This evening

Converging planes

Scenes like this can be seen continuously over King Edward Vii park in Willesden. This is not even a good example, often they seem to converge to the same point, which is puzzling - is it not? Trails can cross but for the leading points of two trails i.e. the planes to cross exactly at the point: this can be seen repeatedly, almost hourly from the park.*

Another thing you can see occasionally from this viewpoint is a plane flying surprisingly low though we're not near the airport. They made a mistake building Heathrow so that planes had to overfly built up London all the time, so let's back Boris Johnson's new estuary airport replacement all the way and close Heathrow. Otherwise it's only a matter of time before a disaster brings out all the hypocrites - if they survive - to wring their hands and puzzle over how it could possibly have happened. Yeah right! Just move the airport - get on with it.

Feargal Mooney

* I know this is probably daft but it makes me wonder if there aren't one or two rogue air traffic controllers practicing for or trying to create a collision - Al Qaeda? Ed.

Hark the old comment restoration completed

All the comments that were originally on the Squawkbox system from 2003 through part of 2004 have been copied and pasted into Blogger comments. The format is not all one could wish for but at least the text is there, preserved in Google's amber for however long that lasts.

Although the counts are wrong, because it will say one comment when there might be five or two when there are about ten etc, the layout is not very different to how it looked on the original Squawkbox system. As some of our technical geegurus have pointed out, a lot of the IP addresses are traceable to the Inbox Café, a local internet caf' that seems to have been piggybacked onto servers forming a technical hub for London and world communications at the time.

Hopefully this will please Mrs and long-suffering Mr Berries, Gladys Abanjo, Dr Gerald Francis, Rainbow Spike, Louisiana Lil, Alura in the Land of Giant Food, the Baroness of Canada and all of our many correspondents from that era. The messages even include one from Lenin - that's how far back they go.

Simon Moribund

Sparrow etc.

Frontenac snow message

To whom it concerns. Something nice to see out your window if you live in Frontenac tower & hopefully had the desired effect (?)

Snowy park

Wogan's last stand

BBC iPlayer - Wake Up to Wogan: 18/12/2009: "It's your last ever chance to Wake Up To Wogan, as the Togmeister entertains his loyal listeners over breakfast for the final time."

Terry plays his favourite tracks on this his swansong breakfast show. He has had me in stitches so many times he could be a master surgeon. Including the poleaxingly funny Janet & John stories. Terry, may you be in Heaven an hour before the divil knows you're dead!

Broadcast on: BBC Radio 2, 7:30am Friday 18th December 2009
Duration: 120 minutes
Available until: 9:32am Friday 25th December 2009

Today is the closing date for the short story competition

There is still time to enter online. I hope our publisher will be nominating some of the finalists for Pushcart prizes again next year. Six is the maximum nominations a publisher is allowed in one year. As well as the inestimable, one-off trophy mug inscribed "Willesden Short Story Prize 2010" there is £300 for the winning entry plus 2 x £150 for runners up. All ten shortlisted will be included in New Short Stories 4, which will be published on print on demand in both the US and the UK. If you don't win one of the main prizes you still get two copies of the anthology, and of course you keep all your copyright. So - last day! Approximately 300 entries as this is posted. Thanks to all who have entered and please send your best story if you haven't yet.

Willesden Herald short story competition link

Inspired Bicycles - Danny MacAskill April 2009

Has to be seen to be believed

Bob Dylan - Must Be Santa

Proceeds to charity

Petition to bring Tony Blair to trial for war crimes

BlairFoundation.Wordpress.Com - To bring Tony Blair to trial for war crimes Petition

Jack Straw was complicit and also the legal puppet who sold his soul for whatever he got - more than it was worth no doubt.

Sunny Sunday football in December

RIP Liam Clancy

A little bit less joy around today

I'll see you in my dreams - Django Reinhardt

If you think a little joy wouldn't go amiss, maybe try the above.

Saturday school project

 

Willesden Library education room

Who's asking and why?

Why is that an application form to join a the local sports centre has to ask people about their sexuality, religion and race? Is this the local council preparing the database for future BNP pogroms? In their stupidity they have turned what was supposed to be something about fairness and equity into something altogether sinister and oppressive. Why must people tolerate that sort of crap and pay for the privilege?

Feargal

BBC iPlayer - Desert Island Discs: Morrissey

BBC iPlayer - Desert Island Discs: Morrissey

Broadcast on: BBC Radio 4, 11:15am Sunday 29th November 2009
Duration: 45 minutes
Available until: 12:02pm Sunday 6th December 2009

"As the lead singer of The Smiths he captivated a generation of angst-ridden teenagers and, a quarter of a century later, he remains the outsider's outsider. As a child, he was enthralled by the emotion and beauty in pop music. He discovered the joy of public performance when, as a six-year-old boy, he stood on a table and started singing. But from an early age he felt he had to avoid everything conventional life had to offer. 'I just didn't want the norm in any way, he says, 'and I didn't get it. And I'm very glad.'"

The Pogues and Joe Strummer - London Calling

Kilburn, the Vienna of punk folk rock ("phock")?

The art of short story writing

Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story (edited by Vanessa Gebbie) is "a collection of 24 specially commissioned essays from well-published short story writers, many of them prize winners in some of the toughest short story competitions in the English language". The contributors between them have won "The Bridport Prize ... The National Short Story Award ... the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award ... The Asham Award for New Women Writers, The Fish Histories Prize, The Fish Short Story Prize, The BBC Short Story Prize, The Commonwealth Award, Writers Inc. Writer of the Year, The Willesden Herald Prize*, NAWG Millennium Award for Radio Short Story and the Per Contra Prize."

* I have highlighted the most important one. Ed

Quote of the Week. Yes, you guessed -

The tests say I have leukaemia... hang on a mo, that can’t be right: "But how these things are distributed is a mystery. Why does the angel of death fly over some houses but not others? There is no rhyme or reason."

It's Boris again. It's always Boris and always will be, unless Van Rompuy comes up with a new haiku.

War crimes trial for Blair?

Leaked documents reveal No 10 cover-up over Iraq invasion: "Military commanders are expected to tell the inquiry into the Iraq war, which opens on Tuesday, that the invasion was ill-conceived and that preparations were sabotaged by Tony Blair's government's attempts to mislead the public." (Guardian)

A vote for the Liberals is a vote for Cameron

Nick Clegg dents Labour hopes of Lib-Lab alliance | Politics | The Guardian: "Whichever party have the strongest mandate from the British people … have the first right to seek to try and govern, either on their own or with others.'"

Hillman Imp

Willesden Library Centre: Filth and dereliction in Brent

Gigi's closed months ago and is still empty. Now the Bellevue Cinema has closed and the fitments have been ripped out. Last night the centre's mens' toilet was in the most nauseatingly filthy condition. Dirty paper was strewn around the floor, there was fluid underfoot. In one cubicle somebody had closed the lid and defecated on top of it. In the other the bowl was clogged and foul. The word disgusting is inadequate to describe the state of the place. The people responsible for the filth are horrible lowlifes but what about the people who run the place, i.e. Brent Council? The council tax this year for a house near the library centre, in Band E, is £1672.93. It's not rocket science - compare the Tricycle Theatre in neighbouring Camden council control also in Brent [correction], or the Southbank Centre or even a typical motorway services, or the loos at Victoria Station. Then ask yourself why Brent gives us nothing like that and instead something more like the opening scenes from Slumdog Millionaire.

Ossian

Grand unification theory questions

Einstein's formulae predict correctly how things will seem from different viewpoints (frames of reference). You can state what is measured from one point of view then feed in variables and calculate how the same event would seem from a different point of view. The idea that reality depended on point of view was and remains shocking but it is true, i.e. it works and accords with observable reality and has been proven by experiment. Although it describes a sort of mutability it is in its own way absolute in that it predicts exactly how events will be perceived.

Einstein's thoughts mainly had to do with things on a grand scale - light, time, planets, people and everyday objects but when it comes to the very tiny world of atoms and electrons, it seems that there is no such predictability. There is a finding called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that says you cannot properly know about an atomic particle because by observing it you change it. There was a famous conference of the top physicists and theorists at which Einstein presented a thought experiment (an imagined experiment) that appeared to prove you could find out the mass of a particle at the same time as finding out its position, using a specially designed machine. However, on the next day of the conference another great scientist - Bohr? - pointed out a loophole that invalidated Einstein's thought experiment.

This troubled Einstein - he didn't accept it - and he spent most of his life trying to work out a way to reconcile his theory of Relativity and the apparently anomalous experimental evidence and conclusions of quantum (smallest possible scale) science. He said "God does not play dice." At other times he confirmed that he was an atheist, but he believed in a universe that follows set laws, rules that could be discovered and documented. He was trying to produce a new theory that would hold true at both the large scale and the quantum scale. Such a theory, one that would comprise a consistent set of rules that hold for all realms of science, is known as a Grand Unification Theory and is still being sought.

It was previously thought that electrons were particles that orbited around the nuclei of atoms but it is now known that they behave as if they are simultaneously all around the atom - smeared. Yet if "observed" or put into use, they will behave as particles. An electron is at the same time a wave and a particle, they say.

It seems to me that there is something in common between these two scientific theories, the conclusion that "different snapshots of the same thing" seem to comprise different realities. On the one hand it seems that X is the case but on the other hand it seems that Y is the case. For example in relativity on the one hand it seems that 20,000 years have gone by; on the other hand (for a space traveller travelling near the speed of light) it seems that only a few years have gone by. In quantum mechanics on the one hand it appears that a photon has gone through one slit in the apparatus, on the other it appears that it has gone through the other slit in the apparatus (in a device that tries to see which route a photon takes, which produces an inconclusive result).

In relativity an event in effect is more than one thing. To viewer A it is something but to viewer B it is something else. Yet there is only one event. In quantum mechanics a photon "is more than one thing". From a pattern seen on the surface of a detector it appears that the photon has gone through both slit A and slit B.

An electron is not in one location in orbit around a nucleus. But what does being in one location consist of for something that is moving - is it ever in one location? No, because it is moving - never in one location. So let us not be surprised that we cannot discover its location, especially as it is travelling at the speed of light - a speed at which time stands still. It is making its way from place to place but in no time. Therefore there is no time interval between it being in one place and the other, which in our terms comprises being in two places (N places) at the same time.

These particles participate in the very weft and warp of what reality is. It should not surprise us, therefore, that they appear miraculous since this whole dream of life is some sort of miracle. That there are elements that are in more than one place at the same time is no more amazing than any everyday event in life - all are equally miraculous. I doubt that anything people discover or describe will ever make life any less miraculous or mysterious.

The point I want to make is that this uncertainty of position is like relativity, it is a form of certainty, in that we know that these particles will be in more than one place at once. The whole question of where the electron is is an analogy of relativity's multiple viewpoints for the same event, where the electron is the event and the multiple locations are the multiple viewpoints.

Since this electron moves at the speed of light time stands still for it. "To the electron" no time passes, yet it moves from one location around the atom to another and therefore is in both places at once, since there is no time interval, there cannot be at the speed of light - when time "stands still". To the electron it is in more than one place at the same time. We cannot participate in this, so by trying to observe and detect this we disrupt it, effectively crash the electron. All we can see is a blur, which is the blur of a particle that is in the process of simultaneously being in more than one place at the same time.

Turning back to the idea that the multiple locations might be thought of as multiple observers of the electron, imagining that at several locations around the nucleus tiny observers could be placed who would have their impressions of where the electron was, they would all receive the same impression, that it was at their location all the time. What I want to ask is this: for these tiny imaginary observers observing the electron moving at the speed of light, and setting the speed of the observed object equal to the speed of light, will we not find that the laws and formulae of relativity do indeed apply and produce the same result for every tiny observer?

Whether or not the existing formulae apply, is it not the case that a set of formulae could be worked out that would correlate the multiple location impression, i.e. quantum uncertainty, with the "definite uncertainty" of relativity where what different observers will perceive can be calculated exactly? In effect is this not just a change to the variables whereby the event is moving at the speed of light and the observers are located in an orbital path of the event such that they all receive the same impression, despite their different locations. Can this quantum scenario not be derived by some transformation of Einstein's equations? (Where T=0?)

Kronk