealth, by love, by disease. Some said he had escaped from an asylum, or he was not mad at all and the whole thing was an act put on for laughs or attention. His riches came from bank-robbery, or from having spent his saner years working the stock exchange, or from a particularly diligent career in begging or gambling. In all the years I spent with him I did not meet more than half-a-dozen people who believed the Mars story, and I have to admit I was always rather sceptical of it myself.

Here is how I came to work for Hyde. In 1902 I was employed on the steam-engines of the Great Midlands Railway. Engine-drivers are an interesting sort. Every small boy wants to be an engine-driver. When grown men meet engine-drivers, they are instantly reminded of their boyhood dreams, of the series of defeats and chance events disguised as 'life choices' which have led them to spend their waking hours in dreary mills and offices, instead of huffing along at the controls of an express train as they once imagined themselves. They go into a kind of nostalgic trance. But I was not an engine-driver. I was a boilerman.

"And no small boy ever dreams of bein' a boilerman when he grows up," said the driver. "But me, I'm one of the few who made it. Tell a chap you're the king, or a property mogul or a millionaire in hats, and he may be happy for you, or jealous, but it's a matter of luck. Tell him you're an engine-driver, and it's different. You're an achiever where he's a failure. He holds you in awe. Ever seen an engine-driver buy his own drinks?"

We were running the slow service from Birmingham to Derby, as we had been every day for three weeks now. Our friendship had begun poorly, and failed to improve.

"I'm not sayin' I'm better than you, Carson," he told me. "That's immeasurable. But my life is better than your life. Much better."

It was true that his job was better than mine, at least, and as there was nothing in my life but my job, he was probably - excruciatingly - right. He had the dials to read, the valves to turn, the levers and stops and brakes. He had the whistle. If a boilerman touched the whistle rope in a Great Midlands engine, he was dismissed immediately, sometimes without waiting for the train to stop. I had the fire. Fires, once they are got going, are generally capable of keeping themselves alive without much outside help, and aside from tossing in a shovelful of coal every now and then, the bulk of a boilerman's work was to sit still and withstand abuse from the driver. This one's name was Willcox.

As soon as we stopped the train at Barrow-on-Trent, a thin gentleman in a flame-coloured smoking-jacket climbed in to the cab and punched Willcox unconscious. It was the first time I saw Ephesus Hyde, and he couldn't have made a better first impression. He swept his fringe out of his eyes and told me he needed an engineer. I said I was a boilerman. He said it was all the same to him, and asked my name.

"Carson."

"I will call you Jenkins," he said. "I just need somebody with a little technical know-how. I can pay -" and he quoted a figure that would test the loyalty of the most dedicated boilerman in England. Inevitably, I asked him a little about himself.

And that was when he told me that he was a commander in the Royal Time Travel Corps who had been sent back in time to prevent the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1895 by Spanish pirates; that he had missed his stop by a few years and had been foraging for the parts to build a machine for the trip home; that the crucial component, the Leighton clockwork, would be invented in a Home Office laboratory in 1920, and he was biding the time being as a gentleman adventurer. Happily he had gathered that Queen Victoria was not assassinated, so the boys must have got through the job without him.

I smiled, nodded, carefully took a rag out of my overalls pocket, managed to wrap it round one hand without using the other, and tried to reach for the hot poker without his noticing. Pokers, by necessity, are heavy and unwieldy, and they are all the unwieldier when you can't see what you're doing because you daren't break eye contact with the madman who's just boarded your locomotive and punched the driver's lights out. It clattered on to the steel floor, narrowly missing the prone Willcox.

"You've dropped your poker, Jenkins," said Hyde pleasantly.

Calling for help was the only thing for it. I dropped the rag, reached behind me, found the flax cord, and pulled.

The whistle on a steam-locomotive has one design criterion. It is to be loud. It must be audible at the other end of a tunnel or at a level crossing several hundred yards away, and the fact it may be moving at sixty miles per hour into a twenty-knot head-wind means it must be all the louder. From the cab, it is disorienting, to say the least. It feels rather like you're about to faint, but you don't. You just sort of teeter over the edge of consciousness until you realise that, although the madman is gone, there is now an angry stationmaster in there with you, looking suspiciously from you to the heavy poker on the floor to the knocked-out engine-driver beside it, and you suddenly wish the madman were back.

"Name?" demanded the angry stationmaster.

I made up my mind.

"Jenkins," I said.

Cinema fun

I spent this afternoon strolling about San Francisco's Chinatown, where ghettoisation is a tourist attraction, and this evening I'm off to see Quantum of Solace:


If you can't read my handwriting, it goes: Car explodes; gadget introduced; Bond operates complex machinery with no training; evil laugh; "Bond, James Bond"; martini; product placement; superhuman jump; parachute; Bond almost dies; baddie with scar; baddie kills other baddie; Judi Dench gives Bond a Disapproving Look; sex; Bond girl dies; skiing; gambling; Bond is double-crossed; dubious accent; exotic location; death other than by shooting; quip; tuxedo; fist-fight.

I'm not the first to have this idea, but it'll make it a bit more interesting. You can use it on the old films too.

The scoter

Of all the fowl and ducks and drakes
That swim the planet's ponds and lakes
None are more elegant than scoters;
They're monochrome, just like old photers.
Despite their pleasant-sounding clucks
They're not the friendliest of ducks
So, should you meet one while out boating,
It's best to leave him to his scoting.

Hungry Man

Made at the Zeum in San Francisco.

"Sneakers", if you're American

With apologies to Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, writer of Victorian morality-tinged children's nonsense rhymes. I hadn't heard of her until this morning. The original to this one is "Alice's Supper", #66 here.

In the Amazon forest, a woodsman
Hauls a rubber tree down to the ground
Which requires open space, so he's flattened the place
For a few hundred feet all around.
As the great thing uproots, he cheerfully hoots:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

In a factory somewhere in Asia,
Some seven-year-old quadruplets
Stand all day in a row, as they cut, glue and sew
To pay off their grandparents' debts.
As they flinch from the whip, they joyfully quip:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

In a nightclub in uptown Manhattan
That's a hangout for drunk CEOs,
A twunt in Italian satin
Wipes a powdery frost from his nose.
He declares with a grin, as he sinks his twelfth gin:
"This is for Alice's trainers!"

The emergency room

The waiting-room had comfier chairs than a British one, and a couple of snack machines that accept credit cards. There was a television in one corner of the ceiling showing a cheap reality programme. Television isn't even an escape from reality any more.

The young man behind the counter had a religious symbol round his neck. He took R.'s details and asked if she had medical insurance. She doesn't. He gave her a card for a financial adviser.

We waited, eating burritos, until a woman called out R.'s first name. We went in to an office and R. told her what was wrong. She has had chest pains intermittently for ten years. Once, when she was poor enough for state medical care, a doctor told her it was probably nothing to worry about, but apparently a real diagnosis would have cost too much. American state medical cover, I suspect, is the reason I've seen two or three double amputees per day since I've been staying here, more than I see in a month at home. Cutting off legs is either cheaper than treating certain conditions properly, or becomes necessary when conditions go untreated for a long time.

In the last week, R.'s chest had become more painful than ever. That day, which was two days ago, it was making it hard for her to breathe, which qualifies it as an emergency, so the hospital was obliged to stablise her condition. Stabilise, not fix.

We waited again and ate more burrito. I was prepared for this to be the several-hour wait that you could expect from the NHS once they'd decided you weren't in immediate danger. It was only about half an hour. The same woman took us to a curtained-off booth and said she'd be back with a gown.

We heard the doctor before we saw him. His name was Tom - that's all his name badge said - and we found out later that he wasn't a doctor but a physician's assistant. American hospitals have the power to keep you in against your will, and Tom was telling the woman in the next booth that this would happen to her, to her great distress. He spoke to her as though she were a petulant five-year-old and he were bad with children.

"That's what happens when you check in to a hospital that has no record of you, with an injury like that." I think it was a bloody knee.

He came in to R.'s booth a few minutes later and asked her the questions she'd already answered.

"How old are you?"

"27."

"Pfffff." (A word I've never heard before, only seen as an internet onomatopoeia.) "So it's not your heart, is that what you're worried about?"

"No." She hadn't said anything of the kind.

Sits down. Sighs. "This is an emergency room. We deal with bad stuff here. Now if this has been goin' on for a week, if it was bad you'd have called as a week ago, wuncha?" I noticed he was chewing gum. Probably. It might have been tobacco.

He prodded her half-arsedly with a stethoscope.

"Okay, we're gonna get you a breathing treatment and send you home." He said 'breathing treatment' in the same tone as he might have said 'lollipop'.

He sauntered out. R., in tears, gathered her things and said we were leaving. "Where d'you think you're goin', honey?" Tom demanded as we passed him on the way out of the ward.

R. got a complaint form from the charge nurse, who took her into another room and asked what had happened. The charge nurse said it wasn't the first time Tom had been complained about.

"Who?" asked another nurse conversationally.

"Tom."

"Who?"

"Tom C—." (That's not a swear word; it's my attempt to look journalistic by omitting Tom's real surname, which is Crawford.)

"Who?"

"The jackass."

"Oh."

They said R. didn't have to leave, and sent in another doctor, who I think was actually a doctor this time. He was pleasant and seemed to listen to what R. said. He prodded around and said she needed a mammogram, but they wouldn't give her one. The nurses took blood and urine tests, did an X-ray, and gave her a breathing treatment, which turned out to be a plastic pipe that you suck nasty-smelling smoke out of.

R. left with a diagnosis sheet, not entirely unlike a printed Wikipedia article, of costochondritis or chest wall pain, and instructions to get a mammogram, which she can't afford. It said to come back if the pain was prolonged or caused difficulty breathing.

Yesterday the director of the hospital called R. about her experience with Tom. According to her, and various pieces of gossip, there have been several complaints, he's been given a severe talking-to, and they are not sure what to do about him.

This morning R. was worse, and her neck had swollen up so that she also had trouble sleeping and eating. We went back, and she eventually got a prescription for some painkillers and antibiotics. They said again that she needed a mammogram and again that they didn't do them.

If R.'s pay were doubled so that she could afford medical insurance tomorrow, the company might pay for a mammogram but wouldn't pay to treat anything nasty that showed on it, because it would be a "pre-existing condition"; if she lost her job and home and went back on to state care, they would say the same.

R. will probably be billed upwards of ten thousand dollars for all this. The hospital can't take legal action if she doesn't pay, which is just as well.

The U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, and the only one in the developed world that dares treat its people this way. Barack Obama's medical plans, if he gets round to them, will probably make things cheaper, but R. and tens of millions like her will still be at the mercy of "the market", i.e. rich bastards who don't want to help.