On Nearing 50 - An Emergency Checklist

I’ve been so busy recently that I completely forgot an impending date. In February I shall turn 50. That’s old, hideously old. I’ve been reviewing my lifestyle (if that’s the right word for it) and have decided that I’m far too immature to reach such an august and respectable age. In fact, I am not at all respectable. Things have got to change fast. Here is my hurriedly written list:

• Desist from playing hopscotch with pretty secretaries outside the offices of clients. Pretending to be a trapeze artist on the walls of clients’ car parks is also to be eschewed.
• Throw away all my clothes and buy several tweed suits and sensible brogues. I might also need ‘long johns’ and trusses (I am not entirely sure what these are so I’ll check with some genuinely old people like my friends David & Mike)
• Wear a tie at all times and replace sarong with night shirt or pyjamas.
• Cultivate a grave demeanour, exude gravitas and stick to ½ a pint of bitter at pub. Getting half cut, falling on the floor and laughing hysterically are definitely off the agenda.
• No more gadgets and especially no more robots (sadly this includes voice activated battle daleks). Instead spend money on pollyfilla, raw plugs and chamois leathers.
  
• Start talking about sensible things. Subjects to include the M25 corridor, power tools and grouting tiles. Also the price of various lengths of woods (2x4 or something) and the relative merits of different makes of workbench. (NB Find out what one actually does with a workbench).
  
• Refrain from conversational topics like cannibalism, cargo cults and sexual deviancy especially on first meeting people. Bear in mind that not everyone finds medieval torture techniques that amusing.
  
• Stop going to Amsterdam. Walking tours of the Lake District now on the cards.
• Take up a mature hobby like fishing or car washing.

On the whole I don't think I'll bother becoming 50. Instead I shall study taxidermy and flee to the jungles of Sarawak.

The Quantum Beach Ball

Take a gander at this BBC news article: Future directions in computing . Then ask yourself, why now and what does it all mean? And what's with all the dry ice and what is the greenish ball with its misty nimbus all about?

Keep your eye on the main picture of that football. It is highly significant. I also like the image of it in the top right of the story. At first it reminded me somewhat of The Creature from the Black Lagoon or that dreadfully creepy bit in The Mummy where the monster wades out of a moonlit marsh but now it brings to mind the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen emerges from the swamp to confront Kurtz.

Is the ball – or rather the picture of the ball - some kind of visual trope? An example of metonymy, say? Is it a graphical representation of a concept associated with another? I think not – the mistiness that envelopes the ball is all pervasive. With metonymy as with metaphor and synecdoche, a degree of precision is required. "Keels ploughed the deep", to take a classic example of all three tropes.

Something here is possibly being reified. But it is reification not so much for the sake of the signified but for that of the signifier. OK, maybe the signified is just about definable – the uncanniness of quantum physics or, more generally, the perceived spookiness of hard science. A misty image standing for a vague concept. But ultimately the medium – or rather the beach ball – is the message, to paraphrase the ever tedious Marshall McLuhan.

One can construct a simpler, more pleasing narrative. Someone at the Beeb had this really, really cool green beach ball in the news studio and needed something to justify taking some dramatic pictures of it. One might almost imagine they had been nibbling dodgy mushrooms or smoking some illicit substance and were gazing at the beach ball in stunned, slightly befuddled wonderment – the way one does. It was just so green and blurry; so green and ... well awesome. Then the idea slowly dawned: a quantum computer! The story could have been just as well have been about nanobots, or genetic engineering or even about the future of technology itself.

Keep watching. The football is bound to get more coverage.