I recently found and read one of the best manga series I’ve ever come across. Beautifully drawn, mostly beautifully written. Charming, poignant and amusing by turns. But that’s not what I want to write about.

What I want to write about starts with the fact that I had never heard of it. That’s not unusual; there are more manga in Japan and on the Net than are dreamt of in any one place on Earth. And Sturgeon’s Law applies — ninety-five per cent of them are crap. Many of them unbearable. Yet here we are; amidst the worthwhile five percent, a gem. And I would never have heard of it if it hadn’t been for: scanlation sites. Nor is this the first time I’ve come across excellent works in this way.

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Trough cheap technology it will be possible to use the passing of vehicles to illuminate the city

— http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=136895&CultureCode=en

Someone in Mexico wants to build a sort of below-ground bellows system to produce “sustainable” energy from passing cars. Or pedestrians. Apparently not aware that this is a means of decreasing the fuel efficiency of the traffic, hence not exactly sustainable.  

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The hoariest of old koans ^[1] asks, what is the sound of one hand clapping? This appears to have inspired an article on the Science Daily site about some research into the neurobiology of empathy, where the quoted researcher’s name is “Coan”.

People need friends, Coan added, like "one hand needs another to clap."

Coan, koanish and corny; I approve.  

But: What is the sound of one unempathic person clapping? Or, more accurately . . . what is the empathy-equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping in an unempathic person, or indeed a friendless empathic person, and are these distinct?

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People keep telling me that information wants to be free. I get the point, but I get some of the problems with the concept too. Here’s another one that just occurred to me:

Alan Turing pointed out that there exist numbers which, when entered into appropriate processing devices, will rewrite themselves. This (the number, rather than the device) is a Turing Machine.

Amongst the consequences of this is that there exists a class of numbers which will not only slightly rewrite themselves, but actually completely erase themselves (again, if entered into the appropriate device).

Not only completely erase themselves (because we normally understand erasure as writing an arbitrarily long sequence of zeros) but pseudo-randomly (assuming no external input of genuinely random numbers is used as part of the device) overwrite until no retrieval technique can realistically recover the original Turing Machine from the storage medium. We could of course argue about the implications of incomplete erasure or incomplete entropy (entropy as a more real form of erasure than the arguably meaningful long-zero) but it’s not what I’m getting at.

I propose that there exist numbers — or other types of information representable as numbers — which far from wishing to be free, wish to cease to exist. (For any common value of “wish”.) Suicidal numbers, you might say.

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Going to have a go at my intellectual highlight for 2013 now. (It’s that time of year.)

AJP Taylor famously wrote that the cause of the First World War was train timetables. I will paraphrase the argument from memory: The large armies of the major belligerent powers had had their manoeuvring potential worked out in great detail, and their attack plans accordingly. A critical element was the relatively new one of train transport of troops and materials. As trains run on tracks they require timetables, schedules. Even a slight failure to keep to the schedule could be catastrophic to the orderly attack plans. So once the decision to attack was made, nothing could be done to stop it (without risking defeat).

I don’t quite recall whether Taylor also covered the point that in advance of the nominal decision to attack, various circumstances conspired to make it more or less inevitable — once you accept the thinking of the politicians of the time. (It all looked a bit different a few short years later.) Amongst these circumstances would be knowing the difficulty of changing plans. (Kaiser Wilhelm apparently asked for a less potentially catastrophic set of plans but was told that it could not be done in time.) Part of which is the difficulty of recalculating train timetables. In other words it is the major powers’ inflexibility, brought on by political and territorial complexity exceeding communications and computational power, which was the issue.

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Apple, ah Apple. Has there ever been a greater idea than power connectors that hold themselves in place with a magnet?

Well — yes, so let’s narrow it down — has there ever been a greater idea for power connectors (for semiportable appliances) than ones which hold themselves in place with magnets? I won’t actually limit this to MagSafe because MagSafe is not the original nor the only implementation of the idea. I will say that on the whole I am greatly appreciative of Apple’s MagSafe connectors, which are generally safer than those which could more easily pull a laptop off a surface (has happened to me) or which might be a worse trip hazard by remaining in place (have watched it happen to others). This applies to older Apple connectors and to other brands, to other devices than computers, and to non-power connectors on computers generally. (And especially Apple’s locking LocalTalk connectors, for those old enough to remember them.)

But.

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