The Imitation Game

Further to the post That is All You Need to Know, we just went to see The Imitation Game, the historical thriller based on Alan Turing's central role in the cracking of the German Enigma code in World War 2.

That is All You Need to Know

 
That is All You Need to Know trailer
We were in Salisbury again last week, to see That is All You Need to Know, a production by Idle Motion at Salisbury Arts Centre telling the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Taiblet's awfu' guid

I can never see the word "tablet" without it raising somewhere in my mind this kind of tablet, the traditional Scottish confection - a buttery semi-crystalline fudge - that probably sprang from the same national sweet high-calorie tooth that gave the world the deep-fried Mars Bar. I first ran into it decades back, visiting Scottish relatives-by-marriage, and about that time found the accolade ...

Taiblet's awfu' guid — Wee Macgreegor

... in a reprint of Florence Marian McNeill's 1929 The Scots Kitchen: its traditions and lore, with old-time recipes.

I only recently tracked the quotation down to a story by the Scottish journalist and author John Joy Bell, who wrote for the Glasgow Evening Times a series of dialect stories about a working-class Glasgow family. The central character is a young boy called Mcgregor Robinson ("Wee Mcgreegor"), and the quotation about tablet comes from the introductory story of the series, in which "Mcgreegor" and his father, against his mother's wishes, conspire to share a secret stash of almond tablet in a paper bag in his father's pocket: .

"Ha'e ye ett yer baurley sugar?" asked his father, during a pause in the childish queries.
"Ay; I've ett it...It's no' as nice as taiblet, Paw."
"But ye'll no' be carin' fur taiblet noo?"
"Taiblet's awfu' guid," returned Macgregor guardedly, with a glance upwards at his parent's face. "Thomson's paw gi'es him taiblet whiles."
"Aweel, Macgreegor, I'm no' gaun to gi'e ye taiblet...But if ye wis pittin' yer haun' in ma pooch ye micht—Ye're no' to let on to yer Maw, mind!"
The enraptured Macgregor's hand was already busy, and a moment later his jaws were likewise.
"Ye've burst the poke, ye rogue," said John, feeling in his pocket. "Noo, ye're to get nae mair till the morn. Yer Maw wud gi'e 't to me if she kent ye wis eatin' awmonds."

The compilation book of the first series is online: see Wee Mcgreegor (JJ Bell, pub. New York and London, Harper & Bro, 1903, Internet Archive ID weemcgreegor00belliala); the Project Gutenberg Australia copy (1100201.html) has an introduction by Bell explaining the origin of the stories. Unlike many fictional child characters, Wee Mcgreegor aged as the cycle of stories continued, and we find him somewhat older in Later Adventures of Wee Mcgreegor (1904) and, topically, at 19 and joining the army in Wee Mcgreegor Enlists (c.1915). By this time, Macgreegor's adventures have taken a far darker flavour than worrying about sweets; his fiancée breaks off their engagement, and he kills a German and is wounded in battle, before things turn for the better.

While the JJ Bell stories have been pretty well forgotten, a look through Google Books shows the fallout that probably still continues: generations of people, animals and things called Macgregor being saddled with the prefix "Wee".

Tablet digression aside, I finally made the jump to tablet computing. A Samsung Internet-capable phone has proven far more useful than I'd imagined, but the small screen size, multi-tap input and poor bandwidth are impediments that had set me thinking about better options. A couple of weeks back I was discussing this with Felix Grant (of The Growlery), and he recommended the Android Allwinner. At only £50 for the 7" screen option, it seemed not a great risk to try out, so I got one a week ago.

It's brilliant. I won't go into vast technical detail, as I'm sure tablets are familiar territory to many readers, but it's just what I wanted for note-taking on the move, along with web browsing and e-mail if I'm in range of a  BT wi-fi hotspot. The package I got didn't include a word processor, but it was easy to find a free app, Kingsoft Office, for creating Word documents, and the pop-up keyboard is fine for two-fingered typing. I tried the voice input, but I think it might need a deal of adjustment on my part to what accent it expects (maybe I'm not RP enough). Even when configured for British English, it persistently hears "six" as "sex", and it produced this ...

will there be a bit forward into the future are you still ask puggles become such will heidi's week old is a pickle roman computer code

... when I tried it on a bit of text handy, the blurb to RA Lafferty's Space Chantey:

'Will there be a mythology in the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic or only in computer code?'

The instructions, a tiny flyer in Engrish ("Use headphones shoulds not be too big volume, If feel tinnitus, Lower the volume or stop using it"), are pretty minimal, but there's plenty of generic guidance on Android operating systems online. It has to be said that this is an enthusiast's device: in a lot of areas, you may be on your own in unfamiliar areas, and need to be comfortable with working out how things work; for instance, this is my first introduction to the possibility of cloud storage, as well as a lot of the protocols of wi-fi connection.

I found only one major problem: the so far inexplicable failure to be able to see some files and directories via the USB connection to my PC. However, there proved to be a simple workaround: to e-mail Word files as attachments to myself, from inside Kingsoft Office, using the built-in Gmail connection and another free add-on app, Android Attach, that over-rides Android Gmail's limitation to photos and videos.

All in all, taiblet's awfu' guid value for fifty quid.

Addendum: even better. Felix just drew my attention to the availabilty of another app, Graffiti for Android. Graffiti is a stroke-based input method using stylised alphanumeric gestures. Since I'm thoroughly familiar with the stylus-based version on my old Palm M100 organiser, I just gave it a try, and was sold on it instantly; for me at least, it's far superior to the touch-screen keyboard.

- Ray

The Diamond Age

1996 Penguin edition cover

Another recommendation. Neal Stephenson's 1995 SF novel The Diamond Age is by no means a new book, but for some reason I'd never read it until I borrowed a copy from the hospital bookshelf a few weeks back (it was the only thing not either 'summer reading' or macho bilge -- I promise I'll take it back).

The setting is near-future, but very different both technologically and culturally. Mastery of nanotechnology has enabled atom-scale rod-logic computers, super-strong materials, and matter creation on demand: on the downside, the air, water, and even people's bodies, swarm with a warring ecology of nanoscale devices. Socially, the nation-state has become obsolete in favour of "phyles" - distributed populations with a common ethos, who occupy "claves" of various sizes, some as small as a building - who interact via shared laws.

The book has been billed as "post-cyberpunk", and it starts with a vigorous demolition of cyberpunk tropes. A character called Bud is getting a nanotech "skull gun" implant installed. In a cyberpunk novel this would probably lead to all kinds of shoot-outs and adventures. However, Bud turns out not to be the protagonist, but a dim racist thug who uses the gun to rob an Ashanti businessman; he is rapidly arrested, put in front of a genially draconian Confucian court (Judge Fang tells Bud "Don't be an asshole" when he asks if he gets to offer a defence), and executed. So much for cyberpunk.

We then get to the real story, which begins among the Neo-Victorians, a powerful phyle who have adopted Victorian dress and rules of conduct. John Hackworth, an "artifex" (software engineer) gets commissioned by a Victorian aristocrat to create a book-format device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The aristocrat has realised that, as with the original Victorians, their culture depends on wildcard personalities, and the Primer would be an educational medium designed to foster such a personality in his daughter. Hackworth does the job, but falls into the Victorian vice of hypocrisy and goes into China to make illegal copies. He is, however, mugged, and the original copy stolen, which ultimately places him in obligation to an illicit Chinese technologist Dr X.

The stolen Primer ends up with an unintended recipient, Nell, a young underclass girl in an abusive household - and by coincidence the late Bud's daughter. She gets to keep it because of further peculiarities of the Confucian justice system. Judge Fang, who also coincidentally deals with the case of the Primer's theft, considers that the thief, Nell's brother Harv, has displayed the correct "filial piety" by giving it to her, and that a greater good is served by her keeping it for her education.

The story then moves into multiple threads, including the life of Nell as she grows up to her teens, educated to higher class and a higher destiny by the Primer; Hackworth's fate, forced by admission of his crime to become a double agent and infiltrate a bizarre and orgiastic hive-community; the life of Miranda, an interactive actor who effectively becomes Nell's mother by providing the characters displayed by the Primer; the growing political unrest in China (much of the action takes place around Shanghai); and, centrally, the interactive story Nell is told by the Primer. Starting with simple stories involving her four animal toys as characters, it's designed to guide her through increasingly sophisticated archetypal adventures, puzzles and challenges that mirror her encounters in the real world.

It's taken me three weeks to read it, as it's quite long at 500 pages, and not always the easiest of novels for stylistic reasons, in places imitating the detailed descriptive digression of Victorian novels. It also has its longeurs; while they're thoroughly pertinent to the theme and I like computing, I found Nell's Primer adventures involving understanding various Turing machines repetitive and uninteresting.

I can see, however, why The Diamond Age won both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996. It's a detailed and brilliantly-imagined exploration of culture, technology and personality, and worth the effort. And I learned a deal about Confucianism.

SPOILER: The Diamond Age at Wikipedia.

- Ray