Most people, I'm told, would either throw it out, or find another kid to give it to (returning it to the owner being impractical ... I thought about using parcel post, but calculated that it weighed minus 1.5 grams, and the post office doesn't do negative stamps.)

Which reminds me of a maths joke: "The number you have dialled is imaginary - please rotate your phone by 90 degrees and try again ..."

<There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who think math jokes are funny and those who don't.>

Anyhow, I had a helium balloon. A bag of elemental star-stuff. I could do science! I shone a laser at it, but nothing happened (was I hoping to start a fusion reaction? Not *really* ...)

Another option would be taking a lungful of helium - quite safe, utterly inert, but less dense than air and thus a different medium for sound vibrations. I've never actually tried this, but you have a squeaky voice for a few seconds, then you need to breathe again and you return to normal. And your helium is gone. I'll pass on that.

So I let it go free. It was leaking very slowly, but still light enough to rise. So it drifted very gradually up the stairwell to the highest point in the house, and leaked some more, and began to drift back down again. Late one night I found it 'innocently' hanging round outside my bedroom door, floating at waist height. I'm not sure what it wanted, but I have made certain inferences about its character and morals.

Although - as a child's balloon - maybe it just wanted to cuddle a teddy bear? Sure ... at *that* height ...?

Anyhow, this passes for a scientific experiment round here. At least Edison got a few laughs.

<Learn Latin in London

Tutors to include:

Dom Daniel McCarthy of St Benedict’s Abbey, Atchison, Kansas, a regular contributor to “The Tablet” on liturgical understanding of Latin Texts.>

The plot thickens, except when it's *inframince* (Duchamp, = 'super-thin' or 'sub-thin').

Not me, baby, the mince.

Eadweard Muybridge, inventor of animated photos, used the name Helios in the 1880s.

I'll be only be worth a dime once we reach the middle-game and my forum is available for study and support of the team.

There is a potential yet unleashed power in there that might stun us as this game proceeds. The World Team can only let herself be humiliated by that much. We used to build up a buffer of analyses in earlier games as we moved along with 6 days per whole move, with each move, and could grab back any relevant line from anywhere; while with this TC we're lucky to get anything at all organized in time. But there are windows of time and opportunity.

Here are some of them:

<smart people> ... yes, of course some people are smarter than others. But who? It's not always easy to say what 'smarter' means -- some folk equate it with education (a bad mistake) or with intelligence ... but 'intelligence' can be hard to pin down. Some say it's whatever an IQ test measures: I suspect this idea is a kind of circular pseudo-logic (I happen to be good at IQ tests ... probably better at the tests themselves than whatever they're meant to measure. Thus my suspicion.)

Then there are social, cultural and even ethnic factors. It's harder for somebody to be smart - in any of the traditional, book-reading, computer-using, logical, mathematical or literary ways - when that person is handicapped by their upbringing or culture. For instance, when they live in a family or a class that scorns both education and intelligence. Despite this, I've seen some incredible cases of really smart people who emerge from difficult backgrounds.

Please understand: I'm not saying that *you* have these biases (though probably everyone, me included, has a bias of some kind). I'm just saying that smartness is hard to define or pin down, and it can lead to a kind of elitism. So I am wary of suggestions that "smart people must... *do whatever*" -- as though all these words stood for fixed entities.

Then there is the question of <resolving uncertainty>. Two points: one, I think uncertainty can be a good thing ... a lot of trouble in the world is caused by those who are convinced that they're right. A humble agnosticism, on many issues, appears preferable to me.

And the second point? Resolving uncertainty is impossible anyway, in areas such as quantum physics and formal logic. Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Gödel, and John Bell come to mind, no matter what Einstein said about a metaphorical deity who doesn't play dice.

Finally, you say <I hate unusless bla bla>. I'm afraid that I don't know what 'unusless' means (useless? the opposite, ie 'un-useless'? useful? or maybe an acronym for the United Nations Umbrella Steering Liner for Education of Smart Sheep ...?)

Although the latter might be followed by 'baa baa' rather than 'bla bla'. (Old English Nursery Rhyme begins "Baa Baa Black Sheep..." and 'baa' is an approximate version of a sheep's bleat ... though these things vary between languages.)

I have to admit that I don't even know what you mean by saying 'bla bla' at that point. It could be that <unusless bla bla> is the thing that you hate; or it could just mean 'et cetera/ und so weiter/ and so on/ enzovoort' ...

Having said all that ... all my over-complex maneuvers, as in chess ... I would agree with this formulation: <If it is evident that a solution to some problem is urgently needed, and the result will benefit people without causing harm, then those who have the ability to solve the problem should tackle it for the good of all>.

That should cover everything from climate change to the best square for the Queen ...

I made a short post once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdD6...

Are you a *Collective Bauer*? Or even - the horror! - a *hegemonic swarm*? aka the Uberherrschaft Angriff in the Swiss-Armenian variation of the Winawer French ...?

I had a dream last night. A chess dream. I was playing in a weekend congress somewhere in East Anglia and, improbably enough, so were you. What's more, we met in the first round. Despite the location we were positioned at the same table I was on when I lost to Sam Osborne in Galway. After eleven (sic) moves, the following position arose, with me, as white, to play:

click for larger view

There are plenty of improbabilities about the above, but there are some cute and appropriate features too: I'm sure your eye caught the e6/d5 pawn setup. Anyway, I spent a couple of minutes analysing 12.Rxb4 Rxb4 13.Qd1, with the idea of Qh5, then woke up.

'...shooting up the motherboard wicted essays...'

'Frogspawn back after a month off and vanadium wasn't a great idea after all.'

There's also some talk of you writing on 'John McGahern's colle'. If he really were prone to playing that ghastly d4/e3/Nf3/Bd3/c3/Nbd2 system then frankly, I'm glad he got banned.

The cutups sound good. I once dreamed (or cut up, I forget) the line "We cannot become like him in his stagnant self".

And sometimes it's the other way around.

I think there's also a kind of proximity alert, where I notice something that I recall being within a few pages of the target. This being the kind of book where one wouldn't expect much sequentiality, obviously.

So I should really send you an email, but <Annie> is at the top of my email-to-do list. Maybe I could manage both, if I concentrated.

Odd stuff is afoot out here in RL (alleged). I'll be in touch.

Oh, I just read Wm Gibson's latest, Zero History. Fine stuff -- everything from London motorbike courier subculture to the persistence of certain addiction-related habits among the not-currently-addicted. But I *do* wish he wouldn't persist in producing trilogies: this one is the third set in its particular milieu, and I wouldn't object to a fourth. Douglas Adams used to cram five or six books into a trilogy, easily.

Not mere doubles or doppelgangers, these. Our name-alikes are part of the way we hide from search engines ... like that metal chaff spewed out by stealth planes to baffle radar systems.

*chaff*: strips of metallic foil, bits of wire, etc, fired into or dropped through the air to deflect radar signals and so interfere with detection (Chambers dictionary).

Yep, that sounds about right: although it's a tad solipsistic, as though the name-alikes were doppelganger-bots created for that purpose, rather than real people.