So to do a search — not leave a comment or anything — I had to fill in a CAPTCHA and answer two trivia questions.

Wow.

Writing that made me nostalgic, so I thought I’d see whether I could find photos on the web.  It took a while, because it turns out that its name has changed to Stella Studios, but I found it.  And on the Stella Studios web-site, I found this photo, taken from nearly the same place, and presumably the best part of seventeen years later:

Look like that little tree/fern thing has grown pretty impressive!

When kids are growing up, adults decide what they’re going to do.  And not only do we make better choices for kids than they would make for themselves, we make better choices for them than we do for ourselves.  Here’s what kids do:

• Learn things (in school)
• Play sports (also in school, if not elsewhere)
• Sing and play instruments (e.g. school concerts)
• Draw and paint
• Write stories

(They also play video games and watch TV, but let’s ignore those for now because those are things that adults also do plenty of.)

All those things are fun.  Adults choose them for kids because they know that they’ll enjoy themselves, that they’ll develop their creativity, that they’ll be healthy.  Then having set our kids off on that trajectory, we slump in front of our computers for eight or twelve hours every day.

In 2012, I’m going to do those things, too.  Why should kids have all the fun?

Learning

Two main areas for me: programming in the foreground, of course; and I’m pushing on with avocational palaeontology.  In the area of programming I want to pick up my sadly neglected long-overdue serious attempt at Lisp.  Less excitingly, but probably also worthwhile, I’m going to try to catch up with the way Ruby programming culture has moved on since I first encountered it.  (I got a small but non-trivial program 90% of the way to being releasable, then foundered on the changing embedded-documentation expectations, and now that I come back to it a couple of years later it won’t even run on my current Ruby installation.  *sigh*)

It’s easy to find statements such as the defining characteristic of real programmers is that they never stop learning, and I won’t disagree with that.  But I’ll go further.  You don’t want to stop learning non-programming things, either.  Which is one reason why my palaeontology side-career actually helps with my programming career: it keeps me mentally fresh and fit.

What do you want to learn this year?

Sports

This is much harder.  However old you get, there are always books, so you can always learn.  But I am forty-three years old, somewhat overweight, and very unfit.  I’m pretty limited in what I can do by the way of sports — especially team sports, which are the ones I really enjoy.  I’d love to play football (= “soccer”) if only I could find a group of similar-standard players to play with.  But there are no similar-standard players — everyone who plays football is young and fit and fast.

So that leaves two options.  One-on-one sports, and solo.  I play squash once a week for forty minutes against an opponent who is much better than me, but by playing left-handed he handicaps himself down to a level where I can compete reasonably well.  So that’s good as far as it goes, but it’s not enough.  Last year, I tried to start running, but I was defeated by our hilly neighbourhood, the English weather and of course my own lethargy.  I might make do with regular walking, lame as that sounds.  I was very impressed by this video, which is very well worth the nine minutes it takes to watch.

Singing and playing instruments

I’m on stronger ground here.  Since August, I’ve been playing and singing songs at the Forest Folk Club, and finding it hugely invigorating.  So far, I’ve made a point of not repeating songs: this policy has driven me to learn 23 songs and counting.  Since the club meets twice a month and a slot is usually two songs, that means I need to learn about one song a week to keep up with that schedule.  That’s a stretch, but doable — which is just right.

It’s actually the Folk Club that led me to my New Year Realisation.  The way the sessions work — people get up from the audience, step on to the stage and perform, then return to the audience to watch the next act — reminded me of a school concert.  In that environment, anyone who wants to perform can: it’s not restricted to the best.  And there is something enormously liberating about that.  I have no a delusions of musical stardom, I just want to play some Beatles songs to an audience that will enjoy them.  A folk club is the perfect venue for that, and I strongly encourage all of you who sing or play to find one.

Drawing and painting

This I have done hardly any of.  I used to draw all the time as a kid — I still have an old orange hardback book that I filled with dragons, spaceships and warplanes when I was seven or eight.  And way back when Fiona and I were first married we had a brief phase of painting watercolours.  But it came as a bit of a shock to me to find that this one (the Pension Stella in Plakias, Crete, where we went on holiday in 1995) is about as recent as anything I’ve painted.

How will I find time for painting or drawing in 2012?  I’m not sure.  But I’ll try to find a way.  Maybe a class.

(By the way, I learned something today: watercolours are very hard to scan well.)

Writing stories

On this one, I have made zero progress.  The last time I wrote fiction was in 1994, and that was only 2000 words.  I have a pretty well formed idea for a novel floating around in my mind, but I’d only written 800 words of that before stalling.  I’m not sure how to make progress with this.  Last year a couple of people suggested NaNoWriMo might be useful.  Maybe I’ll try it this year if I’ve not got anywhere by then.

Conclusion

The more I think about the things that we expect kids to do, the more I like them.  I think they’re creative, empowering, demanding, rewarding — the kinds of activities that make us better people.  We make kids do them because we can see very easily that they need to grow.  We don’t see that so easily about ourselves.  But it’s just as true.  If we don’t grow, we stagnate.

In response to this, many high-profile web-sites are demonstrating the results such laws would have by going dark for the day.  They include Reddit and, most importantly, Wikipedia.  (Also, the entire Cheezburger network and many, many others.)  We can only hope that this distributed demonstration results not just in SOPA and PIPA being rejected, but in an emphatic smackdown that makes it impossible for similarly dumb legislation to get mind-space in the future.

But there is another threat also making its way through the US Congress — less publicised but also hugely important.

That threat is the Research Works Act (RWA), by which scholarly publishers like Elsevier (with its 36% profits as a proportion of revenue) hope to claw back total ownership of federally funded research.  The way academic research works is an absolute scandal to start with, but the behaviour of publishers now — charging both authors and readers, and trying to get laws passed supporting their outdated and corrupt business model — is absolutely disgraceful.

A couple of days ago I had an article about this published in the Guardian, one of the the UK’s more respected newspapers.  I was pleased to see that yesterday it was the most viewed article in their science section, and today it’s still hanging around in second.  I recommend that you read it: if it doesn’t make your blood boil, something is wrong with your metabolism.  The title should give you some idea: Academic publishers have become the enemies of science.

Please: any of you who are in California or New York — the states that the RWA’s co-sponsors Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) supposedly represent — write to your representatives.  There is no justification for legislation that siphons federal funds away from scientific research into the pockets of Dutch shareholders.

… and finally

I forgot to mention that I was back at the Forest Folk Club last Sunday evening, where I sung two more songs before the main set: While My Guitar Gently Weeps (including the “lost” third verse!) and The Girl From Ipanema.  To anyone who thinks I’ve now lost all grasp on what “folk music” means, I can only recommend that you watch this Arlo Guthrie video, which NickS pointed me to.  I found it rather moving.

[By happy coincidence, it's only a few days ago that the world's first Sushi In Space video was released.  Why?  I couldn't tell you.  But that's where this image is taken from.]

Method

As in the sushi example above, balloons have often been used to lift light objects to the edge of space.  They have even been used as a launch platform for light rockets — the combination is called a rockoon.  The problem with balloons is that as they climb higher, the pressure of the atmosphere decreases, so the gas density difference inside and outside the balloon decreases, and so does its lifting power.

My idea is a progressively evacuated rigid balloon (which we can conveniently abbreviate PERB).  I think it can be used to get easily up to — well, I don’t know what height, that would depend on material properties — but high enough to make it a reasonable launch platform for smaller rockets.  (Many of the other non-rocket spacelaunch techniques also do not aim to get into orbit as the space elevator does, but just to make a rocket’s task easier by starting from a point some way up through the atmosphere.)

The PERB is simply a large, rigid shell strong enough to withstand a pressure differential of, say, 0.1 atmospheres without imploding.  You use a vacuum pump to evacuate air until the pressure inside is down to 0.9 atmospheres.  If your PERB is sufficiently voluminous, it will now be floating: what’s needed of course is a volume such that one tenth the mass of contained air at one atmosphere is greater than the mass of the PERB itself: the shell, the pump mechanism and any payload.

The beauty of the PERB is this: if  you can make it take off at all, then you can take it higher and higher very easily: you simply keep evacuating the shell to a pressure that is 0.1 atmospheres lower than the surrounding air, and let it float higher and higher.  (I am neglecting some details, of course.  For example, you’d want to tether it to the ground, and the mass of the tether itself will grow linearly with altitude.  I am guessing this needn’t be a killer.)

What is the limit?  I suppose the PERB can keep rising while there is enough atmosphere to give a pressure differential capable of lifting it.  You’d end up by fully evacuating the shell, at a point where the atmospheric density is something less than a tenth of an atmosphere.  From there, you launch your rocket into orbit by conventional means.  (Notice that it’s pleasantly simple to bring your PERB back down to ground level: you merely bleed air slowly into the shell.)

Advantages

If this can be made to work at all, it seems to have many important advantages.

First, the launch cost would seem to be negligible, on a par with running a vacuum cleaner: all the significant cost would be in manufacture of the light, rigid shell.  Presumably your tether would double as an electrical supply, so you don’t need to carry any fuel.

Second, simplicity.  The PERB has almost no moving parts — only the pump — and (fingers crossed) seems pretty much foolproof.

Third, safety: because everything happens so slowly, if things do go wrong there should be time to do something about it.  Provided the shell doesn’t fail catastrophically by buckling — which should be easy to avoid just by evacuating slowly enough to allow the PERB to climb — if a leak develops, it should only cause the PERB to descend slowly.

Fourth, reusability.  I don’t see any reason why a PERB should not be used many times.

Drawbacks

The big one: do we have a material that the shell can be made from?  It needs to be strong, light, and impermeable to air (or nearly so — very slow leakage shouldn’t be a problem, as the vacuum pump will easily overcome it).  Here, I am lost.  I know almost nothing about material properties.  Anyone?  Carbon nanotubes?

The PERB would likely be very vulnerable to bad weather.  Wind is the obvious hazard — it could conceivably break the tether; it could throw the PERB upwards or downwards too fast for the pump to compensate for pressure changes, causing the shell the implode or explode; it could throw solid objects against the shell causing a local failure.  Perhaps even the pressure of rain could be enough to defeat the lifting power, if it acts over a wide enough area (although this only applies at low altitudes).

Would it need to operate at, or near, the equator?  I am not clear on why, exactly, but I seem to recall that the space elevator can only be built at the equator for reasons that elude me (and which the Wikipedia article is strangely silent about).

Have I missed any?

Maths

Obviously some calculations need to be done here.  The key one is this: can we make a shell voluminous and strong enough enough that it can sustain a pressure differential great enough to counteract its mass?  And how much additional mass can it carry while maintaining a healthy safety factor?  Does anyone out there have the relevant background to work through this with me?

Here is the easy part.  Consider a PERB with a shell of mass Ms and volume V, capable of withstanding a density differential of P atmospheres.  The mechanism (vacuum pump and associated stuff) has mass Mm and we want to lift a payload of mass Mp.  The density of air at one atmosphere is 1.2 kg/m^3, so the difference in mass between the enclosed partially evacuated volume and the equivalent volume of air is 1.2 P V.  That buoyancy has to overcome the mass of the shell, mechanism and payload, so we have lift-off when 1.2 P V > Ms + Mm + Mp.

The hard part is calculating the strength of a shell of mass Ms and volume V made from some specific material in some specific shape.  Is it capable of sustaining a pressure difference of P atmospheres, where P = (Ms + Mm +Mp)/1.2 V?  If so, we are good to go.  Does anyone have the background to comment on shell strength for various materials?

Conclusion

The big question: why has no-one done it before?  Surely that can’t be the case?  Does anyone out there know of any prior art?  Has the idea been proposed, shown to be stupid, and discarded?  (If so, it should at least be mentioned in the Wikipedia article.)  If not — is it stupid anyway, for a reason that I’ve missed?

1. Spring Hill (2011), Chloe and Silas [18 listens]
2. Days of Open Hand (1990), Suzanne Vega [17 listens]
3. The Incident (2009), Porcupine Tree [16 listens]
4. So Beautiful or So What (2011), Paul Simon [13 listens]
5. Liege and Lief (1969), Fairport Convention [9 listens]
6. The End of History (2006), Fionn Regan [8 listens]
7. Help! (1965), The Beatles [7 listens]
8. Blue Divide (1994), Richard Shindell [7 listens]
9. CSN (1977), Crosby, Stills and Nash [7 listens]
10. Hejira (1976), Joni Mitchell [6 listens]

Looking at the list, I am immediately struck that eight of the ten are folk music of one sort or another, with the only exceptions being the prog rock of The Incident at #3 and the Beatles’ Help! at #7.  Of course it may be that this tells us only what a broad church “folk music” is, encompassing the jazz-folk of Joni Mitchell, the country-folk of Richard Shindell, and so on.

I also notice that a few of these albums are there largely on the strength that I have loved other work by the same artists — Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Crosby Stills and Nash’s eponymous debut, Richard Shindell’s Reunion Hill.  The albums that made it onto this year’s lists haven’t necessarily captured my heart the way those others have.  I am pleased that the overall winner, Spring Hill, is an album that I adore entirely on its own merits.

The big shift in my listening this year has come from the fact that I am looking not only for songs that I like to listen to, but also for songs that I will be able to perform myself at the Folk Club.  That explains the big swing towards folk — and in fact, it occurs to me now that even Help! has the folkish quality that most of the songs would work perfectly well as just guitar+vocal.  In fact I’d say that my musical 2011 has been more about playing and singing than about listening.

But in the early days of 2012 I find I am really missing the complexity of prog, and listening more to bands than soloists.  It’s music that I’ll never be able to play (even if I could find a band), but prog speaks to my soul in a way that folk can’t.  (Not a better way; just a different way.)

[None of the Spring Hill songs are on YouTube or GrooveShark, so the image above links, in a new window, to a player that provides four of the eleven songs: Call Somebody, Tax Office Love Song, Worst House and Woman You Can Love.]

I wrote about Chloe and Silas after seeing them at the Forest Folk Club in August: “Their songs are insightful and distinctive, and their performances finely judged and very clear … They are a perfect combination — much more than the sum of their parts.”  Having listened to their album Spring Hill eighteen times in the last quarter of 2011, I can confirm everything I wrote then.

Consider, for example, the album opener Call Somebody.  In terms of its harmonic base, it’s one of the simplest songs on the album, with the guitar alternating between I and IV chords every couple of bars almost throughout.  But that very simplicity provides the perfect landscape to paint the singing onto: the song exists in a sonic world that is lonely, cool, isolated; and the vocal has a very different mood — warm, intimate, thoughtful. That’s especially so because Chloe’s and Silas’s voices weave so organically in and out of each other, a perfect depiction of the closeness that the song is about.  And so the music reflects the theme of the song: that in a cold, lonely world, warmth and companionship is there for the taking.  Call somebody.

So there you have it: Spring Hill, an album of crystal acoustic purity, of both careful meditations and joyful outbursts (as in One-Man Standing Ovation, one of the happiest songs I know).  A wonderful discovery, and my highlight of 2011.

[Buy the CD from amazon.com or CD from amazon.co.uk.  The CDs are ludicrously expensive for some reason, but you can also buy MP3s from amazon.com or MP3s from amazon.co.uk, and that makes more sense in this case.]

Next time: a summary and some reflections on my 011 in music.

Suzanne Vega is, rather unjustly, known almost exclusively from her second album, 1987′s Solitude Standing — and particularly for the two hits Luka and Tom’s Diner.  That was my first album of hers (and by the way, these two songs are some way from being the best it has to offfer).  It inspired me to dig a bit deeper, so I got her self-titled debut album, which is a delight: sparse, insightful and chilly.  And this year, her third album, Days of Open Hand.

It’s a noticably warmer sound than those first two albums: while instrumentation is still mostly crafted in a way that leaves a lot of space, it now seems to work much more with the vocal rather than being a canvas that the vocal is painted onto.  (I’m not saying that this is a better approach, only that it’s different: both work well.)  The songs feel as though the words, melody and backing were all evolved together, whereas on the first two albums the sense (whether actually true or not) is that songs were written with just a guitar, and then arrangements added later.

The song I’ve chosen, Fifty-Fifty Chance, is perhaps not very representative, and feels in some ways as though it would sit more comfortably on one of those first two albums.  But I’ve chosen it because I love how the tension of the string part — the only instrumentation — evokes the helplessness of sitting by a hospital bed, not knowing what the outcome might be.  The twist at the end of the song casts the whole in a new, and more heartbreaking, light.

[Buy from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk, although for some reason it's insanely expensive in the UK.  Better pick up one of those cheap second-hand copies instead of a new one.]

Next time: my number one most-listened-to album of 2011!  What can it be?

Anyone who remembers my 2010 album selection, and even more those privileged few who saw the unblogged 2009 selection, will recall that I tend to land up on a fairly even mix of folk music and prog rock.  This year has been the exception: folk has nearly swept the board, largely because of my new interest in playing it as well as listening to it.  That leaves us with only one prog album this year, but what an album it is: Porcupine Tree’s The Incident.  While it shares with all good prog the qualities of richness, technical proficiency and inventiveness, it adds another quality much rarer in this genre: approachability.  Call it likeability if you wish.  Because much as I love prog, I have to admit that it’s not always the most welcoming genre to people approaching it from the outside.  This album is an exception.  It draws you in.

I don’t know much about about Porcupine Tree — Amazon gave me the Time Flies MP3 as a freebie when I bought something else.  I loved that opening couplet, “I was born in sixty-seven / the year of Sergeant Pepper and Are You Experienced?” (it made me sad to have been born in the year merely of the white album and Axis: Bold As Love).  I liked the whole song enough to get the album, but so far that’s all I know of their material.  Above, I’ve embedded the YouTube video of the single edit of Time Flies, since it comes it at a fairly digestible 5:25.  But you really want to listen to the full-length version that’s on the album (embedded below), which takes rather longer to illustrate its point of the passage of time — it breathes and explores in a way that the short version can’t.

(Students of the classics will recognise several homages to Pink Floyd’s Animals album — specifically, the opening acoustic guitar pattern is a nod to the similar opening of Dogs, and the cascading descent of echoing electric guitars shortly afterwards evokes a similar passage in Sheep.)

[Buy at amazon.com or at amazon.co.uk]

Next time: a lesser-known album from a “one-hit wonder”.

This is one of two albums to make this year’s top ten that were actually released in 2011.  That’s pretty unusual for me, I am usually at least a few years behind the curve.  More typically for me, it’s the 2011 album by someone who’s been releasing records for more than half a century.  (Back in April, I wrote about this album’s stupid staggered release schedule.)

Paul Simon is a genus, it’s a simple as that.  If I don’t mention him as much as newer discoveries like Dar Williams and Richard Shindell, it’s because I have been so intimately familiar with his catalogue for so long that I’ve run out of new things to say about him that I haven’t already said many times to my friends.  His music covers an astonishing stylistic range, from the simplest three-chord blues through the most sophisticated jazz ballads, via every kind of folk music, a Broadway musical, a film soundtrack and of course the South African and South American-influenced music that younger fans (by which I mean people in their forties) are likely most familiar with.

Every new Paul Simon album is an occasion for rejoicing, and it’s to his credit that at the age of seventy he is still cranking them out (albeit less frequently than he did back in the 60s and 70s).  2011′s offering, So Beautiful or So What, offers ten very different songs.  They constitute a sequence of meditations on life, love, religion and philosophy, leading to the stark choice presented by the title track: two different ways to respond to the universe.

From an album that covers as much musical ground as this, it’s not really possible to choose any one song as representative.  The one I’ve picked out, Rewrite, uses the conceit of a man revising his novel’s manuscript as a metaphor for all the changes he wishes he could make to all the bad choices of his earlier life.  Typically for Simon, this is done with a light touch, against an idiosyncratic musical backdrop that somehow contrives to simultaneously be both sparse and rhythmically dense.

[Buy at amazon.com or at amazon.co.uk.]

Next time: something completely different: the second of only two non-folk albums on this years top ten.