Unfinished work

Today our drawing class visited the Russell Cotes museum, perched on Eastcliff, Bournemouth. The museum is furnished with many fine exhibits, and is endowed with a beautiful garden, looking out over the cliff-top towards the sea. As Terry Pratchett once said, it's amazing how precisely the sky fits the sea at the horizon. The picture here is drawn with an ink-pen, and is, sadly, unfinished.

Million-dollar treasure hunt!

With the publication of my book imminent, I can now reveal for the first time, exclusively to readers of McCabism, that the book contains the clues to buried treasure, estimated by De Beers at a million dollars. If the reader numbers all the words in the book, and then takes the first letter of the prime-numbered words, the resulting string of letters can be transformed by a single mathematical operation into the instructions for finding the buried treasure. The rest I leave up to you. May the best man, or woman, win!

Nicolas Cage

What is it with Nicolas Cage at the moment? It only seems like a few weeks ago that he was compulsively bursting into flames, and whizzing about on his moped in 'Ghost Rider', and now he appears in 'Next' as a man with the ability to see two minutes into the future! It sounds like the premise of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, but in fact it's yet another film based on a story by Philip K.Dick.

Imagine if there were a whole set of people who could see 2 minutes into the future. They could get together, and form a chain, enabling them to see hours and days into the future. In such a scenario, the individual at the base of the chain sees one of his comparably-afflicted friends, 2 minutes into the future, telling him what HE can see 2 minutes into his future, and he, in turn, sees a third individual telling him what HE can see 2 minutes into his future, and so on.
Or perhaps this would work with just two such afflicted individuals. Individual A sees 2 minutes into his future where individual B is telling him what he can see 2 minutes into his future, but individual B sees individual A telling him what he can see 2 further minutes into the future, and so on.

In fact, what if the single Nicolas Cage character just spent all his time writing down what he sees two minutes into the future? Right now, he would see what he's writing down 2 minutes into the future, which would describe what happens 4 minutes into the future, which, in turn, is a description of what happens 6 minutes into the future, and so on.

Iain Nicolson and the Dark Side of the Universe

I'm currently reading 'Dark Side of the Universe', by the Scottish astronomy writer Iain Nicolson. This is a fabulous, fabulous book. It's a brilliantly written introduction to, and exposition of all the issues surrounding dark matter and dark energy in cosmology. There are many popular books on this subject, but none have the authority and clarity of Nicolson's. It's accessible to non-specialists and non-scientists, but still manages to be completely accurate and reliable. Nicolson reasons clearly about his subject, and impartially weighs the competing evidence supporting different theories. It's also beautifully illustrated.